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- [00:00]
Helen Lewis
Lattice is the first comprehensive HR platform where people and AI succeed together. It helps every employee grow faster, every manager lead more effectively, and every company unlock their people's full potential. Stop settling for HR tools that hold your company back. Build a future where technology doesn't replace people, but actually elevates them. No regrets. Ready to see the power of people plus AI? Visit lattice.com noregrets this is that's L-T T I C E.com noregrets
- [00:34]
Brian Greene
It's Wednesday, July 22, 2026, from Peach Fish Productions. This is the gist and I'm Brian Greene, host of the commercial break. Normally, but today, temporary custodian of this show. On today's show we have a brand new interview Mike conducted with journalist Helen Lewis. Helen wrote the June cover story for the Atlantic titled the Men who Don't Want Women to Vote. The subject, of course, is masculinity, something I happen to pretend to know quite a bit about. I can't help it. It's just the way I was born. I'm just a guy's guy. No need to check my low T, Mr. Hegseth. You'd have to recalibrate those instruments. Now, can I get behind a tank? Always wanted to drive a tank. No. Well, I can't fly a fighter plane. I don't operate a drone or refuel an aircraft midair. But I can stand safely on the ground and yell at people. Your attitude is shitty. Drop and give me 20. Everything is better with testosterone, as my imaginary friends, the Tate brothers, might soon be saying from inside the walls of a British prison. Anyway, Helen Lewis understands this subject much better than any of us do, which is why Mike interviewed her and not me. Fresh Mike Pesca Fresh Helen Lewis. It's coming up next on the G.
- [01:55]
Mike Pesca
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So that's 30% off plus an extra $50 off with promo code the Gist exclusive for my listeners. That's L E E S A.com promo code the Gist for the July 4th sale, which goes way beyond July 4th. It's 30% off. And then we'll also give you an extra $50 off. Support our show and let them know we sent you a checkout Lisa.com promo code the Gist did you know that when Helping older Navy dolphins. A researcher unlocked a secret to healthy aging for all of us, even the non dolphins among us. And you know, everyone loves dolphins and I hope I can convince you to love yourself just like our flippered friends. You're worth it. I'm excited to share with you guys. C15 from fatty15, the first emerging essential fatty acid to be discovered in more than 90 years. It's an incredible scientific breakthrough. It supports long term health and wellness and healthy aging. So the founder of Fatty 15, Dr. Stephanie Van Watson, discovered the benefits of C15 while working with the US Navy to continually improve the health and welfare of older dolphins. She went to the dolphin retirement home and she noticed some of them were really thriving. What do they have? It's what is now called C15. She did studies on cellular fragility syndrome caused by the lack of C15. As many as 1 in 3 people. I can't give you the dolphin percentage worldwide may have C15 levels and fragile cells. We're all aging. Which means that healthy aging starts from birth. Studies have shown that C15 is a foundational nutrient for you and for flipper. I'm taking fatty 15. They give it to you in a nice glass vial. I pop one every day and I have to say I feel a little bit more energy and I've been very successful at disabling bombs with my nose underwater. Now I joke about that, but I do feel a little Vim. Fatty 15 was developed to support healthy aging for all from kids to parents to grandparents. That's why award winning fatty 15 is now available as pure capsules, Delicious Apple Mint gummies for teens and adults, and Yummy Berry Blast gummies for kids. Fatty 15 is on a mission to support healthy aging for all, including all ages and stages of life. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com gist and using code just to check out. The 2026 primaries are all around us and you could trade the biggest political races on cow sheet. On Kalshee, you could trade major primaries, election outcomes and the biggest political storylines as they happen. Like you could pick who will win the Senate, the Democrats or the Republicans. Or let's take California. Will Karen Bass or Naima Raymond win the California mayor race Right now, Bass is currently trading at 63%, meaning a hundred dollar trade would pay out. That's $155 if she wins the mayor's race. You could bet on when Jay Clayton will be confirmed or when will traffic at the Strait of Hormuz return to normal. It's pretty close. 64%. 65% as I speak. Ticked up 1% before September 1, 2026. So bet 100. What's that? 65%. You win about a little less than 150. 147. 148. On Kalshi, you're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. As the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position for a limited time. Download the Kalshi app and use code gist to get $10 when you trade 10k a l shi calshi trade on anything 18 plus. Only restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk may not be suitable for all investors. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see kalshee.com regulatory Writing in the Atlantic Helen Lewis, who is a fantastic writer. I'm actually just going to quote her prose before I even tell you the nature of the story. Wilson was one of the most unpleasant Internet Personas I've ever encountered, and I've been on Blue Sky. He did not reply to my request for an interview, which was a relief. Helen Lewis has written an article that just on the Atlantic site and in its pages goes by many names. The men who want women to be quiet. The men who fear women, the men who don't want women to vote. She did in fact go inside masculinism and find about all these men who are often the same men described different ways. Helen, welcome to the Gist.
