This one was a miss for me. The problem is "New Right" /= "Conservative." I absolutely believe that many women are finding a home in some sort of "conservatism." I've seen it just in the publishing world and I'm delighted by it. Your work on this stuff in particular has been excellent, as has Louise Perry's. But the "new right" is a very different beast from "conservatism." The new right is in many ways antithetical to any traditional understanding of "conservatism," I think, and is probably better understood as "progressive right wing."
The right wing progressives / new right are far more likely to be into techno transhumanist stuff (which is often tacitly deeply demeaning to human bodies and to most human persons) and also tend to be very into domination politics, which plays out in very predictable ways when it comes to gender.
I actually agree, I just think a lot of the time women aren’t leaving the “new right” for old school conservatism but abandoning all of it (and encouraged to!) The NY Magazine piece implies that all conservative men are like this deep down, and the New Right are just being open about it. Becomes harder to have an honest conversation about real problems this way.
Yes, totally agree there. I just couldn't help noticing the slippery back and forth in the piece b/w "conservative" and "new right" and so wanted to register that concern. I think one way to undercut Adler-Bell's claim is for actual conservatives to be the ones policing the madness happening with the new right. But that can only be done if it is recognized that those are two separate things.
Grateful for your work. We have a review essay on your book and one other coming soon, btw.
I guess I’m not online enough but I’m a little confused by the distinction. When I think of conservative influencers I think of Matt Walsh (happily married, 5 kids), Charlie Kirk (happily married) Ben Shapiro, (married, 4 kids) etc. I don’t see any angry single dudes who hate women . Are we just talking about Nick Fuentes?
Yeah, so the people I'm thinking of are Fuentes, Tate, Costin Almariu (Bronze Age Pervert), Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist--a guy who got boosted by Tucker Carlson and publishes lots of pornographic content via his magazine Man's World). That's more the heart of the dissident right, IMO.
In the reactionary Christian space you can find people like the Ogden UT crew (Brian Sauve, Eric Conn) that are closely associated with guys like Stephen Wolfe (Case for Christian Nationalism author, which Rusty Reno, whose magazine published Freya's piece, endorsed). Joel Webbon would be another example of this.
The Daily Wire is interesting because Shapiro is basically a normie Reaganite type with a bit more of an edge, as was Kirk. So I wouldn't say either of those guys are New Right in any real sense besides a kind of lazy analysis of personal brand. Their politics are basically normie Reaganism. Guys like Walsh and Knowles are much more adjacent to the New Right space.
Almariu at least is a pretty equivalent figure in terms of reach and influence, but he hasn't popped in the mainstream quite as much. But if you look at the metrics we can find re: audience and reach, it's significant. Cornish-Dale is less so. The others are mostly known only in Christian circles.
The leftist narrative that tells women, "it's not you choosing to be conservative; it's the patriarchy working through you," is deeply disrespectful. It presumes that women are incapable of making decisions that affect their own lives, that they are mere stooges for somebody else's agenda.
It's 2026 for goodness sake. Can we stop acting like women are incapable of agency and free will? Maybe she just doesn't agree with you. Deal with it.
Congratulations Freya on First Things and another very well-written essay. Living in New York City as I do, I'm all too familiar with the biased slop that New York magazine calls "editorial." Thank you for again taking up the cause of balance and reason.
The New York magazine article you're responding to sounds like just another tired exercise in what C.S. Lewis called "Bulverism": the refusal to consider someone's ideas on the merits, and simply assuming they are wrong and proceeding to psychoanalyze why they are wrong.
It's just bad-faith propaganda to keep up the morale of the kind of people who read (and write for) New York magazine.
There is a meme/chart that I'm unfortunately unable to attach here, showing the Left vs Right "discourse dynamics," if you will. On the Left is uniformity. They agree on every major policy from open borders to big government policies to UBI. One harmonious blue (?) blob. Free speech need not exist because everybody says the same thing.
But on the Right? It's a veritable blizzard of colorful, competing online discourse, disagreement, and fratricidal X-bombs. Posts against leftism, posts leveraging leftism (woke-ish arguments, in fact), "conservative dads" duking it out with Frogs, libertarians quoting Austrians, you name it.
