Young Women are Ditching MAGA in Droves as They Become Disgusted by Trump & Fuentes

0:04Sam Adler Bell:We are joined today by one of my favorite new finds, journalist and writer, Sam Adler Bell, who is also the co-host of Know Your Enemy, which is about the right. And the whole thing fascinates me. So your latest piece in New York Magazine is fascinating. I devoured it immediately. And it's called The Women Leaving the Right. And I was particularly enthralled by the art that came with the piece because it shows Pete Hexeth, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson. So that's just an interesting cast of characters. And so the two things that really stuck out to me are women leaving the conservative movement and then the influence of Nick Fuentes and all of these right wing influencers.

0:52Sam Adler Bell:So start by, if you will, describing your piece and the women that are featured. Sure. Well, there's two main subjects of the piece. A woman who I call Anna because she does not want to go by her actual name and a woman who went under her own name, Alex Kishuda. Both of them were really prominent pundits on the MAGA New Right. A lot of the work that they did was about really criticizing women, talking about how women are unwell, and that feminism has diverted their natural motherly instincts into a quest for worldly success, and that now that women have it, they're using their newfound authority to punish and fetter men, imperiling civilization in the process.

1:37This all sounds kind of crazy and awful. But this is the kind of thing that has become totally normalized on the right. And these women, you know, in different ways and to different degrees were involved in kind of being mouthpieces for that message over the past 10 years. But they, over the course of more recent time, started to realize that they were really, you know, selling the rope to hang themselves with. and the movement that they were a part of, really the MAGA movement has become, if you can believe it, even though it started from a very sexist place with a figure like Donald Trump at the top of it, has become even more openly sexist.

2:14And a lot of the sort of currents of misogyny that were somewhat below the surface have come out to the forefront. And they have decided, and that's how they came to me, that they'd had enough and that this movement was no longer really redeemable. there was a form of it that could exist that wasn't sexist and uh they decided to leave um and in the case of talking to me you know call it out okay so what's interesting is i grew up uh born

2:45Sam Adler Bell:and raised by super evangelical christian and republican so that's what i did and there's just a certain amount of internalized misogyny and sexism that you just tolerate as you just don't even realize that's happening and then the bible is very patriarchal are the were these women also involved in the christian part of the right yeah one of them uh anna uh very much was um and is still a believing catholic but she was um raised uh uh very in a conservative um a conservative religious environment um i think that's a big part of it but one of the things that the source is not just these two but other people i talked to for the piece pointed out was that in some ways the old christian patriarchal traditionalism that was the mainstay of the right for many many years that's changed you know i mean the people who are leading the charge of sexism on the right these days are not just these sort of old school christian patriarchs um because you know and this is steel manning perhaps the sort of biblical christianity a little bit but those people those men thought of themselves as protectors, that they had to give something up in being a part of the patriarchal family.

4:03And mainly what they had to give up was their aggression in exchange for the things that they get from being a part of a heterosexual couple, a marriage. The thing that we have now is that the men who are leading the MAGA movement, they no longer think of themselves as having responsibilities or some kind of reciprocal obligation to the women who they have control over. They expect these women to be under their control, but that they don't have to be even good patriarchs in exchange for that submission. And I think that's something that came through really clearly in my conversations, that in some ways the old patriarchy was more tolerable than what we have now, which is people like Nick Fuentes, who is, he's not saying, you know, I love and respect women and their, you know, their important role in society.

4:55He's saying women are, you know, disgusting, odious creatures who are my political enemies. I mean, that's a big, that's a big change. We don't want to give too much credit to the old patriarchs, but at least they had this conception of themselves as protectors of women, not as this fundamentally hostile, violent, domineering force in women's lives.

5:15Sam Adler Bell:And there's also a part of the movement that wants to punish women as a right, like an Andrew Tate style person. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, a big part of the trajectory we're talking about here is that the conservative movement used to have some, there used to be some significant difference or somewhat of a difference between the conservative movement and what was called sort of the manosphere or the red pill side of the internet, this sort of world of the incels. You know, these men who think of women as basically like co-conspirators in a plot to deprive them of their, you know, God-given rights to domination and sex and status.

