00:03:17.680It wants to roll them back as much as humanly possible.
00:03:20.640And as you say, the 19th is modeled on those amendments.
00:03:23.960It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that, like, hey, maybe we could lob a few softballs to John Roberts and hope that he'll take a whack at this one, too.
00:03:32.660Adrienne, you're being way too generous to the people who are promoting this idea.
00:03:36.620These guys don't have a legal strategy.
00:03:38.600They don't have a vision of how this is going to happen, really.0.81
00:04:13.580These guys, the fundamentalist Christians and the sort of like new masculinist tech right or like male supremacist tech right, they're not actually a very particularly masculine bunch.
00:04:22.060But those guys, they're having this kind of like synthesis in the rise of the manosphere.
00:04:27.360And this male supremacist internet has moved the, quote-unquote, issue of repealing the 19th Amendment from the, like, really marginal, even for the far-right, fringes of discourse into a new prominence.
00:04:40.960Guys are using the hashtag repeal the 19th.
00:04:43.500Like, it's in a lot of my, like, Twitter replies now.
00:06:14.340That gets them to this idea of first complementarianism and then later the more extreme biblical patriarchy.
00:06:23.580Like they feel that the revocation of women's suffrage, it's just core to their religious worldview of male dominion over women, right?
00:06:30.080They don't think that women should vote because they don't think women should ever roll in public life for any kind of pretensions to independence or equality with men.
00:06:39.240The techies, on the other hand, they're not like the main intellectual force in the repeal of the 19 movements, but they have been an accelerant.
00:06:47.880And their technologies like AI drive the creation of a lot of anti-women suffrage content.
00:06:54.540Their platforms like Elon Musk X host an algorithmically advantage anti-19th Amendment content.
00:09:15.200Peter Thiel really is the Ernst Rome of our time, right?0.99
00:09:18.200Like we need to eradicate all traces of femininity and of women so that I can have my little like masculinist gay Nazi utopia in Miami.0.99
00:14:13.000The 19th Amendment is not being removed from the U.S. Constitution.
00:14:16.560Even on a long timeline, I don't see any path for them to build a coalition where they can get both houses of Congress and then three quarters of the states to agree to do that.
00:14:26.700It's not to say that they can't make any kind of policy interventions that will make it harder for women to vote.
00:14:31.720But I think what's really going on with like hashtag repeal the 19th is more a way of mainstreaming ideas about what sexual difference is and what it means.
00:14:41.960And it's about what women are and what rights and privileges and freedoms and dignities they can claim.
00:14:47.860And I see it also as kind of a bit of a yardstick for the forces of the, like, masculinist right that are increasingly organizing, you know, across the MAGA factions, across this, like, internally contentious and contradictory Republican coalition.
00:15:05.520More and more, they're uniting those factions with male supremacy, with misogyny.
00:15:10.700Yeah, I mean, it's kind of analogous to the way far right parties in the United States and Europe have kind of started leaning into more and more extreme positions on immigration.
00:15:23.120How like suddenly Republicans are sort of trying to walk away from this mass deportations now, right?
00:15:28.580Or in Europe, this would be the remigration thing.
00:15:30.920Five years ago, they're like, how dare you accuse us of advocating for this?1.00
00:15:34.260And then three years later, they're like, hey, let's try it out.
00:15:36.480And then today they're like, yeah, we're into this.
00:15:38.620Now I guess they're partly trying to walk away from it again, but like, it is exactly that, right? You have this extreme kind of demand, you disidentify with it and say like, how dare you imply that that's what we're doing? We have plenty of, you know, non-white people in our party, we have plenty of women in our party, blah, blah, blah. And then like, you're like, except, right? Like, and then eventually, again, no, I'm actually, I identify with this, this policy demand.
00:16:03.380It's like a way for them to see how far they can go and like what they can get away with, like who they can bring on board, what they can popularize.
00:16:09.560And I think the most interesting part is this other thing the repeal of the 19th Amendment is doing.
