The Other MAGA War….At Home

Summary

Podcast Summary:
Runaway Country with Alex Wagner
Episode: The Other MAGA War….At Home
Date: March 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Runaway Country" delves into the resurgence of traditional gender roles and conservative campaigns targeting women’s rights and autonomy in the US—what Alex Wagner calls “the other MAGA war” unfolding at home. Against a backdrop of international chaos, the episode homes in on the domestic front: the right-wing push to revive the “tradwife” archetype, the political and cultural machinery behind it (like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025/2026), and its real impact on women’s lives and choices.

Wagner is joined by former “tradwife” influencer and ex-Mormon Sharon Johnson for a deep-dive into the lived experience of traditional domesticity, and then by Erin Ryan (host of the Hysteria Podcast) for incisive political analysis of the anti-feminist agenda ascendant in MAGA circles.

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Opening Segment: State of Crisis

Timestamps: [01:21 - 04:01]

• Alex Wagner opens recovering from hip surgery but laser-focused on dire global news: the escalation of war in Iran launched by Trump and Netanyahu, with devastating casualties and an information blackout.
• The uncertainty and shifting justifications for the war are paralleled with disarray at home: “But as fucked up as international relations are right now, man oh man, we are doing a real number on the domestic front as well.” – Alex Wagner [03:50]
• Tees up this week’s main topic: the political and cultural battle over the roles and status of women in America.

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Tradwife Culture & Heritage Foundation’s “Return to 1950s” Agenda

Timestamps: [05:06 - 08:20]

• The episode kicks off discussion with examples from viral “tradwife” influencers (like Nara Smith) making the domestic sphere look glamorous and desirable on social media.

  • “These 21st century Betty Drapers are not the only ones selling the trad life. Right wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, are now pushing for women to forgo higher education and return to the home…” – Alex Wagner [05:54]

• The Heritage Foundation is spotlighted as a central driver, with retrograde policy proposals:

  • Eliminate welfare for non-married parents
  • Restrict tax benefits to women who marry and have kids before 30
  • No tax credits for women returning to work after only one child
  • “Even suggested a marriage boot camp for couples run by the Department of Health and Human Services.” [07:10]

• Recent Trump administration actions are explicitly connected to Heritage Foundation blueprints (Project 2025/2026).

Quote:
“Is it a stretch to think that Heritage’s vision of the Handmaid’s Tale is now a distinct possibility? No, it is not. Especially when you have a guy like this in the Oval Office.” – Alex Wagner [08:21]

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Living the Tradwife Life: A Conversation with Sharon Johnson

Sharon Johnson’s Background

Timestamps: [10:08 - 13:18]

• Sharon, a former Mormon “tradwife” from Utah, describes her upbringing:
  • Taught from early childhood that her calling was to be a wife and mother
  • Participated in church activities preparing her for marriage and homemaking from age 12 onward
  • “At 12 years old, I was writing letters in my church class to my future husband…learning how to iron white shirts at 13…trying on wedding dresses at 14.” – Sharon Johnson [10:41]

Conditioning & Perceptions

• Any exposure to “non-traditional” gender roles (via movies, pop culture) was dismissed as inferior or harmful.
  • “How you reconcile is that it's wrong...they don't have the whole truth…” – Sharon [12:09]
• Sharon reflects on her late-in-life experience of normal independence and surprise at “adult” socializing, such as recently going out for drinks with friends for the first time:
  • “I'm 39 years old…for the first time in my life…oh my gosh. This is like the movies. This is like TV. I didn't know that was real.” – Sharon [13:11]

The Trap of Non-Choice

Timestamps: [14:26 - 15:48]

• The profound effect of religious indoctrination:
  • “It's not…it doesn't feel like a choice of belief. It just is…Like, here are two different chocolate bars…this one is poisonous and is going to send your family to hell forever…but you totally have a choice.” – Sharon [14:36]
  • Choosing any path but homemaking is deeply stigmatized; leaving feels not just difficult, but dangerous.

The Tradwife Internet Zeitgeist

Timestamps: [15:48 - 18:01]

• Sharon sees viral “tradwife” culture as a reactionary push to the exodus of women from high-demand religions and rigid roles.
  • Many who lived through forced domesticity wouldn't willingly choose it again, yet social media now romanticizes and “prettifies” it to recruit new adherents.

Her Own Family’s Pivot

Timestamps: [18:38 - 20:03]

• Johnson’s family reversed gender roles after her husband’s layoff; now she works as an influencer and he manages the household.
  • “He loves being the trophy husband…he is so incredibly proud of me…” – Sharon [20:03]

Political Reflections

Timestamps: [20:30 - 23:46]

• Sharon’s reaction to Heritage Foundation policies: deeply upset by government (or church) coercing women into domesticity.
• Stresses importance of true choice:
  • “No one should be forced into that. Nobody should be guilted into that…Our mothers were stuck. Our grandmothers were stuck. They didn't have choices. And now that we do, churches and politicians are losing their minds over it…” – Sharon [22:52]

Gendered Power & the Illusion of Control

Timestamps: [23:57 - 25:56]

• Within Mormon and similar frameworks, women are taught their power is in supporting men, not leading.
  • “We need to hold their hand and teach them how to be good leaders…and if we take on too much leadership…” – Sharon [24:32]
  • “It's the whole ‘you're the neck and they're the head’…behind every successful man is a hard-working woman…” [25:36]

Why Do Women Support MAGA Despite the Agenda?

Timestamps: [26:44 - 28:11]

• For many in her community, support for Trump is seen as “the lesser of two evils” and doesn’t feel threatening to their lives (“I'm already a stay at home mom…so it doesn’t impact me as much…”)

The Challenge of Agency After Leaving

Timestamps: [28:20 - 30:03]

• Biggest struggle post-tradwife: “learning to make decisions” for herself after a life of deferring to external authority.
  • “It was never like, look inside yourself and decide what feels right…in therapy a lot of our work is in trusting yourself…you feel like a child and you feel stupid because…I've never made an adult decision in my entire life.” – Sharon [28:29]

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Erin Ryan Segment: Feminist Politics, Policy, and the “Tradwife” Resurgence

Timestamps: [34:27 - 80:48]

Why Are Tradwives Trending?

• Erin sees two drivers:
  1. The appeal of simplicity—life is hard and confusing; the idea of being "taken care of" can be seductive, especially for those with little context about the 1950s’ realities.
  2. Intentional right-wing propaganda—glossy magazines and social media campaigns trying to lure women with a romanticized image of domesticity.
     • “The only way that works is if the people being messaged with that don’t have any real-world experience.” – Erin Ryan [40:03]
     • “EV Magazine … funded by Peter Thiel, a creepy gay dude from Silicon Valley who’s obsessed with spying on people and launched a fertility app…now suddenly very interested in women and their periods. It is a very, very creepy backstory.” – Erin [37:24]

The Economics and Policy of Heritage's "Tradwife Manifesto"

• Highlights of the Heritage Foundation proposals:

  • Cut welfare for non-married parents
  • Bonus for married parents who don’t use daycare
  • Benefits for women who marry/have children before 30 (“We only want young eggs.” – Alex [45:38])
  • Discouraging higher education for women; tax penalties for working mothers/divorced parents

• Erin’s analysis:

  • “The picture within the picture here is that Heritage Foundation wants to promote marriage by making life more difficult for women who don't get married and have children—not by making life better for anybody whatsoever, except for the men…” [46:25]
  • Ridicules the economic ignorance: “It's like, how much does daycare cost? $2,000 a year? That's how much it costs a month!” [45:36]

Historical and International Perspective

• Cites Romania’s failed pronatalist policies (Decree 770):

  • “It doesn't even in the most extreme version…work in the long term. What it does do is it increases the birth rate among people less equipped to handle parenting…and increases the burden on the state…” – Erin [52:28]

• Empirical studies show what really helps birth rates: “Men helping.” [55:23]

  • “What they should do…is male-focused education designed to train boys and men to provide an environment where their wives and female partners want to have children because they know they're going to be supported. But I don’t think we’re ready for that.” [55:24]

Boot Camps, Bureaucracy, and Right-Wing Hypocrisy

• Skewers Heritage's proposal for government-run “marriage boot camps” and the hypocrisy of government intrusion in marriage/sex lives after years of railing against “big government.”
  • “Obamacare is going to bring us death panels…and now the government can be in your gynecologist's office and apparently your marital bed...” – Alex [56:31]
  • “Are we doing reps? Like, what are we…emptying the dishwasher?” – Erin Ryan [57:44]

Is There Any Common Ground?

