How trad wives took over the internet — from 4chan to TikTok

Where did the "tradwife" trend come from — you know, aside from the 1950s — and why has it become increasingly popular online? Today, we’re talking about not just how men aren’t doing that well, but maybe women aren’t either. This question, of course, is because the (usually) alt-right tradwives supporters have a new girlboss, and it’s Erika Kirk. Journalist Liz Plank joins us to break down the resurgence of these regressive ideas about where women belong and how they should conduct themselves, the trend’s origins (again, aside from in the ‘50s), and why the #tradlife is appealing to people now. Our guest Liz Plank is a journalist, podcaster, and author. She hosts the Boy Problems podcast wherever your listen (or watch on YouTube), the Airplane Mode newsletter, and you can follow her work more broadly at https://www.elizabethplank.com/ or @feministabulous everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Ryan Broderick?

  In recent months, it seems that Erika Kirk has been everywhere but at home. Today, we are investigating how tradwives move from Nazi fantasies to a performance conservative women everywhere are doing.

• 0:43Ryan Broderick?

  Have you ever had the urge to drop out of society and work on a farm and then post clips of that to TikTok? Is that something you dream about?

• 0:51Speaker 02

  I dream about the farm part. I don't think I dream about the posting the farm because I feel like that would go against the farm part. The fun part of the farm part, which is, you know, being like completely disconnected from the world that we're in. And I think having to like performantively post would take the fun out of it.

• 1:27Ryan Broderick?

  Like all men with a beard, I have fantasized about going to the woods to eventually die alone there. And then the idea of having to-

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Is that the dream? Is that what men want?

• 1:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. All men want, if a man gets stressed enough, he'll just start fantasizing about dying anonymously in the woods somewhere. It's a thing.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Like a dog? Okay.

• 1:44Ryan Broderick?

  Like a dog. Like a dog or like an old cat. Yeah. Our audience was like, hey, women want this too. So at least in our listenership, they are- Oh, yeah. Apparently, our women listeners also want it.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Interesting. That's not a fantasy for me. I do have the farm fantasy, but it does- yeah, I'm too codependent. What's the satisfaction for men of dying alone instead of dying with someone like the couple in the Titanic, holding hands? Like, why is doing it alone better?

• 2:11Ryan Broderick?

  You know, I've never really like interrogated it. It's just a feeling. Like your comparison to an old dog or like a cat or something like I just, I'm drawn to the woods to disappear there. Like the guy from Into the Wild.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26Ryan Broderick?

  You know, that's, that's the dream.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:28Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, but, but as you said, the, the act of posting about it ruins the fantasy.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I guess it does.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  It does. And that is what we're going to be interrogating today. We're going to be interrogating the desire to drop out of society and then of course post nonstop about it. And we're going to try to figure out, is it connected to a large scale fascist takeover of America? This is what we're talking about today on Panic World. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is my trad wife, Grant Irving, uh, my lovely producer. And this is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And, uh, yeah, with disturbing frequency, regressive ideas about where women belong is becoming increasingly mainstream. And we're going to try to figure out where those ideas are coming from and how they took over the internet. And joining us today is the host of Boy Problems, Liz Plank. I've been a fan of yours for a very long time. Welcome to the show.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. I, the feeling is mutual.

• 3:19Ryan Broderick?

  Before we talk about women, and we're going to be talking about women a lot today, but like, do you think men are okay to like, like how, how would you compare? How would you compare like the genders right now?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Who's doing worse?

• 3:30Ryan Broderick?

  Who's doing worse? Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I, hmm, that's a good question. I do think men are, are faring worse, but I don't think that, I, I think that women are better at coping. I think women and men both are feeling like crap. I think women are better at coping with it. I think that, um, if any, we've learned anything from the Manosphere documentary. And sort of the last 10 years of, of, of the internet, it's that like, there's a, a lot of, of, of male suffering that, that can be monetized.

• 4:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Women tend to internalize pain and men tend to externalize it. And so, um, no, I think men are acting out more than, than women, but I think women are really sad too. You know, there, there, there's all this, uh, you know, talk about the loneliness crisis. I really, women are really lonely too. We're just not going out and like, shooting like, up like, massage parlors.

• 4:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right, no, yeah, I was gonna say the, the mass violence would be the difference.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yes, it's less visible. Like, a lot of things that women do, you know, a lot of it is invisible. The labor, the suffering.

• 4:34Ryan Broderick?

  The hidden, the hidden emotional labor of not killing everybody.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Not killing everybody. But I do, okay, I think about this, I've been thinking about this really a lot lately. I don't know when this episode is coming out, so you can cut it, but the, the whole Taylor, I can't, it's Taylor Frankie Paul. She has like, three first names.

• 4:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And I'm not familiar at all with, unfortunately, the, well, I've watched like, one episode of The Mormon Wives. They sound really fun and entertaining, but, you know, the, the whole thing about her throwing a chair at a guy, and I'm like, I feel like it's a miracle that, and not even a miracle, it's actually unsettling that we don't throw more, more chairs at men. Like, I think that's actually on us, you know, and, and requires some, some thinking, because I, I, I think that we're, we're not doing that enough. Like, it is weird. It is.

• 5:18Ryan Broderick?

  I, you know, barring, uh, anything we eventually learn about the Mormon Wife Lady, yes, I would agree with you, that women probably could throw chairs at men more often. And that's, that's what we're gonna be talking about today, which is sort of the, uh, the modern, uh, the modern evolution of this very lucrative subculture, particularly in the right wing, um, called trad wives. And I want to start by asking you, how would you define a trad wife? What comes to mind?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  I mean, what comes to mind is a very like, 1950s, um, you know, uh, sort of version of, of what being a, a woman is. It's a woman who is very domestic, who's very docile, who focuses on traditional, you know, roles, um, that, that we sort of should, you know, tend to assume, uh, or, or sort of tend to assign to women, which is taking care of the kids, taking care of the home, making a lot of muffins, and, uh, making a man, um, you know, feel like he's a man by, by having absolutely no, sort of like, emotions or, or thoughts that would challenge, um, his own view of, of being a man.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  I think actually trad wives are like, a lot about making, uh, men feel, feel, feel better.

• 6:33Ryan Broderick?

  You know, so our research actually backs it up and we're going to get to where the term comes from in just a second. But I wanted to start with this. Yeah, we were actually surprised. But let's start with this CNN segment about Erika Kirk, because I think that she's probably the most kind of visible of this group right now.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, she's in the home all the time.