The Right, therefore, is where free speech is thriving. Thoughtful women, unsurprisingly, are drawn to conversation. Thoughtful women of "a conservative leaning," are very drawn to these right-side discussions, particularly when the leftism they may have been spoon-fed in college is clearly not making their lives nice. (An aside: Some of the fiercest, most brilliant critics of feminism's nonsense are women like Dr. Janice Fiamengo, Dr. Dani Sulikowski, and Dr. Hannah Spier. Check them out, either here or on podcasts.)
That cacophany on the Right is also open to critiques like the one you mention. So what? Join the party! The "women-were-tricked" argument is as condescending as the 20-year-old book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (sp?) It argued that Republicans were voting against their interests because they voted against government programs that would give them..money. Horrors! They voted for lower taxes instead - *like idiots who were tricked* - and now look where they are: Red states with smaller government programs. What deplorable idiots. Etc.
I look forward to reading "Girls." Congrats on your success. Keep it up!
It is interesting that the vast majority of liberals seem to not understand conservatives actually believe some of the time tested traditions of the past might be right. The cultural continuity and a harmonious community are important to them
The leftist narrative is “You’re free, you can do anything, be happy and anyone who says otherwise is an oppressor, we are all friends”.
The right is “Life is full of trade-offs, happiness is transient, you have duties & responsibilities whether you like it or not, put away childish things, you have enemies / evolution / competition whether you like it or not, look for contentment”.
One is all about feelings, the other is about reality because you’re an adult.
One is all about being a child, the other is about being a soldier / parent.
One leaves you & your society vulnerable, the other enables (but does not guarantee) survival.
One deals with Luciferian goods (the costs outweigh the benefits, but they ideologically ‘feel’ good) , one deals with objective good (charity starts at home i.e. we can’t feed everyone, but we can “afford” to help family).
Notice they are not opposites just fables like The Grasshopper & the Ant are not ‘right wing’ coded, they merely tech children to deal with uncomfortable truths & realities.
After 80 years of peace many have forgotten these lessons.
You are a very interesting person and I commend your openness to debate.. That said, when is new right actually new right and not the center from which the left wing has departed radically?
There is a problem in that,today one cannot even start to talk about social issues without having to reestabljsh truthful baselines that are continuously eroded.
It is no coincidence that Dr Cory Clark's survey finds a majority of women in Social Psychology self-declare that "its complicated " when asked if they would present findings which disagreed with their values. (Along with a significant proportion of their male colleagues).
This is a problem because this continuous filtering process informs what the public is told
So when you speak of women on the right, it is important to distinguish that from the women who stayed where they are when their feminist female friends turned hard left by this mostly untrue rhetoric.
When you cant have a conversation without disagreement on base reality, it is no wonder males and females are separating politically.
In a bayesian nutshell, if you saw something in a psychology Ted Talk, you would be more correct on average if you presumed it was BS.
I mean, for many progressives, just having an opinion that a pre-born life should have some rights automatically makes you anti-woman. At the end of the day most of the hyperbole boils down to an inability with the left to be okay with people having differing opinions on abortion, even if they don’t just come out and say it. So the ones with the biggest target on those back are the women, because it destroys their confirmation bias
I read a hit piece on your book recently. It seemed suspiciously hard on it, almost as if the critic hadn’t really read your book. I wondered if the person writing it was in some way affiliated with some of the social media giants you bring attention to. It seemed oddly OTT.
the "left" believes the state is the highest form of morality, rationality and safety. The "right" believes nature must be honored. A female(or male), as an object, fights for and is ruled by the state. A woman(or man), as a living being, is at home in nature. As original people of Australia have said -- a woman is made by nature, a man is made by culture. State agents who cannot see beyond the state (liberals, communists, marxists, jews) want to make a place for women in the state. States will always be infinitely less than Nature.
I believe that many women (and men) are turned off by both the "Progressive Left" and parts of the "Right". Its quite obvious as to why some women left the Liberals in the last election. But what neither this article or the Adler-Bell piece considers, is that there are other factors including economics causing disillusionment. When the present administration was elected, there was a promised to lower prices and to start no new wars. Neither of these things have happened and many now feel let down and are going independent.
