Young Women are Ditching MAGA in Droves as They Become Disgusted by Trump & Fuentes

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We are joined today by one of my favorite new finds,

journalist and writer, Sam Adler Bell,

who is also the co-host of Know Your Enemy,

which is about the right, and the whole thing fascinates me.

So your latest piece in New York magazine is fascinating.

I devoured it immediately, and it's called The Women Leaving the Right.

And I was particularly enthralled by the art that came with the piece,

because it shows Pete Hexeth, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes,

Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson.

So that's just an interesting cast of characters.

And so the two things that really stuck out to me

are women leaving the conservative movement.

And then the influence of Nick Fuentes and all of these,

you know, right wing influencers.

So start by, if you will, describing your piece

and the women that are featured.

Sure. Well, there's two main subjects, the piece,

a woman who I call Anna, because she does not want to go by her actual name,

and a woman who went under her own name, Alex Kishuda.

Both of them were really prominent pundits on the MAGA new right.

A lot of the work that they did was about really criticizing women,

talking about how women are unwell,

and that feminism has diverted their natural,

motherly instincts into a quest for worldly success,

and that now that women have it,

they're using their newfound authority to punish

and fetter men in paralleling civilization in the process.

This all sounds kind of crazy and awful.

But this is the kind of thing that has become totally normalized on the right.

And these women, you know, in different ways

into different degrees were involved in kind of being mouthpieces

for that message over the past 10 years.

But they, over the course of more recent time,

started to realize that they were really, you know,

selling the rope to hang themselves with.

And the movement that they were a part of,

really the MAGA movement has become,

if you can believe it, even though it started from a very sexist place

with a figure like Donald Trump at the top of it,

has become even more openly sexist.

And a lot of the sort of currents of misogyny

that were somewhat below the surface have come out to the forefront.

And they have decided, and that's how they came to me,

that they'd had enough,

and that this movement was no longer really redeemable,

that there was a form of it that could exist that wasn't sexist.

And they decided to leave.

And in the case of talking to me, you know, call it out.

Okay, so what's interesting is I grew up,

born and raised by super evangelical Christian and Republicans.

So that's what I did.

And there's just a certain amount of internalized misogyny

and sexism that you just tolerate,

as you just don't even realize this happening.

And then the Bible is very patriarchal.

Are these women also involved in the Christian part of the right?

Yeah, one of them, Anna, very much was and is still a believing Catholic,

but she was raised very in a conservative religious environment.

I think that's a big part of it,

but one of the things that the source is not just these two,

but other people I talked to for the piece pointed out

was that in some ways the old Christian patriarchal traditionalism

that was the mainstay of the right for many, many years,

that's changed, you know?

I mean, the people who are leading the charge of sexism on the right these days

are not just these sort of old school Christian patriarchs.

Because, you know, and this is steel manning perhaps,

the sort of biblical Christianity a little bit,

but those people, those men thought of themselves as protectors,

you know, that they had to give something up in being a part of,

you know, the patriarchal family.

And mainly what they had to give up was this, you know,

their aggression, in exchange for, you know,

the things that they get from being a part of, you know,

a heterosexual couple, a marriage.

The thing that we have now is that men,

the men who are leading the MAGA movement,

they no longer think of themselves as having responsibilities

or some kind of reciprocal obligation to the women

who they have control over.

They expect these women to be under their control,

but that they don't have to be even good patriarchs

in exchange for that submission.

And I think that's something that came through really clearly

in my conversations.

That in some ways, the old patriarchal patriarchy was more tolerable

than what we have now, which is people like Nick Fuentes,

who is, who he's not saying, you know,

I love and respect women and their, you know,

their important role in society.

He's saying women are, you know,

disgusting, odious creatures who are my political enemies.

I mean, that's a big, that's a big change.

We don't want to give too much credit to the old patriarchs,

but at least they had this conception of themselves

as protectors of women,

not as these fundamentally hostile, violent,

domineering force in women's lives.

And there's also a part of the movement

that wants to punish women as a right,

like an andriutate style person.

Yeah, no, that's true.

I mean, a big part of the trajectory we're talking about here

is that the conservative movement used to have some,

there used to be some significant difference

or somewhat of a difference between the conservative movement

and what was called sort of the manosphere

or the red pill side of the internet,

the sort of world of the in cells.