00:16:14.300I think it's a way for a sect of the male right that has been in the woods for a bit over the past couple of years to try and redefine themselves and get ahead of the curve and reintegrate into the MAGA movement that has like kind of left them behind.
00:16:30.480because one of the theses I have about the repeal of the 19th movement
00:16:33.840is that it's about the revival of a new kind of preacher masculinity.
00:16:39.400Nice. I hadn't thought about that. Interesting.
00:16:41.600So, Adrian, could you tell our listeners who might not know
00:16:44.480about our signature in-bed-with-the-right taxonomy of right-wing manhood?
00:16:49.820Who are the preachers and where do they fit into this world?
00:16:52.840Yeah, I realized that the light bulb went off for literally just me in that moment
00:16:56.160and probably every other listener is like, wait, what?
00:18:19.740Yeah, or I think the barstool guy, Dave Portnoy, was an example of this, right?
00:18:24.320Like people who in the end put women in their place by being kind of boorish and kind of gross around them or to them or about them.
00:18:33.780And then the creep is yet another interesting kind of exemplar because the creep almost avoids women a little bit or like doesn't know what to do with them when he encounters them.
00:18:44.620But is also obsessed with sort of disposing of them in ways that to him feel safe or feel like they empower him.
00:18:52.440And there, I mean, Elon Musk is a good example.
00:18:55.140And this is one of those things that we were interested in, the fact that like, give a tech billionaire enough time, money, and cook his brain enough on Twitter.
00:19:03.740and suddenly he'll have the exact same inclinations0.87
00:19:06.880as a fundamentalist Mormon in St. George, Utah,
00:19:34.740Yeah, so there's these three genres of guys, and they do all kind of tend to converge on, like, domineering polygamy, right?
00:19:44.760Like, Andrew Tate has a harem, Elon Musk has a harem, and, like, Warren Jeffs has a harem, but we style them differently, right?
00:19:51.920But they all do ultimately understand women as, like, trophies to be collected at best and sort of animals to be corralled at worst.
00:20:01.600Yeah, I mean, as I say in my book, the creep often thinks of them as non-player characters in video games, right?
00:20:07.660NPCs, they're people to be deployed, moved around like pieces on a game board.
00:20:12.400And like in many ways, you know, there's been a lot of proclamations of a new religious revival among Gen Z men.0.60
00:20:18.800That turned out to be empirically overstated.
00:20:21.300But the preachers have like, they've lost ground, right?
00:20:24.640They've lost influence in the right wing gender politics of the MAGA era because of the rise of the Trump pervert model, like the Christian rights style of like a prohibitive sexuality, by which I mean, you know, heterosexual marital chastity and a kind of like conspicuous, like almost reverential continence.
00:20:46.200Yes, exactly. Like that stuff fell way out of fashion.
00:20:49.980And on the right now, the dominant model of male sexual politics is this like swaggering, violent sexual entitlement embodied by the pervert, like from Donald Trump to Andrew Tate.0.69
00:21:02.700Those are the men who are in the sort of limelight or presented as the right wing ideal.0.52
00:21:07.980And those are not guys who are disciplining their appetites in a kind of dignified self-restraint for the sake of the Lord, right?
00:21:14.940Those are guys who are pursuing a sexuality of performative contempt.
00:21:20.660So, like, Mike Pence is nowhere to be found.
00:21:24.260The Manosphere doesn't have a lot of guys like him in it.
00:21:27.220Yeah, the preacher masculinity is the one that says, like, oh, I have to sleep in separate beds for my wife.
00:21:32.640And then there's a Trump model which comments on, you know, his 13-year-old daughter's body, right?
00:21:38.100Like, you only have to watch five-second clips and be like, whoa, this is a very different thing.
00:21:41.740But like the point of the model, as you proposed it back then, is that at base, they're not actually that different.
00:21:47.480Right. Yeah. These are different routes to the same place.
00:21:50.220Yeah. Right. But like, meanwhile, the MAGA alliance that brought Trump back to power in 2024 has really been between perverts and creeps.