A lot of this frantic denial is both projection and deflection: it's rare to find someone who doesn't understand that MODERNITY ISN'T WORKING. You don't have to be alarmed by birthrates or an increasingly shallow and nihilistic culture or the rot of institutions. All you must do is ask yourself: is your life deeply meaningful? Are you stable and happy? Do you feel like a good person?
Modern progressives - if they're being honest - will have to answer 'no' to these questions. It's easy to criticize an older hierarchy, and pick apart the status quo. It's much harder to erect an IMPROVED substitute, and the Blob has failed. It has failed to give us a society with functional, natural communities, intact families, psychological stability, and meaning. It has failed to provide these things at a level that's probably 10x greater than any other similarly pathological civilization in human history. Don't even get me started on the margins: on schools filled with poor kids (where I teach Civics), and neighborhoods full of government dependents, and nursing homes full of imprisoned zombies.
If you think our society feels empty and meaningless when you sit at the center (working a symbolic capitalist job and living in a large or medium-sized city) you have NO IDEA how bad things are for the rest of us.
This is the system that people like this writer are implicitly defending.
Here's my essay (from a year or two ago) on the 'new right':
The arrogance is just... incredible. That's what I am most embarrassed of from when I was a Leftist for many years-- the arrogance, the hubris, the certainty that anyone who disagreed with me (with "us") was a brainwashed, two-dimensionally evil fool and a shit-kicker who was too dumb to understand how right I was. (I'm working now to reverse the damage I helped do to my country and civilization, but there is no shame in being wrong, or not knowing everything-- it's the arrogance, not only in worldview, but to also indoctrinate your audience into that arrogance, or to sell them emotionally and mentally-triggering self-validating slop that reinforces their own arrogance that is leading them to ruin... it's so gross.
This one was a miss for me. The problem is "New Right" /= "Conservative." I absolutely believe that many women are finding a home in some sort of "conservatism." I've seen it just in the publishing world and I'm delighted by it. Your work on this stuff in particular has been excellent, as has Louise Perry's. But the "new right" is a very different beast from "conservatism." The new right is in many ways antithetical to any traditional understanding of "conservatism," I think, and is probably better understood as "progressive right wing."
The right wing progressives / new right are far more likely to be into techno transhumanist stuff (which is often tacitly deeply demeaning to human bodies and to most human persons) and also tend to be very into domination politics, which plays out in very predictable ways when it comes to gender.
I actually agree, I just think a lot of the time women aren’t leaving the “new right” for old school conservatism but abandoning all of it (and encouraged to!) The NY Magazine piece implies that all conservative men are like this deep down, and the New Right are just being open about it. Becomes harder to have an honest conversation about real problems this way.
Yes, totally agree there. I just couldn't help noticing the slippery back and forth in the piece b/w "conservative" and "new right" and so wanted to register that concern. I think one way to undercut Adler-Bell's claim is for actual conservatives to be the ones policing the madness happening with the new right. But that can only be done if it is recognized that those are two separate things.
Grateful for your work. We have a review essay on your book and one other coming soon, btw.
I guess I’m not online enough but I’m a little confused by the distinction. When I think of conservative influencers I think of Matt Walsh (happily married, 5 kids), Charlie Kirk (happily married) Ben Shapiro, (married, 4 kids) etc. I don’t see any angry single dudes who hate women . Are we just talking about Nick Fuentes?
Yeah, so the people I'm thinking of are Fuentes, Tate, Costin Almariu (Bronze Age Pervert), Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist--a guy who got boosted by Tucker Carlson and publishes lots of pornographic content via his magazine Man's World). That's more the heart of the dissident right, IMO.
In the reactionary Christian space you can find people like the Ogden UT crew (Brian Sauve, Eric Conn) that are closely associated with guys like Stephen Wolfe (Case for Christian Nationalism author, which Rusty Reno, whose magazine published Freya's piece, endorsed). Joel Webbon would be another example of this.
The Daily Wire is interesting because Shapiro is basically a normie Reaganite type with a bit more of an edge, as was Kirk. So I wouldn't say either of those guys are New Right in any real sense besides a kind of lazy analysis of personal brand. Their politics are basically normie Reaganism. Guys like Walsh and Knowles are much more adjacent to the New Right space.