• 6:54Ryan Broderick?

  She's always.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  We never see her.

• 6:56Ryan Broderick?

  She's at the family farm and we never hear about her. She's always barefoot in the kitchen.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:01Ryan Broderick?

  She's not in some sort of WWE Thunderdome, shooting Charlie's casket into space or some shit. No. So, okay, so she says to CNN, I love submitting to Charlie because he's a phenomenal leader. I mean, clearly, he had the larger forehead of the family. So you sort of, you know, you follow him. He's got a big head. And so she says, as a woman, you are meant to be the guardian of your home, to be the helpmate of your husband, be that biblical wife you are supposed to be for him, and honor the order that God had created marriage to be in. When I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about the career. Well, he's gone now and she really cares about the career. So that does seem to back that up. But that's like the last Pokemon evolution

• 7:45Ryan Broderick?

  of this movement. Erika Kirk is performing a girl boss trad wife. But let's talk about how we got here before we unpack how confusing that is.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's fascinating.

• 7:54Ryan Broderick?

  If I had to ask you, like, when the concept of a trad wife started, like, in the modern context, how old do you think this idea is? Because this surprises us a lot. Like, how far back do you think this stuff goes?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  I learned this recently on Amanda Montell. She came on my podcast, sort of surprised me in the way that she explained where the term originated, which is like 4chan. It is basically like the manosphere before we sort of had a term for it, that came up with that term as a way to sort of mock women and degrade them. And then it was, like, turned into a positive, I guess. That's sort of the origin story is, I understand it, but maybe you have a different.

• 8:36Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, searching on X these days is kinda tough, but our researcher Adam went pretty deep, and he thinks he found the first use of the word tradwife on Twitter. It was, uh, May 2016. Oh. And it was a, uh, an account named Paraxial underscore logic, who was writing a Mother's Day post, uh, to his, uh, wife, I guess, um, whose name is A Purposeful Wife. And, uh, this guy writes, "Happy Mother's Day to Alia, our dear lady. Best to you and your family." So maybe it's not his wife. I actually have no idea what this means, but anyways. He then uses the hashtags, hashtag tradwife, hashtag tradlife, hashtag white girls are magic. Wow.

• 9:21Ryan Broderick?

  Which would have been a response to the black girls are magic. That last one. Yeah, so this was from the jump associated with white supremacy. Alright. Um, so this is what this, uh, account looks like. It's, uh, it's private now, but these are older posts. And it was, it was very active mid 2010s. They identified as a Church of Latter Day Saints, a tradwife. They, uh, identified as alt-right. They are also posting like a bunch of like Nordic, uh, like traditional, you know, clothing and stuff. And yeah, it was, it was, I'm not even totally clear this is a real person, you know? Like, this was back in those days where you're just making up kind of like white women to

• 10:03Ryan Broderick?

  say racist shit before you could just find white women to say white racist shit. Uh, the 4chan guys used to have to make them. So it, uh, isn't very common still in 2016, but then in 2017, uh, there is something called the White Baby Challenge. Oh, yeah, yeah. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. Well, I remember reading about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, a, a wife with a purpose, uh, basically starts the White Baby Challenge, where like you're gonna have white children. And, uh, it was this weird kind of mix of far-right Nordic fetishism and Mormonism and a like- Clearly going against like whatever was happening on black Twitter at the time.

• 10:42Ryan Broderick?

  And then in August 2017, this woman is invited to speak at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. And allegedly declines, writing, certainly a women's perspective is important. And I plan to speak on the importance of families, but this event was quickly becoming something more, something bigger, something for the leaders of the movement, not for a mom of six children. Which definitely, you know, sounds like this is a real person. This is all real.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Or they killed a white woman at that rally.

• 11:09Ryan Broderick?

  They did.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  So she, she had a good, maybe she, yeah, she had a good premonition.

• 11:15Ryan Broderick?

  Maybe, but yeah, it's really heating up in 2017. Reporter Will Somer writes at the time, so basically far right guys are obsessed with telling the women on the scene to get married and have kids. Everybody's hunting for a hashtag tradwife. And this is the beginning. And what's really fascinating, this is a bit of data science here. In 2014, the number one search term on Pornhub was lesbian. In 2015, as tradwife started to enter the consciousness, stepmom became number one. Really fascinating psychosexual kind of peer into the world.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Wasn't there also, and forgive me, I don't remember the term, but there's a term for a certain kind of porn that was also sort of trending. But this was more around 2020, so maybe it was after that stepmom moment, where it was a kind of porn that is, that like happens within the home where like a woman is literally in the middle of a domestic chore. And the man starts having sex with her while she's doing the chore.

• 12:15Ryan Broderick?

  Free use?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  What's that called?

• 12:17Ryan Broderick?

  Free, I think it's called free use.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Free use.

• 12:19Ryan Broderick?

  Is what you're describing?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Didn't that also then become really popular? And then some people say that it was like an extension of tradwife, but also an expression of the pandemic and the fact that like we were all sort of indoors. I mean, many of us were indoors.

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  So you've stepped into a digression that I have a lot of thoughts on because I have seen this as well. I've seen this, this argument as well. I've had a theory for many years though, that the incest stuff, the free use stuff, the MILF stuff is all. Actually, an expression of a very, very like, uh, limited housing market.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:55Ryan Broderick?

  And, and so like, people like can't own their own homes anymore. So even our sexual fantasies reflect back that you still live at home.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So there was a New York Times piece that came out, I think a few days ago, and they, you know, published it on, or, you know, did a carousel on Instagram. And it was like millennials, you know, love living with roommates and, you know, this resurgence of like, and wasn't it, it wasn't even just roommates. It was like, people are living with couple, like couples are living with a third.

• 13:23Ryan Broderick?

  Couples are getting a roommate. That's right. Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Everyone in the comments was like, um, it's called a housing crisis. Like, like, like, are you fucking joking me? So yeah, that's super interesting that then it would affect, I mean, it's affecting us in so many different ways. And, and yeah, it's really funny to see them or see all the theories, except the one that's very obvious, which is like, we're in a fucking housing crisis and.

• 13:43Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Yeah. People aren't gooning to free use.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:46Ryan Broderick?