You know, these men who think of women

as basically like co-conspirators in a plot

to deprive them of their, you know,

god-given rights to domination and sex and status.

That part of the movement, you know,

the patriarchal conservative Christian part of the movement

has merged in kind of a significant way

with this more virulent, angry,

young, in cell part of the right

that's represented by people like Nick Fuentes

and the tape brothers.

What's interesting to me is like, in these circles,

you hear that like the women caused all the problems.

We're mad and we'll boil it down

to women causing the problem.

And I found that to be interesting and fascinating.

Yeah, it is, it is really fascinating.

I mean, something I found just sort of like really

waiting into the waters of right wing sexism today

is that if you look at every problem they diagnose

at the center of it really is a woman with too much power.

So that you have this whole theory that goes by different names,

you know, this sort of anti-feminist woman figure

Helen Andrews wrote about it as the feminization

of America's public life.

But then you have more people on the far right

who call it the long house.

And the idea is basically that like women have,

as they've grown in their numerical dominance

in various fields in education,

in the law, in healthcare,

that they are changing the norms of these spaces

and making them more womanly.

And what that means to them is that women are, you know,

congenitally, you know, liberal and empathetic

and motivated by emotion instead of reason

and all of these ideas.

And that is what's caused,

that's what caused, for example,

wokeness from their perspective.

That's what caused all these major problems

in our collective life.

And so for the right-wing MAGA misogynists,

it's really women who are undermining Americans

of a Western civilization in general at this point.

That we've engaged in this sort of massive experiment

in allowing women to have too much power.

And that's what's causing all the problems

in our collective life.

I mean, this seems totally crazy, awful,

straightforwardly sexist to me.

But there are a lot of young men on the right

who are compelled by this.

And they're compelled by it,

frankly, in a similar way, I think,

and this is something one of my sources pointed out to me,

in a similar way to the way that they're

compelled by anti-semitism.

Because this is a theory of the world

that explains why you don't have what you're supposed to have,

that there's some kind of secret power structure

that is constraining you

and preventing you from getting what you want.

And in the same way that anti-semitism treats Jews

as simultaneously these like weak creatures

and disgusting creatures,

it also treats them as all-powerful,

somehow both all-powerful and weak.

And women are taking the place of the Jew

in that sort of anti-semitic paradigm

for a lot of young men right now on the right.

Okay, this is an interesting thing in the article.

I just could not wrap my head around this.

You have Nick Fuentes, who I would say is a nut.

He is openly anti-semitic.

He hates women.

He makes nobuns about it.

But you think he's super fringy.

In my mind, he's super fringy.

You know, he's not close to power.

Are you here about the Gorypers and you know how crazy it is?

In the piece, please tell the audience

how much influence or how prevalent Nick Fuentes is

in this White House's circle in Capitol Hill.

Yeah, this is something that really shocked me too.

I had thought of him as a fringe figure.

I mean, obviously he's grown in prominence over the past year.

He was allowed back on Twitter.

His number of followers on X was grew, you know, by many folds.

But what I heard from sources on the Hill

and sources who work in the White House

in the administration is that the young staff are class,

you know, people under the age of, say, 35.

Many, many of them listen to Nick Fuentes,

whether they're big fans or just, you know,

have to pay attention to him because he's a big enough

and influential enough figure with the men that they're trying to reach

is a different, is it, you know, varies?

But yes, I talked to a source who is a former administration official

who said it's certainly the case that the young staff are class,

many of them listen to Nick Fuentes.

And I heard from several people who work on the Hill

that it's totally normal for people in his milieu

to listen to Nick Fuentes to repeat the things he says on his show.

So this is, he is no longer, we cannot, you know,

kind of tell ourselves the comforting story

that Nick Fuentes has no influence.

He's a major figure on the right today.

That is just so stunning.

That is stunning to me.

And then you have, you have this whole group of people

that, you know, misogyny has now turned into this hatred of women.

And there are leadership positions like Project 2026,

they don't want women in the workplace

and that the root of all evil is women.

Then I see someone like Pete Hexath

who just goes all through me.

And I, that's why I liked the art for the piece.

Because you just have all the offenders,

Andrew Tate, Pete Hexath.

These men hate women.

It's just so obvious.

There's this rage.

Did you get any clue from these women?

Why there's such a groundswell of anger towards women?