- [10:03]
Brian Greene
Hello.
- [10:03]
Helen Lewis
I like the way you imply there's some sort of deep state conspiracy about the fact that it's got several headlines. One of those was the COVID line, so it was the COVID story. And then we a b test the headlines. So actually the men who want women to be quiet, which is a riff on St. Paul, won out over the print headline, which isn't unusual, right? Print headlines are written to work with all the furniture and stuff like that, whereas you have to often be a bit more Ron Seal. And this is. Sorry, this is a reference I make all the time on American Podcast. There's a very famous advertising campaign for like yacht varnish here and it says Ron still it does exactly what it says on the tin. So yeah, the headline now does exactly what it says on the 10. These are the men who want women to be quiet.
- [10:38]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I. Well I liked all the different versions of the headline because a headline supposed to be succinct and this told me a lot of things about all the men. Now, we could debate if St. Paul really said that. You know, it was translated from the Greek, I believe quiet is originally hasukius, which is calmness or stillness. You know what, let's get to that in a second. First, let's establish the thes, which is masculinism, obviously a word that's a riff on feminism, but it's not a friendly riff, as you document. This really is the toxic, the owning of the toxic version of masculinism, isn't it?
- [11:14]
Helen Lewis
Well, I wanted a word to use that kind of captured the idea that this was an ideology as fully formed as feminism. You might call it the kind of inverse of it, really. And it's a word with a relatively long history. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the American writer, talks about masculism. She was a great feminist campaigner. But I also wanted to distinguish it from the manosphere, which I think we've heard rather more about. And that is often seen as being just purely kind of attention seeking creatures of the algorithm. You're Andrew Tate's or like Myron Gaines, fresh and fit or whoever. And there are people who cross over, you know, Nick Fuentes is kind of more on the provocateur end, I would say, than the deep thinker end. But there is also a big intellectual movement that says feminism has gone too far. It has been a net negative for America and some of the things about it should be rolled back to make the country great again.
- [12:05]
Mike Pesca
Right. And like the manosphere, some of the names of the progenitors of this idea go by Baby Gravy9, who is also raw egg nationalist. So it's not all serious professors, but there are professors and there are pretty well followed theologians who say this stuff and have been saying it for years. So who are the most actually influential and important ones?
- [12:29]
Helen Lewis
Right. But absolutely no one in American politics anymore takes themselves seriously. Right. Everything comes in this glutinous layer of irony.
- [12:37]
Mike Pesca
Mike Pence does. And it's. I don't know if it's working for him.
- [12:39]
Helen Lewis
He might be the last, the last holdout. I think Mitt Romney probably did, but you know, he's now retired with his lovely billion grandchildren. But everyone else is sort of simultaneously kind of parodying themselves at the same time. So these people are both advancing very strong ideas and also poison playing in very evocative, deliberately offensive and inflammatory language. And that's kind of part of the performance. And you have to understand it as both sincere and as trollish at the same time, which I think could be quite hard. So you get somebody, even somebody very serious, like Scott Yenner, who's an academic now at the, the Heritage Foundation. He chairs a committee there and he has said that modern women are medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome. So that's. We're going to go up the gradient here. Okay, you ready to go up the gradient? Then you get to Doug Wilson, who is Pete Hegseth, the co founder of the denomination of Calvinism that Pete Hegseth follows was invited to talk in the Pentagon recently. And he has a very, very amusing but undeniably offensive blog called Blog and Mablog in which he refers to women as small breasted biddies, Jezebels, the C word. Like okay. And then above that even you get Nick Fuentes, self proclaimed white nationalist, Christian nationalist virgin, who says, I think all women should be put in breeding go legs. And then maybe we should let some of the good ones out. You know, just as Hitler banged up all of his enemies, the Jews, the gypsies, so we should imprison every woman. And you know, when you get to that stage, right, it's deliberately, it's done for effect. He's deliberately trying to get a rise out of people. But that doesn't mean he isn't also conveying something very significant to his base, which is very male dominated, which is about saying you're the cool kids, you're the ones who can handle this super edginess. You know, polite society won't let you say that. But we all know we've all been red pilled. You know, we're, we're all cool here.
- [14:29]
Mike Pesca
Yes. And so culturally there is this, what Richard Hanania calls this. Well, it's in group signaling, right? So you show that you're based just like everyone else. And who knows what the line is between what you're saying for effect or shock value or that you don't even believe. But you, you know, it's funny, or at least funny in the way that you say something transgressive. It gets an uncomfortable giggle. And how, and how much does that serve as a way to carry water for these actual sincerely held odious beliefs now, right?