00:21:59.380Yeah. Between the kind of sexual ethos that like valorizes rape and this like eugenics obsessed odiousness of the Silicon Valley nerds.0.95
00:22:09.660And here I include everybody from like Elon Musk, who seems to have understood his support for Trump as like a contiguous project to the maintenance of his global breeding harem.
00:22:18.560Like they definitely come from the same ideological place to like Nick Fuentes, who I also call a creep, who refuses sexuality.
00:22:25.800He's like a voluntary incel. He's like sort of made a point of pride out of his own social failure and cultivated resentment.
00:22:33.000So, like, Nick Fuentes is the ultimate creep, and he's, like, really good friends with Andrew Tate, who I'd say is the ultimate pervert, right?
00:24:36.320I actually think like this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think a bit of a weird nostalgia for this is now being peddled to women by other women in the trad wife zone.
00:24:50.860It's a more appealing pitch to women to be like, I'll protect you than to be like, I'm going to dominate and beat you, which is like what's been coming from the rest of the right.
00:24:58.100but like men on the christian right are moving away from that kind of like patronizing paternalistic
00:25:04.720sexism towards what we might call hostile sexism yeah under like our religious guise because it's
00:25:10.680like that hostility and that contempt for women not the condescension or the emphasis on difference
00:25:16.160or any conception of how like you know you can make the hierarchy benevolent somehow right like
00:25:22.240None of that is the rights uniting project right now.
00:25:26.320Their uniting project is like actual hate and violence towards women and anger towards women.
00:25:31.660And it's a thing that all of their factions love and all of them can agree on.0.96
00:25:35.460So I think what we're seeing is priests trying to speak creep and pervert.
00:25:41.320They're trying to hang out with the cool guys again.
00:25:43.240And they're doing that by being as ostentatiously misogynist and like contemptuously misogynist
00:25:48.080as they can within the bounds of sort of like the genre that they've established for themselves.
00:25:52.780That's fascinating. So who are these people? Like, walk me through, who the fuck is this?
00:25:57.660Well, like, look, I think the actual leaders such as they are of this movement are guys who are like0.99
00:26:04.080fairly marginal. Like, let's be real. This isn't a very well-organized movement right now.
00:26:10.300So most of them are far-right Christian fundamentalists leading comparatively kind
00:26:15.620of small and extremist churches in rural parts of the southwest and mountain west right so this guy
00:26:22.540in arizona there's a guy in idaho there have always been opponents to women's right to vote
00:26:27.820but that position has not taken on like gotten a ton of purchase even among like really committed
00:26:35.200personal and ideological misogynists and that's because something that you adrian alluded to a
00:26:41.100couple of weeks ago on our Elizabeth Cady Stanton episode, which is that like husbands pretty quickly
00:26:46.760learned that either by persuasion or by force, their wives would vote the way they did, right?
00:26:51.340Their wives' votes would become their votes and sort of double their votes. So I actually wanted0.97
00:26:55.740to turn your attention to this like very controversial pro-Kamala ad about this reality
00:27:01.640from the 2024 election. Your turn, honey. In the one place in America where women still have a right
00:27:08.240to choose. You can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know.1.00
00:27:20.800Did you make the right choice? Sure did, honey. Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the
00:27:26.600booth. Do you remember this? Yeah, I do remember this. Yes. It's Julia Roberts reminding us that
00:27:32.380what we do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth. This idea, it's like, oh, ladies,0.82
00:27:36.960it's just our little secret. You don't have to tell your husband that you're voting for the
00:27:41.960Democrat. You can pretend that you're voting for the Republican and like keep harmony in your home.
00:27:46.820It's your vote. It's your choice. I always thought it was kind of a bad look or like a preemptive
00:27:52.080admission of defeat from the Democrats that they acknowledged that some people were going to be
00:27:55.880voting for them in secret. You know, so you don't have to tell anybody. It's like, oh, you're losing.
00:28:00.320But this idea that the true freedom of married women's votes is always a bit conditional or contingent has been around for a long time, right?