• Both Erin and Alex concede that direct cash support for families/children is good policy—if not tethered to regressive marital requirements.
  • “Giving people that have children money is good…Even though they think the money is going to be enough to convince people to have children. Let's let them think that...Because it’s been shown that children who have parents that have the means to care for them tend to have better outcomes…” – Erin [58:40]

The Problem with Poster Boys like Trump and J.D. Vance

• Trump is an utter mismatch for traditional family values; Heritage is more aligned with J.D. Vance, but even he is problematic (e.g., biracial children, not Christian, accused of being a political chameleon).
  • “I kind of disagree with you that he's a true believer. I think he says whatever he has to say to get closer to power...” – Erin [61:36]

The Right’s Contradictions on Abortion, IVF, and Personhood

• The push for “personhood at conception” creates impossible contradictions for IVF and reproductive autonomy.
  • “If you do that, that makes IVF a lot more complicated…” – Alex [68:26]
  • “They want IVF to be difficult to access because…IVF gives [women] the idea that they can have babies later…and it's also something that is used by LGBTQ couples often…” – Erin [69:55]

What the “Tradwife” Project Is Really About: Masculinity, Power, and Setting Back the Clock

• Ultimately, the “tradwife” push is about rebalancing the power dynamic in men’s favor—a backlash against female progress:

  • “Men in America move through life being told that a marriage and family is a participation trophy that they get for just not going to jail…They're told society is set up around the idea that they are better than women…and then with their eyes and their ears they witness girls are actually doing better than them in a lot of ways. They want to go back to a system where whatever shines about girls and women is suppressed…” – Erin [72:44]

• The “1950s fantasy” was never real:

  • “These are fantasies, spun fantasies around a non reality that was initially an ad campaign…That was always something designed to make people feel like buying a refrigerator…” – Erin [77:13]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “No one should be forced into that. Nobody should be guilted into that. … Churches and politicians are losing their minds over it and they're trying to do something about it by shaming us back into the role.” – Sharon Johnson [22:52]
• “Heritage Foundation wants to promote marriage by making life more difficult for women who don’t get married and have children—not by making life better for anybody whatsoever…” – Erin Ryan [46:25]
• “What actually increases the birth rate, she found, or keeps the birth rate from dropping, is men helping…Male-focused education designed to train boys and men to provide an environment where their wives want to have children because they know within their home they’re going to be supported.” – Erin Ryan [55:24]
• “Are we doing reps? Like, what are we…emptying the dishwasher?” – Erin Ryan [57:44]
• “There’s gotta be some answer to the rightward movement … to just make it a completely retrograde proposition.” – Alex Wagner [75:43]

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Key Episode Segments & Timestamps

• [01:21 - 04:01] | Opening: State of crisis (global and domestic)
• [05:06 - 08:20] | The Heritage Foundation’s “tradwife” agenda and current policies
• [10:08 - 31:09] | Interview with Sharon Johnson, ex-Tradwife and ex-Mormon
• [34:27 - 80:48] | Analysis with Erin Ryan: Tradwife politics, feminism, and the right-wing anti-woman push

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Episode Takeaways

• The “tradwife” resurgence is not just an online subculture—it is being actively weaponized by powerful conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the current Trump administration as a way to roll back women’s rights and autonomy.
• Heritage Foundation’s proposals are mostly punitive, designed to coerce women into early marriage and motherhood and penalize those who break from traditional norms, rather than meaningfully supporting families.
• Real-life experience—especially from women who have lived through and then left these roles—reveals the emotional and psychological costs of enforced domesticity, and the profound difference between choosing homemaking and being coerced into it.
• Despite the right’s fantasies, there’s no evidence these policies work as intended; the only proven way to support birth rates and healthy families is through substantive support, equitable structures, and men sharing domestic responsibility.
• The cultural and political push for “tradwife” life is a proxy war about broader gender, power, and masculinity anxieties, not nostalgia for an illusory past.

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Further Listening/Viewing

• Rapid response videos related to the episode will drop on the Runaway Country YouTube channel.
• Listeners are invited to share their experiences for possible inclusion in future episodes ([e-mail]).

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Note: This summary omits advertisements and focuses exclusively on substantive discussion, as per guidelines.

Transcript

[Gavin Newsom]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

If you love Positive America and want more of my political analysis, you should subscribe to my newsletter. In messagebox I'm Dan Pfeiffer, former senior advisor to Barack Obama. And in messagebox I break down what's actually happening in politics and what it's going to take to beat Donald Trump. MAGA if you follow every poll and every twist and turn in the campaign message box is for you. This isn't just hot takes. Every edition delivers clear analysis, behind the scenes insight and practical strategy you can actually use whether you're working on a race, organizing your community, or just trying to win the argument in your group chat. So if you're listening to this, hit pause, go to your browser and head to crooked.com yeswedan because I have a special offer for crooked media fans. You will get 20% off a message box for an entire year. So go to crooked.com yeswedan.

[Alex Wagner]

Hello, from the present day, I have been recovering from hip surgery for the last two weeks, which I do not recommend in case anyone out there is thinking of getting a new hip just for fun. But not even the incredible anesthetics they put me on have muted the news from the home front and the extraordinarily dangerous moment we now find ourselves in. The Mad King, together with Benjamin Netanyahu, has launched a war in Iran that has spread throughout the region and killed, as of this recording, over 1,000 people, six of them American. But the vast majority of those killed are Iranians. We know, for example, that 175 people, many of them Iranian students, were killed in the bombing of the Shajarat Ha Yiba girls school. But there is essentially an information blackout in Iran that has made coverage of this war distressingly asymmetrical. So we don't know how bad it is inside Iran, but we know it is very, very bad. Then again, we don't know a lot of very essential things about this war, like, for example, why Trump started it. Already, just in the last five days, the White House has shifted its explanation for a war that really nobody asked for. Trump started it for regime change. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated on Saturday, and it's now utterly unclear who will lead the government. Or Trump started it because Israel was going to start it anyway, and so the US decided to join in because that seemed like the best thing to do. Or Trump started it because Iran has ballistic missiles that could have been headed our way soon. Or maybe, just maybe, Trump started it because he was anointed by Jesus to start Armageddon. I wish I was kidding on the last one, but that is legitimately being reported out this week. In other words, we just don't know. All we know is that it is a shit show and you can rest assured that we will be digging into this with some fresh firsthand perspective and brilliant analysis next week. But now for this week, we have a great and very compelling show on a topic that remains eternally relevant and distressing and confusing and is a reminder that as fucked up as international relations are right now, man oh man, we are doing a real number on the domestic front as well. So please take a listen and I will see you next week with some rapid response videos on our YouTube channel and a fresh new podcast about the strange turns our world has taken between now and then. Thanks for listening.

[Erin Ryan]

Hi everyone.

[Alex Wagner]

What a week or so I would imagine. Though I am technically still out of office this week, before I left the podcasting studio, the crackerjack Runaway country team put together an episode on an issue we thought would probably not be resolved by the air date the Repression of Women. Happy Women's History Month 2026 if you have been spending a lot of time on social media recently, which please don't, you might actually be confused right now about what year it is.

[Sharon Johnson]

When I told my husband my favorite sandwich is a French dip sandwich, he said he doesn't recall ever having one, which sounded so ludicrous to me that I had to make him one. I started by salting and peppering my chuck roast, searing it off on both sides before transferring it over to my crock pot. I added in some onion with my roast topped with beef broth, my onion soup mix, a little bit of Worcester sauce before letting that go for six hours on low. This was absolutely divine and Lucky rated it an 8.5 out of 10, which is amazing. And his books?

[Alex Wagner]

Not even a 10 with a homemade roll that is the Internet's most notorious trad wife, Nara Smith. Her retrograde lifestyle has gone viral and become emblematic of a growing interest we see across the culture. The return to a simpler time, Women as homemakers managing their sphere of influence in child rearing and cooking and supporting and, dare I say, indulging their spouse. Accounts like Nara's and Ballerina Farm's Hannah Nealman make motherhood and housework look beautiful and glamorous and even relaxing. Which, as someone who lives in a house with two young children prone to wild messes, surprisingly violent fights and endless negotiations, I can assure you is not the full picture. But these 21st century Betty Drapers are not the only ones selling the trad life. Right wing think tanks, including the Heritage foundation, are now pushing for women to forego higher education and return to the home because centering families and heterosexual marriage, they claim, will stave off the collapse of the United States.

[Unnamed Heritage Foundation Representative]

So we had the sexual revolution. We had the upheavals in the 60s. You had no fault divorce, breaking down of so many social norms and out of wedlock's break births skyrocketed. Part of that was a cultural decay that was supercharged, fortunately, by government policy. So you had Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs that was actually paying young women to have kids without getting married. So when the Great Society and welfare program said, look, we're going to pay a whole lot of money in the tens of thousands to single unwed moms, you got more single unwed moms. And that helped to break down the marriage culture.

[Alex Wagner]

Okay, that Heritage VP is not wearing sexy cocktail dresses and making elaborate French dip sandwiches for his spouse. But the Heritage foundation is a powerful force when it comes to shaping national politics. Remember that this is the group that authored Project 2025. And now Heritage is releasing new plans like Saving America by Saving the Family, which came out earlier this year. And it has some ideas that you can bet Stephen Sorry feminists Miller is pretty excited about eliminating welfare for non married parents, restricting tax benefits to women who marry and have kids before the age of 30, and no tax credits for women who return to work after having only one child. In this report, Heritage argues that the country's education policy should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials. They've even suggested a marriage boot camp for couples run by the Department of Health and Human Services. So lessons on love from yogurt and cocaine enthusiast RFK Jr. Sounds awesome. If any of this sounds far fetched, it is not. Sitting here in 2026, we can see the ways the Trump administration has followed Project 2025 nearly to the letter. Dismantling the federal bureaucracy and expanding presidential power. Check. Shredding environmental regulations and expanding oil and gas exploration?

[Erin Ryan]

Check.

[Alex Wagner]

Enacting highly questionable tariffs? Check. Is it a stretch to think that Heritage's vision of the Handmaid's Tale is now a distinct possibility? No, it is not. Especially when you have a guy like this in the Oval Office.

[Erin Ryan]

You can do anything, whatever you want.

[Alex Wagner]

Grab him by the.

[Erin Ryan]

You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.

[Alex Wagner]

So the question is, will MAGA misogyny successfully turn back the clock on American women, or will we be able to put MAGA patriarchy back in its place? First, I'm Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway country, we are going to be digging into the conservative movement that wants to rewind our clocks to the 1950s or maybe even earlier. I'll be joined by Crooked's own Erin Ryan, host of the Hysteria Podcast, to get into what retrograde lifestyles actually do to women, as well as the power and influence of groups like the Heritage Foundation. But first, we wanted to talk to someone who really understands the tradwife life from the inside out, why it's not all homemade butter and hand knit backpacks or whatever happens there. Sharon Johnson is an influencer and she's host of the podcast Wake Her Up. She lives in Utah with her husband and their six children. Here's our conversation. Sharon, thanks for joining me. I've been so eager to speak with you because I feel like your history is so different than mine and I want to know more. You are a self identified former trad wife. So how did that come to be? What was your childhood like? What was your young adulthood like?