Ehhhhh, I’ve heard of Andrew Tate & Nick Fuentes, but I don’t think the other people you mentioned are all that popular or famous
Almariu at least is a pretty equivalent figure in terms of reach and influence, but he hasn't popped in the mainstream quite as much. But if you look at the metrics we can find re: audience and reach, it's significant. Cornish-Dale is less so. The others are mostly known only in Christian circles.
The leftist narrative that tells women, "it's not you choosing to be conservative; it's the patriarchy working through you," is deeply disrespectful. It presumes that women are incapable of making decisions that affect their own lives, that they are mere stooges for somebody else's agenda.
It's 2026 for goodness sake. Can we stop acting like women are incapable of agency and free will? Maybe she just doesn't agree with you. Deal with it.
Indeed. It is so infantilizing to women.
Congratulations Freya on First Things and another very well-written essay. Living in New York City as I do, I'm all too familiar with the biased slop that New York magazine calls "editorial." Thank you for again taking up the cause of balance and reason.
The New York magazine article you're responding to sounds like just another tired exercise in what C.S. Lewis called "Bulverism": the refusal to consider someone's ideas on the merits, and simply assuming they are wrong and proceeding to psychoanalyze why they are wrong.
It's just bad-faith propaganda to keep up the morale of the kind of people who read (and write for) New York magazine.
I'd not heard the term Bulverism before, but I've certainly seen it in action.
Good think-piece. I think it's possible to have ethics which combine conservative social values with a sense of social justice.
Actually, come to think of it, that's probably Christianity I'm describing.
There is a meme/chart that I'm unfortunately unable to attach here, showing the Left vs Right "discourse dynamics," if you will. On the Left is uniformity. They agree on every major policy from open borders to big government policies to UBI. One harmonious blue (?) blob. Free speech need not exist because everybody says the same thing.
But on the Right? It's a veritable blizzard of colorful, competing online discourse, disagreement, and fratricidal X-bombs. Posts against leftism, posts leveraging leftism (woke-ish arguments, in fact), "conservative dads" duking it out with Frogs, libertarians quoting Austrians, you name it.
The Right, therefore, is where free speech is thriving. Thoughtful women, unsurprisingly, are drawn to conversation. Thoughtful women of "a conservative leaning," are very drawn to these right-side discussions, particularly when the leftism they may have been spoon-fed in college is clearly not making their lives nice. (An aside: Some of the fiercest, most brilliant critics of feminism's nonsense are women like Dr. Janice Fiamengo, Dr. Dani Sulikowski, and Dr. Hannah Spier. Check them out, either here or on podcasts.)
That cacophany on the Right is also open to critiques like the one you mention. So what? Join the party! The "women-were-tricked" argument is as condescending as the 20-year-old book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (sp?) It argued that Republicans were voting against their interests because they voted against government programs that would give them..money. Horrors! They voted for lower taxes instead - *like idiots who were tricked* - and now look where they are: Red states with smaller government programs. What deplorable idiots. Etc.
I look forward to reading "Girls." Congrats on your success. Keep it up!
It is interesting that the vast majority of liberals seem to not understand conservatives actually believe some of the time tested traditions of the past might be right. The cultural continuity and a harmonious community are important to them
The leftist narrative is “You’re free, you can do anything, be happy and anyone who says otherwise is an oppressor, we are all friends”.
The right is “Life is full of trade-offs, happiness is transient, you have duties & responsibilities whether you like it or not, put away childish things, you have enemies / evolution / competition whether you like it or not, look for contentment”.
One is all about feelings, the other is about reality because you’re an adult.
One is all about being a child, the other is about being a soldier / parent.
One leaves you & your society vulnerable, the other enables (but does not guarantee) survival.
One deals with Luciferian goods (the costs outweigh the benefits, but they ideologically ‘feel’ good) , one deals with objective good (charity starts at home i.e. we can’t feed everyone, but we can “afford” to help family).
Notice they are not opposites just fables like The Grasshopper & the Ant are not ‘right wing’ coded, they merely tech children to deal with uncomfortable truths & realities.
After 80 years of peace many have forgotten these lessons.
You are a very interesting person and I commend your openness to debate.. That said, when is new right actually new right and not the center from which the left wing has departed radically?