- [15:01]
Helen Lewis
He calls it the based, yeah, he calls it the based ritual. And I think it's a really interesting thing. So Sam Adler Bell had a really interesting piece in New York magazine a couple of months ago, I don't know if you saw it, about women in the MAGA movement. And they discover that there is also that, you know, there's this performative layer of sexism and then they sort of appear slightly shocked that some of these people might also not really respect women's opinions, think that they should have, you know, should have any authority or role in the movement. So once again there, there is this real dance between do I mean it? Do I not? You know, it's hard to say yes.
- [15:29]
Mike Pesca
And that goes on with so much of society. There's a Martin Bailey. There's the incentives for what you have to do to get attention online and what your sincerely held beliefs are. Though I believe in the philosophy that if you're espous beliefs five hours a day, let's say what you say to a reporter in repose is not as important or significant or as sincere or to take Pastor Wilson when he does, what does he call it? Unexpurgated November.
- [16:00]
Helen Lewis
No, Quarter November.
- [16:02]
Mike Pesca
Quarter November named after self censorious October.
- [16:08]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, Nitpicky November. Yeah, no, he really doesn't, you know, but that's again, that's part of the, the reason that people want to go and join his church. You know, there are any number of mild mannered Protestant denominations that you could go and join. People pick to go and join Christchurch, which is his denomination, because they want something really strong. They want a church that demands a lot of you, that has quite a lot of social control over its congregants. You know, that's the choice they've made and you see that. Actually, you know, I'm here in Britain and it's, it's really interesting that the evangelical churches have been growing at the same time as the Church of England. The established church has been just tapering and tapering. You know, seems to be that what people want from politics is quite often fireworks and they kind of want the same from their religion too.
- [16:51]
Mike Pesca
Yes, well it, it models and reflects our populist age, our populist rage, the incentives of all the media that we consume. So let's just do a little laying of the predicate. If we take the, I don't want to say serious, but the figures that you point to as actually providing the intellectual underpinnings of this movement where Nick Fuentes is free to riff on some of their ideas, what are they actually advocating? One concerns repeal of the 19th Amendment. That's Wilson taking away women's rights to vote. What else are they legitimately advocating?
- [17:27]
Helen Lewis
Right. You can see that very much as the top end. I kind of try and think of that as a kind of stretch goal. Which is the idea is that that's both something you kind of resile from and say, well I Don't want to do that straight away, but it's also there as a kind of demand. You know, this is the final destination I think we should be going for is back to a much earlier version of society along the way. A really good example of some of the things that are being asked for is in the Heritage Foundation's document they put out both Project 2025, which people might have heard of, their blueprint for a second Trump turn, and also their more recent guidelines on the family. They want an end to no fault divorce. They want people to get off dating apps. They want to encourage a breadwinner homemaker model. Scott Yenna, for example, wants to bring back the idea of a family wage where you would preferentially hire and promote married men in order that their wives can stay at home. You know, there is a very strong vision of society and it's kind of. It's essentially an idealized version of the 1950s, because that model existed for, you know, not everybody at all, even then. And then for some people it's. Yeah, the model is actually the 1650s.
- [18:31]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So I don't necessarily believe this, but I think it should be asked other than the shocking aspects of it and the fact that now there are no media gatekeepers. So the sentiments in our face. And I guess you could say a guy like Nick Fuentes has gotten good at getting attention or maybe even being entertaining in espousing these views. I want to ask you about the always ever thus question. So the getting rid of no fault divorce. Mike Huckabee ran on that as part of his platform when he was running for president and advocated that and tried to institute that in Arkansas. And he wasn't the only governor. The surrendered wife was a big, I don't know if you remember that, but that was a big trend that. I don't actually know how big a trend it was among Christians, but I know that in the milieu that I operate, the. The presence of that trend got a lot of backlash. So there has. And then not paying women as much as men or just thinking that it is correct to pay men more than women because they're the breadwinner. This was the de facto assumption up through, I think, the 70s. So what about that? Other than the fact that there is more of it in our face, how much. How different is it than what has always ever been? How potent is it or dangerous is it now compared to when Mike Huckabee came in eighth or whatever when he was running on that for president?
