The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

Thank you.

So I wanna start with a clip from Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University, that I think is a, a good place to start.

Our independent women seek their purpose in life in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing.

They are more medicated, mettlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be.

Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome, and mettlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project.

They are agents of the new world, but not new life.

Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world.

I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you've been reporting on a- as I've heard from any of its subjects.

So tell me about him and the view of society you understand him to be spinning out here.

Well, uh, you know, as you heard, it's one that's not afraid to be, uh, 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 qui-- I qui-- I like my job, and I also feel that my job is equal social worth to Scott Yenor being in a think tank, right? Like, he's hardly a cancer surgeon.

Calm down, son.

I, I, I find it kind of i- intriguingly repellent, and I think a lot of people do as well.

One of the things I heard in that, uh, clip is an echo of the J.D. Vance miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the twenty twenty-four campaign.

We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via, 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 wanna make the rest of the country miserable too.

Wh- which I mention because I think it can be easy to look at Yenor and some of the people we'll 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, a kind of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart.

So defend that for me a bit.

Right.

So you can see the splits in MAGA very obviously at the moment over the war in Iran, um, 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 gonna, you know, are gonna 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.

Thank you.

So I wanna start with a clip from Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University, that I think is a, a good place to start.

Our independent women seek their purpose in life in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing.

They are more medicated, mettlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be.

Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome, and mettlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project.

They are agents of the new world, but not new life.

Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world.

I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you've been reporting on a- as I've heard from any of its subjects.

So tell me about him and the view of society you understand him to be spinning out here.

Well, uh, you know, as you heard, it's one that's not afraid to be, uh, 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 qui-- I qui-- I like my job, and I also feel that my job is equal social worth to Scott Yenor being in a think tank, right? Like, he's hardly a cancer surgeon.

Calm down, son.

I, I, I find it kind of i- intriguingly repellent, and I think a lot of people do as well.

One of the things I heard in that, uh, clip is an echo of the J.D. Vance miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the twenty twenty-four campaign.

We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via, 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 wanna make the rest of the country miserable too.

Wh- which I mention because I think it can be easy to look at Yenor and some of the people we'll 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, a kind of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart.

So defend that for me a bit.

Right.

So you can see the splits in MAGA very obviously at the moment over the war in Iran, um, 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 gonna, you know, are gonna 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.