00:28:10.320It's this idea that like women might acquiesce to husbands who have more time to spend on politics than they do and just say, okay, he knows more about it than I do.0.70
00:28:17.460I'm going to just do what he says.0.68
00:28:19.440Or they might feel that their husbands are smarter than them or they might have their husbands threaten them or they might just like not want to make a fight about it.
00:28:27.300Like this isn't as important to me as it is to him.
00:28:30.020It is like pretty well established that men spend a lot more time consuming the news as
00:28:34.200entertainment than women do, which might be one reason why the electorate shifted so far to the
00:28:39.700right. But this ad got made fun of a ton for being overwrought at the time, right? And for the record,1.00
00:28:47.240I do think that like the absolute vast majority of American women voters are simply voting for
00:28:51.560who they want to without particularly worrying about what their male partners are going to think
00:28:55.500about it but it's not like absolutely crazy right this does happen and historically it used to
00:29:00.720happen kind of a lot yeah but there's also always been this sect of the far right particularly the
00:29:05.940christian right that has opposed women's suffrage like kind of on like principled grounds right like0.92
00:29:11.900we don't think women should have their own rights we don't think that women should be working we
00:29:17.960certainly don't like abortion we don't think that there should be birth control we don't think that0.99
00:29:23.280women should be able to earn their own money that their husbands don't control. We don't think that0.96
00:29:29.020women should be independent legal entities responsible for like their own crimes, for1.00
00:29:33.000instance. And also we don't think that women should have the right to, you know, not be beaten1.00
00:29:39.360in marriage or raped in marriage, like that kind of thing. So it's a re-envision of like a0.76
00:29:44.880coverture style marriage in which women are like sort of owned property without personal rights.0.99
00:29:53.280And that is a vision that's always been around, but it's now getting a lot more attention because, as you said, Adrienne, we've got a couple of well-placed weirdos who are getting a lot of attention and have sort of the ears of power.0.99
00:30:41.220He briefly owned like a rock climbing gym in Riverside.
00:30:45.140But around 2020, he pivoted hard to Christ.
00:30:49.080Can I ask about the Arizona part of this?
00:30:51.120You sort of, in passing, mentioned that this was mostly the Southwest and the Mountain West.
00:30:56.140And that's kind of interesting for two reasons.
00:30:58.360My spidey sense as a gender historian went off on two counts here.
00:31:02.300One is, we talked a couple of weeks ago about Elizabeth Kitty Stanton and the fight for women's suffrage.
00:31:06.980Now, the first women's suffrage bills that did pass and the first time women really were allowed to vote in U.S. election were all in the Mountain West and the Southwest, right?
00:31:16.840It's the Wyoming Territory, I believe, in 1869.
00:31:22.380It's pretty soon then, like, Idaho and then Colorado.
00:31:26.900So, like, this is also where it sort of started, interestingly enough.
00:31:29.700So, the path to the 19th Amendment sort of starts in the same place where you're saying there's now this kind of opposition coming up.
00:31:37.520The second thing is that in Jennifer Holland's wonderful book, Tiny You, she points out that that's where the anti-abortion movement really started in the 1970s.
00:31:47.640Yes, these are hotbeds of the anti-abortion movement.
00:31:50.400They're places that first allowed women to vote in state elections back in the late 19th century.
00:31:56.040They're also, I would point out, strongholds of Mormonism, like large Mormon populations in places like Idaho and Arizona.
00:32:02.520So there's a history of, you know, women's comparative emancipation or relative emancipation in these communities.
00:32:10.540And then there is also a long history of reaction in which there's organized opposition to women's rights in the form of the anti-abortion movement.
00:32:17.980And there's also a long tradition of, you know, a very gender conservative new religious movement that, among other things, also has and continues to have a long tradition of polygamy.
00:32:39.160There's about 100 regular parishioners, but a ton of people like come to visit.0.74
00:32:42.760Like it's kind of a tourist attraction and like curiosity for members of the Christian far right.