5:56That part of the movement, you know, the patriarchal, conservative, Christian part of the movement has merged in kind of a significant way with this more virulent, angry, young, incel part of the right that's represented by people like Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers.

6:13Sam Adler Bell:What's interesting to me is like in these circles, you hear that like the women caused all the problems. We're mad and we'll boil it down to women causing the problem. And I found that to be interesting and fascinating. Yeah, it is really fascinating. I mean, something I found just sort of like really wading into the waters of right-wing sexism today is that if you look at every problem they diagnose, at the center of it really is a woman with too much power. So you have this whole theory that goes by different names. This sort of anti-feminist woman figure, Helen Andrews, wrote about it as the feminization of America, of public life.

6:56But then you have more people on the far right who call it the longhouse. And the idea is basically that women have, as they've grown in their numerical dominance in various fields, in education, in the law, in healthcare, that they are changing the norms of these spaces and making them more womanly. And what that means to them is that women are congenitally liberal and empathetic and motivated by emotion instead of reason and all of these ideas. And that's what caused, for example, wokeness from their perspective. That's what caused all these major problems in our collective life. And so for the right-wing MAGA misogynists, it's really women who are undermining Western civilization in general at this point, that we've engaged in this sort of massive experiment in allowing women to have too much power.

7:52And that's what's causing all the problems in our collective life. I mean, this seems totally crazy, awful, straightforwardly sexist to me, but there are a lot of young men on the right who are compelled by this. And they're compelled by it, frankly, in a similar way, I think. And this is something one of my sources pointed out to me in a similar way to the way that they're compelled by anti-Semitism. Because this is a this is a theory of the world that explains why you don't have what you're supposed to have, that there's some kind of secret power structure that is constraining you and preventing you from getting what you want.

8:26And in the same way that anti-Semitism treats Jews as simultaneously these like weak creatures and disgusting creatures, it also treats them as all powerful, somehow both all powerful and weak. And women are taking the place of the Jew in that sort of anti-Semitic paradigm for a lot of young men right now on the right.

8:46Sam Adler Bell:Okay, this is an interesting thing in the article. I just could not wrap my head around this. You have Nick Fuentes, who I would say is a nut. He is openly anti-Semitic. He hates women. He makes no bones about it. But you think he's super fringy. In my mind, he's super fringy. You know, he's not close to power. You hear about the Groypers and you know how crazy it is. In the piece, please tell the audience how much influence or how prevalent Nick Fuentes is in this White House's circle and on Capitol Hill. Yeah, this is something that really shocked me too. I had thought of him as a fringe figure.

9:27I mean, obviously, he's grown in prominence over the past year. He was allowed back on Twitter, his number of followers on X grew by many folds. But what I heard from sources on the Hill and sources who work in the White House, in the administration, is that the young staff or class, you know, people under the age of, say, 35, many, many of them listen to Nick Fuentes, whether they're big fans or just, you know, have to pay attention to him because he's a big enough and influential enough figure with the men that they're trying to reach is different, you know, varies. But yes, I talked to a source who was a former administration official who said it's certainly the case that the young staffer class, many of them listen to Nick Fuentes.

10:13And I heard from uh several people who work on the hill uh that it's totally normal for um people in his milieu to listen to nick fuentes to repeat the things he says on his show uh so this is he is no longer we cannot you know kind of tell ourselves the comforting story that nick fuentes has no influence he's a major figure on the right today that is just so stunning that is just stunning to

10:37Sam Adler Bell:me. And then you have, you have this whole group of people that, you know, misogyny has now turned into this hatred of women and they're in leadership positions like project 2026. They don't want women in the workplace and that the root of all evil is women. Then I see someone like Pete Hexeth who just goes all through me. And, and I, that's why I liked the art for the piece because you just have all the offenders, Andrew Tate, Pete Hexham, these men hate women. It's just so obvious. There's this rage. Did you get any clue from these women why there's such a groundswell of anger towards women?