[Sharon Johnson]

So I grew up Mormon, which I guess the church now likes to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of

[Alex Wagner]

Latter Day Saints and the LDS Church.

[Sharon Johnson]

The LDS Church. And my entire childhood, I grew up in Utah. So just in the thick of Mormonism, I grew up being taught that my calling was to be a wife and to be a mom. And I like to say that, like I was essentially a tread wife even before I was a wife. You know, at 12 years old, I was writing letters in my church class to my future husband.

[Erin Ryan]

Really?

[Sharon Johnson]

I was like, yes, we are writing down the traits that we wanted in our husband. And we were learning how to iron white shirts at 13 years old and we were trying on wedding dresses, you know, at a church activity at 14 years old. So that's my reality. I didn't know that I had a choice. I mean, I guess I did, but the choice was to have a career and get an education and that was seen as the lesser choice. And Something that you only do just in case something happens to your husband and you have to go back to work or, you know, you're in a financially stressful situation, you have to go to work. But I was kind of taught that, you know, where you need to be and where you should be and what's best for yourself and your children. Society and for God is for you to be in the home. And that's all I saw, too. I didn't.

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah.

[Sharon Johnson]

You know, that was my mom. That was my mom's friends, it was my aunts. It was my whole world. I didn't see anything else.

[Alex Wagner]

And this is. I mean, I wonder how much outside non traditional, non Mormon culture seeped in. Right. Like, there was the Internet. I'm sure your youngest years, social media was not as pervasive as it is now. But, like, when movies or songs or, you know, seepage from the outside, non Mormon world came in, how did you reconcile those gender roles with what you were being taught and what was being celebrated in your religious culture?

[Sharon Johnson]

No, I mean, how you reconcile is that it's wrong. Right. That they don't know. They don't have the whole truth, that it's sad that these kids don't have a mom who's at home. It's hurting them. And I just didn't relate to it. I didn't understand it. And it kind of looked like pretend like I just went out to get a drink with two friends for the first time in my life. I'm 39 years old. I'm gonna turn 40, and for the first time in my life, we had a meetup, and I said, who wants to get drink?

[Alex Wagner]

Wait, when was this?

[Sharon Johnson]

A month ago.

[Alex Wagner]

No, you went out for your first drink with your friends a month ago.

[Sharon Johnson]

So it wasn't my first drink. I've drunk before in the last four years since leaving the church, but it was my first time of not going out with my husband, not going out with a group, just, hey, who wants to go get a drink?

[Alex Wagner]

Wow.

[Sharon Johnson]

And we were sitting down and it hit me like, oh, my gosh. This is like the movies. This is like tv.

[Alex Wagner]

This is like tv, right?

[Sharon Johnson]

Like, I didn't know that was real.

[Alex Wagner]

Wow.

[Sharon Johnson]

Does that make sense?

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah. I mean, welcome.

[Sharon Johnson]

Thank you. It feels like you're coming in. I mean, you're being 39 years old. It's very bizarre to suddenly feel like I'm becoming an adult, that I can make choices for myself. It's a very confusing and disorient. It's not just a change of beliefs. It's your whole reality shifts. And it's very weird.

[Alex Wagner]

I mean, just to go back to being on the inside for a second. What do we not get? I mean, I feel like, you know, there's like, big love. There's shows about their Mormon. Mormon culture. There's also a new. And we're gonna talk about this in a second. Like the zeitgeist of tradwives on social media, which is not necessarily affiliated with the Mormon Church, but is about sort of very traditional and I would say retrograde gender stereotypes about being at home and primarily keeping the hearth and raising children and decidedly not working. That's its own thing. And then there's kind of like the political trad wife thing, which we'll get also into in a second. But, like, what are. What are we getting wrong about it? Because I feel like we have this buffet of stereotypes to choose from. And I wonder if there's something we're missing in all of that.

[Sharon Johnson]

I think that what I see the most getting wrong is people not understanding that it's not. When you're in it, it doesn't feel like a choice of a belief. It just is right. It just is your reality. I like to use the example of if somebody came up to you and said, hey, here are two different chocolate bars. You can have the choice of which one you would like to eat, but just letting you know this one is poisonous and it's going to, like, send you and your entire family to hell forever and ever and ever. But you totally have the choice.

[Alex Wagner]

Right. Got it.

[Sharon Johnson]

That's what it feels like. So it's this cult mindset, and you don't really get to choose that. And once people see it, like, truly see it, I think that determines kind of like their character if they choose to choose differently. But before that, you don't feel like you have a choice. It just is reality.

[Alex Wagner]

It's the only option.

[Sharon Johnson]

It's the only option, and it's the good option. It's the loving option. You're trying to do what's right. You think that it's the way that God is and love is, and you think it's the better choice. You're trying to do the right thing.

[Alex Wagner]

What do you. Okay, so that I feel like religious indoctrination is a huge part of that. Yes, absolutely. There's a phenomenon, though, that's happening which I alluded to just a second ago, which is the tradwife role on social media, which is not necessarily affiliated with the church. Many times it is but not necessarily just the Mormon Church, which is more about really like lifestyle grooming. It's these women who think everything is simpler and better and the way it should be in the natural order of things. For me to stay at home, for me to be the tender of the hearth and the children and to not work and to not be overeducated, and by all means to not challenge my husband. What do you think about those sort of popular Internet memes of trad wife Dom?

[Sharon Johnson]

I think that that culture shift, which is new to me because I'm coming out of it and I'm like, what? Why are people going back into yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that it's a direct result of women like me, me leaving Christianity and leaving high demand religions in huge waves. I would say, like 90% of the people that I know are ex Mormon are millennial women. It's a huge population that is leaving the church. It is women saying, oh, I saw what this did to my mom and I see what this could do to my children. We're not doing this. So I think that the, this new trend, if we want to call it, of women going back to that, it is these people in power pushing this narrative because so many of us are leaving and they need to fight back against it. And they're not using this same kind of idea of, oh, God's going to punish you. They're making it look wonderful and pretty and beautiful. So that that kind of tricks us back into the mindset. And, you know, there are things that I love being. I loved being a stay at home mom in so many aspects, but it's the idea that you don't have a choice and that it's hurting people, it's hurting society, it's hurting your children that's really harmful. And that you should be there and everyone should be there. That is the part that I'm like, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[Alex Wagner]

Why? You know, look, as someone who is a mom and is working and feels constantly between a rock and a hard place and understands the notion of sacrifice and mom guilt very acutely, I can understand how just operating on a binary, the simplicity of the choice to do it or not do it, to just like not work or work and sticking with a decision and saying, this is the way it should be and I'm not gonna even try to achieve balance, and maybe that's even impossible. I understand the lure of that. Why ultimately, if you were, you know, kind of satisfied, you have six kids, is that right?

[Sharon Johnson]

Yes.

[Alex Wagner]

That's like six jobs right there. How and why did you decide to be, shall we say, a modern wife rather than a trad wife?

[Sharon Johnson]

It kind of came at us accidentally. My husband was in the corporate world in healthcare administration, and he was laid off a year and a half ago. And I was doing influencing and it was like, okay, well, we'll do this until we, like you find another job. And we found that we both loved it, that he needed a break. We needed a dad to be a part of our lives. Like, he finally was working 70 hours a week. We saw him, he could have a relationship with his children. And I love working. I love working. I love doing whatever this weird influencing life is. I'm a huge mental health advocate, so that's where a lot of my work goes. And it just, it works. It feels like we get a life now. And it's beautiful seeing these stereo, these stereotypes, like gender roles, like flop, flop. Yeah, it's quite fascinating to experience in real time. And yeah, it's.

[Alex Wagner]

Is he okay with it? I mean, I just think it's like not only is his wife working, he's not working. That's like a real inversion of the trad wife. Yes. Stereotype.

[Sharon Johnson]

He loves it and he is so incredibly proud of me and he hypes the kids up to be proud of me. And it's been really empowering for me. It's been really good for our relationship. He doesn't see it as a knock on his ego at all. He loves being the trophy husband. That's awesome. And I love having that support. It's really incredible.

[Alex Wagner]

I have to ask you, because there's obviously a huge political movement and one would argue that what undergirds a lot of the ascendant conservative ideology right now is in essence tradwifery. To sound old English about it.

[Erin Ryan]

Right.

[Alex Wagner]

It's this notion that we need to return to this again, retrograde, very like, binary idea of where women should be and where men should be. And I wanna bring up, you know, one of our focuses in the last couple weeks is in the news industry is this report from the Heritage foundation, which is a right wing think tank that very much influences this administration. They are the authors of Project 2025, which in many ways was a blueprint for the first year of the Trump administration. They are centering marriage in their agenda. And earlier this year they released a report called Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years, which is a long time. So I just, I want to highlight a few points from it for people who are unfamiliar in the report, they advocate for eliminating welfare for non married parents, offering benefits to women who marry and have children before the age of 30, but not women who don't. They want women. Women who return to work after one child lose future tax credits. So it's incentivizing stay at home motherhood. Divorced parents are ineligible for certain tax benefits.

[Erin Ryan]

And.

[Alex Wagner]

And also the report stipulates that education policy should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials. First of all, what's your reaction to that raft of policy proposals? And I mean, sort of like I don't need to get. You don't have to offer a treatise on the economic impact of that, but the sort of using the arm of the federal government to encourage women not to be educated at the higher level and to stay home and have children young.