00:32:47.620So like people will come from like Indiana or like Colorado to like go to church with him on a Sunday.0.58
00:32:54.580But I think he makes most of his money from his podcast because like every white millennial man, Dale Partridge has a podcast.0.97
00:33:11.320And on his podcast, he is a fucking shock jock, right?0.95
00:33:15.800He is really leaning in to the Internet vernacular of vulgarity, of incendiary statements, of like impassioned statements.0.98
00:33:25.760Right. He has earned a following that way by sort of mimicking his, I guess, competitors in the male Internet space in terms of like being shocking, of trying to get clicks, of trying to incite strong emotions and of taking like more and more extreme positions.
00:33:43.300And among them, he does not believe that women should have the right to vote.
00:33:46.880We're not trying to think of like a zoo crew, a Christian zoo crew.0.97
00:33:51.480It's Jebediah and the whore of Babylon or something like that, right?0.99
00:33:55.140Isn't it always like a guy and an animal?1.00
00:33:57.660Like his weird like cackling sidekick is like the gator or like some weird shit.0.99
00:34:01.980Well, he does have a wife and these wives always seem like sort of like changed dogs a little bit.0.99
00:34:07.340They're just shrinking several steps behind their men and then dutifully saying into the microphone that they agree with everything their husband says, you know, this church that Dale Partridge runs has really, really strict gendered traditions.0.86
00:34:22.160So like women are required to cover their hair, at least in church, which is something you see some of the tradcast doing now.0.97
00:34:29.020It's like gotten rid of in Vatican II.0.99
00:34:31.620But if you go to like the wrong Catholic church on a Sunday morning, you'll see some creepy looking like Gen Z women with little doilies on their heads because it's like trying to revive a former tradition of, you know, a sign of submission.1.00
00:34:44.740And the married couples in these churches are instructed to submit to something called biblical patriarchy, which we will get into.
00:34:52.160There's also a guy named Douglas Wilson. This one is the Moscow, Idaho-based preacher who is the spiritual advisor to one Pete Hegseth, our drunk and alleged sexual assaulter Secretary of Defense.0.66
00:35:13.160Hegseth, a couple months back, retweeted a video of Wilson calling to end women's suffrage.
00:35:18.800And he also had Wilson come to lead a prayer at the Pentagon recently.1.00
00:35:24.660Doug Wilson refers to himself, I think this is important for our listeners to know, as D-dubs.1.00
00:35:30.100So take with that information what you will.1.00
00:35:33.500And before Doug Wilson started calling for the end of women's suffrage,
00:35:36.600he was best known for his positive public statements about American slavery.0.57
00:37:09.600Least surprising plot twist in history.
00:37:13.280He resigned after an internal investigation found that he had a relationship that was, quote, inappropriately affectionate and romantic with a woman who was not his wife.
00:37:21.640The following year, he was sued by his family's former nanny, who alleged years of sexual abuse.
00:37:28.460So he resigned and the church liquidated its assets.
00:40:21.360And one reason I don't think this is a real political possibility and my sense of like what the Overton window is, what the realms of possibility has become like really changed and a lot more cynical over the past decade.
00:40:32.800I don't think these guys are going to be able to repeal the 19th Amendment because I don't think they know how.
00:41:27.020But they are building off of an escalation from complementarianism, the sort of traditional model of right-wing Christian misogyny, into something called biblical patriarchy.
00:41:40.780So, Adrian, do you want to gloss complementarianism for us and, like, where it comes from?
00:41:45.900Complementarianism is the idea that you actually do hold men and women in equally high esteem,
00:41:51.260but that God has endowed them with different and complementary characteristics
00:41:57.700that predestine some of them more to some kinds of tasks and others more to others.
00:42:04.440The doctrine of complementarianism is not named, I think, until like sort of the late 80s or 90s.
00:42:09.840It's really something that I think tradcasts and like Protestant right pastors cook up.
00:42:15.280But this idea has been around for centuries, and it often sort of came out of actually what you were saying, the kind of oikos model, the household model of political representation, right?
