Ezra Klein

to very old policies that centralize the power they wield and the way society is ordered.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and The Genius Myth.

She's just written a great cover story for The Atlantic mapping this world.

She calls it masculinism, talking to many of its key figures, trying to understand its core ideas.

So I want to have her on the show to talk about it.

As always, my email, Ezra Clancho at NYTimes.com.

Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So I want to start with a clip from Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University that I think is a good place to start.

I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you've been reporting on, as I've heard from many of its subjects.

So tell me about him and the view of society you understand him to be spinning out here.

One of the things I heard in that clip is an echo of the J.D.

Vance miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the 2024 campaign campaign.

Which I mention because I think it can be easy to look at Yenor and some of the people we'll talk about and think, oh, this is a fever swamp right-wing movement.

This is when you've clicked on too many posts on X and the algorithm has found something out about you that you wish it didn't know.

But one of the arguments you make in this piece is that masculinism has become a kind of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart.

So defend that for me a bit.

What does that vision look like?

So it's worth, I think, for you to expand on that, which is to say, I think the core critique here and the core politics here is that modernity has thwarted masculinity.

The arguments here—and we're going to tour through a number of them—