- [19:55]
Helen Lewis
Well, yeah, I think you're right, there's always a push and pull. You know, I wrote about the suffragettes in Britain and they faced enormous opposition. But some of the arguments that were being made for why women shouldn't get the vote are the same ones that are now being made for white should be taken away from them. You know, it's much better to vote as a family. Is it right that a married man and a married woman would have different opinions? You know, shouldn't that the unit be the two of them? All of that stuff is extremely familiar. What is different is, as you say, this is countercultural in the sense that the, you know, there is an equal rights law in the us, right? Things are declared unconstitutional if they are, if they are unequal. So there's a fight back against that. And there is also a fight back very specifically about dei, diversity, equity, inclusion. You know, the feeling that that has been used to unfairly disadvantage white men through bureaucracy and even through the federal government and the law. You know, the idea of protected groups essentially that have been given preferential treatment, you know, and you can say 10 years ago that was the argument was mostly wooing had about that was about affirmative action, which has proved pretty unpopular in lots of places that you would think are otherwise impeccably liberal like California. But now the impetus is rolling back dei. So you'll see someone like Pete Hegser talking about the fact that he doesn't want to DEI military. And there is a, you know, it's tricky because I'm sure, you know, you probably feel about this having to pick through some of this stuff. I do have some sympathy with the idea that there was a kind of sweeping cultural change in the last 10 years that left a lot of people feeling left behind. And there was a kind of performative nature to the kind of anti white men sentiment as well that if you hung out in certain online spaces, some offline ones too, that did genuinely exist. And you know, it's one of the reasons I've been a boring old fashioned liberal all the way through that saying we should probably treat everybody the same, right? Like we should have, we shouldn't, we should have universal standards. But. But now the feeling is, well, hang on a minute, you know, the left were very good at using these tools to advance their favoured groups. Why, why not? You know, turnabout like now is our go. And so you have the government equality office essentially putting out one. There's like ambulance chasing lawyer ads saying are you a white man who's been discriminated against at work? Come be our test case in a lawsuit. So they want to use that, you know, bureaucracy in order to turn it back on their enemies, you know, and they've got several ways of doing that. You look at the way that affirmative action has been used to argue that Asian students are discriminated against in university admissions. You look at the way that since October 7, the rise in anti Semitism has become a complicated part of that conversation. All these universities that were incredibly attentive to whether or not black students were feeling marginalized on campus, now having to deal with the idea that Jewish students are saying that the same. These currents are really quite complicated in America. And I agree with you that there's never a kind of final, perfect victory for one side or the other. But that's what kind of makes it interesting. And I would say from my point of view, this stuff is happening in the context of a second Trump term, which is no longer a fluke. He won the popular vote. He's much more aggressive about the things that he wanted to get through. He put through a blizzard of executive orders. There is a feeling among bits of the conservative movement like, go, go, go, guys. This is. This is our time.
- [23:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And when they don't have to actually pass laws which have proved all but impossible, and when they can execute executive action and not be stopped by the courts, they have been actually successful, maybe, maybe mostly in terms of signaling, but also actually achieving some anti DEI policies. There's been some very good reporting about how Pete Hegseth has disallowed the promotion of very well qualified, in some cases, black and women candidates for higher general status. And in the military, then those people have to retire. So thus weakening our country by jettisoning some very qualified people based on the fact that they once said something positive about equity and inclusion, which they had to, or maybe they wanted to, but they had to as part of their military, as part of what the military back then was endorsing. I do think that there is a backlash going on, and I think you agree with me there. But how much of it is the natural backlash? Or does the pen. Does the momentum of the pendulum actually swing harder, which physics tells us shouldn't actually happen in the natural world?
- [24:19]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. I think the test of that we'll know in a couple of years time when this term is over. And also very much it depends who is next in the White House. Right. Because actually, you do need a long time to put these battles through the courts. I mean, you know, look at child gender medicine, which is something that I cover the way that the government was on one side of Schemetti, which was the case about banning puberty blockers. And then Trump came in and it was on the other side. Right. That was something that the Biden administration thought was going to go all in one way and put the laws in a place that they wanted. And the Trump administration had very different their side.
- [24:51]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [24:51]
Helen Lewis
Right. So, you know, if we end up with a President Rubio, President Vance next time around, then a lot of this stuff will have a much more of a chance to bed in than if it is, I'm going to say, speculate on Democratic presidents, the widest field of Star wars cantina scene you've ever seen. But you know what I mean. So it's quite hard to kind of finally declare definitively. The thing I would say is I think you're right to say that there is backlash and counter backlash. One of the things that happened recently which was really interesting was J.D. vance's memoir Communion, in which he says that his line was about Democrats of the party of childless cat ladies. You know, that was the stupid, he said, I think he says that was the dumbest thing I ever said. And Sarah Longwell, which is quite an
- [25:30]
Mike Pesca
admission given some of the other things,
- [25:32]
Helen Lewis
it's up there with America's Hitler and cultural heroine, which are ways he described Trump back before he loved him. But you know, it's just, it's interesting to me that he has acknowledged, which I think, as I say, Sarah Longwell, who does lots of focus groups, said this is something that for women voters, they just feel kind of insulted by this. And that I think is the problem. It's all very well when you're all of you rampaging over X being ever so spicy and amazing. But as the left has found out many times to its cost, you can have small social media spaces that make you feel like you're winning a cultural war. And the average normie voter in the middle of America goes, I'm sorry, what you want what now?