00:42:25.460The state is a big household that gathers all the small households, and the node between those two is the paterfamilias, is the man who leaves the household to participate in the polis.
00:42:37.620There's a version of this already in Aristotle, but it becomes very strong and sort of like early modern justification of the divine right of kings.
00:42:47.720Something like Robert Filmer's Patriarcha comes out of that tradition.
00:42:51.760But Rousseau has something like that, too.
00:42:53.380Like there are people that we think of as more progressive that have this kind of idea that like, no, what makes the family such a unique and indestructible unit is the fact that the members are not like members in a state where they all are exactly equal.
00:45:27.260And because they are, quote unquote, one flesh,
00:45:29.320they do not have a separate identity from men.
00:45:32.400So marriage is a sort of personhood-obliviating institution, right? It puts women sort of underneath men in this total, complete, and permanent way. If you guys ever read right-wing women in the chapter Jews and Homosexuals, Andrea Dworkin has a very long argument with St. Paul, among other things, is about this.0.91
00:45:52.960And also when this came up in my church once, the priest was like, this is a really controversial reading, but I am going to read it anyway.
00:46:03.340I'm not going to skip it like some cowardly priest because I think my parishioners need to know what marriage is really like.
00:46:11.320And I'm like, bro, you're a Catholic priest.0.97
00:46:19.020I think Phoebe Waller-Ridge did a great disservice by depicting a millennial priest as, like, dreamy and, like, nice in this Andrew Scott way because what they actually are are fucking rancid incels.0.98
00:46:39.720There's a lot of hot priest calendars, but we did not buy them.
00:46:42.080But we were in St. Peter's and there was a group of—I mean, what a smoke show, I got to say.
00:46:47.220You don't want to hear them talk, all right? You want them to be quiet.
00:46:50.200Hosanna in the highest is all I can say.
00:46:55.620So like from this passage in St. Paul, these far-right fundamentalist evangelicals extrapolated their new vision of gender relations.
00:47:06.440Or maybe I should say that with this passage, they constructed a post-hoc rationalization for the more misogynistic and contemptuous gender politics that they wanted all along anyway.
00:47:17.220But that concept is a more extreme form of Christian misogyny that they call biblical patriarchy.
00:47:23.220Essentially like complementarianism plus domination, right?
00:47:27.480It's complementarianism without the fig leaf of equal dignity, right?
00:47:30.600So it's the gender model that these guys use to get from the merely degrading and misogynist complementarianism to the more violent and domineering world in which women lose their right to vote.
00:47:43.220in complementarianism women and their husbands like can disagree and argue it's just that like
00:47:49.260what the man says always wins um but in biblical patriarchy women are quote-unquote in submission
00:47:55.680to their husbands which functionally means that they lose the freedom to diverge from their
00:48:00.180husbands in preference or an opinion and defiance is punished with what these people and with what
00:48:06.380the new york times in a recent profile of them chose to refer to as quote-unquote discipline
00:48:12.080Because I'm not here to lie to our listeners, I'm going to say that in biblical patriarchy, women's aspirations to individuality are met with domestic abuse.
00:48:33.280So this is a worldview that justifies men meeting women's difference, independence, or aspiration to dignity with violent physical force, right?
00:48:42.380This is not in like an excess of passion as domestic violence apologists usually frame it, but actually as a matter of principle.
00:48:49.260And this is a side note, but like a lot of times when you try to discuss this Christian right stuff online or in the left liberal circles that I kind of run in in my real life, people will start laughing this off as a kink.0.72
00:49:01.160And I want to take a minute here to explain why I'm really uncomfortable with that framing.
00:49:05.980Because I think it's a move that mistakes kink as being somehow apolitical, as if like sexual desires and sexual practices don't have any like political content.
00:49:16.960Or at worst, it's as if like violence that happens in sex and as sex, like that is like sexual violence, is like not real violence.
00:49:26.960And it's a way to, like, laugh off and avoid confronting the actual, like, violence and abuse and injustice that men are perpetuating against women in these scenarios.