[Sharon Johnson]

It sounds familiar. It sounds the church, the LDS Church has something called the proclamation of the family. And it sounds like that. And it is heartbreaking to me. It is terrifying. Like, I get why men want a tradwife. I have a trad wife of a husband now. I walk into my bedroom and I have my clothes laid out and folded and washed.

[Alex Wagner]

Where did he learn how to do that?

[Sharon Johnson]

Me watching you, watching you. I walk into the bathroom and it's clean. Like magically. I like not having to think about dinner at night. It is amazing. But he got to choose that. He asked for that he wanted that. No one should be forced into that. Nobody should be guilted into that. And we don't have to do that. If we wanted him to go get a job, he could get, go get a job right now. We're not doing that. He could leave and do whatever he wanted at any moment. And it has never been for women. Women have never been benefited from these gender stereotypes. Our mothers were stuck. Our grandmothers were stuck. They didn't have choices. And now that we do, churches and politicians are losing their minds over it and they're trying to do something about it by shaming us back into the role.

[Alex Wagner]

Right. The guilt, saying that your children aren't gonna turn out. Society is askew. The power balance is off and it's destroying our society.

[Sharon Johnson]

Absolutely.

[Alex Wagner]

Do you. It really, I mean, to your point, it really does feel like a mechanism by which men can control women. Yes. And I wonder, you know, you, I'm sure, know lots of trad wives. Do you think that people living the trad wife lifestyle see this as a control thing? Do they, do they. Would they acknowledge that and okay. And, and do they acknowledge that Men have more at least choosing power. Do they want that? Talk to me a little bit about like how.

[Sharon Johnson]

Yeah, that, that's a lot of the rhetoric of. So it like in Mormonism particularly there's something called like the priesthood and men hold the priesthood.

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah.

[Sharon Johnson]

A few years ago there was this huge wave of women saying we want the priesthood as well. And they were quickly shot down by the church. But a lot of the rhetoric from other women saying, I just don't even know why you would want that respons. Why that's like so much work and we have so much work on our end and if we take on that responsibility as well, then men won't like they need to be incentivized in order to like take the helm and be good people. We need to teach them and rear them. There's a lot of like infantilizing of not only just adults, I think in Christianity, but men in particular. That's like we need to hold them their hand and teach them how to be good leaders. And if we take on too much

[Alex Wagner]

leadership but don't be leaders themselves.

[Sharon Johnson]

Oh yeah, no, we can't be leaders. We need to like teach them and support them to be leaders. Otherwise they won't be good people. They will.

[Alex Wagner]

So there's never a sense of loss of control. This is about no sort of like low key matriarchy expressed through patriarchy. That's.

[Sharon Johnson]

Yes. It's the whole like you're the neck and they're the head. Right. Like behind every successful man is a

[Alex Wagner]

hard working woman or whatever.

[Sharon Johnson]

Exactly. And that's our role, to be supportive to the men so that they can do what they can do. But we aren't supposed to be loud about it.

[Alex Wagner]

You live in Utah still, I believe, is that right?

[Sharon Johnson]

Small town. Small town Utah.

[Alex Wagner]

So you, you, I mean you must know some Trump voters, you must know some women who voted for Trump. And I, I kind of like given his track record with women, his number of divorces and remarriages, considering who his advisors are, and these don't have to be trad wives, just like Trump supporting women in that state. Conservatives, given how regressive the picture is for women, if Trump and Project 2026 have their way, like why do you think they still support Trump? What is it that's so intoxicating about him, given who he is as a person and the policy that he's pushing for women, why do women still support him?

[Sharon Johnson]

At least in my social circles, which I've, I've lost pretty heavily in the last Four years around here. Yeah, it's. There aren't a lot of true Trumpers. It's like the lesser of the two evils. It's a. Both side, you know, both parties are corrupt, both parties are awful. Yes, he's done X, Y and Z, but the Democratic Party is pro life and Trump is better for the economy. And it's all of this mental gymnastics.

[Alex Wagner]

And they've created a permission structure.

[Sharon Johnson]

Yes.

[Alex Wagner]

For themselves to vote for him.

[Sharon Johnson]

Yes.

[Alex Wagner]

But they're not looking at what it means for them and their lives, I guess, huh?

[Sharon Johnson]

No, because I think that in Mormonism, it doesn't change much in their eyes. It's like, well, I'm already a stay at home mom. I already want these things, I'm already doing these things. So it doesn't impact me as much as it does people who, you know, are pro choice and have a full career and are not interested in getting married and not interested in having kids. Those are. Even though they see them as extreme. And I would say that most of my Mormon friends don't want to push and force those ideas on anyone. They believe in them to some extent that, yeah, your place is in the home and yeah, we should be having babies, we should be getting married young.

[Alex Wagner]

When you decided to change the game, as it were, what was the biggest adjustment you had to make?

[Sharon Johnson]

Oh, that is a big question. I would say learning to make decisions.

[Alex Wagner]

Wow.

[Sharon Johnson]

Because all of your decision making, you are trying to find outside of yourself. You're looking to a God and to a church and things outside of yourself to choose for you.

[Alex Wagner]

You mean back in version 1.0 of your life?

[Sharon Johnson]

Yeah, I mean, from 0 to 36 years old, it was never like, look inside of yourself and decide what feels right and what you want to do. It's look outside of yourself for all of the answers to everything. And so in therapy, a lot of our work is in trusting yourself, in learning to be an adult and make decisions without someone telling you what to do. It's very odd. You feel like a child and you feel stupid because you realize, oh, I've never made an adult decision in my entire life. I don't know how to do that. And you have also the caveat that you don't trust yourself anymore because you're like, I lived this life for 36 years and it was a lie. How can I trust myself that I'm gonna make the right decision? So it's a lot of work, it's a lot of therapy, it's a lot of time.

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah. But at the same time, it's so interesting that you explained that way because it also, it goes a long way in opening the door to why people stay in that lifestyle. Right. They don't have to ask themselves tough questions. There are predetermined answers. The sort of choice matrix is much more limited and less overwhelming, I would assume. And life is simpler, if not quite as rich. Yeah.

[Sharon Johnson]

It lays out the whole idea of this is how you live and you just have to do that.

[Alex Wagner]

But look at you going out for drinks with your friends.

[Sharon Johnson]

I know, right?

[Alex Wagner]

You're on the road, sis. You're on the road. Sharon, it's like it's so valuable to get your perspective on all of this.

[Sharon Johnson]

Thank you so much. It's fascinating because I'm still in small town Utah and I forget that it's weird. I forget that it's different my whole life.

[Alex Wagner]

It's just different. Let's not call it weird. You just. You came up in a different way and you made different choices, and now you're having cosmos. What did you drink when you went out with your friends?

[Sharon Johnson]

My drink of choice is a gin and tonic, which I found out. My grandma is an lds. I recently found out that that is her drink and I got to have a drink with her for the first time ever just a few months ago. It was amazing.

[Alex Wagner]

I love that for you.

[Erin Ryan]

Me too.

[Alex Wagner]

Well, have a gin tonic on us.

[Sharon Johnson]

Thank you so much, Alex.

[Alex Wagner]

Thanks for coming on the podcast. Good luck with everything.

[Sharon Johnson]

Thank you.

[Alex Wagner]

That was former trad wife Sharon Johnson. We'll be right back with Crooked's own Erin Ryan right after the break to unpack the political motivations of pushing the trad wife life. Runaway country is brought to you by Helix. Spring has sprung and bed has springs. Take that to the bank. Or in my case, both springs and memory foam. It's almost allergy time, but I'm ready to snap. Sleep it all off with my hybrid mattress from Helix. Why do I love Helix? Let me count the ways these mattresses help you sleep better. My mattress has me sleeping through the night and lounging through the day. Just kidding. I wish I could spend my days in it, though. A study the company conducted found that 82% of those involved in the study saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on a Helix mattress. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand. It's tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Helix delivers your mattress right to your front door with free shipping in the US and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix Guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixsleep.com Alex for 27% off sitewide that's helixsleep.com Alex For 27% off sitewide this offer is exclusive to Alex our listeners, so make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com Alex ZipRecruiter Runaway country is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Skills based hiring is all the rage right now. It's when employers emphasize capabilities over education and direct experience. According to experts, this leads to faster hiring and better job performance. And is it really a surprise if you're an employer who's adopted some skills based hiring? The best way to ensure that your applicants have the right skills is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter recommends smart screening questions to help you hone in on that perfect match for your role. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] Runaway Now ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology. I assume it's proprietary because imagine the possibilities. But their powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates fast in a zip Zippy if you might even say in a zip zip Recruiter's powerful matching technology. Is it proprietary? If not, I'd like to use it for some other stuff. Finds qualified candidates fast zipily you might say. You can easily add ZipRecruiter's screening questions to your job post so you get the highest quality applicants. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com runaway that's ziprecruiter.com runaway meet your match on ziprecruiter Aaron it's such a pleasure to have you on this podcast. And what people won't know unless our editors are very malicious is that we began this sit down talking about pregnancy scammers and divorce filings and all manner of strange like I guess, marriage dynamics and unmarriage dynamics.

[Erin Ryan]

Reproductive dynamics.

[Alex Wagner]

Reproductive dynamics, which is such a brilliant segue to the thing we're going to be talking about today, which is this, the resurgence of. What do we even call it? Let's just start with the big socio cultural resurgence, which is like the tradwife phenomenon. And I guess I've been consuming, well a Far too much content on the Internet, but especially as it concerns us, like this group of women, and I would say men who are really interested in and turned on by the idea of like, super retrograde gender roles and the, you know, hold onto your poodle skirts. Because we're rewinding the clock back to 1954, where before we get into the sort of political aspect of all of this, where, why, I should say not where, but why are we at a moment where we're talking about trad wives?