  Porn because, uh, they're fascist. They're doing it because they can't afford, although maybe the housing market is exacerbating the rise of fascism.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think that's possible. But, but isn't it also that like, we no longer have, we no longer go to work. There's no places to go. There's like, people don't, like you, there's no like, there's like barista porn. Right. You don't order a plumber to come over. Yeah. Like, that's it. Exactly. It's like, it's like, it has to suddenly be your stepmom who's really hot. Like, it's like women. Cause you have no larger network of social stuff. Yeah. So in the late 2010s, the back half of the decade, the term trad wife is, is kind of bouncing around the internet. It doesn't get true mainstream attention until the New York Times covers it. And they open with this anecdote about a woman who is much happier being a stay at home mom.

• 14:36Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and it reads, "I always wanted children that looked like me, blonde hair, blue eyed babies, but I kind of had to say it under my breath. The digital far right, frequently called the alt-right, is largely regarded as a men only space. The movement shares DNA with so-called incels, and it is defined in part by its misogyny and anti-feminist, anti-woman language. But some members of the alt-right have been weighing whether the absence of women from their movement is a problem. Nationalist Marcus Follin says, "You might not like that women have the right to vote. You might not like that anyone has the right to vote, Mr. Follin conceded, but it's about winning a long-term political victory." And that's, I think, the real kind of breakthrough is that like when the whole alt-right

• 15:20Ryan Broderick?

  thing fizzles around 2018, the larger far-right ecosystem is like, we need a way to bring women in. And what's fascinating is like, it starts to look exactly like the way ISIS treated women. A friend of mine for years was covering like, the Tumblr blogs of ISIS brides that were virtually identical.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  ISIS or ISIS? Okay, I thought ISIS. Okay, got it.

• 15:42Ryan Broderick?

  So like, in the early 2010s, all these women were flying, and young girls were flying from Europe, and they would go to Syria, and they'd join ISIS, and they'd marry ISIS members. And then they would start blogging on Tumblr, and there's like, these incredible photo shops of like, Disney princesses wearing hijabs, and like, like, "Life in the Day of an ISIS Bride" posts with hashtags.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  What?

• 16:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's, it's, it was virtually identical to like, what the trad wives started to do in the later part of the first Trump administration.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  So we took it from the ISIS, which totally makes sense. It's a circle.

• 16:14Ryan Broderick?

  Or just like, yeah, I mean, all these, all these movements treat women the same way, which is like, you're the propagandist, you know, you've got to bring other women in. And so then, author Annie Kelly, who's great, anyone listening, definitely check out her stuff, makes the argument about like, why the trad wife stuff would be so appealing to women. And Kelly writes, "Female fears of objectification and sexual violence remain as potent as ever. The trad wife subculture exploits them by blaming modernity for such phenomena, and then offers chastity, marriage, and motherhood as an escape. One such YouTube commentator, a teenager, told her audience, 'Traditionalism does what feminism is supposed to do in preventing women from being made into sexual objects and treated like a whore. Trad wives may seem like a lunatic fringe at the present, but they may not stay one

• 16:59Ryan Broderick?

  for long.'" And this was like, eh, very right. Very, very, very right.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  But also, I'm hung up on the term teenager. So, because this kind of, it's a teenage blogger. Did I understand that correctly? Who said that? She's like-

• 17:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a teenage YouTuber, basically.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is, which is part of this other theory on the internet right now, which is like, everyone's 12. Have you heard that theory?

• 17:23Ryan Broderick?

  I have, yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  It's just like, you look at the Manosphere doc, it is, or who's that guy who interviews all of them, who's South Asian, I think he's South Asian, he's in a studio with a, one of those race cars in the back, that's definitely like, a green screen. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Okay, you have no idea.

• 17:42Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know your time.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  He interviews a lot of these, these manosphere guys. He interviewed the guy from the manosphere, Doc, who's like, you know, says that women have never invented anything, like that guy. And the set of the interview is like what a 12 year old boy's version of being a man looks like. And a lot of people have been using the Simpsons meme of Net, I think it's Ned Flanders with his little like race car bed. Not Ned Flanders, um, oh my God, Bart's friend's dad.

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Millhouse's dad.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Millhouse's dad has a race car bed. I think he gets a divorce and maybe gets a race car bed. I don't know what, I don't remember. And so people are like, this is the energy that it's giving. Like, like a 12 year old boy wants a race car bed. And these men are sort of using literally like that level of intellect in order to sort of like, yeah, conjure this ideal of masculinity that like, that like, boys would want. And, and I think that on both sides, that's what's happening. You know, like when I was, yeah, 12 years old or maybe a little bit younger. I, yeah, I played with my Easy Bake Oven. That's the only thing I fucking cared about. Like, my parents were like, you need to get a fucking life. I was like, that's all I could talk about. And I wanted babies to like, you know, dolls to play with.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Like, that's what, you know, yeah, an eight year old girl's version of being a woman is. And, and then what we're seeing on the manosphere is like, is like the same. It's like a mirror of that, right?

• 19:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Just like on the side of the manosphere, the people who are at the helm of these like movements, who are monetizing them are not even living the life that they are claiming is this ideal, right? And, and it's the same thing with women. I mean, you brought up Erika Kirk, who's like, okay, so she's like the trad wife we're supposed to, you know, look up to. Candace Owens, who has like, you know, like.

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  I think Candace Owens is a true trad wife, though. She's real ride or die for Charlie Kirk. Like, I love their love.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  You do. Yeah, yeah, it's inspiring. It's for sure. I, yeah, I want to, I want to be just like her.

• 19:44Ryan Broderick?

  Most people will go their whole lives looking for a love like Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk's. You know, that, that, that, yeah. She's still talking to him in the astral plane right now. But we're going to talk about after the break, how trad wives go from this like fringe Nazi, like kind of troll to a full on cultural movement. Of course, thanks to. TikTok and also surprisingly Tumblr. And we're going to do that right after we're from our sponsors. Turning Point USA. They want to talk to you or kids about stuff. Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 03

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• 20:51Ryan Broderick?

  Let's look at this tweet from 2018 here. I got it right here and I would love for you to read it. Let me pull it up.

• 21:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so this is, this was an early kind of trad wife tweet from deplorable wife on Twitter.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 21:07Ryan Broderick?

  Was the name.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're asking me to read it?

• 21:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  You know, you've sent the message to your family that you want to be a trad wife when your birthday gifts consist of kitchen supplies, cleaning supplies, home decor and dresses. Cry laugh emoji.

• 21:23Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I can't speak for the dresses part, but this to me feels like you're gross and your family's trying to tell you.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like getting gum. You know, when someone keeps offering you gum all the time, you're like, am I, do I have bad breath?