Well, one thing that people talked about a lot was, you know,

this kind of like the sort of psychic dimension of this,

that a lot of these men are people who,

they had some kind of, you know, primordial experience

or indelible experience of being humiliated by a woman,

whether it's a teacher, a caregiver,

a woman who wouldn't have sex with them,

their mother.

I mean, there's, there's, you don't want to, you know,

reduce people's political ideology to a psychoanalysis entirely.

But when you, when you watch these people,

when you watch somebody like Pete Hexath on television

and talking about, you know, women in the military

and how they're undermining, you know, our warfighters or whatever,

and you see this kind of like boiled, coiled rage

and sort of impotence that you know is such a,

just such a feature, such a signal feature of his

self-presentation.

You can't really, you can't really,

you can't believe psychoanalysis out of it, you know,

and I think that something that really brought this home for me

and that ended up being sort of the conclusion of the piece

was when Renee Good was shot and killed in Minneapolis.

And there was this sort of unbelievably like

unanimous message coming from the White House,

from the press secretary, and then from all of their foot soldiers

on the internet, that the reason that she was killed

was she was a bad mother, that she, you know,

I remember seeing this image, I don't remember,

I don't know if you saw this, that was like,

there was shared thousands of times,

that was a picture of Renee Good,

and it was the message was,

I've been condescended to by a woman

who looks just like this countless times.

And so the idea, you know, the whole project

in the aftermath of Renee Good's death, her murder,

was to say, this woman is dead

because she wasn't acting like the right kind of woman,

like the right kind of mother.

And in fact, you know, this movement is encouraging men

to not feel bad or even feel titillated by her death

because, you know, this is just the kind of woman

who's treated you badly throughout your life.

And that message was just so clear, I felt,

and you know, in the aftermath of her murder.

And I think that you can't, you really can't set that aside.

This aspect of like, of encouraging these resentments

and these petty grievances and these deep feelings

of sort of lack and humiliation that these men have experienced

or that they feel that they've experienced

and that that motivates a lot of this politics.

You know what's interesting to me is,

you have this old man.

I mean, this old guy that he doesn't know where he is,

he talks with marbles in his mouth, he makes no sense.

And he's the leader.

Everybody's just cult of personality around him.

So I was naive enough to think, well, it's the Fox News,

the Sky will be gone.

It seems like what's coming after with the youth

and the Nick Fuentes and the Andrew Tates,

that it seems worse, like it's going to be worse

their ideology for women, for black people, for immigrants.

It is getting cooler by the evolution.

Did you get any sense of where we're going from here?

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the fear.

I think that, you know, it's crazy.

I mean, it's unbelievable to think like, oh, we had a good

when it was just Trump.

But it's possible.

It's possible.

You know, I think Tucker Carlson is a major figure in this world

and he, you know, he talks about how he doesn't want to run for office.

But I think that if he decides that JD Vance doesn't have the juice,

I think he might.

And I think that one sort of important aspect of this whole debate

that I'm talking about in this piece and this, you know,

to a certain degree, this is a debate that's internal to the right.

I mean, we're looking in on it from the outside,

but there are people within the right of obviously some of the women I talk to

who are saying, you know, this has to stop, you know,

and some people are saying it who are still more inside the movement

than people I talk to are saying this has to stop

because we're going to lose.

You know, you can't, you can't say half the country

are sort of like sub-human, sub-rational creatures

and win, you know, a national election.

I think that what's going on here is an awareness

that Trump is losing his grip on the movement.

They understand that Trump, you know,

is senescent and marble mouth at this point

and that he is not going to be the leader of this movement forever.

They don't like admitting that if they're really still hardcore mega

because Trump doesn't like to hear it.

But I think that what's going on is that there's a mild fear

that after Trump, yes, the deluge of the maniac, hateful, cruel,

and to a larger degree than Trump, really unsympathetic forms

of violent hatred.

You know, we don't think Trump is sympathetic

but Trump's sort of irony, his campiness,

this quality of, you know, it's a little bit of a joke.

When you see petexat, you don't think this is any part of this is funny,

any part of this is a joke.

And I think there is a fear on the right

that when Trump leaves the scene,

they will be left with a movement that is shaped in his image,

in the sense of an image of cruelty towards women,

towards people of color, towards immigrants.

But they will not have a leader who has the Teflon charisma

and this sort of magnetism that Trump does

to pull the whole project together.