[Erin Ryan]

I think there. I think that's kind of two pronged. Like on one hand, if you think about, you know, why a person who doesn't know very much about life would be attracted to the idea of tradwifery. And I guess has never, like, read a book about the 1950s and how like, mentally unwell women were who were trapped in that lifestyle. Somebody coming in with very little knowledge or information in a world that is very complicated, in a world that has a lot of. A lot of decisions to be made that are stressful, in a world where your success and your comfort is not guaranteed. The illusion of having a life accessible to you, where you're just taken care of like a house pet and your only job is to, like, take care of the kids and look pretty. There's something very appealing about the idea of being like, I don't want to have to deal with any of the complications of the modern world. I don't wanna have to earn money. This sounds great, you know, and again, this is something that someone would assume, knowing very little about what that actually does to the human psyche if you're put in that situation. Now, the other side, which is more insidious, is there has been a push from entities that have a vested interest in trying to incentivize tradwifery to make it look like it's more appealing than it actually is. So like, for example, EV Magazine, which. To which I am a subscriber for work. EV Magazine is a conservative women's magazine. But if you get a copy of it in your hands, it is beautiful. It looks like those. The magazines I used to buy at the airport before I got on a plane so I could buy the magazines

[Alex Wagner]

I used to buy, period. There are no magazines left at the airport.

[Erin Ryan]

I know. And if they have magazines, they're like so thin and just really sad. I just want there to be magazines from 1997 for me to buy. Why can't I just do that?

[Alex Wagner]

I think that's exactly. Please. Right.

[Erin Ryan]

I would love. Yes, let's relaunch that. But Yvie does like a print magazine once a year and if you hold it, it's beautiful. Like the last year's issue had Ballerina Farm in it. And it was like a 50 page spread of her looking amazing. Like, some of the pictures are a little hokey, but she looked amazing. And then there's these articles and they're talking about cooking and they're talking about sex and they're talking about fashion. And it's all the things that you would expect from a women's magazine.

[Sharon Johnson]

Expect.

[Erin Ryan]

Except there's this undercurrent of like, have a baby, have a baby. Don't put out having a baby. Have a baby. Have sex with your husband. Have sex only with your husband. Only do it with your husband. Have babies, have babies, have babies, have babies. Don't wait. Have babies, have babies. Don't go on Ozempic. Be skinny. Don't be on Ozempic. Have babies. It's very, very insidious. But who it's funded by is not like this, this organic upswelling of young women that are like, I wanna read this stuff. It, its major advertiser when it first started was EV28, which is an app, a fertility app that Peter Thiel bankrolled. And so if you think about the actual like money behind it and the mechanisms behind it, it's like this creepy gay dude from Silicon Valley who's obsessed with spying on people and launched a fertility app who's suddenly very interested in women and their periods. Like, it is a very, very creepy backstory to EV magazine. Like that's, that's also like at play here. So we have like, real interest in, you know, kind of avoiding the complications of modernity from people who don't know any better and a push to try to convince people to have more babies.

[Alex Wagner]

I, I, I, I think it also, I guess, and I am not playing devil's advocate by any stretch, I think it's also because modernity is fucking complicated.

[Erin Ryan]

Right? There is, I totally get it. Yeah.

[Alex Wagner]

As, as a mom, as a working person, as a divorced person, like, it is a sweet, fucking really complicated balancing act. And especially if you are, you know, depending on where your income is at, being a parent, being out there in the world, it's just all expensive. It feels undoable. It feels really tough. And when you're offered a solution that's like, but there's another way, and that way is to simplify your life and let your man bring home the bacon and like, just have one role instead of three. And you'll be so much more fulfilled, right? Totally. It's like this intoxicating process of just simplifying everything. You don't have to make the choice between achievement and children. The children are your achievement. And that to me seems the most pernicious because it's proposing a solution that's first of all, not. I mean, it really undermines the idea that women may want to do things other than raise children or have ambitions that could be balanced hand in hand and that men maybe also want to stay home or, or maybe they don't want to be married to, you know, you don't want to have a normative relationship or whatever it is. Like all these gains we've made in the last 50 years are totally wiped away in favor of this really honey hued idea about the way life used to be and how much better it actually was.

[Erin Ryan]

Right? But the only way that works is if the people being messaged with that don't have any real world experience. Like example, right? I had two babies in the last five years. And with my second one, I was working a full time job. So I took maternity leave. And before I took maternity leave, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so looking forward to this. I know what I, you know, I'd been through the newborn stage before. I knew it wasn't gonna be like a break, but I was like, it's gonna be really nice to just have one thing that I have to do during the day. And I'm really looking forward to this. And by the end of maternity leave, I was like, I need to get

[Alex Wagner]

me the fuck out of here. Right?

[Erin Ryan]

Because motherhood to like a small baby is, you know, there are some people that absolutely love it and, you know, more power to them. That's great. I would love for them to have the option and the choice to, to stay home and devote their lives to that if that's what they truly want. But for most people, it is both overwhelming and incredibly boring at the same time. You can never, you can never not be, be parenting. But parenting is not mentally stimulating for an adult woman with a brain.

[Alex Wagner]

Or it can be isolating. Even if, if it is stimulating, it can be incredibly lonely. It can be incredibly. I mean, there's so many feelings you have in those early years. And I think the idea that like, there is a like key in a lock where women feel automatically fulfilled and that this is their destiny, it just really shortchanges the complexity of women's emotions and ambitions, you know, but nonetheless we are at this moment where the trad wife archetype is ascendant, I guess. And we have, I think, to your first point, an entire political infrastructure that's being built around it to encourage support and, like, further this. This idea of retrograde femininity and really insanely traditional and regressive gender roles. So let's talk about the Heritage foundation, because they in recent weeks have been making waves for a report that came out in January called, wait for it, Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years. Erin, just hold onto your cone bra, because I'm gonna read you some highlights to end America's family crisis. The Heritage Rights. The Heritage foundation rights policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice, driven by two truths. The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right in a loving and stable home is. I'm not reading this correctly at all. This is my hangover. Okay. The second. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents. In contrast, the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them. The presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood. This is a fascinating reframing when they're using the same argument to go after Obergefell and gay marriage. Children are do the right of being raised by a man and a woman in the home, and anything less than that shortchanges children. This is about children.

[Erin Ryan]

Well, it's interesting that they're also willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Pun intended. When it comes to adoption here, it sounds like. It sounds like they don't want babies to be adopted out at all. It sounds like because they don't want gay couples to have babies, they want

[Alex Wagner]

adoptions to work for married. I'm not gonna say white, but I think that's probably ideal. Married heterosexual couples, which is kind of how they get around the IVF thing, which we'll talk about in a moment. But yes, I mean, generally, the idea is that children. This is a child's rights issue, which dovetails really quite nicely with their stance on abortion and giving fetuses personhood. It's all about child first and thinking. And if you don't think of the child first, you are a selfish person.

[Erin Ryan]

That's interesting. That doesn't. I mean, whatever. They don't really care about being hypocrites because they just, like, they do it all the time. But it's really interesting that the child first thing doesn't apply to things like gender affirming care or things.

[Alex Wagner]

Education.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah, education. It's very interesting. That is an inconsistency, the first and only in the Heritage foundation ideology. It is really interesting to position it that way. But it's also. This is a word salad, Alex. This is a lot of words that are disguising the true insidious intent behind this and the true insidious actions that they're suggesting achieve this. But I'm sure we'll get into that in a little bit.

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah, I mean, I just. My first issue with all of this, even if you set aside the gender stuff and the sort of sociocultural aspect, is that you are a government that is really encouraging people to have children at the same time that you're shredding the social safety net, but at the

[Erin Ryan]

same time you're kicking out immigrants.

[Alex Wagner]

Exactly. Well, right. Which is a great. The great way to increase the American birth rate is to, like, keep immigrants in the country, right?

[Erin Ryan]

Yes.

[Alex Wagner]

But I want to get into some of the sort of policy prescriptions from this report, AKA time machine, back to the Eisenhower era. They want to eliminate welfare for non married parents. They're suggesting offering a $2,000 a year bonus for married parents who do not use daycare. But only if you're married. By the way, average childcare costs are between.

[Erin Ryan]

It's like how much it costs a month for daycare?

[Alex Wagner]

Exactly. $2,000 for a kid? Yes. It's usually like, I think between 11 and $15,000 a year average. They're offering benefits for women who marry and have children before 30, but not women who don't. We only want young eggs. I love this one. Education policy, Erin, should not coax young Americans to delay marriage or while pursuing needless credentials. That's a twofer because not only is it an assault on women's autonomy and bodily autonomy, it's also an assault on colleges and universities and women who want to return to work after only one child would lose future tax credits. And of course, divorced parents, the scourge of our society, are ineligible for certain tax benefits. Do any of these stand out to you as particularly onerous? Like, what are your thoughts about some of these ideas?

[Erin Ryan]

I mean, if you kind of look at it like a magic eye poster, where you just stand Close to it and then back away. And you're like, what is the picture within the picture? The picture within the picture here is that Heritage foundation wants to promote marriage by making life more difficult for women who don't get married and have children, not by making life better for anybody whatsoever, except for the men who are within these marriages. Because this traditional form of marriage is beneficial only to mention it is not beneficial to children, it is not beneficial to women. And if we're going to bring back 1950s style marriage, the least they can do is bring back Quaaludes. Right.

[Alex Wagner]

Honestly, that's how you could get more people to stay married.

[Erin Ryan]

I would 100 like. I think that that's what they need. That should be item number one. Bring back quite actually like the.

[Alex Wagner]

You maybe have me if you bring back Quaaludes.