00:49:35.540That's a way of saying that, like, if something happens in a home or in a marriage or in a family or in the context of a sexual relationship, then, like, that private sphere of abuse is, like, less serious and less real.1.00
00:54:18.920Sometimes these people are a little more coherent
00:54:20.960and say there would be something more like family voting,
00:54:23.900in which case unmarried women would still not be able to vote,
00:54:27.660but they would be quote unquote represented1.00
00:54:29.660in the votes of like fathers, brothers, uncles, what have you. Surely there's some man somewhere,
00:54:35.800but this is like an all-male electorate, right? But the talk of a quote-unquote household vote1.00
00:54:41.780allows these like anti-women suffrage people to emphasize, and they do this like with shockingly
00:54:48.640straight faces, to like emphasize like community and consultation and harmony and these like gauzy
00:54:55.780imprecise words that are meant to evoke like peacefulness and virtue, when they're talking
00:55:00.840to reporters, that is, right? When they're talking to people outside the movement, they actually
00:55:05.580emphasize a lot of those traditional preacher masculinity qualities, right? Things like
00:55:09.640deliberativeness, responsibility, self-discipline, generosity. They seem to sense that those are a
00:55:16.200better sell, but that is different from the way they talk about this when they're talking to the
00:55:21.200in-group. Yeah. It's like there's the pitch you have to the dummies of the New York Times,
00:55:24.480And then there's what you say on the podcast that the New York Times could also watch, but chooses for some weird reason not to.
00:55:31.420Right. So like when they are talking to other far right people, they are tailoring their tone to much better fit the MAGA ethos.
00:55:39.440Because when they're talking to their right wingers, the anti-women suffrage people are like very much like not conciliatory.
00:55:47.220They're not calm. They're much more contemptuous. They're sneering. They're angry.
00:55:52.700That's when they don't just talk in the kind of patronizing, like, soft focus terms about relieving women of the burden of having rights so that they can focus on, like, being feminine and pretty or whatever.
00:56:03.780They talk about women as a corrosive moral and political force.0.54
00:56:09.100Not people in need of, quote-unquote, protection, but people who need to be controlled, punished, and even eradicated or at least eradicated from any place that's, like, public, meaningful, and important.
00:56:21.000Yeah. So as I said, this is not feasible politically. There's no legal way to get there. This is not going to happen. But it's much more feasible that we see a replay of what Republicans have done with the Voting Rights Act protections for the black vote since 2013.
00:56:36.760Like, the idea that they could apply similar tactics to the women's vote is not so crazy.0.78
00:56:42.120And that would look like a slow, piecemeal increase in obstacles to the franchise that, like, disproportionately burden women and not men, and thereby create a redder and mailer electorate.0.53
00:56:54.620And this is already at play with the SAVE Act, which Republicans can't pass through Congress with a majority but are, like, trying to sneak in through budget reconciliation.
00:57:02.580Adrian, do you know much about the SAVE Act?
00:57:06.440So the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is basically an act that would combat the non-existent problems of voter impersonation and non-citizen voting.
00:57:17.760And basically, it would require you to use certain forms of identification to register to vote and then provide similar or sometimes identical forms of identification when trying to vote.
00:57:31.900This would often be a passport, which is a huge problem because a lot of Americans do
00:57:35.480not have a passport for our international listeners.
00:57:38.420This is something kind of unusual about our country, but this is the facts.
00:57:42.160I think there's something like 60 million Americans that do not have a passport, 70
00:59:55.180Because there's a sense that will benefit the Republican Party, but also increasingly the diagnosis made by the repeal of the 19th people is being shared by people on the right even who aren't advocating for that position, right?
01:00:09.660So there's this idea on the one hand that giving women the right to vote has like quote unquote atomized families and caused loneliness, alienation by encouraging women, and I guess also men, but they're only ever talking about women, to like think of themselves as independent individuals.