• 21:36Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly right.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I don't know anyone who's happy about getting cleaning supplies. I mean, except like Monica from Friends, like, like, like I just, it is an immediate insult. And also like boring, like, why would I, can you just buy Windex?

• 21:51Ryan Broderick?

  Very boring. This person describes himself in their Twitter bio as proud to be a white, American Christian, hashtag trad life, hashtag feminism is cancer, hashtag MAGA. And then we have this person who is another trad wife posting around the same time. So this is 2018 in our story, just to orient our listeners. And this is Midwest Trad Wife or Samantha, who writes, first time making banana bread. It looks like. Kind of boring banana bread. Uh, then they write, I'm pretty excited. Then hashtag trad life, hashtag trad wife, hashtag Sunday fun day. Of course, the bio also says pro medical freedom, informed choice, breastfeeding advocate, homeschool, stay at home wife.

• 22:32Ryan Broderick?

  Just to sort of summarize, like the alt-right appears after Trump becomes president. They're all weird men. They're trying to figure out ways to get women interested in their movement. They start like creating kind of like aspirational content for women. I think oftentimes using bots, making it explicitly racist. Then they actually seem to get some women on board. And then through there, you start to get like the new agey home, like the, um, what is it? School choice movement. You get anti-vax stuff down the line. You get homeschool. You get all of that. That's all starting because like they've basically like connected themselves over into Instagram. That that's how I sort of see it. And you, and that's when you start

• 23:13Ryan Broderick?

  to see like a lot more of these like hashtags spinning around. And what's really interesting is I had sort of assumed that the cottage core stuff was before all of this and it was not. Um, yeah. Uh, our managing editor, Kate's Holderness, who used to work at Tumblr, did some digging, uh, around Tumblr, not using any sort of proprietary information, just to say she just knows the website really well. And she discovered that the first cottage core post on, was on Tumblr in 2018, which would have been right around the same time all this is happening. And it's from a username honey goblin who writes cottage core is jam,

• 23:53Ryan Broderick?

  honey, insects, fruit, wooden spoons, milkmaids, stone and wood, ceramics, moss and mud, goats and lambs, picnic baskets and bread, and then a bunch of hashtags. And then the first comment. I, I got it. You have it? Human be like, I must create something or I will kill myself. Cool, cool. Um, and then it gets kind of recognized as an official aesthetic. There's an aesthetics wiki, um, around in June of 2018. And then in August of 2018, you get the cottage core subreddit. And so- What's, to be clear, like, this is not at the current point in our story connected to all this stuff. But it is fascinating that it's happening around the same time.

• 24:38Ryan Broderick?

  Like, it's, it's, it's strange to me that you have one part of the internet going like, we all want to be barefoot and pregnant trad wives. And then you have this other part of the internet saying, we all want to go like, eat moss out in the woods or whatever.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:51Ryan Broderick?

  Do witchy stuff. And then they collide, basically, um, in 2020 during the pandemic.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Right around that time is when the internet got really shitty, right? Like, I think there's this whole, you know, sort of trending conversation that's been going on for maybe like a couple of months, about 2016, you know, 2016 being like the last good year. And this sort of idea that it was like the golden age and, you know, and, and yeah, infinite scrolling. People don't remember, I mean, that's how, I don't know how old you guys are, but like, there were, infinite scrolling is a new, pretty new, modern in, invention. Like, I remember a social media, um, that, that didn't, like, you, where you were on it and then you were done. Right? And so then you could move on. You'd be like, oh, I've seen everything. Bye, I'm gonna go outside now. And so I also, you know, weirdly enough, it's almost like,

• 25:41Speaker 02

  that part of the internet that you're describing, you know, trad alt-right, I mean, it's pretty negative, right? Like, even if it's, it, it, even if it's, I don't know, helpful, quote unquote, to some of these men that were lost or lonely, it still was like solving their problems in a really sort of like, it was not like helping them be better people or like feel better about their lives. Then, then that cottage core thing almost feels like a response, you know, to like wanting to go offline and sort of, I mean, it's off the grid. All of it feels like a big coping mechanism for the world getting like really weird. And the internet being, you know, a place that sort of, you know, in a way,

• 26:22Speaker 02

  was, was a way to escape, you know, in the way that yeah, TV and movies are a way to escape your life or even reading. Like, now the internet is, is, is where, yeah, where, when you go, like, you feel worse.

• 26:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and I, I think it also speaks to the insidiousness of a lot of this stuff where it does become very hard to separate. And that, that gets, and it's gotten harder over time, you know? In, in 2020, we found an article from a trad wife written in this publication, EVY, which I have never heard of.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  What's the big trad wife magazine?

• 26:51Ryan Broderick?

  Is it, is it the big trad wife magazine?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  It is. I've, I've interviewed the founder. Um, I was, I was at a panel like a couple of months ago in LA and they, they plumbed me right between, um, yeah, the founder of a trad wife magazine and then like an academic lesbian feminist. Like, it was just like, go. I felt like Andy, um, Cohen at like a, like a, like a housewives reunion. I was like, oh my.

• 27:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  But, but so, yeah, she, the EV is like, yeah, a very, very big public, uh, trad wife, public. I don't even think they would identify that way, but yeah.

• 27:23Ryan Broderick?

  They see the opportunity that COVID has provided. In April 2020, they published a story titled, here's why I decided to become a hashtag trad wife. This is an expert, uh, this is an excerpt I'd like to read to you and sort of get your thoughts on. So it reads, truth is, many people are tired of the constant pressure to feel fulfilled by having it all. While the career model works for most in this day and age, many don't want to run on the career treadmill and would rather be a housewife and mother, but these women are told that this isn't enough to want in life and are looked down upon by the mainstream culture and media. For example, an Australian mother posted on Facebook about how she felt proud of doing housework and preparing breakfast for her husband and children, only to be slammed by journalists on national TV.

• 28:06Ryan Broderick?