[Erin Ryan]

Yes. Item number one. Okay. Heritage Foundation. I'm listening. The amount of the amounts of money that they're suggesting are sort of along the lines of. It's a banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10? Like, a complete lack of understanding of how much children cost, how much childcare costs. And it really betrays this vision. I think that ultimately Heritage really wants only men to work. I don't think that they want. They think that women should have jobs. I think they think that women should stay home and take care of children, and that's it. And the way that they're trying to do that is by making life more difficult if you choose not to do those things. Also, the not having. Getting them to have children before 30 is really an interesting thing. And I think it also gives the game away a little bit because we talked about EV Magazine earlier, and I said, I think it's aimed at very young women who don't know anything. And I think one way to trick women into doing this is to get them in before they have enough life experience. Experience to be like, hey, this is actually pretty sweet. I kind of love living in my own apartment. I kind of love having everything exactly the way I want it. I kind of don't think that I really want more than one child. You know, it's It. It. They're trying to get in before people have enough information to make a. A rational decision.

[Alex Wagner]

Before they've been educated.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah.

[Alex Wagner]

Before they've seen the world and talked to their friends too much. Yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

Before they have friends that are over 35 who are like, don't do it.

[Alex Wagner]

We say this as two mothers who love our children. Yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

Absolutely.

[Alex Wagner]

Love the shit out of them. We'll be right back with Erin Ryan right after a quick break. Runaway country is brought to you by Zebiotics Pre Alcohol what is the one small shift I've actually maintained this year? Reclaiming my mornings people, I realized a night of fun should not cost me an entire day of productivity. So my shift is planning a balanced night out to ensure a high quality morning after. I rely on Zebiotics Pre Alcohol to support that goal and keep my social life and my wellness goals aligned. Zebiotics Pre Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre Alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. I forgot my ZBiotics, to be honest, earlier this week and I had a rough morning and that's all it takes to get me to think about taking them the next time I'm going out. And to take it first. Even after a night out, I can confidently plan on maybe going into an infrared Pilates class. What? Or just walking around and being a good parent the next day without worry. Let's be real. Usually a Friday night out means a Saturday morning spent canceling my workout class. But since I started incorporating pre alcohol, my glass of wine does not disrupt my morning flow. Remember to head to ZBiotics.com Alex and use the code Alex at checkout for 15% off. Runaway country is brought to you by Wild Alaskan Company. When was the last time you truly trusted the seafood you brought home? I used to question everything from nutrition and taste to sustainability until I discovered Wild Alaskan Company. Wild Alaskan Company is the best way to get wild caught. Perfectly portioned, nutrient dense seafood delivered directly to your door. Trust me, you have not tasted fish this good. I've been doing some oven roasted cod or sea bass, maybe a little teriyaki salmon. Pop it in there a it's 100% wild caught, never farmed. That means no antibiotics, no GMOs or additives. Just clean, real fish that support healthy oceans and fishing communities. Wild Alaskan fish is frozen right off the boat to lock in taste and texture and nutrients like omega 3s. If you're not completely satisfied with your first box. Wild Alaskan Company will give you a full refund. No questions asked, no risk, just high quality seafood. Not all fish are the same. Get seafood you can trust. Go to wildalaskan.com Alex for 35 bucks off your first box of premium wild caught seafood. That's wildalaskan.com Alex For $35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. You're right about the negative incentive, and I just think that's where it's like that. First of all, government pushing people to have babies is like, I don't know, I just feel like it doesn't usually work very well. Very Orwellian. We've seen it around the world in autocracies. It's fucking freaky. And it doesn't work. And negatively incentivizing it seems problematic as well. Just like we're gonna make life so miserable for you and we're gonna devalue you and say, and in the tax code, to the degree that you just are forced to stay at home and have babies, because that's the only option, that doesn't seem like a great recipe for a happy society.

[Erin Ryan]

It's not. It's not. And it doesn't work like it does. And let's talk about the most extreme example of it ever being tried in recent history. And that was, like, in Romania in the 60s. And, like, I'm obsessed with this. I'm like, morbidly obsessed with this and was laughing because I talk about it all the time. When Nicolae Ceausescu took power in Romania, he instituted this thing called decree 770. Now, if you were alive in the 80s, listeners, viewers, if you're alive in the 80s, you probably remember Romanian orphanages. Those were a direct result of decree 770, which made abortion completely illegal. It made birth control illegal. And also, like, secret police would spy on women when they went to the hospital, when they went to the doctor. I think if you were over 45 and if you had more than four children, you were allowed to be on birth control eventually. But it was really, really horrible. So now, in the first place, first couple years, the birth rate went up in Romania, of course, because suddenly you get pregnant, you're going to stay pregnant, and that baby's coming out of you and you're going to raise it. But after a few years, women of means and education in Romania figured out ways around it. Like, it's not necessarily that they were having, like, sneaky abortions. They just were figuring out a way to Evade this. If they didn't want to have a baby, they could just, they would not have babies. And the people that couldn't figure out ways around it were women that were more disenfranchised, younger women, abuse victims, et cetera. People who were less equipped to parent their children were more likely to be children. And so a lot of these excess children that they couldn't take care of ended up in Romanian orphanages, not being looked after, being completely neglected. An entire generation of just absolute national shame. These children were just completely emotionally like non functional once they reached adulthood. So I think that that's like, that should be a lesson to anybody who's gonna try to like carrot and stick women into doing anything. It's like this doesn't even in the most extreme version where, you know, medals are given to moms with six kids and, you know, all of these things, it doesn't actually work in the long term. And what it does do is it increases the birth rate among people that are less equipped to handle the work of parenting and increases the burden on the state when some of those children are, you know, not being adequately cared for by their parents.

[Alex Wagner]

You'd think it's almost as if the right wing has not looked at historical

[Erin Ryan]

precedent or current precedent or what's happening currently. Like, there was a study that came out a couple years ago by a woman named Claudia golden that actually looked at what does increase the birth rate. Looked at different countries around the world like, okay, so Germany was having a really hard time and so what did they do? Free daycare, you know, all of these special things. And they were able to stop it from dropping as fast as it was dropping, but they weren't able to stop the drop entirely. And then they, you know what actually increases the birth rate, she found, or keeps the birth rate from dropping, is men helping.

[Alex Wagner]

Oh, don't tell anybody that.

[Erin Ryan]

Men helping. It's like this. But the Heritage foundation, it's like, it's right there. If you Google how to raise birth rate, it's one of the most recent, you know, this like, flurry of press around this paper by, by Golden. It's one of the like top results. Like, I'm sure they have the same Google I do over the, at the Heritage Foundation. Maybe they really, what they should do if they really want to increase the birth rate in the US Is male focused education designed to train boys and men to provide an environment where their wives and female partners want to have children because they know within their home they're going to be supported But I don't think we're ready for that.

[Alex Wagner]

I don't think we're men. Men helping. That seems radical. I mean they, one of the things they do prescribe, however, and this is maybe my favorite, is a boot marriage boot camp for couples run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Let's just like envision that for a second. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[Erin Ryan]

Marriage running a boot camp marriage. He's been married a couple times, he's been married like twice or three times. He's got a couple experience being married.

[Alex Wagner]

I mean, I can't. First of all, what. Like this is the same group of people that are like, Obamacare is going to bring us death panels. Government's going to be up and now, now that the government can be in your gynecologist's office and apparently your marital bed, like the cognitive distance between what the right has railed against for years and years and years and what they're actually suggesting, which is a form of like the most heavy handed socialism.

[Erin Ryan]

Like, it's really crazy.

[Alex Wagner]

What are you talking about?

[Erin Ryan]

You know, it's also funny, they're backing into like being like, oh actually, you know what, what if we did sex education? It's like you guys spent an entire, like, you spent 50 years being like, we're not gonna tell anybody, anybody about their bodies at all and kids shouldn't know and blah blah, blah, blah. Now one of the suggestions is what if we educated women on their like menstrual cycles and their fertility. It's like, that's called sex education. And you guys got really mad when we tried to give it to people. Like it is, it is very. It's so interesting that they're trying to do this and also like boot camp. Why, why is there an army component to this? Like are we doing reps? Like, what are we.

[Sharon Johnson]

I'll know the dishwasher.

[Alex Wagner]

Honestly, I'd be for a fucking boot camp about like doing the fucking dishes. But that's so lame of me. It does beg the question though, Aaron, because as you point out, some of this stuff there is a shared value I think are increasingly on the right and certainly on the left in terms of like, oh, I don't know, education around sex and you know, sexual, basically sexual empowerment in a way. But even some of the proposals on a tax level could be advantageous. Not if they weren't only limited to married couples. The idea of having a more robust social safety net is something that the, like childcare, like defraying the costs of childcare, giving Tax credits to people like, these are not anathemas. These are not bad ideas. If you are a liberal or a progressive. And I wonder if you think there is a way to try and find common ground on this, or is the ground so poisoned that it's not worth walking on at all?

[Erin Ryan]

I think that we can agree as progressives that giving people that have children money is good. I think that's good. Even though they think the money is going to be enough to convince people to have children. Let's just let them think that. Let's let them think that and let them give people money like that. Great. Because it shows, you know, it's been shown that children who have parents that have the means to care for them tend to have better outcomes for different reasons. You know, they're able to buy what the kids need. Kids need stuff all the time. But also. Yeah.

[Alex Wagner]

Or support services or whatever it is.

[Erin Ryan]

Exactly. And also, having financial security reduces parental stress and maternal stress, especially has poor outcomes in children. So, you know, reducing a parent's stress and making things easier for them is going to be good for kids. So it's actually going to probably be good for kids to incentivize having children. I just wish that they weren't saying they're only doing it for married couples

[Alex Wagner]

or whatever else, or women under 30.

