Alright, Let's Debate the Ideas Then
on Sam Adler-Bell's New York article
Last week, Sam Adler-Bell published an article in New York about women who have either left, or are considering leaving, the New Right. Alex Kaschuta, the influential former host of the podcast Subversive, split with the movement after years of genuine intellectual engagement that included interviewing many of the online subculture’s architects, like Curtis Yarvin, Steve Sailer, and Darryl Cooper. He also interviewed an anonymous woman, a mother and former true believer who wrote for right-wing outlets and worked for various conservative institutions, requested anonymity because she fears for the physical safety of herself and her children. (That detail has been laughed at and called “dishonorable.” But it’s worth thinking about why a mother would want to do something like that!)
Both women describe a subculture that openly treats women, in the anonymous source’s words, as “subhuman: subrational, non-agentic, cattle.” Adler-Bell, who hosts a podcast that provides an excellent history of right-wing ideas, reported the piece well, and I believe he wrote it in good faith.
Over the last few years, the online right has been seriously questioning what they want women’s role to be. At first, the whole thing feels somewhat backward—these are questions polite society has long settled—questions like whether biological sex differences are so profound that women’s increasing presence in professional and institutional life has degraded those institutions, and whether women are, by nature, too irrational or too conformist to participate meaningfully in intellectual or political spaces. The women Sam interviewed aren’t leaving because of policy disagreements, or at least, not entirely. Their primary motivation for leaving is that they feel like the online right (which, is, ultimately, a better term than “New Right” in my estimation) has decided that women like them shouldn’t have been there in the first place. These aren’t random entryists, milking right-wingers for attention — these are people who, arguably, helped build the movement’s momentum. And what makes the whole thing more complicated is that it’s not just men who are the most prominent voices. It’s women criticizing women.
All that being said, I’m sympathetic to why some right-wingers were uneasy with Adler-Bell’s piece. It ran in New York. It’s the type of thing that will be read by progressives as validation of what they already believe about the right, and in ways that don’t require them ask why these women were drawn to the right in the first place. Things like real frustrations with liberal feminism and real experiences with a sometimes condescending institutional culture on the left.
The piece also, in places, paints with too broad a brush. People who share very little in common become part of the same narrative arc— Scott Yenor, a family policy scholar at Heritage becomes interchangeable with Nick Fuentes, a self-described “incel podcaster,” becomes interchangeable with Doug Wilson, a controversial Idaho pastor who preaches that women should submit to men. It should go without saying that these aren’t the same projects and not all of them are pro-Trump or MAGA. The question of who counts as “New Right,” who’s MAGA, who’s conservative, who’s a fringe podcaster tolerated for tactical reasons is complicated. And, frankly, most Republicans don’t know or care about it. The regular people who vote Republican and are completely unaware of these internecine conflicts don’t enter into Adler-Bell’s story at all.
Now’s probably a good time to disclose that I have skin in the game. I was quoted in the piece, not as a woman who’s leaving the right, but as somebody familiar with some of the communities described. For my part, I drew on Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women to make the point that the historic conservative bargain for women, submission in exchange for protection, no longer holds up some of the most popular right-wing subcultures, like the groypers – the young, chronically online followers of Nick Fuentes – or the masculinist orbiters of figures like Andrew Tate.
Dworkin’s argument was that conservative women weren’t dupes. Instead, they were women who made a rational calculation. They knowingly traded in their autonomy for safety—to them it was just a better deal. But in these newer subcultures, specifically the groypers, the men don’t offer protection. They still demand submission, but there’s no reciprocal obligation. In fact, the idea that men owe women anything has been replaced by open contempt. Because I spoke to Sam, I’ve been accused of “throwing friends under the bus” for “status and access.” Ironically, my biggest critics agree with me — they’re pretty uniformly anti-groyper—and some of them are open fans of both Dworkin and Right-Wing Women in particular. I’m not the only person who’s been criticized. Several of the women quoted in the original piece have been dismissed as “clout chasers” by both left and right.
