... tell us what you were thinking with that, with that comment.

I mean, I think I was just having fun, but I, I, I do think obviously from a, like, strategic standpoint, it's, it's totally responsible for the left to abandon the symbols of this country and its, and the useful parts of its past for the purpose of, like, winning majorities and, you know, establishing, you know, a hegemony that, uh, you know, comports with our vision of the good.

I mean, I would n- I would never advise-- If a candidate that I was, like, [laughs] working for or s- or supportive of said what I said in that tweet, I would say, "You're a fucking idiot.

Uh, never say that." But I'm luckily not, uh, a political candidate, nor even a political advisor or strategist.

Um, I was just speaking from my own personal relationship with this country, and I think...

I mean, I don't know h- what, how you guys took it, but I did mean that I do love this country.

I just think it's-- I, I do so in a, you know, ironical and, and sort of embarrassed way.

Um, yeah, I don't know.

I saw someone on Discord posted, like, tornado warning, and then right below that, it was like a 4 p.m. tweet from Forest Hills that said, like, we're still going ahead with this show.

Yeah, I mean...

It all worked out.

Um, there, I don't think there was a drop of rain during Bob's set.

That's fantastic.

No tornadoes, I hope.

And no tornadoes.

I understand, he did not.

Are th- were these women also involved in the Christian part of the right?

Yeah.

One of them, uh, Anna, uh, very much was, um, and is still a, a, a believing Catholic, but she was, um, raised, uh, uh, very in conservative, um, eh, conservative religious environment.

Um, I think that's a big part of it, but one of the things that the sources, not just these two, but other people I talked to for the piece pointed out, was that in some ways the old Christian patriarchal traditionalism that was the mainstay of the right for many, many years, that's changed.

You know? I mean, the people who are leading the charge of sexism on the right these days are not just these sort of old school Christian patriarchs, um, because, you know, and this is steel manning perhaps the sort of biblical Christianity a little bit, but those people, those men thought of themselves as protectors.

You know? That they had to give something up in being a part of, you know, the, the patriarchal family.

Uh, and mainly what they had to give up was this, you know, their aggression in, in, in, you know, in exchange, uh, for, you know, the things that they get from being a part of, you know, a, a heterosexual couple, a marriage.

We're mad, and we'll boil it down to women causing the problem, and I, I found that to be interesting and fascinating.

But tell us Anna's story.

Well, Anna's really a representative character, um, for a certain kind of young woman who was attracted to the right and during Trump's first term, who was a very talented writer, became a popular pundit writing for major outlets, working in conservative institutions, um, and often writing about women as a woman, um, including this kind of narrative that the right was adopting at the time that women are really unwell, you know, that feminism has diverted their natural motherly instincts into this quest for worldly success.

And now that they have it, women are using this newfound authority to punish and fetter men, which imperils civilization in the process.

This is the kind of thing that Anna was writing.

Um, but her experience is one that is representative of a lot of people I talked to in the piece, which is that over time, she started to see that basically she was, you know, basically selling people the rope to hang herself.

You know, she started to realize that, um, she was participating in a movement that was using her, um, and that it wasn't worth it really to, uh, you know, get this kind of career and status on the right, um, as the right sort of basically made their whole project about punishing women, uh, pushing them out of public life, out of the workplace.

Um, and she did start to see, uh, that this was wrong, uh, and that she didn't want to be a part of it.

This is a-

Right.

... ever becomes a kind of, like-... you know, the kind of cultural hegemonic leader in this country, or, uh, it would be because they've been able to credibly, you know, point out that it's wrong, evil, anti-democratic for the Republicans to just use the machinery of government to make money for themselves at all times.

And there, the reason that that doesn't really happen, or hasn't really happened, or that isn't a winning issue for the Democrats, I think is because they aren't credible on that issue.

Right.

And he's not himself the, some kind of secret rich guy.

The thing about Bernie Sanders, and he's not the only one, but he is the kind of prototypical figure who represents this credibility in his anti-plutocratic message, his anti-oligarchy message.

And he's been on that message, you know, since 2016.

And it's not a coincidence, I think, the Democrats haven't been able to adopt that message in a way that seems, that's winning, because they also have tried to marginalize Bernie, you know, much less so than they did in Trump's first term.

Right.

... we are produces these kinds of moments where someone like this judge, or someone else in a position of momentary authority over somebody else's life, has to make this decision, like, "Well, do I trust this, you know, like, pseudo-Gestapo to treat this person according to the law or according to their human rights?" And I think increasingly we're seeing situations where, you know, in an encouraging way, people make a decision that's like, "No, this is an extreme circumstance and it demands a kind of moral courage that would seem to be norm-breaking in another circumstance." I don't, I'm, I'm not saying that that's necessarily true about this judge.

I don't know the details.

But what it reminds me of is just in the first Trump administration, there were also circumstances where people, you know, were kind of...

They felt the need to do something extreme to protect against an extreme behavior by the administration, but then there was this very strong impulse that, "Well, if we break norms..."...

in reaction to their norm breaking, are we just setting up this kind of inevitable, you know, domino chain decline of consecutive norm breaking? I feel like, and I, I never really got there in the first administration, I'm here now, I'm there now, that we really kind of are out in the breach.

We're in a very, very, very dire situation where the kinds of choices people have to make about what's normal and not normal to do, I think those things are changing.

... 50 years.