Alright, Let's Debate the Ideas Then
on Sam Adler-Bell's New York article
Sam Adler-Bell recently published a profile in New York about women who have left, or are quietly leaving, the New Right. Alex Kaschuta, an influential writer and former host of the podcast Subversive, publicly split with the movement after years of genuine intellectual engagement that included interviewing many of its architects, from Curtis Yarvin to Darryl Cooper. An anonymous woman, a mother and former true believer who wrote for right-wing outlets and worked for 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.” It’s a detail worth sitting with!)
Both women describe a movement that once promised women a place at the table and now openly treats them, 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.
The backdrop is a debate that has consumed the online right over the past few years: 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 consensus-oriented to participate meaningfully in intellectual or political work. The women leaving aren’t leaving over policy disagreements. They’re leaving because they feel like a movement they helped build, or promote, has arrived at the conclusion that women like them shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What makes this harder to narrate cleanly is that women are not only the targets of this debate but, in some cases, its most prominent voices. The conversation is not simply men saying these things about women.
It is, in part, women saying these things about women – which is precisely why some of the people who’ve pushed back feel not just disagreed with but trapped.
That being said, I understand why some right-wingers were uneasy. It ran in New York. It will be read by progressives as confirmation of everything they already believe, in ways that don’t require them to reckon with why these women were drawn to the right in the first place: real frustrations with liberal feminism, real observations about institutional culture, real experiences of being condescended to. The piece compresses figures who share very little into a single narrative arc. Scott Yenor is a family-policy scholar at Heritage; Nick Fuentes is a self-described “incel podcaster”; Douglas Wilson is a pastor in Idaho whose church community has attracted controversy for decades over its teachings on gender hierarchy. These are not 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, and who’s a fringe (often media) figure tolerated for tactical reasons is genuinely complicated, and it’s a debate most Republican voters have never encountered and would find alien. The ordinary people, men and women alike, who vote Republican without ever listening to a podcast or posting on X are absent from the story entirely.
Full disclosure – I also have some skin in this conversation. I was quoted in the piece, not as a defector, but as an internet culture reporter familiar with some of the communities being described. For my part, I drew on Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women to make the point that the old conservative bargain for women, submission in exchange for protection, no longer holds in 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; they had made a rational calculation. They traded autonomy for safety within a system that offered them no better deal. What’s changed in these newer subcultures is that the protection half of the bargain has been dropped. The submission is still demanded, but the reciprocal obligation – that men owe women provision, loyalty, respect – has been replaced by open contempt. For this I was accused of throwing friends under the bus by people, who, ironically, both oppose the specific communities I was critiquing and, in some cases, even enjoyed the text I was recommending. Several of the women quoted in the original piece have been dismissed as “clout chasers” by both left and right.
But the most vocal critics didn’t engage with the Dworkin argument, or really any argument made.
We all spoke to a “liberal journalist.” I myself might even be the liberal journalist! The sin was committed, and we were promptly dismissed as traitors. This is a more important snag than it might seem on the surface.
The most common response I’ve seen from the online right is: “Why don’t they attack the ideas?”
I want to take that demand seriously. Many of the women in Adler-Bell’s piece have attacked the ideas, at length, in public, for years. The ideas are not hard to attack. What’s hard is being taken seriously — getting the attack to count, because the online arenas where this debate is actually happening have been structured so that no criticism from a woman registers as legitimate.
The request to “debate the ideas” is, in most cases, not a real request for debate. It is a move in a game whose actual logic runs on a version of Carl Schmitt’s famous, and famously abused, friend-enemy distinction. What matters is not whether the argument is sound but whether the person making it is your ally. This is the defining pathology of 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: your criticism reflects your privilege, which prevents you from perceiving structural oppression. Disagreement becomes a failure of perception rather than a difference of analysis. The conservative version, now ascendant in the (let’s be honest here) X and podcast-dominated gender debate: women who disagree with claims about feminine irrationality are exhibiting the feminine irrationality being diagnosed. They aren’t accused of being wrong. They’re accused of “flirting” with ideas they were never serious about, even when they spent years making substantive contributions to the movement or living the prescribed lifestyle (e.g. traditional marriage, homemaking, child-rearing). 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. Read plainly, they are calling her a tease – or worse, a whore.
This rhetorical tactic should be familiar by now.
When Robin DiAngelo introduced “white fragility,” the most common criticism, and I think the right one, was that it was unfalsifiable. Agreement proved the theory and denial was itself an exhibit of fragility. No possible response counted as evidence against the claim. The online right’s Great Gender Debate now operates the same way. Agreement from women validates the thesis. But disagreement validates it too. The argument never has to defend itself because all possible criticism has been defined as inadmissible. You cannot 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. Real survey data does show gender gaps in attitudes toward free speech, and the question of whether institutional norms have eroded as demographics shift is worth asking.
So let me engage with at least one of Andrews’ answers, because I think it illustrates how even serious versions of this argument slide into the same structural trap.
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 precisely because rigid rule-following produced unjust outcomes. This was recognized in the fourteenth century, not during “peak woke.” The tension between rule and judgment isn’t a modern corruption, it’s the tradition of the Western world. And it has always been the tradition.
What Andrews frames as feminine contamination (interpretation, discretion, contextual reasoning) has always been constitutive of legal practice! Framing it as a deviation is the novelty, not the other way around. The baseline she’s measuring from never existed in the West, so no amount of evidence can disprove the decline.What Andrews frames as a deviation from legal tradition is, in fact, part of the tradition 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.