And so part of what's happening right now,

the conversation about antisemitism,

the conversation that I've surfaced about misogyny,

there is a dawning awareness on the right

that they might have a problem.

They might have a problem.

If this is the main message, people are getting

about what Republican and conservative politics is.

I hope they do have a problem.

Because the alternative is they don't have a problem.

These people are in charge.

And they do unimaginable things

to vulnerable people in this country.

That was a question I have for you.

These women who are now saying, you know,

we were used by this movement.

We were propped up, we drank the Kool-Aid,

we were all in and now they're turning it on F.

And one part of, I think it was Anna's story,

I'm sorry, Alex's story, where she made a comment

that was somewhat against the man at the table.

And he got up and he pounded the table and he screamed at her

and nobody defended her.

So was there a sense that, okay,

I realized they're doing this to me.

We see antisemitism coming out of the White House.

They want to make all these policies with universities

yet the junior staffers are all in on Nick Fuentes.

Okay, whatever.

But it's every group.

Was there a dawning that?

It's not just women.

They are doing this to immigrants.

They are doing this to Black people.

Everybody that's not them.

Was there any awareness of that?

I think that it's dawning.

I mean, for my sources, I think that the first step

and it's often the case that the first step

is to realize that you yourself are in danger

and then you can go from there to, you know,

that's sort of the like prerequisite for solidarity

is to realize that you might need some protection

from other people,

that you might need some, you know, strengthen numbers.

I do think that, and a lot of readers have pointed this out

and they're entirely right,

that it is, it doesn't really flatter these sources

that they didn't mind any of the racism

or other kinds of bigotry

that were just so transparent about this movement.

It was only when they realized,

oh, they're coming for me as well,

as a white woman that they turned on it.

So I think that's, you know,

that's just, that's the true thing about this story

for these women.

And I think, you know, to their credit,

they feel a lot of shame and guilt now.

But for readers who read it and go,

oh, you're just finding out now because it hurt you,

I totally understand that reaction too.

Yeah, and I, having been inside, not to the extreme,

but there is a part of being raised in it

that you're immune to it.

That you're above it, you're entitled.

For me, it went along with the evangelical Christian thing.

So I, I can see where it dawns on you slowly.

Okay, last question, I'll get you out of here

because I know you have lots of other stuff.

What is the, is this something all women and mackerel

talking about?

Is this widespread?

Is it isolated?

And is there anything going to change moving forward

that you can tell?

Yeah, it's a good question.

It was one I, you know, tried different ways

of answering in the piece, you know,

the people who came to me obviously were self-selecting

and then the people that they put me in touch with

were also people who they knew.

But one of the sources who I spoke to,

who was very involved, one of my main subjects

was very involved in very prominent outlets

working in conservative institutions

said to me every single woman working

conservative politics knows what I'm talking about.

If she says she doesn't, she's lying.

So that does mean that, you know, from her perspective,

they all know about this problem.

Whether they're responding to that problem

by talking to New York Magazine about how much of a problem

it is and defecting from the movement,

that's a different question.

Some women are still making the calculus,

well, it's worth it.

I have these other political commitments

or I have a career or I have an income.

I would say that there is no doubt that this is growing

as a fear and you see some glimmers of it come out

even, you know, just in on Capitol Hill,

you know, you have the women who've criticized Mike Johnson

for his leadership in Congress saying

that he's too patriarchal, he doesn't listen to women.

You had the revolt over the Epstein files

that was led by Republican women.

It's not a whole lot, you know, you wish it was a lot more.

But I think that at this moment,

it's mostly subterranean, it's beneath the surface.

My hope is that it'll come out.

I mean, what my source has said was that, you know,

these conversations are taking place primarily in private,

in the background, in the group chats that everybody is in.

All these women are talking to each other,

comparing notes about, you know, bad conservative men

and talking about, you know, what they can tolerate.

And I hope that more of them, you know,

make the decision that the sources in my piece did

and that moving forward, we can have, you know,

a reckoning about this.

I hope you're right.

Listener, follow Sam Adler-Bell, his podcast

where he's the co-host, you know, your enemy,

it's fascinating.

It's like what's going on behind the scenes

on the right, it's very interesting.

Thank you for coming on.

I so enjoyed it.

I could talk to you for hours, but I will let you go.

And thanks again for being here.

Thank you so much.

This was a lot of fun.