  Why do feminists or the mainstream media depreciate housewives as being extremists or lazy or aggressive? If feminists truly cared about all women's rights and empowerment, shouldn't they also be cheering on women who choose a life outside the boardroom?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's like a classic straw, like, you know, like, why do feminists hate, you know, stay at home wives? And you're like, show me a Jessica Valenti post about how, you know, it's wrong to make banana bread. Like I, many of these quote unquote feminists are, are, yeah, mothers themselves. And yeah, maybe if this was like, I don't know, the 1970s and like, I don't know what Andrew Dorking would have said about trad wives, but maybe she was critical of motherhood. Like, it's just not a take. It's not a modern take that you'll hear, you know, any kind of mainstream feminist have. I mean, women on the right are told a lot of stuff. Um, and what I've found when you start having conversations with them is like, or even with Brittany, like, we're friends. Like, once we started

• 29:01Speaker 02

  talking, realized, oh, we have all these things in common and I don't look down on you for being proud to be a mother. Like, I want to be a mother. There, there's money to be made by. Making people angry and particularly, I guess, making women angry.

• 29:14Ryan Broderick?

  What has become very apparent to me now, because I'm watching, I'm watching a lot of people. We're recording this in the midst of, gosh, I think this is probably day seven or eight of our national discourse about Lindy West's throuple.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 29:27Ryan Broderick?

  And I'm watching a lot of people talk about mid 2000s and 2010s blogging culture, talking a lot about Jezebel. And like, you know, I had, I had an RSS reader up and running with my favorite blogs in it since I was like a freshman in college. I was reading all of those sites as they became bigger and bigger. And it's fascinating to watch young people, but also just like non-media people, I suppose, misremember that era so explicitly. And I have to imagine that it's like not totally their fault in a way, like because of the way everything moved online and conversation moved onto the internet in the 2010s and not everyone moved with it immediately.

• 30:11Ryan Broderick?

  I'm just realizing that there are massive gaps in American culture that like a large chunk of people don't totally understand because it was happening on Twitter and no one was on Twitter in 2015.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, how do you think it is misremembered?

• 30:26Ryan Broderick?

  I saw this one take that like Lindy West and all the Jezebel writers are the reason why Roe v. Wade was repealed in 2022 and they were spending all their time doing dumb shit and being frivolous. And I'm like, they were like one of the most aggressive newsrooms in the country in like the 2010s. And, and I have to imagine that like it's like a purple monkey dishwasher thing. Cause I even like clicked on some of these accounts being like, okay, are you just like a right winger? That's like being up to some purpose and like, no, these were like chapel roan stands being like, oh, millennial feminists like threw us all under the bus. And it's like, yeah, because you were like 12 and you didn't understand what was going on. And I think like a large chunk of the population probably saw

• 31:11Ryan Broderick?

  social progress happening in visible ways and not really understanding why, like what conversations led to that.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 31:19Ryan Broderick?

  Who was involved. Yeah, I have to imagine that's the case and. All of this gets like, supercharged after the pandemic because now, now a huge chunk of the country is on the internet. And that's when these platforms start to like, really latch on to the trad wife thing. And The Cut interviewed reporter Max Reed about like, the trad wife trend in 2003. And he had kind of an interesting take on it, which was, Reed said, it's neither bait nor authentic. It's just audience strategy. Social networks are specifically designed to engage people in exactly this way, through the performance of political and social identity. Putting that together as a lifestyle that you show over the course of multiple videos, it's perfect.

• 32:01Ryan Broderick?

  Which I think is largely true, like, it's performative, you know? It becomes far more performative after COVID.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yes. Social media, look, it was always performa- like, it was performative, right? Like, we, we, we posted good brunch pics. Like, if you made a shitty, you know, or if you tried to do a Pinterest recipe and it came out looking fucking bad, like, you didn't post it. But, but now, we're kind of, like, all avatars of ourselves. And in a way that back then, your real life was more important than your digital life. Your digital life was, was, I mean, in my case, and it seems like yours, like, full and, and interesting, but it, it didn't, it, it was still separate. And, and now I truly do think that who you are online is, is more important than who you are in, in, in real life.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, we're, I'm not surprised to see, yeah, these, I mean, what you're describing is like, like caricatures. I mean, I, I saw Andrew Tate talk yesterday. He's like, sitting alone in some fucking boat and, what did he, yeah, he was like, "Men who have wives are gay." He was like, "If you don't have multiple baby mamas, you're gay." Like, like, like you, like, any guy who posts about his wife on social media is gay. And the proof is, think about guys in elementary school, again, who is he talking to? The guys who had friends that were girls were all gay. Like, like, the logic, you know, it's, it's just, it's, it's a parody.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  And, and we're all a little bit parodies. I mean, even if you look at the, the real faces of celebrities now. They they they're like, they look like avatars of themselves.

• 33:48Ryan Broderick?

  They look crazy, yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  They, everyone, you know, anyway, it's just reached a fever pitch.

• 33:53Ryan Broderick?

  And it and it has, and it's it's largely thanks to this this TikTok effect that we see, you know, in the in around 2023. And that's when we started to get accounts like Este Williams. Are you familiar with her? Or?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  The name is familiar.

• 34:07Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sure you've probably heard of Ballerina Farm.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:10Ryan Broderick?

  And then we also get Hannah Neillman, who is a Mormon woman who married the son of the founder of JetBlue, and which I think is very important to point out here that like, this is something that rich women are telling poor women to do.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:27Ryan Broderick?

  Like, everything on the right, this is a concerted effort from the rich and powerful to convince poor people to do something that they want them to do.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 34:38Ryan Broderick?

  And there is nothing probably better for their overall political strategy than telling poor women to drop out of the workforce and rely on a man.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:49Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, and and drop out of school. It it seems to have not really worked out for these women. Williams had a baby born with a birth defect, and after that, did a big pivot away from trad content. Hannah Neillman of Ballerina Farms was profiled in 2024, and the dynamic between her and her husband honestly seemed scary. And in 2025, Gwen, the milkmaid, deleted all her milkmaid content and went back to Gwen Guiz, i.e. making ASMR videos in lingerie, which is fine. That's, yeah, okay.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:21Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's Magdalene Taylor, former guest of Panic World, who, excellent sex and culture writer, who just was like, this is all, like, this is all porn.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:31Ryan Broderick?

  Her take is like, trad wife content is all porn to some degree.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:36Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that that's right.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Wow. Do guys like that?

• 35:40Ryan Broderick?

  Like? I don't.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  But when when you're like, is it again, like, we're all 12, like, 12, like, is it the idea that a 12-year-old boy would be like, be like, yeah?

• 35:51Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I there's some data to back that up, too. In 2024, trad wife searches were up 72% on Pornhub.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Well.

• 35:59Ryan Broderick?