[Erin Ryan]

This is going to increase lavender marriages. Let's just say it. Like, people are just about to. They're going to get married to their gay bestie. Like, I'm a single. You know, have kids with whoever they want, get married to their gay bestie, be like, oh, yeah, that's totally his kid, and then, like, raise the kid together. You know, there's. There's. People are always gonna find ways around this sort of incentive structure. And so I think it's very. It's almost, like, cute that they think that this will work, but I just. I can't see it working. But I also feel like, yeah, yeah, let them. They want to start giving people with kids more money. I'm actually kind of in favor of that.

[Alex Wagner]

Do you feel like I'm sort of obsessed that they have the worst possible figurehead for a movement like this, which is Donald Trump. Right. Project Heritage, like, pumps this stuff out and they, like, give it to Trump and he takes it and then pretends he never got it in the first place? Right. That's certainly the case with Project 2025. This is Project 2026. Trump is obviously twice married, notorious philanderer. He's been found civilly liable for sexual Assault. He's not exactly who you would recruit to be the avatar for a Christ loving marriage. And by the way, there is a white Christian nationalism that undergirds all of this stuff coming out of Heritage. But I do think J.D. vance, our vice president. Congratulations on your coming fourth child, Mr. Vice President, is actually not only a great avatar for this movement, but is a true believer. And I wonder how much you think. Well, first of all, what do you think about J.D. vance as the interlocutor for this movement? Does he make it more palatable because he's less palatable? Is this something. Can you talk about this in national politics? I mean, he's gonna be running in 2028. Like, can you run on this and find resonance? Can you win support if you talk about this as a national issue? I mean, he would elevate it from like the freak show at the Heritage foundation to, you know, a piece of the RNC platform.

[Erin Ryan]

Well, I kind of disagree with you that he's a true believer. I think that he believes, he says whatever he says he has to say in order to get closer to power. And I think that this is something that he has realized that if he embraces it, he can sort of. He can kind of run to the right of Donald Trump on it because he does actually have the like, bonafides in his personal life. He seems like he's had the same wife for a long time and been faithful to her. They have four children, you know. But there are some things that I bump against, which is one, I don't think JD Vance tells the truth about anything at all. I think he's kind of a hollow man. And also I think that, you know, you brought up white Christian nationalism. I think that there are components of the American right that truly have a problem with the fact that his kids are biracial.

[Alex Wagner]

Yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

And that his wife is not a white person. And that he was married.

[Alex Wagner]

Or Christian.

[Erin Ryan]

Or Christian. He was married in a Hindu ceremony. And I am fully in favor. That's like the only cool thing about him, like, to me is the fact that he's. He's actually had this, like, life experience that's very unique and that it sort of expresses this really wonderful thing about America, which is that people from different backgrounds come together and make a life together here. But unfortunately, that's not what he's taking forward. He's taking forward this like, pro life. Pro life. Pro life thing. You know, he spoke at the March for Life. Did you watch any of the speech that he gave? I did.

[Alex Wagner]

I Saw some of it. Yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

Well, the Trump administrator, he kind of danced around this thing that the Trump administration is in trouble for. Anti abortion activists right now are really gunning for the abortion pill. They want the abortion pill to be illegal. They wanna take mifepristone out of the out market. But the problem with that is the Trump administration. I mean, Donald Trump used the pro life vote to get elected. And now that he's been elected twice, he's kind of like, you know, pound sand.

[Alex Wagner]

Well, he got a Roe v. Wade overturned and they should be happy with that.

[Erin Ryan]

Exactly. You got what you wanted. You got your Supreme Court. Now I don't really care about anything else. He doesn't care about the abortion pill. And the, the pro life movement in the US is, has been really screaming about this. And in his speech, J.D. vance was like, look, look, he did that thing that he does that's very like hr where he's like, I know, I know, I understand. And then he.

[Alex Wagner]

So the administration's hr, Chief HR officer. Oh my God, that's so accurate.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. Right. So now that you, now every time you see him, you're going to be like, this is the fucking HR guy just being just full of. No offense to the hr, crooked media. I'm talking about other experiences I've had with HR in the past.

[Alex Wagner]

Amen, sis.

[Erin Ryan]

Yes, but he has this kind of HR thing where he's like, yeah, let's address the elephant in the room. And then he mentions something or alludes to something and then doesn't do anything about it. He never once mentioned the abortion pill. He never called it out. He was like, we could be doing more. But he never spelled out what the administration is going to do. I think that his big talk and the fact that he's about to have his fourth kid is not gonna be enough to convince the super hardcore pro lifers that he's doing something or he's pushed the administration to do something that they just haven't done. And it's kind of right there for them to do too, like, you know, try to make an executive order that eliminates. He can't even. He hasn't even taken those like big swings that are gonna be overturned in court. So I think that like on one hand, J.D. vance is. Appears to be more of a true believer. But I think on the other hand, like, if you actually analyze what he has done versus what he has said, there is a pretty wide gap there that'll be hard for him to negotiate going into 2028.

[Alex Wagner]

Well, to enter Your point? I mean getting rid of mifepristone is a political dead ender. Like you're, it's a wrap. Like I think it's the majority of abortions that still happen in this country are medication abortions. And if it really would change, I mean already dismantling Roe changes the notion of bodily autonomy in this country. But it would really, I mean it would, it would change the dynamics of our society in such a profound way. Well, and it is a non starter for national election.

[Erin Ryan]

It is. But it also wouldn't really change care available to abortion seeking patients because isoprostol can also be used to induce abortions. It's not as it has like a slightly higher failure and complication rate. Yes, but like it's still like right?

[Alex Wagner]

I mean, yes, you people will find a way. We know this from the era when abortion wasn't safe or legal. And that is a terrifying but I mean women should not have to go through unnecessarily difficult and dangerous procedures because J.D. vance is trying to score political points with a fraction of the right wing. You know, like even if they have to only rely on women, one part of the two drug regimen, like if something goes wrong, then they have to go to the emergency room. And if something's going wrong in the emergency room in the middle of a botched abortion, good luck. If you're in a red state, I mean that's like a death sentence for women. More for my conversation with Aaron Ryan right after the break. Runaway country is brought to you by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. One of the quiet wonders of American democracy is this. The government doesn't get to tell you what to believe. That principle, the separation of church and state, isn't anti religion, it's pro freedom. But right now, that line is being deliberately blurred by politicians who think their beliefs should be everyone's law. The Freedom From Religion foundation exists to stop that. They defend the First Amendment so that public schools, courts and governments work for all of us, believers, non believers, everyone. This isn't about silencing faith. It's about stopping the government from picking favorites. If you care about democracy, pluralism and freedom to live your own life, join them and help protect a country that belongs to all of us. Visit FFRF us newyear or text my first name A L E X to 511511. To learn more and join, go to FFRF us newyear or Text my name Alex to 511511 and support the work of protecting our shared freedom message and data rates may apply.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

If you love Positive America and want more of my political analysis, you should subscribe to my newsletter, the Message Box. I'm Dan Pfeiffer, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, and in messagebox I break down what's actually happening in politics and what it's going to take to beat Donald Trump. Maga if you follow every poll and every twist and turn in the campaign message box is for you. This isn't just Hot takes every addition to delivers clear analysis, behind the scenes insight and practical strategy you can actually use whether you're working on a race, organizing your community, or just trying to win the argument in your group chat. So if you're listening to this, hit pause, go to your browser and head to crooked.com yeswedan because I have a special offer for Crooked Media Fans. You'll get 20% off a message box for an entire year. So go to crooked.com yeswedan.

[Alex Wagner]

I guess to go back to the the idea though of abortion, because I do think that's, I mean that is the elephant in the room, right? We started talking about ivf and I think that this is where the right gets twisted up in its own sort of ethics, right? They want fetuses, they want an egg at fertilization to have personhood. And if you do that, that makes IVF a lot more complicated, Right? And we saw this play out in Alabama because if that egg has personhood rights and it gets destroyed or isn't carried to term in the course of an IVF round, that creates a whole set of legal complications. At the same time, there's some women, some people who want to get pregnant who cannot have a baby without ivf. So where does that leave you in your pronatalist movement? If you both want to encourage the building of families, but you want to one of the main tools by which people have families in the 21st century. I wonder what you think about the ethics of that and whether that's a problem for them. I mean, I think the IVF thing is just a really super thorny issue generally for the right and they've managed to skirt over it. But the more you have this conversation about families and family building, the more complicated it becomes and the more convoluted their position on IVF becomes.

[Erin Ryan]

Well, like we were talking about earlier, the Heritage foundation has decided that the way to be boost the birth rate in the US Is to get em young. Get em young, get them having babies before they even think about it.

[Alex Wagner]

To neutralize it.

[Erin Ryan]

Exactly. And IVF is Something that enables people who have delayed parenthood to an age where maybe getting pregnant is slightly more difficult. Which, by the way, I think the fertility cliff is just, like, propaganda. But that's a whole other topic. They want IVF to be difficult to access because they have decided that the way forward is to trick women into having babies young. And IVF gives them the idea that they can have babies later. And it's also something that is used by LGBTQ couples often. And so this is a way for them to both be homophobic and to limit LGBTQ couples ability to have children. And it also is a way to further scare women into thinking that they need to. You know what? You gotta do it now, because otherwise you're gonna lose your chance. You gotta do it before you're 35, otherwise you're gonna lose your chance.

[Alex Wagner]

And 30, ideally, Erin. Ideally, like, early 20s.

[Erin Ryan]

So I cannot imagine what a nightmare mother I would be if I had a child at 30.

[Alex Wagner]

Oh, my God. At 24, like, I.

[Erin Ryan]

No, my mom was 23 when she had me, and I'm like, if. If she. Like, I was.