Of course, the most vocal critics, didn’t engage with the Dworkin argument, or any argument made by me or anyone else.
We all spoke to a “liberal journalist.” I myself might even be the liberal journalist! And so because we sinned, we were dismissed as traitors. This is an important snag.
We were all accused — me, Sam, the women interviewed— of focusing on ad hominem attacks. We didn’t attack the ideas.
So, let’s take that demand seriously. Let’s debate the ideas then.
Let’s start here. The women interviewed for Adler-Bell’s piece have attacked the ideas, at length, in public, for years. The ideas aren’t hard to attack. What’s actually hard is being taken seriously by your opponents and getting that attack to count. Twitter, where this debate is happening, is structured in a way where no criticism from a woman can register as legitimate.
When people ask you to “attack the ideas” it’s a trick. If you attack the ideas, you’re not an ally. It’s actual logic runs on a deprecated version of Carl Schmitt’s famous, and famously abused, friend-enemy distinction. This is the defining pathology of online political cultures, of any argument online, and it’s the same one the center, right, and “politically homeless” spent the past decade complaining about when the left did it.
The “woke” or progressive version of the move is that your criticism reflects your privilege, which prevents you from perceiving structural oppression. It’s not a different analysis, it’s because you can’t properly empathize.
The version we see here is that women who disagree with claims about “feminine irrationality” are exhibiting the feminine irrationality being discussed. Nobody tells them they’re wrong, they tell them they’re not really right-wing. They were just flirting with ideas they weren’t serious about, even if they made real intellectual contributions (like Alex did), or really walked the walk with the “trad” lifestyle (like the anonymous woman in the piece did). The defecting woman is not treated as an intellectual, not even a failed one, but as a sexual presence who wandered too close to serious ideas and couldn’t follow through. She’s a tease, or worse, a whore.
When Robin DiAngelo first talked about “white fragility,” the most common criticism, and I think the right one, was that it was unfalsifiable. If you agreed with it, it was proof. But if you disagreed with it, that was an exhibit of white fragility. No possible response is evidence against the claim. The online right’s Great Gender Debate works the same way—both agreement and disagreement validate the thesis. How are you supposed to attack the ideas when the ideas have been designed to make your attack into proof that you shouldn’t be attacking them?
But that’s the ecosystem, not every thinker in it.
Whether you agree or disagree with their underlying claims, not every anti-racist thinker was or is Robin DiAngelo, and not every sex realist – that is, someone who believes biological sex differences have meaningful social and political implications – is a podcast reply guy calling women cattle. Helen Andrews, one of the most vocal voices in this conversation, engages with arguments. She debated Leah Libresco Sargeant on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Survey data does actually show that there are gender gaps in free speech, and the question of whether institutional norms have changed or eroded is a reasonable one.
So let me engage with at least one of Andrews’ answers, because I think it illustrates how even serious versions of this argument are still unfalsifiable:
On Triggernometry, Andrews said:
And we had increasing female representation in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which I think is more damaging in lawyers than it is in almost anywhere else. Because the law is the one field where you really want people to be as literal minded as possible, as devoted to the rules as possible, not fudging things so that everybody’s happy, really sticking to the letter of the law. And so if the law is corrupted, that’s something that I’m very, very worried about.
The first problem is that this description of law is a fantasy of what the legal profession actually is. The common law tradition is built on interpretation, not literalism. What Andrews said is, in fact, so detached from the reality of the legal profession I was stunned she said this so confidently.
Equity courts exist because rigid rule-following doesn’t produce just outcomes. We realized this in the fourteenth century, not during “peak woke.” The conflict between rules and judgment is the foundation of the Western world.
What Andrews says is a feminine contamination (interpretation, discretion, contextual reasoning) has always been a part of legal practice. What she describes as a change due to women’s increased involvement is just the profession itself.
So, ostensibly, in this version of history, when male judges interpret the law, it is called jurisprudence. But when women do it, it becomes evidence that women are corrupting the institution?
