Ezra Klein

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—

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.