  I think there's a couple dimensions to this. Like, I think. I think it's particularly easy for like Zoom school Gen Z kids to fantasize about a life that they do not live because they don't really live one. TikTok is a portal to like different kinds of identities and lifestyles that they can try on and like very early on in sort of the Gen Z story, there was a lot of like identity play and aesthetic play and sort of like understanding the world through what they're seeing online. I think trad wives fit in perfectly there because you can just sort of imagine this thing that is not real.

• 36:34Ryan Broderick?

  I think that there is a lot of millennial trad wives that are doing it to make money or because they have like hardcore, right wing political beliefs. Not to excuse the Gen Z kids, but I think it's a lot more sort of cynical at that age, our age. And I also just think that I don't see this as, I think it's twofold, like, yes, it is something that is being performed for a male audience to a degree. I think that's newer. I think, I think it originally started as a way for women to recruit women and it has, it has now kind of pivoted. And in fact, we had, we did an episode about the manosphere with Siri Doll a couple of weeks ago, and she had this great take where it's like, the manosphere used to be something

• 37:17Ryan Broderick?

  that was totally like focused on helping men meet women.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, pick up.

• 37:22Ryan Broderick?

  And now it is totally focused on helping men perform for other men.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:27Ryan Broderick?

  So it's like, both of these kind of sides of the coin have devolved over time into being just like some combination of porn and wrestling and QVC.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And I will add, I think for millennial women who have fallen into this, who have fallen in, into this rabbit hole, we also have to remember, although the 2010s were wonderful, you know, that's also when the girl boss movement sort of, you know, that was, that was our trad wife.

• 37:56Ryan Broderick?

  Hold that thought, hold that thought right there.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  We're gonna talk about it.

• 37:59Ryan Broderick?

  Because, because that's coming up next, but we're gonna first go to a word from our sponsors, Prager University. Accurate historical information about women's rights from Prager University.

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• 38:43Ryan Broderick?

  All right. We are back now, and I want to show you a video. In my opinion, this video basically caused the global recession we're all living in.

• 38:54Ryan Broderick?

  It is titled...

• 38:54Speaker 02

  This is Charles Amber's TED Talk.

• 38:56Ryan Broderick?

  Gen Z and a mini?

• 38:58Speaker 02

  No. I can't hear what they're saying, but I know this...

• 39:02Ryan Broderick?

  You don't have to.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Like, Gen Z, I know the trend.

• 39:05Ryan Broderick?

  Gen Z boss in a miniskirt. Do the whole thing, Ryan.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Gen Z boss in a mini! Gen Z boss in a mini! Itty-bitty titties in a bob! Itty-bitty titties in a bob! New friend, great and spiky, link.

• 39:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So if you have never seen this video, this video is probably without question the most viral video of Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter, of X. It is the most hated piece of content of the 2020s, and when Donald Trump announced the tariffs, like, thousands of Trump supporters were like, "We did it to specifically hurt these women because we hate them so much." These women are not American. They run an Australian skincare brand called TBH.

• 39:50Ryan Broderick?

  They seemingly have no idea that they have become the symbol of everything wrong with feminism and women and life. And, like, there are, like, multiple thousand, 10,000-word screeds out there of men being like, "I want to crash the global economy to make sure that these women can never be in an office again because they were so mad about this video."

• 40:12Speaker 02

  What I'm I did I missed this whole thing. So these women are making a funny because I know the trend of like, like, you know, high pony and hoop earrings. So they just happen to make a version of it. And and why did why were men so so mad about it? Because they're happy?

• 40:31Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, trying to follow, sort of, yes, but trying to follow the thought process in these spaces like takes a lot of time and energy. Like, it's really stupid every time. But so basically, during the pandemic, a bunch of men working in like, engineering and coding and sort of STEM jobs, started complaining that like, they had to work while their bosses who were women, or what they call laptop mommies or product mommies, got to like, sit in pools all day and answer Slack messages. Oh, yeah. And so there's this, yeah, there was this massive wave of resentment, largely started by one previous video of two young women basically work on their laptops out of out of a pool. And that sort of created this idea that like,

• 41:15Ryan Broderick?

  in the 2010s, progressivism installed a bunch of young women in managerial positions to manage a bunch of men. Wow. And then when this video dropped, they saw it as proof that like, women don't do anything but do TikTok dances all day in the office. And so we should smash the global economy so that women have to marry men to survive the global depression.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Got it. And what makes men escape this global depression that they've caused? Or is it like a murder-suicide situation?

• 41:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, well, like, men love hurting each other. Yeah, that's just a good thing that they do. And like, they just sort of believe that, like, what's the term they use? Like, a high interest rate phenomenon, or whatever it's called. We're like, they believe that, like, women having jobs is like, a totally caused by like, just having interest rates that were too low, or whatever.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Is this a real this is a real thing?

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes. I've, yeah, it's, this video like, comes around on like, the, so I have like, a watch list of like, the worst guys. And like, they're sharing this video like, once a month, probably, still, being like, they're like, when, when. There'll be like the, it's okay that like we're having an energy crisis because of the war in Iran. Because it means like these women won't have jobs soon. That's like the thing.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Wow, fascinating.

• 42:35Ryan Broderick?

  It links to your point about girl bosses, where it's like, we have to punish the girl boss.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and by the way, oh my God, I mean, we could do a full hour on the girl boss. That defined the 2010s, it really did, right? So, so, you know, basically 20, before 2013, women were in the office, but like a real like minor, like treated like a, like a true minority. And not that they're not anymore. But when I started writing, I moved to New York in 2013. That was like my first year of like working as a journalist. I remember seeing a New York Times Room for Debate. Remember, remember that? I don't, they still have it. They'll have people like debate a topic. And the headline, I need, I need to get this right. Oh yeah, the headline was, Can Women Lead?

• 43:25Ryan Broderick?

  Didn't they just do that story again like a month ago? Like, like, yeah, yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just, and then they had four people debate that idea. And, and, you know, have like one normal person be like, yeah, I think women can be bosses. Um, I think that's, that's possible. And then like three other people be like, evolutionarily, um, women are supposed to just be fucked. You know, like it just, it was ridiculous. And, and, and it was printed and I, so my first article I wrote and I was like, the fucking New York Times. And then Margaret Sullivan, who was the public editor at the New York Times at the time, wrote, like I was writing for a blog called Mike.com at the time called Policy Mike that no one knew about. And she responded to my article and then they ended up taking it down and having sort of a,

• 44:14Speaker 02

  and, and this was, so there was a moment of reckoning, obviously beyond the scope of this one article that the New York Times did, where there started to be a Huffington Post women's section. And, you know, people started being like, maybe we should hire women in newsrooms. And like, maybe we should have a, a manager, like a managing editor who's a woman at one of these newspapers. So, so this was. A really exciting time for women.