- [26:06]
Brian Greene
We'll be back with more Helen Lewis after the break.
- [26:17]
Mike Pesca
Did you know that when helping older Navy dolphins, a researcher unlocked a secret to healthy aging for all of us, even the non dolphins among us. And you know, everyone loves dolphins. And I hope I can convince you to love yourself just like our flippered friends. You're worth it. I'm excited to share with you guys. C15 from Fatty 15, the first emerging essential fatty acid to be discovered in more than 90 years. It's an incredible scientific breakthrough. It supports long term Health and wellness and healthy aging. So the founder of Fatty 15, Dr. Stephanie Venn Watson, discovered the benefits of C15 while working with the US Navy to continually improve the health and welfare of older dolphins. She went to the dolphin retirement home and she noticed some of them were really thriving. What do they have? It's what is now called C15. She did studies on cellular fragility syndrome caused by the lack of C15. As many as one in three people, I can't give you the dolphin percentage worldwide may have C15 levels and fragile cells. We're all aging, which means that healthy aging so starts from birth. Studies have shown that C15 is a foundational nutrient for you. And for flipper, I'm taking fatty 15. They give it to you in a nice glass vial. I pop one every day and I have to say I feel a little bit more energy. And I've been very successful at disabling bombs with my nose underwater. Now, I joke about that, but I do feel a little Vim. Fatty 15 was developed to support healthy aging for all, from kids to parents to grandparents. That's why award winning fatty 15 is now available as Pure Capsules, Delicious Apple mint gummies for teens and adults, and Yummy Berry Blast gummies for kids. Fatty 15 is on a mission to support healthy aging for all, including all ages and stages of life. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com gist and using code gist at checkout. So I collect, or did collect comic books and I was trying to sell them and it was dispiriting because sometimes I had, in some cases I held onto them for decades or I bought them in the late 90s and saw their price go up. But then when I take them to a store, you know, I understand they have rent to pay. I thought they'd pay a quarter of what maybe a comic book of such vintage and good condition was listed. But this is not true. This is why whatnot is really helpful. First of all, they're a community and I have just been looking at some of their videos about caviar, the fish videos. You could buy a whole bunch of fish and crab on whatnot, but forget buying, just wade in and see what they're selling. Whether businesses are big or small or don't even exist, people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces because it doesn't really always feel like a marketplace. It feels like a show. And the people who are doing the selling, sometimes there's Another. There's another version of this where people talk about all the clothes they got in a storage locker and they'll just go through a bag of clothes. Look at these pants, look at these shoes. There's a lot of just really off the wall unexpected joy there. Across whatnot, the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year has doubled. Search whatnot W H A T N O T in the App Store download and you could start selling right away.
- [30:09]
Brian Greene
And welcome back to the Gist. We're continuing Mike's conversation with journalist Helen Lewis, whose June cover story for the Atlantic, Ex Masculinity. The men drawn to it. And what happens when anxiety about gender becomes a political movement.
- [30:24]
Mike Pesca
So how do we do this? Help me figure this out. On the one hand, the actual content that you quote is oftentimes shocking, sometimes shocking in the guise of being funny, sometimes shocking just because it's awful. On the other hand, this future, if there's a President Rubio or Vance, and then we'll see different policies enacted that might further. Further enshrine Dobbs or take away, go further with what the chainsaw relationship to cutting some of these DEI regulations have been, you know, to some extent that's just politics. If conservatives win, they're going to do what they can to get more conservative policies, which generally have been, whatever you want to call it, pro, pro family, anti women in the workplace, et cetera. I guess the question is if we ran an experiment in which there was no Wilson giving a speech at the Pentagon, and if there was no Andrew Tate as one of the most popular online manosphere influencers or many of the other things you're talking about, if we ran that experiment, wouldn't we get, just, in terms of normal politics, a lot of what you're predicting we might get under Rubio and Vance anyway?
- [31:41]
Helen Lewis
Well, that's a very big question, so you have to give me a moment to digest it.
- [31:46]
Mike Pesca
I mean, you could come back with not just one, but three headline answers if you'd like.
- [31:50]
Helen Lewis
Three headline answers. I mean, to take the most obvious example, abortion rights. That would undoubtedly be going on and actually not a lot of these guys don't really. I mean, the Christian influencers obviously do care, but actually, even they don't sound as excited about abortion rights, I don't think. I think its power as a wedge issue has massively dimmed with the Dobbs decision because you've now ended up in a situation in which red and blue states have diverged quite, quite differently in what they do.
