In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins break down The New York Times’ recent coordinated coverage of masculinity and fatherhood. They analyze four pieces that attempt to redefine what it means to be a dad — including a cartoon about a trans father on Father’s Day, a childless writer’s take on “modern” fatherhood, an attack on Scott Galloway’s views on paternity leave, and Ezra Klein’s conversation with Helen Lewis framing the “New Right’s very old vision of men.”

The Collinses argue these articles reveal deep cultural elite contempt for actual fathers and promote unsustainable, self-indulgent views of parenting that prioritize personal identity and emotional affirmation over duty, sacrifice, and long-term human thriving. They explain why pronatalist, traditional approaches to masculinity and fatherhood will inherit the future while progressive narratives collapse under their own contradictions.

Expect sharp cultural analysis, personal parenting stories, and a direct challenge to the mainstream media’s attempt to gaslight men about what fatherhood really is.

Show Notes

@AlexBerenson wrote:

Cannot make this up, either.

@nytimes opinion has had four recent pieces about fatherhood and masculinity, with six authors:

Three women

A trans “man”

Two childless men

Not one father. The cultural elite contempt for dads runs so deep we don’t even get to speak for ourselves.

The four pieces appear to be these recent New York Times Opinion items on fatherhood/masculinity:

* “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated” (guest essay in comic-strip form, by Zach Ellams, a trans-identifying parent writing about being a “trans dad” and fatherhood).

* “The Most Important Way That Fatherhood Has Changed” (Father’s Day–timed essay on changing perspectives on fatherhood).

* “This Masculinity Influencer Is Loud and Wrong About Paternity Leave” (criticizing a male influencer’s stance on paternity leave and broader masculinity issues).

* “The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men” (Opinion video/transcript focusing on men, masculinity and the New Right, featuring journalist Helen Lewis).

“To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/opinion/trans-dad-parenting-fathers-day.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/opinion/trans-dad-parenting-fathers-day.html?unlocked_article_code=1.r1A.oWDB.tcG4utZreGgZ&smid=url-share

This shows a series of cartoon panels about a trans father who underwent surgery at 18 and has lived as a father of a daughter, mostly quite out, for some time.

It’s about how he found self acceptance through parenting (and I love that, because I—Simone—have also experienced that and can totally relate)

The panels include things like:

* His daughter yelling: “HOW DID YOU GROW A MUSTACHE IF YOU WERE A LADY?” at a public school

* His daughter asking about a pre-transition picture of him in an album and asking:

* “Who’s that?”

* “It’s me”

* “Oh. You look cool.”

* “Then or now?”

* “Then.”

* Him worrying about his daughter outing him at school

* “I don’t actually tell everyone I’m trans. I save that for special people”

* Eventually she outs him, saying she wants to grow a beard when she grows up, and when told she can’t, insisting she can because her dad did and he was a girl.

* Her various sick burns

* “You’re slow because you’re old!”

* “Maybe I’ll be like you when I grow up” // “Yeah?” // “Yeah. Really short.”

The Backlash:

* @realBrandonGill: “On Father’s Day, the New York Times decided to promote a cartoon of a woman cosplaying as a father. And they did it for a reason. Because the cultural left knows that the first step to conquering the future is brainwashing the minds of our children— and they’ve realized that strong fathers are the biggest obstacle to that goal. They want to tear the institution of fatherhood down to nothing because, to the left, things that are normal, good, and holy are a threat to their marxist revolution.”

* Matt Taibbi: “Today’s NYT editorial on Father’s Day is an all-timer. Again, don’t know where to put it on the funny-vs-horrifying axis:”

* @EndWokeness: “The New York Times on Father’s Day. We do not hate the media enough.”

* Caitlin Flanagan: “The child’s job was to help the parent feel comfortable with his gender.”

* @AfterTheReset: “Message aside, is it necessary for the cartoons to be ugly, poorly drawn, and unappealing?”

Is this an affront to father’s day?

* Sort of

* Mother’s Day in the modern U.S. sense was founded by Anna Maria Jarvis in the early 1900s to create a solemn “memorial mothers day” honoring the sacrifices and care of individual mothers, inspired directly by her own mother Ann Reeves Jarvis’s wish for such a day and by Ann’s community health and reconciliation work.

* Anna’s drive was rooted in her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis’s work: Ann had organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” in the 1850s to improve sanitation and reduce infant mortality, and later “Mother’s Friendship Day” events to heal divisions between Union and Confederate families after the Civil War. Ann also expressed in a Sunday school prayer that she hoped someone would someday establish a “memorial mothers day” for the “matchless service” mothers render to humanity, a line Anna took as her guiding mission

* In the U.S., Father’s Day is generally credited to Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, who proposed the holiday in 1909 after hearing a church sermon about Anna Jarvis’s newly established Mother’s Day. (her civil war veteran dad raised her and her siblings alone after her mother died).

* I find this really relatable as a parent

* Many of us have peculiarities and a story about how parenting helps with acceptance and getting someone out of their heads is actually really good

* In fact, these panels even demonstrate how the author’s daughter gets him to stop overthinking things

* There’s a panel where she’s like: “I spot something that starts with T!”

* And all he can think of is “trans”

* And he’s like: Termite? Turtleneck? Tiny morsel of wood?”

* And his daughter is like: “TREES.”

“The Most Important Way That Fatherhood Has Changed”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/opinion/fathers-day-fatherhood.html

https://archive.is/Gn93j

In this, Frank Bruni, a (childless) contributing opinion writer who has been on staff at the time for over 25 years, talks about how fatherhood has changed between his dad and his brother’s generations (his brother has three kids in their 20s)

He talks about fathers spending more time with their kids now an cites an article suggesting one reason fertility is lower is that men want to give the kids they do have more attention.

In short, he says modern fatherhood is high effort, high investment, and he says that’s good.

He sort of misses that the investment now isn’t in empowering kids but rather indulging them, and he provides a good example: “Mark encouraged his children to let him in by inviting them to understand him. He made sure that they met and mingled with his adult friends and thus observed how he tended relationships and what they meant to him. He also showed his children his passions.

“I took Frank to a Grateful Dead concert when he was 12,” Mark told me, referring to his oldest son, who, like me, is named after my father. But that outing wasn’t just characteristically ardent Deadhead evangelism (and, well, unorthodox parenting). It reflected Mark’s sustained effort to expand the time that he and Frank spent together. The more hours, the more conversation. The more conversation, the greater the likelihood of serendipitous revelations, real familiarity, deeper connection.”

“This Masculinity Influencer Is Loud and Wrong About Paternity Leave”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/paternity-leave-debate.html

https://archive.is/Zm4Oy

In this opinion piece, Jessica Grose denounces Scott Galloway’s stance on paternity leave.

It should be noted that Scott Galloway is one of the few progressive-leaning pronatalists out there (center-left liber...