• 44:37Ryan Broderick?

  Long, long live the hairpin and the toast.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:41Ryan Broderick?

  Remember that.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  R I P, R I P, and R I P Jezebel. I mean, I can't.

• 44:46Ryan Broderick?

  R I P Jezebel.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  I can't even believe that's a sentence, but, but so it was a very exciting time. Women were starting to be respected and, and have sort of, you know, this sort of equal place. And or at least there was this belief that was sort of, um, like you weren't supposed to say women are inferior. At least like you were supposed to at least publicly say like, yeah, women are equal to men. And I do think that we took it a little far, you know, like I do think that then it just became this like capitalist definition of, of, of mask, of, of feminism, this very like white feminist, you know, definition of like, you can have kids and be the boss and sleep four hours a day because you'll be fine. You have a brown or black nanny to, you know, it was very, it was not realistic as an ideal.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  And it was very elite and very white. And I do think a lot of women burnt out from it. I myself did. I mean, um, Samira Lukopaidai, who was one of the founders of Feministing, another amazing blog from the 2010s. I mean, she wrote an entire book about it. She was the, you know, she made it. She was the executive editor at Teen Vogue and had been, you know, at the helm of all of these different media companies. And yeah, we all burnt out. And, and so in a way, this is my admission in a moment of vulnerability. I will be honest, like.

• 46:03Ryan Broderick?

  Are you a trad wife? Is that what?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  I'm not a trad wife. I, I'm not. I would need like a husband and like many other, you know, I would need like to own my home and like have a bunch of cows.

• 46:13Ryan Broderick?

  A trad, a trad rental.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  I'm a trad, yeah, I'm not even a trad girlfriend, but like I, because part of the trad wife movement has been sort of tangential in any kind of extreme, you know, sort of movement. There's also like smaller, more like, I don't even know how to, how to describe it, but like, like less, I guess, radical portions of it. And one of them is the stay at home girlfriend.

• 46:36Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I was about to say, my dream is to be a stay at home girlfriend.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Well, same, right? When I see those across my feed, I'd be like, this fucking girl. And then I look at her day and I'm like, I, I kind of wish that could be my life, you know? Part of it is that we're all trying to escape the fucking hellscape of living, especially in the United States, you know, in a country where you have to work just to afford to be alive, maybe, you know? Or if you're James Van Der Beek and you, you're literally living the American dream, you still need to create a GoFundMe after you've already died to pay for your expenses, right?

• 47:11Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, but wasn't that because his wife was a trad wife who's like doing right wing shit on Instagram and like, and like, didn't he die because she's anti vax and stuff? Yeah, I'm pretty sure like, all of that, yeah, because like, she's like a woo woo, I'm pretty sure she was like a woo woo trad wife who made them move to the farm. They were like still renting or something and like, we can cut this, but I'm, I'm almost positive, like she is, like he died kind of because she's a trad wife.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  She killed him, okay.

• 47:41Ryan Broderick?

  Or she like wouldn't let him take like real medicine or something.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Okay, I did not see that portion of the discourse.

• 47:48Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah. James Van Der Beek's wife is anti-science and was against him doing chemotherapy in favor of holistic stuff. His colon cancer was specifically very survivable. And like their whole move to the farm was sort of to support her like woo woo bullshit. It's a Steve Jobs.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  It's just.

• 48:10Ryan Broderick?

  It was totally treatable, but he needed to eat like only orange food.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  That's really sad.

• 48:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the whole thing about like them not having money or whatever is like real weird.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Okay, I just.

• 48:22Ryan Broderick?

  There's no evidence he was right wing, apparently.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Okay, but there's no evidence he wasn't.

• 48:26Ryan Broderick?

  I think it has become increasingly difficult to understand like who is doing this stuff for what reason? And I think RFK, you know, as the installation of, you know, whatever his stupid fucking title is, the Department of Health, Secretary of Health, yeah, has like made it even more confusing because like we've done research into. Is sort of how Maha or Make America Healthy Again works as a network. And you have a lot of people who know that it's explicitly right wing. And then you have a bunch of like crusty yoga moms who don't know that they are repeating right wing talking points. And that's on purpose. Like this stuff has become so insidious. The, the right wing fixation on Sydney Sweeney and whether or not she's conservative or not.

• 49:09Ryan Broderick?

  They don't, they're not really waiting around to recruit people anymore. What they're doing is like casting the widest net possible and then making you be right wing by association. It's all about like false consensus building, I think.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, I went to a Turning Point conference a few months before Charlie Kirk was killed.

• 49:32Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, wait. Did you go to the one where Dana Loesch spoke to like all the women? Cause that's literally next to our, our outline here. Did you?

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I, they kicked me out. So I wasn't allowed to.

• 49:43Ryan Broderick?

  Why did they kick you out?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Well, I mean.

• 49:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Why'd they kick you out?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Cause I do podcasts like these. I don't know. Uh, no, like they, they, yeah, really, I really tried to get in and I paid actually like, they owe me like several hundred dollars. That ticket was expensive, but whatever.

• 49:55Ryan Broderick?

  Was it, was it the, was it the TPUSA one in Dallas?

• 49:58Speaker 02

  No, it was in, um, fucking Tampa, dude, in the summer. Yeah. I don't, I blacked out for half of it. No, it was the one where like, um, they taught, where, where Tucker Carlson gave that speech where he was like, hey, you can't afford your house. Like that sucks. You know, it gave a very sort of left wing kind of speech. And, and, and where the Epstein file stuff also, like a lot of, some of them even spoke out about, and I think Charlie Kirk spoke out about the Epstein files on stage. But whatever.

• 50:27Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Yeah. The, the one we have here is basically like kind of a, a bow on where we started with this episode, which is, there was a Q and A with Charlie Kirk and Erika Kirk, uh, in Dallas at a TPUSA event. And, uh, this is from the New York Times who covered it and they basically, they write. One after another, members of the audience came forward to ask Mr. Kirk and his wife for advice. "Why? Why are you... Okay. "I don't want to go to college and I don't want to commit to a career that I know I'm going to have to abandon once I have kids," one young woman said, to which Mr. Kirk replied, "You're already thinking correctly." Mrs. Kirk asked if anyone in the room had a liberal boyfriend. A hand near the front shot up. "Pray for her," an audience member yelled.