- [32:16]
Mike Pesca
Well, I'll also add one in our age of negative partisanship, what you want to do is contrast with your opponents. And I have found that on the left, especially if you look at the recent elections where the DSA won, they were hardly ever mentioning abortion rights. So the left has talked about it less. Maybe they saw it as an election loser when it was a major part of Kamala Harris's plank. So that means that the right doesn't think that it's a great opportunity to talk about it so much either.
- [32:40]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, I think that's true. And I think you'd probably say the same about trans too. Like it's just come up a lot less in this last set of primaries. It's not, you know, I was looking around the DSA website this morning. It's not, it's been, you know, largely elbowed aside by Gaza and the litmus test has become really, now will you say the word genocide about Israel's action elections in Gaza? So there, you know, and the interesting thing about that is I'm not sure that one is an issue to which the Republicans actually have a pretty good answer, you know, in terms of polarization. And I don't think the Republicans really want to be the pro Israel party. Actually. There's big sways within them that are very, you know, negative. J.D. vance is an isolationist. Someone like Tucker Carlson is flat out openly anti Israel in an extremely vitriolic way. Even Donald Trump appears to have got tired of Benjamin Netanyahu, as I imagine anyone who had to spend a lot of time talking to him would. But you know what I mean. So I think that was quite, that's probably more maybe one about winning an inter party fight, you know, an inside the Democrat party fight. But yeah, these currents I think are always going to exist because, you know, there's so much laid on to them. So much is about the idea of masculine as being strong as well. And every political leader wants to be strong. You know, to be feminine is to be weak. And that's, you know, that's killer. When I interviewed Gavin Newsom, the California governor who I think very openly wants to be president, he quoted to me this line from Bill Clinton about voters would rather have someone who's strong and wrong than we can. Right. And it's very true. And like a lot of what Trump has done in this, you know, in the last couple of weeks has been about projecting strength. That's what the UFC cage fight was all about. It was a very militarized, macho, violent, bloody, you know, guy's Guy in the big night out with the, you know, bald eagles being fired at a cannons while people were playing the tuba. You know, it was. And you saw that from the mega influencers. They had that. And then they had, you know, like the pride parades at the White House with the kind of rainbow flag and they were like, look at the difference between the two of us. And so the, you know, gender is this like huge, huge lens that you can lay over the top of everything else. And it is a huge problem for women trying to achieve something in politics that they have to overcome this barrier that being a woman is seen just in this inherently negative way as being weak. And that's what you get all this criticisms. You know, there was a double digit polling gap in the last election between the sexes in terms of what they voted. But you do get all this feeling on the right that the Republicans are the boys party and the Dems are the girls party. And that will make a lot of men and some women not want to vote for the Democrats. Like girls have cooties.
- [35:18]
Mike Pesca
Well, for a long time the Democrats were seen and described as the Mommy party and the Republicans the Daddy party. Chris Matthews wrote a big essay about that in the New Republican. Actually, I think this is accurate. George Lakoff invented that framing. But he would say because he was more a Democrat, that Republicans were the daddy party and Democrats were the caring nurturer party. So he wanted to make, you know, that it could be a man who's a caring nurturer, which is something that no Republican would make it distinction about.
- [35:46]
Helen Lewis
Right? Yeah. The gender neutral, caring parent party. Yeah. It's not the chest quite the same ring, has it?
- [35:52]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, no, no it doesn't. So that's kind of an always ever thus. But and this may be too hard a question, you're so verbally fluent and dexterous that you might be able to come up with a good answer. But this might be even a harder question to ask in an interview or to answer in an interview. But I wonder how we are there historical signifiers or antecedents where we can figure out which part of this masculinist agenda is posturing is mostly to monetize as an audience and which parts have real, a real political chance to become policy. And I know it's easy to say all of it is dangerous. And I know it's easy to say that none of it's going to happen. But as you write about in the essay, you're onstage when at one point the idea that, you know, Roe vs. Wade would ever be overturned was laughed at by now prominent members of the manosphere. Manosphere assigned thinkers. So that's the question, like what's the, what do we look at as history or as a guideline to try to discern which part is troublesome blather and which part really could change our lives in the form of policy?