There is a problem in that,today one cannot even start to talk about social issues without having to reestabljsh truthful baselines that are continuously eroded.
It is no coincidence that Dr Cory Clark's survey finds a majority of women in Social Psychology self-declare that "its complicated " when asked if they would present findings which disagreed with their values. (Along with a significant proportion of their male colleagues).
This is a problem because this continuous filtering process informs what the public is told
So when you speak of women on the right, it is important to distinguish that from the women who stayed where they are when their feminist female friends turned hard left by this mostly untrue rhetoric.
When you cant have a conversation without disagreement on base reality, it is no wonder males and females are separating politically.
In a bayesian nutshell, if you saw something in a psychology Ted Talk, you would be more correct on average if you presumed it was BS.
That is a major reason why
[finishing the above comment]
That is a major reason why I mostly read ACTUAL psychology papers on gender and not the filtered commentariat.
I am very often confronted with the question: "How is this shoddy science different from lying to me.....!?"
Happy to provide (many) examples.
I mean, for many progressives, just having an opinion that a pre-born life should have some rights automatically makes you anti-woman. At the end of the day most of the hyperbole boils down to an inability with the left to be okay with people having differing opinions on abortion, even if they don’t just come out and say it. So the ones with the biggest target on those back are the women, because it destroys their confirmation bias
I read a hit piece on your book recently. It seemed suspiciously hard on it, almost as if the critic hadn’t really read your book. I wondered if the person writing it was in some way affiliated with some of the social media giants you bring attention to. It seemed oddly OTT.
the "left" believes the state is the highest form of morality, rationality and safety. The "right" believes nature must be honored. A female(or male), as an object, fights for and is ruled by the state. A woman(or man), as a living being, is at home in nature. As original people of Australia have said -- a woman is made by nature, a man is made by culture. State agents who cannot see beyond the state (liberals, communists, marxists, jews) want to make a place for women in the state. States will always be infinitely less than Nature.
I believe that many women (and men) are turned off by both the "Progressive Left" and parts of the "Right". Its quite obvious as to why some women left the Liberals in the last election. But what neither this article or the Adler-Bell piece considers, is that there are other factors including economics causing disillusionment. When the present administration was elected, there was a promised to lower prices and to start no new wars. Neither of these things have happened and many now feel let down and are going independent.
A lot of this frantic denial is both projection and deflection: it's rare to find someone who doesn't understand that MODERNITY ISN'T WORKING. You don't have to be alarmed by birthrates or an increasingly shallow and nihilistic culture or the rot of institutions. All you must do is ask yourself: is your life deeply meaningful? Are you stable and happy? Do you feel like a good person?
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-great-divergence
Modern progressives - if they're being honest - will have to answer 'no' to these questions. It's easy to criticize an older hierarchy, and pick apart the status quo. It's much harder to erect an IMPROVED substitute, and the Blob has failed. It has failed to give us a society with functional, natural communities, intact families, psychological stability, and meaning. It has failed to provide these things at a level that's probably 10x greater than any other similarly pathological civilization in human history. Don't even get me started on the margins: on schools filled with poor kids (where I teach Civics), and neighborhoods full of government dependents, and nursing homes full of imprisoned zombies.
If you think our society feels empty and meaningless when you sit at the center (working a symbolic capitalist job and living in a large or medium-sized city) you have NO IDEA how bad things are for the rest of us.
This is the system that people like this writer are implicitly defending.
Here's my essay (from a year or two ago) on the 'new right':
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-new-right
Thank you for this article Freya. Your words are making a difference, keep writing!
The arrogance is just... incredible. That's what I am most embarrassed of from when I was a Leftist for many years-- the arrogance, the hubris, the certainty that anyone who disagreed with me (with "us") was a brainwashed, two-dimensionally evil fool and a shit-kicker who was too dumb to understand how right I was. (I'm working now to reverse the damage I helped do to my country and civilization, but there is no shame in being wrong, or not knowing everything-- it's the arrogance, not only in worldview, but to also indoctrinate your audience into that arrogance, or to sell them emotionally and mentally-triggering self-validating slop that reinforces their own arrogance that is leading them to ruin... it's so gross.