• 51:09Ryan Broderick?

  And then Charlie Kirk suggested that we bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.

• 51:17Ryan Broderick?

  And then he said, "You know who the most miserable and depressed people in America are?" Mr. Kirk said. "Career-driven, early 30-something women." So this woman told New York Times in attendance at the thing, she said, "First, she got rid of her seed oils and food dies. And she ransacked the cabinets and threw out Cheez-Its and candy. And then she decided to not get the COVID vaccine. And then, she said, "All these doors opened when I found out about the food. It only takes one voice to start going down a rabbit hole." And like, I think that's really the driving... Like, that's how most people are encountering this stuff now.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:50Ryan Broderick?

  Is like, they're... They see a post and they're like, "What does that mean?" And then they just start picking and picking and then they find themselves at a TPUSA event.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:59Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, it's... I think the point, I think, of this whole episode is just like, this stuff was done on purpose. Like, it was set up this way on purpose to do this exact thing. And they succeeded.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's... It's like, sort of comes back to even our joke about wanting to die alone in the woods, like...

• 52:19Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, people are unhappy, right? Like, people... I mean, and it's a normal part of being alive, you know? It's a normal... Suffering is a normal part of the human condition. And I think what we've been seeing is... I mean, I think a lot... Sorry to make this whole conversation about the 2010s, but the internet in the 2010s, one of the big differences with it now, is, sure, there was always optimization and monetization, right? The tech bros wanting to make money and like, you know, all those things, right? Mark Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook out of like, the kindness of his own heart to, you know, bring people together. But... The internet wasn't as much of a place to monetize everything. And the perfect example of that for me is couch surfing.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Do you guys remember couch surfing? So Gen Z people have no idea that this existed. Basically, I'm like, oh, it was Airbnb, but it was free. And they look at me and they're like, I'm sorry, what? And of course, and I don't know if you, I used it at multiple occasions. It led to many, I did it in Hungary, I did it in France. I met friends, I had a boyfriend, like, it was great. And then Airbnb comes around, it's like, well, we can make money off of someone having an extra couch. Airbnb was like, literally after an air mattress, right? Because some of these couch surfers, it was, is a couch surfing, right? So it wasn't even to have an extra room. It was like, I have just like an inflatable mattress. And, and yeah, someone was like, we got to monetize this.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  And, and I really do think that so much of this is tied to that, right? People being fucking scammed. I mean, it is, I think, going to be the defining characteristics, characteristic of the 2010s. And I think it definitely started with Donald Trump, but who's, you know, the griftyest president we've ever had. It's just like people seeing opportunity for money and even clavicular. I mean, we didn't even get into that, but.

• 54:12Ryan Broderick?

  He's a, he's kind of a trad wife.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  He is, he's a beauty influencer.

• 54:17Ryan Broderick?

  He is a beauty influencer.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  He's a beauty influencer. And I also still do not think he believes a lot of the things that he says to that extreme, but he's making money off of it. And so, yeah, I, I think sometimes it's like, and I'm not saying that to depress us. It's like, sometimes it's not even that deep.

• 54:33Ryan Broderick?

  Before, before we move off clavicular, like further proof of like how insidious this stuff is, I was having a conversation with like, a good reporter, like a good internet culture fluent reporter. And she was saying like, oh my God, like the clavicular stuff is so funny. I think he's so funny. And I'm like, yeah, like he is funny, but like he's super racist, of course. And she's like, what do you mean, super racist? Well, he's got like tons of videos where he's just like talking about how like black people are inferior and all this stuff. And she's like, oh, I didn't see any of that. I just saw like the funny. clips and I'm like right

• 55:06Speaker 02

  right

• 55:07Ryan Broderick?

  and because like that's that's what that's how all of this stuff works is like you you could and she's like I'm mortified I've been going to parties being like I think he's so funny and I'm like yeah and I bet you like 90% of the people you're talking to are like yeah he's funny because they also don't know that like he's talking on the in the same streams about all kinds of fucked up stuff because we only watch clips

• 55:29Speaker 02

  yeah

• 55:29Ryan Broderick?

  because we only we only see the jester maxing at the club we only see the we're not we're not yeah

• 55:34Speaker 02

  and how could we see it all I mean that's the other thing I'm like what are

• 55:37Ryan Broderick?

  you can't see it all

• 55:39Speaker 02

  you can't me and

• 55:40Ryan Broderick?

  you can't have it all and you can't see it all

• 55:42Speaker 02

  yeah and the rise of streaming it's like I was explaining it to my sister you know and she was like but like I don't understand don't people have jobs like what do you mean watching someone for eight hours a day it's it's a perfect storm and and it took all of these different things for it to you know sort of get to where we're at

• 55:58Ryan Broderick?

  I I always say this I hope this stuff is losing steam and I I sort of think the proof of that is that people are getting more desperate about making everything seem trad wife coded like the Sydney Sweeney meltdown last summer like to me feels very desperate um I think a vibe shift is happening whether the right wing wanted or not and so yeah I know I'm not totally pessimistic about all of this but I will definitely be posting tiktoks of myself churning butter on my farm

• 56:23Speaker 02

  dude

• 56:24Ryan Broderick?

  um yeah and I want to thank you for coming on the show

• 56:27Speaker 02

  thanks for having me

• 56:28Ryan Broderick?

  lovely

• 56:28Speaker 02

  this is so fun

• 56:30Ryan Broderick?

  I I ask all of our guests this uh where can people follow you on the internet if you want to see your trad

• 56:35Speaker 02

  my trad

• 56:36Ryan Broderick?

  tenant

• 56:36Speaker 02

  yeah

• 56:37Ryan Broderick?

  your trad

• 56:37Speaker 02

  my application

• 56:38Ryan Broderick?

  stay at home girlfriend yeah

• 56:39Speaker 02

  um yeah I I am at feminist tabulus on Instagram but if you put in Liz Plank you'll you'll find me I'm Liz Plank on tiktok and YouTube you can find my podcast boy problems on Spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcasts you can watch it on YouTube uh I have a sub stack called airplane mode and where I break down the news and try not to make you feel depressed about it um I think those are the big ones um For now, yeah.

• 57:05Ryan Broderick?

  Awesome. Well, thank you again. This was lovely. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to.

• 57:48Ryan Broderick?

  You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 58:11Speaker 00

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