- [37:14]
Helen Lewis
Well, if you're going to take the American view of it, then you have to say on free speech grounds, people on the Internet should be able to make whatever arguments they want, right? Like Doug Wilson has an entire and complete freedom to say, I think the 19th should be repealed. That's, you know, that's his right as an American. And other people, if they don't like that, can contest that. The bit where I think it is dangerous is when the preferences of the administration of the day are enacted through illiberal means on the public realm. So to give you a very recent example of this, Clint Smith in the Atlantic wrote a piece about the Smithsonian and the way that they are being encouraged, shall we say, to tell a particular version of the American story. You know, in the same way that the Kennedy Centers, you know, independence was taken away by a load of Trump patsies being put on the board, which completely nuked the existence of the Kennedy center, the same thing is now happening to the Smithsonian. You know, and if you've ever been to the Smithsonian African American History Museum, it's really beautifully done, right? It goes from the Middle Passage through slavery, through Emmett Till to Motown and to Michael Jackson and to Beyonce and tells this really complete, very like multi dimensional story of black American life. But that's the kind of thing that there are people in the Trumpet administration who don't, you know, they would just want all, A, they don't really want a black museum to exist in the first place, but B, they certainly don't want to have anything that implies America should feel guilty about slavery. And I wouldn't be at all confident that they, you know, if they, if they get a chance, they won't think of illiberal ways to dictate what those museums should do to remove their independence. You can see the same way that the universities, you know, Harvard is still in the middle of many, many legal actions. You know, the way that these are all just parts of, you know, Trump's retribution agenda. Essentially, he is trying to control huge amounts of civil society the same way that, you know, he's trying to control the news media by blocking mergers and trying to get late night hosts sacked and all this kind of stuff, right? These are the things that, these are the ways that, that they are trying to implement this agenda that I think are genuinely worrying and dangerous. They have a vision of America and they are waging a total war on the culture in order to implement it beyond just saying the things that they believe.
- [39:32]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that's a good answer. So here's what a thought that you sparked to me from that answer, which is that normally with propaganda, we think that it works in particular ways. One of the ways is that it establishes a figure who's so far out of the mainstream, and that gives cover to actually somewhat radical thoughts to seem pale by comparison. And so that's a way that propagandists work with policymakers to get policy changed. However, what you're pointing out is that Trump's essentially a propagandist. So I don't know who the next president's going to be, but if it's someone who's working in the propagandist mode, they will do things like change the story told in the Smithsonian, which is a very staid and careful institution. There are places you could go where you'd get a much more feisty version imbued by black liberation theory of American history.
- [40:27]
Helen Lewis
It's a Black Panther museum by any means at all. I think you're exactly right. And you can see it at the moment with the July 4th celebrations, which have been moved from being what they would have been under any other president, like even a Republican president, like either of the Bushes. They would have been a bipartisan pee into, like, vague abstract nouns about, like, liberty, you know, all this kind of stuff. Instead, Trump has made them into the great big Donald Trump Amazo ball circus pageant of joy. About me. Right? And, and I think that is one of the things that people, you know, I find it really, I find it really wearisome that everything there has to be red coded or blue coded. But clearly that's. Yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of working for him in some ways.
- [41:05]
Mike Pesca
So, one question, as a reporter, what's your impression when you interview someone who is unbelievably outrageous and that's their stock in trade online, and everything that is known about them is that they're purveyors of craziness. And then when you talk to them, they're very nice, reasonable people? Do you think less of them for that, or do you say, okay, maybe there is a spark of humanity there?
- [41:34]
Helen Lewis
That's a good. That's. I'd be interested to hear your answer to this because you Must have interviewed a few, few Ludens in your time. I, I, I try and come in with no preconceptions, and I try and understand why they hold the views that they do. Right. Because I think that's the thing that's interesting to me about reporting this story was like, that this is actually an extremely coherent worldview. That actually, because I spend a lot of time reading about it, I, I feel like I understand now intuitively much more than I did. But actually, I think to people on the outside, it's not, you know, if you say to people, Stephen Miller attacked James Talarico, the Texas Democratic Senate challenger, for having soy running through his veins, they go, what? Why? Like what? Like why, why, though? And you go, well, it's this whole thing about phytoestrogens in soy, and they think that they keep suppressing men's testosterone, and they think they're making men weak. And they go, oh. And then they obviously begin to shuffle away from you. But, like, there is a, quite a, you know, now I think that our culture is so fractured. I think there really is a point to being the reporter, essentially, as anthropologist. And you go away and you say, this subculture has got extremely strong norms, prevailing ideas, modes of operation, and here's how it works. So that's the, that's the spirit. And then obviously, like, because I'm the writer that I am, I do put in mean jokes about them. Sometimes I say the mean jokes to them, actually, which is quite fun. But the one thing you can't come in to the interview and do is just be like, now's the opportunity for my, you know, for me to now scold this bad person, because no one thinks they're a bad person, and no one reacts well to being scolded. And you're not going to get anything interesting from somebody. You know, I think there's a. You see it all the time in Trump interviews, right? There's a feeling that basically what people should do is they should walk in and sort of tell him off. And you're like, well, this is just, this is sort of therapy for you. But I don't know what, you think he's going to suddenly go, no, you're right. I've never seen it that way, actually, I should respect the Constitution. You make a great point. It's kind of more interesting to find out really what, you know, what kind of ideas people are bringing to him, like what things are buzzing around in his head that he will now try and enact with no planning whatsoever. So to Me, the point of journalism in this moment is just sincerely trying to understand the world. I don't know if that. Is that how you conceive it a bit too.