[Alex Wagner]

She had.

[Erin Ryan]

When she was my age, she had a 19 year old. Like, what? What? That is crazy. But I also think that, like, you know, there have been plenty of resources or research into children's development that has found that parents that are older actually do a better job of parenting because they have financial stability, they have emotional stability, emotional maturity.

[Alex Wagner]

I was going to say they're less whacked out. Yes, I was whacked out in my 20s.

[Erin Ryan]

Yes, I should. Nobody should have handed me a baby. I should barely have had a cat.

[Alex Wagner]

That's the next movement at its essence, though. I think when we get back down to all of this, right, this is about men. They're making it about what women can or can't do. But ultimately, it is about rebalancing the power dynamic and making men, as you said, back to head of the household, back to the sort of primary breadwinner, back to sort of the masculinity of yesteryear. And that is what is. I mean, that is the thing of the Trump 2.0 is like, where. What did we miss? What went wrong that allowed for the space to develop where men have felt like it's a zero sum game, that women's empowerment, that feminism, that women being equal earners is a direct threat to them and their lives instead of something that should be seen as complimentary and maybe even rewarded as evidence of a more inclusive and equitable society. I mean, the whole Game with this Heritage report. And even the pronatalist movement is just really about making men, putting men back at the top of the power pyramid. That's all it is.

[Erin Ryan]

I think that men in America move through life being told that a marriage and family is a participation trophy that they get for just not going to jail, basically. And at the same time, they're moving through life through systems where boys don't necessarily thrive. So they go to school, the girls are smarter than the boys. You know, they go through high school. Girls are more likely to. You know, girls talk sooner, they potty train sooner. They do all of these things developmentally.

[Alex Wagner]

They take tests better, take tests better.

[Erin Ryan]

They're better at sitting still in school. And, you know, there's a whole other conversation we could have about the system being designed around a specific kind of child and not another kind of child. But they witness girls doing very well all through school. They're outnumbering them in college. They're outnumbering them in some professional fields now. And I think that they're being told there are these conflicting things. They're told that society is set up around the idea that they are better than women and deserve to be in charge of them. And then with their eyes and their ears and their life experience, they witness that girls are actually doing better than them in a lot of ways. And I think that they have chosen, instead of being like, maybe I should improve, they wanna go back to a system where whatever shines about girls and women is suppressed so that once again, they can get that shiny trophy that they were told that they were going to get just by virtue of being born male in America. And it's very. It's frustrating because, you know, I think that there's a collective failure among some parents to raise good boys. And there is a collective failure among some parents to raise girls to demand a certain treatment from boys. And I also think that there's. We're seeing a dynamic in, I think, our generation, but. But especially for people that are maybe like, you know, a generation younger than us. Boys want their dad's lives. Men, when they become young men, they want the life that their dad had. And girls are raised having their mom pulling them aside, whispering, you don't have to have this life. And they don't want their mom's life. And it is a conflict. And there is not a lot of communication happening around what that means. And I think, you know, I'm married to a man, and I sometimes have tension in my marriage because I'm like, oh, you expect me to do this? We never talked about this. This is just something that I'm expected to do. I plan all the birthday parties. I hate that shit.

[Alex Wagner]

Well, the emotional labor of motherhood is a real thing.

[Erin Ryan]

Intense. But I think that there's a gender dynamic in America right now where men expect certain things to be performed to them in the dynamic of a hetero relationship. And women are like, fuck no, I don't wanna do that. Nobody said I was gonna do that. And I think that a lot of young men are choosing what seems easier for them, which is for a woman to just be like, oh, please, pick me, pick me, pick me. Put me in your house. I'll be your little pet. I'll raise your kids. They'll get your name even though I carry them, even though I let them suck on my boobs for a year. Like, it is something that is a simple minded solution to a complicated world.

[Alex Wagner]

I would just say I have two boys and I'm really sensitive to the idea that we need to think about parenting them different than we think about parenting girls necessarily, and that you want to raise good boys and how do you do that? It's not just simply like, work harder. It's like, what should we change? What structures should be more malleable to accommodate for the ways in which boys learn, but also the ways in which girls learn. But I think the work right now of being a progressive and being someone interested in like, you know, female power and equity is to not let that conversation bleed into the. This whole space of toxic masculinity, right? Like the left has to come up with some answer to the right movement, the right word movement, to just make it a completely retrograde proposition, right? There's gotta be some kind of space to be like, okay, we do care about boys. We need to figure this shit out without making this a conversation about drag wives. Like, there's gotta be some ownership of the fact that, you know, there is kind of a crisis happening here, but it's not about redirecting it towards women and punishing women for their achievements, while also coming up with some solutions, which is like the most fucking I'm running for office statement I've ever fucking made. But you know what I mean? Like, I don't wanna forsake it. I don't wanna forsake it because it's like, what the right's proposing is a super easy solution. Just go back to the way it was in like 1897, but the way it was.

[Erin Ryan]

I mean, they're Also lying about the way it was.

[Alex Wagner]

Exactly.

[Erin Ryan]

Of course they're lying about the way it was.

[Alex Wagner]

It wouldn't work.

[Erin Ryan]

It wouldn't work. I mean, like you, you know, Mad Men is something that people are rewatching and I think that show does a good job of being honest about the human cost of gendered expectations. They looked great. They dressed cool.

[Alex Wagner]

January Jones. Nobody smokes a cigarette like her. Huh? Or drinks wine at 9am yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

Or rests like tumbler of liquor on a pregnant belly like she does. It's. I think that something that we need to remind as progressives is that these are fantasies, spun fantasies around a non reality that was initially an ad campaign. We can't go back to it because it never was that. It never was that. That was always something designed to make people feel like buying a refrigerator. It wasn't designed to be a blueprint for how to live a life because it's not possible. And there may be some people who can fit into that mold and again, like more power to you if that's something that brings you authentic joy and fulfillment. But to imagine that every woman is satisfied just staying at home and taking care of kids and having that be her life's work, and every man is satisfied being a paycheck for his family, that's a very unfair set of expectations. And I think when you listen to like Manosphere podcast, which I don't recommend. I tried to listen to one last night and I was like, they're dumb. They're so dumb. But it relies on an inexperience from their audience. An inexperience, a bitterness, a deliberate misleading of their audience because it sounds like people just make like larping masculinity without actually having to interact with women or their wife or their children as individuals. And I think that it's just important for us to understand that like the 1950s were not good. You know, women were very ill. Just ask black people. Yes, just ask people. Anybody who wasn't white and middle class. Like women were going to college and immediately being hustled back home and popping out kids. And they were popping out. They were put in like twilight sleep and they had birth injuries and nobody knew what to do with them. And like their doctors were calling their husbands after their mental health appointments. Like there was such a. It was so fucked up. And a lot of children of that generation grew up to be emotionally damaged

[Alex Wagner]

people and are now making laws.

[Erin Ryan]

And they're now making. And they're now making laws. But it is very interesting, having gone to therapy to be like. I can see what you would have talked about in therapy. Yeah. I think that it's just really important for us to pour cold water on the illusion, the fantasy. Exactly. Because it's not real. It's not real.

[Alex Wagner]

You know what's been a fantasy?

[Erin Ryan]

What?

[Alex Wagner]

Having you on this podcast.

[Erin Ryan]

Oh, that's so nice.

[Alex Wagner]

You're such a great conversationalist. I feel like we could just go on and on. We could give each other gift each other mutual subscriptions to EV Magazine.

[Erin Ryan]

Do you want my login? Yes, I'll give it to you. You can use my login because there's an article today. Here, listen. How to trick your man into dressing more masculine. Anyone want to know any man tricking tips? They got him.

[Alex Wagner]

What? What?

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm about to tuck in.

[Alex Wagner]

Is that the crisis we're facing? Men be dressing too feminine.

[Sharon Johnson]

Yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

How to trick your man into dressing more masculine.

[Alex Wagner]

Oh, man.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah.

[Alex Wagner]

The scales are falling from my eyes. Erin.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. I'm gonna send you the login because you're gonna really have some fun, actually.

[Alex Wagner]

Please do. Thank you for doing this podcast with me.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Alex Wagner]

You're the best.

[Erin Ryan]

You're the best.

[Alex Wagner]

That is our show for this week. As always, if you've been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, send us an email or a one minute voice [e-mail] and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge and sincere thank you to everyone who has written in already. And last but not least, please do not forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway country with Alex Wagner. Runaway country is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Ilick Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacey Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landis. Ben Hethcote is our video producer and Matt De Groat is our our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adrienne Hill is our head of news and politics. Katie Long is our executive producer of development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

[Jon Favreau]

If you guys like Pod Save America, please consider subscribing to our Friends of the Pod program. So Friends of the Pod get lots of stuff. You get more Pod Save America. That includes our new show which is called Pod Save America. Only friends. It's where Dan gets naked, where Dan gets full frontal nudity. But mostly It's a bi weekly subscription exclusive podcast that is based on basically Pod Save America but behind a paywall so it's a little bit looser and more fun and it's love it. And Favreau and me and Pfeiffer and then other cricket hosts, we go deeper on the news and cover more stories. You also get Open Tabs which is a weekly behind the scenes newsletter from the show. Plus you get ad free episodes of your favorite crooked podcasts and all kinds of other stuff. Dan will come to your house and clean it once every quarter.

[Unnamed Heritage Foundation Representative]

Yeah, clothes.

[Jon Favreau]

Dan is very busy, clothed only but along with just getting great content. Becoming a Friend of the Podcast Joining our subscription community is the number one thing you can do to help us grow to help independent progressive media. So if you're ever thought about doing it, if you ever wanted more Pod Save America, consider going to cricket.com friends and becoming a friend of the Podcast.