Ezra Klein

They shift between this, as you say, 1950s nostalgia for when you had the single breadwinner family.

And this, in some cases, it's very Christian.

In some cases, it's very pagan nostalgia.

But this spiritual level of politics, and it seems to me to have this dimension of modernity is hollow.

People are working, as you mentioned, particularly women, these bullshit jobs in human resource management and in marketing and environmental protection, and men are caged in these little offices and doing retail work that is beneath them.

And, you know, Jenner in their quote says, agents of the new world, but not new life.

There's all this emphasis on what life is, the good, the beautiful, vitality, vitalism.

Can you talk about that dimension of it, this the spiritual cell being made?

OK, let me try to think about how to do this, because I will say that typically when I get into a literature, I think I'm usually a generous reader and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in.

And I read your piece and then I read The Last Man by Charles Cornish Dale, the raw egg nationalist.

I read Bronze Age Mindset.

And it's one of the first times I can really remember coming out of something like this and thinking, oh, there was so much less there than I thought.

Like, I just assumed people were making some reasonable arguments.

But I want to try to be generous before I get into that reaction.

So let me ask it this way.

As you were talking to these people, as you have immersed yourself in this literature, which parts of the critique or the diagnosis of modernity and its ills and ailments did you find recognizable or find yourself responding to?

Vegetarianism is a tool of social control to sap our vitality and make us easier and more obedient to subjects.

That's where you parted company.

OK, let me let me describe the argument of this book, because I think it actually gets at something that I want to try to do, which is it brings up some things really worth talking about and then goes in some really wild directions.

You can correct me if you feel like I am being unfair on any part of this.