01:00:26.220I feel like this is actually what was kind of a fascinating undercurrent of the response to the Kamala ad that we talked about at the beginning,
01:00:33.920which was that people were sort of accusing Democrats of family alienation, the way that like Christian conservatives often are like,
01:00:43.420Husband, right? And it's like the same way that they're like, you want that child to say what you did to them?
01:00:48.940Like, think of what that's doing to that family, right?
01:00:50.860Like you have these kind of family alienation, like witnesses testifying at custody hearings or often at abuse trials, like basically flat out, like peddling junk science to be like, you know, they should really move in with their abuser, right?
01:01:04.900Listeners, if you ever want to feel really, really sad, look up the pseudoscience of quote unquote parental alienation syndrome and its deployment to protect sexual and domestic abusers and guarantee them continued access to children and sometimes women to victimize.
01:01:23.000It's saying, how dare you drive a wedge between the sacred bond of the family, right, by telling her she has rights and giving them to her, more importantly.
01:01:31.920And acknowledging that her interests are not totally subsumed by that of, you know, daddy-husband.
01:01:36.880That she remains her own person with her own rights, dignity, and interests.
01:01:41.260And also, like, I will say this pay-on to, like, the unity of the family is also theologically tricky.0.96
01:01:47.240Because the Christianity that these guys practice for all that one flesh shit, they actually are placing a lot of emphasis on the individual.0.92
01:01:54.680Like their theology does not say that husband and wives go to heaven or hell as pairs.0.99
01:03:48.500I'm going to go out on a limb and say something kind of controversial, which is that I think women have a tremendous capacity for rage and at times a deep appetite for violence.0.98
01:03:56.960sometimes I just kind of start yapping in a very noncommittal way about like what I think should0.88
01:04:03.260happen to the leaders of this right-wing movement like what I think should happen to the likes of
01:04:06.420like Alex Karp and Kat goes oh you're planning your gulag again uh I was gonna say if you want0.86
01:04:13.540to hear women capable of deep rage and a deep appetite for violence check out the stuff I cut0.94
01:04:19.600out of this podcast yeah you're moira off mike yeah yeah whoa well that's not that's not staying0.95
01:04:28.160in um like you know i do not particularly feel like uh burdened or blinded by empathy in those
01:04:34.480moments right no it's one of your best features yeah but like the broader idea of empathy as a
01:04:42.560force that leads to like immigrant rights civil rights expanded welfare state like the idea that
01:04:48.040empathy is like this corrosive negative force that like betrays America's purpose and is
01:04:52.420antithetical to its interest. That is getting a lot of steam on the way. Yes, yes. And it's being
01:04:57.220advanced again by guys who had taken on this like particular preacher masculinity. Yeah. That has
01:05:02.480been a bit like marginalized in the MAGA movement, but is now sort of coming back by being more
01:05:06.880contemptuous, right? Yeah. So like last year, a guy named Joe Rigney, who's a pastor, put out a
01:05:13.320book he called The Sin of Empathy. The Sin of Empathy, I remember that, yeah. Ben Shapiro, who's like a
01:05:18.200Jewish, as we mentioned, a Jewish political commentator in the sort of sexually prohibitionist0.58
01:05:22.500pastor model, has also railed against toxic empathy. And the uniform consensus is that this
01:05:29.380empathy is female, that is natural or innate trait of women, and that is women who bring it into our0.69
01:05:34.720politics. He has also railed against macaroni in a pot, but let's not go back there. This contrasts
01:05:40.080with the rights, similar idea of women1.00
01:05:42.400as like gossiping, scheming bitches who don't forgive.0.99
01:09:52.280and try to sort of package them with moral panics,
01:09:54.320et cetera, et cetera, in order to launder them.
01:09:56.560Like, we are uniquely set up for stuff like this.
01:09:59.760It's not always going to happen, but we're uniquely set up for that kind of stuff to jump over and sort of become mainstream before we know it.
01:10:07.780Yeah, you know, something that Dale Partridge said when he was profiled by The Times is like, you sound crazy, and then in a couple years, you're in the mainstream.