11:23Well, one thing that people talked about a lot was, you know, this kind of like the sort of psychic dimension of this, that a lot of these men are people who they had some kind of primordial experience or indelible experience of being humiliated by a woman, whether it's a teacher, a caregiver, a woman who wouldn't have sex with them, their mother. I mean, you don't want to reduce people's political ideology to psychoanalysis entirely. But when you watch these people, when you watch somebody like Pete Hegseth on television and talking about women in the military and how they're undermining our war fighters or whatever, and you see this kind of boiled, coiled rage and impotence that is just such a feature, such a signal feature of his self-presentation, you can't leave psychoanalysis out of it.

12:24Sam Adler Bell:And I think that something that really brought this home for me and that ended up being sort of the conclusion of the piece was when um renee good was shot and killed in minneapolis and there was this sort of unbelievably like unanimous message coming from the white house from the press secretary uh and then from all of their foot soldiers on the internet that the reason that she was killed was she was a bad mother uh that she you know i remember seeing this image i don't remember i don't know if you saw this that was like it was shared thousands of times. It was a picture of Renee Good and it was the message was, I've been condescended to by a woman who looks just like this countless times.

13:07And so the idea, the whole project in the aftermath of Renee Good's death, her murder, was to say, this woman is dead because she wasn't acting like the right kind of woman, like the right kind of mother. And in fact, this movement is encouraging men to not feel bad or even feel titillated by her death because, you know, this is just the kind of woman who's treated you badly throughout your life. And that message was just so clear, I felt, you know, in the aftermath of her murder. And I think that you can't, you really can't set that aside, this aspect of like, of encouraging these resentments and these petty grievances and these deep feelings of sort of lack and humiliation that these men have experienced or that they feel that they've experienced and that that motivates a lot of this politics.

14:00Sam Adler Bell:You know, what's interesting to me is you have this old man. I mean, this old guy that he doesn't know where he is. He talks with marbles in his mouth. He makes no sense. And he's the leader. Everybody's just a cult of personality around him. So I was naive enough to think, well, it's the Fox News. This guy will be gone. It seems like what's coming after with the youth and the Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tates, that it seems worse. Like it's going to be worse, their ideology for women, for black people, for immigrants. It is getting crueler by the evolution. Did you get any sense of where we're going from here?

14:43Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the fear. I think that, you know, it's crazy. I mean, it's unbelievable to think like, oh, we had it good when it was just Trump. But it's possible. It's possible. You know, I think, you know, Tucker Carlson is a major figure in this world. And he, you know, he talks about how he doesn't want to run for office. But I think that if he decides that J.D. Vance doesn't have the juice, I think he might. And I think that one sort of important aspect of this whole debate that I'm talking about in this piece, and this, you know, to a certain degree, this is a debate that's internal to the right.

15:24I mean, we're looking in on it from the outside, but there are people within the right, obviously some of the women I talk to, who are saying, you know, this has to stop, you know. And some people are saying it, who are still more inside the movement than people I talk to, are saying this has to stop because we're going to lose. You know, you can't you can't say half the country are sort of like subhuman, subrational creatures and win, you know, a national election. I think that what's going on here is an awareness that Trump is losing his grip on the movement. They understand that Trump, you know, is senescent and marble mouth at this point and that he is not going to be the leader of this movement forever.

16:07They don't like admitting that if they're really still hardcore MAGA because Trump doesn't like to hear it. But I think that what's going on is that there's a there's a mild fear that after Trump, yes, the deluge of of the maniac, hateful, cruel, and to a larger degree than Trump, really unsympathetic forms of of of violent hatred. it. You know, we don't think Trump is sympathetic, but Trump's sort of irony, his campiness, this quality of, you know, it's a little bit of a joke. When you see Pete Hegseth, you don't think this is any part of this is funny. Any part of this is a joke. And I think there is a fear on the right that when Trump leaves the scene, they will be left with a movement that is shaped in his image in the sense of an image of cruelty towards women, towards people of color, towards immigrants, but they will not have a leader who has the Teflon charisma and this sort of magnetism that Trump does to pull the whole project together.