- [43:47]
Mike Pesca
I'd say 100%, I think with Trump or interviews of that kind of. I don't know what the audience wants. I know what the vocal part of the audience wants, which is how could you let him get away with that? And how could you let him say that? And every interview should be a smackdown fact check that never works. Whereas when Maggie Haberman or someone like that, sometimes Swan will give him. I guess the way to say it that would flatter them is enough rope to hang themselves. But at least act interested or maybe even be interested in what he thinks and why he thinks it's it. There is a lot of blowback to that kind of interview though. It would be interesting to see if those interviews actually, you know, get more traction and more attention than the blow ups.
- [44:29]
Helen Lewis
I am, I'm in the middle of reading Regime Change, which is the Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan book. And it is incredible. And the main thing I think about it is that it is very useful for future historians to have all this stuff written down, not least as they can be the subject of some great documentary in 50 years time with like a warning from history as the subtitle. But it is just really flatly very interesting and useful to know who has what opinions within that White House, who's arguing for what, how close they came to trying to repeal habeas corpus. You know, that kind of stuff is, you know, particularly if you are somebody who wants to contest some of those things, knowing what they're doing and who is behind doing them is just phenomenally useful intelligence information to have. So the idea that they don't end every sentence with which is bad is like, that's fine by me. I'm okay with it. I can have my own moral judgments about stuff on my own in my, in the privacy of my own home. But please just tell me what's happening here.
- [45:26]
Mike Pesca
By the way, when you. In one of your older BBC series, I think it was the new goo gurus you talked about, the gigachads, was this first wave masculine masculinism?
- [45:39]
Helen Lewis
Well, I don't know. I mean, probably first. I mean, who knows when the first wave of masculinism was, but that was, that was a bit early because some of this stuff dates as far back as like pickup artistry from the 2000s, doesn't it? You know, the kind of remember the heyday of the game yeah. And the neuralistic neuro linguistic programming and sort of men dressed like stage magicians telling you how to pick up girls.
- [46:00]
Mike Pesca
By negging them.
- [46:01]
Helen Lewis
Yes, by negging them, yes. Which is, I mean in a way like Trump has perfected show about the,
- [46:06]
Mike Pesca
these guys, the middle ages.
- [46:09]
Helen Lewis
But you know what I mean, they always look, they always wear like black shirts and black ties together, which is not a look I would ever recommend to someone who doesn't want to look like they're on the afternoon slot at some small time Vegas casino. But you know, it was a copper
- [46:21]
Mike Pesca
regime at best of a minor crime family Lucchese.
- [46:25]
Helen Lewis
Right. But the thing about it is that there will always be a market for predominantly insecure younger men who would really like to find a girl like those that they are. You know, it's a hard way to determine but like easy marks to be exploited by these kind of guys. And, and that's the line that runs to somebody like an Andrew Tate. Right. Andrew Tate built his business, he built it on webcams by coercing women essentially to come and work with him. And he built it by his very scammy Hustlers University which was essentially like a pyramid scheme type deal. But they are specifically targeting young men who feel really insecure. You know, once you're like a 30 something married dad, you're in, you're, you know, if you're happily married, you're just not the audience for this kind of stuff. Maybe if you get divorced, you become it again. But. So I don't think that's, I think that is quite old. The Sigma Wolves are more like the progenitors of Nick Fuenters because Nick Fuenters is whole shtick, which to me is sort of baffling, but obviously popular with a certain segment is like, ugh, girls are horrible. And, and like, you know, I just, you know, I'm sure that resonates with some, but it's much more a descendant of the. Do you remember the Men Going Their own Way forums?
- [47:34]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [47:35]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, right. Which was a big like Reddit community. So I think, I think he's. There are definite strains within them. But you know the, the sad thing that links them is there are lots of vulnerable guys who really could use a really good friend. And what they instead get is some Charlotte on the Internet trying to take their money.
- [47:52]
Mike Pesca
Helen Lewis has written for the Atlantic, the Men who Want Women to Be Quiet. It's about how masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right. And she is also behind such podcast series as Helen Lewis has left the chat. I specifically recommend episode three. Thank you, Helen. Thank you so much.
- [48:11]
Helen Lewis
I had a really great guest on that one. And then I had you
- [48:15]
Mike Pesca
Zinger.
- [48:16]
Helen Lewis
Yeah,
- [48:23]
Mike Pesca
That's it for today's show. The Gist is pretty produced by Cory Wara. Jeff Craig does How To Ben Astaire is our booking coordinator. Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list. And Michelle Pesca is extraordinary in her role as COO Uproo G Peru de Peru. Thanks for listening.
- [48:42]
Helen Lewis
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