The Right’s Pre-Modern ‘Masculinist’ Fantasy | The Ezra Klein Show

A new masculinist movement has gone mainstream on the right. The prominent voices in this movement yearn for an earlier time, when men were men and women were women. Sometimes that time seems to be the 1950s, like when Tucker Carlson extols a world where men go to work and women stay at home. But sometimes it goes way farther back. The pastor Doug Wilson advocates household voting, in which men vote for their wives. And Costin Vlad Alamariu, better known as Bronze Age Pervert, harks back to the Bronze Age — specifically the ancient Hittite and Mitanni Empires. Helen Lewis wrote a recent cover story for The Atlantic about this new antifeminist backlash, which she calls “the single most important force holding together the American right.” So I wanted to have her on the show to talk about these ideas, the political program of this movement and how seriously we should take it. Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights” and “The Genius Myth.” 0:00 Intro 2:09 The New Right’s view of women 9:47 Raw Egg Nationalist and a hormonal theory of politics 18:50 Bronze Age Pervert 30:16 Nietzsche and the hollowness of modernity 32:42 A masculinist Christianity 40:17 Boys are struggling 43:59 Looksmaxxing Spiral 50:29 Helen Andrews and “The Great Feminization” 1:00:32 An alternative vision for masculinity 1:08:55 Self-help culture 1:09:29 Looksmaxxing 1:13:58 MAGA Aesthetics 1:22:24 The New Right’s policy agenda for women 1:29:52 Women exiting the right 1:37:40 Book recommendations Read the full transcript here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-helen-lewis-gender-right.html Watch more on @EzraKleinShow Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html