17:10And so part of what's happening right now, the conversation about antisemitism, the conversation that I've surfaced about misogyny, there is a dawning awareness on the right that they might have a problem. They might have a problem if this is the main message people are getting about what Republican in conservative politics is, I hope they do have a problem. Because the alternative is they don't have a problem. These people are in charge and they do unimaginable things to vulnerable people in this country.

17:41Sam Adler Bell:That was a question I had for you. These women who are now saying, you know, we were used by this movement. We were propped up. We drank the Kool-Aid. We were all in and now they're turning it on. And one part of, I think it was Anna's story, I'm sorry, Alex's story where she made a comment that was somewhat against the man at the table and he got up and he pounded the table and he screamed at her and nobody defended her. So was there a sense that, okay, I realize they're doing this to me. We see anti-Semitism coming out of the White House. They want to make all these policies with universities, yet the junior staffers are all in on Nick Fuentes.

18:21Sam Adler Bell:Okay, whatever. But it's every group. Was there a dawning that? It's not just women. They are doing this to immigrants. They are doing this to black people, everybody that's not them. Was there any awareness of that? I think that it's dawning. I mean, for my sources, I think that the first step, and it's often the case that the first step is to realize that you yourself are in danger, and then you can go from there to, you know, that's sort of the like prerequisite for solidarity is to realize that you might need some protection from other people, that you might need some strength in numbers. I do think that, and a lot of readers have pointed this out and they're entirely right, that it doesn't really flatter these sources that they didn't mind any of the racism or other kinds of bigotry that were just so transparent about this movement.

19:15It was only when they realized, oh, they're coming for me as well as a white woman that they turned on it. Uh, so I think that's, that's, you know, that's just, that's a true thing about this story for these women. And I, I think, you know, to their credit, they feel a lot of shame and guilt now. Uh, but for readers who read it and go, oh, you're just finding out now because it hurt you. Uh, I totally understand that reaction too. Yeah.

19:39Sam Adler Bell:And I, having been inside, not to the extreme, but there is a part of being raised in it, that you're immune to it, that you're above it. You're entitled. For me, it went along with the evangelical Christian thing. So I can see where it dawns on you slowly. Okay. Last question. I'll get you out of here. I know you have lots of other stuff. What is the, is this something all women in MAG are talking about? Is this widespread? Is it isolated? And is there anything going to change moving forward that you can tell? It's a good question. It was one I, you know, tried different ways of answering in the piece, You know, the people who came to me obviously were self-selecting, and then the people that they put me in touch with were also people who they knew.

20:25But one of the sources who I spoke to who was very involved, one of my main subjects, was very involved in very prominent outlets working in conservative institutions said to me, every single woman working in conservative politics knows what I'm talking about. If she says she doesn't, she's lying. So that does mean that, you know, from her perspective, they all know about this problem. Whether they're responding to that problem by talking to New York Magazine about how much of a problem it is and defecting from the movement, that's a different question. Some women are still making the calculus, well, it's worth it.

20:56I have these other political commitments, or I have a career, or I have an income. I would say that there is no doubt that this is growing as a fear. You see some glimmers of it come out even just on Capitol Hill. You have the women who criticized Mike Johnson for his leadership in Congress, saying that he's too patriarchal, he doesn't listen to women. You had the revolt over the Epstein files that was led by Republican women. It's not a whole lot. You'd wish it was a lot more. But I think that at this moment, it's mostly subterranean. It's beneath the surface. My hope is that it'll come out. I mean, what my sources said was that these conversations are taking place primarily in private, in the background, in the group chats that everybody's in.

21:44All these women are talking to each other, comparing notes about bad conservative men and talking about what they can tolerate. And I hope that more of them make the decision that the sources in my piece did and that moving forward, we can have a reckoning about this.

22:02Sam Adler Bell:I hope you're right. Right. Listener, follow Sam Adler Bell, his podcast where he's the co-host, Know Your Enemy. It's fascinating. It's like what's going on behind the scenes on the right. It's very interesting. Thank you for coming on. I so enjoyed it. I could talk to you for hours, but I will let you go. And thanks again for being here. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.