Is The Online Right Eating Itself? The Free Press’s River Page deconstructs the trolls
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you know, that's something I've seen a lot of my generation, uh, is, you know, people becoming obsessed with their own health and their own bodies, I think in a way, because you can have a certain degree of control over like how you look and how fit you are and like how well you eat and how much you go to the gym and, you know, this sort of discipline because you don't actually have control over your life. You can't buy a house. You can't, um,

find somebody to settle down with, but at least you can have a six pack. Hi, it's Megan. The podcast is back. I am slowly recovering from losing my house and the fires out here in Los Angeles. So thank you for your patience. I just want to say something quickly about this conversation. This is an interview with river page. There's a reporter at the free press. Initially I asked him to come on to talk about a piece he recently wrote about the online right and what's going on with all those crazy, uh,

anti-Semitic misogynist, uh, everything horrible and disgusting memes and whether or not that's going to ruin the party, um, or conservatism or MAGA or whatever. We do talk about that, but the conversation really wandered in some unexpected directions. And we talked about sort of what's going on with young people, uh,

more generally like what's going on with men why are they so obsessed with fitness and like living till they're 200 and just bizarre kind of health rituals and just kind of what's going on with people's dating lives and sexual lives and all of that so it's a great conversation it's not just about the online right and I hope you enjoy it thanks again for your patience we are back

Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I am your host, Megan Daum. This is my first interview post-Wildfire. I'm coming to you from a makeshift studio. So fingers crossed, everything is plugged in correctly. And thank you for your patience while I got myself sorted out here a bit. My guest is River Page. River, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for doing this. You are a reporter at The Free Press.

where you recently published a piece called The Online Right is Building a Monster. And this is a phenomenon that I've been observing for a while, and I've always had a hard time figuring out the precise contours of it. You break it down very concisely in this piece. And I wanted to have you on so we could sort of continue that here. So I want to start by asking you to elaborate a

On something you say in the second paragraph of the piece, you say, for those of you who are offline, it is important you understand how bad things have gotten on X, X Twitter. So why is that important and what are people not understanding? So the reason that it's important is not that everybody in the country is on X. It's actually the opposite. The people who make culture and who make policy change.

and who do journalism in this country are on X. It is an elite platform. And this has always been the case, even when Twitter was left-wing and we saw how that, you know, the crazy things that were being said online when Twitter was a left-wing echo chamber reverberated through the media, reverberated through culture, reverberated through policy, reverberated

um to where you know non-binary used to be this like weird thing this is the example i give non-binary binary used to be this weird thing that only people on the internet talked about and then fast forward five years and it's all over in the media uh tv shows with non-binary characters it's in corporate hr policies it's everywhere and that is because the people who um

are in control of culture and of policy in this country are on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. That is the elite platform of choice. Now, X has become a right-wing echo chamber. And my theory is that basically everything that happened to the left is going to happen to the right.

Things are becoming more and more insane because Twitter sort of uniquely and its algorithm fuels conflict. It's the hate site. It's the site where people get on and they debate and they argue about things. And the algorithm fuels that. And so when there are no more lives left to own on X, the conservatives have to start going after each other. This is what happened on old Twitter.

left-wing Twitter, when right-wing people, many of them were banned, including people who weren't like straight up Nazis. You know, they banned the Babylon Bee for like making some, you know, trans joke or whatever. So you had, when you have people who are more or less on the same side, if you like, coming after each other and cultivating an increasingly insane party line,

that's going to reverberate through the culture and it may not happen today and it may not happen tomorrow, but when it does happen, people are going to catch wind of it and it's going to freak them out. Normal people who are not on Twitter, who have not seen the development of these ideas, who have not been immersed in them all day, every day. You know, the things that I see on Twitter every day, I feel like if you, you know, showed a regular person

Holocaust denial. Yeah. Crazy stuff about, you know, interracial marriage. You know, people being against it. People saying that, you know, biracial people should basically feel bad for existing. Like all this stuff that I see pretty much every day. If you showed this to a normal person, it would freak them out. They'd be like, what the hell? Like, this is not...

These people need to be dealt with, you know? Right. So I want to make sure people understand what we're talking about because we're not talking about just sort of banal negativity or like this is ugly. Like this is supremely ugly stuff, cartoonishly ugly. So, I mean, you say, you know, you write in the piece yesterday morning, right?

like I do every morning, I woke up and immediately opened Twitter. The first thing you saw was Elon Musk reacting positively to a post alleging that Tom Hanks is a pedophile. Then you saw somebody named Lord miles. Who's a conservative travel influencer. Um,

talking about like, you know, he's talking about being Anglo-Saxon and should not be ignored. I mean, you've got like Andrew Tate. I mean, this is, can you just actually give some examples? I mean, I can pull up my feed right now. I mean, I'm literally pulling up Twitter and I'm seeing like what kind of retarded ass judge decided not to give them the life or death penalty. I don't even know what this is referring to. I mean, just like absolutely vile,

Yeah. People need to understand. The Lord Miles thing. Let me explain that because that explains like how insane things are going and how weird it would be. So there's this thing on right wing Twitter now where like, you know, a lot of people are anonymous on Twitter and there's these big giant right wing accounts that are all like accusing each other of being secretly Indian. And I think some of them are Indian, which is also kind of weird, but they're, you know, it'll be like, you

you know, defending Western civilization against the Muslim lords, but then it's an Indian guy or they're suspecting it's this whole game where they're trying to root out who is and isn't Indian. And it's kind of funny, but it's also like crazy. It gets crazy racist. You know, I think another example I cited in there was somebody calling, referring to biracial children as failed Jewish science experiments. This was like a reply to another, um,

super racist tweet. It got like, it was the top comment, like 2000 likes or something. A lot of very recently, there's been a lot of crazy stuff about gay people. Sam Altman, the head of open AI. He had a kid with his husband, presumably by surrogacy. And there's all these tweets now that are like,

Why do gay men only ever have male babies? Like, they're basically, like, accusing Sam Altman of, like, having a child, buying, quote-unquote, buying a child to, like, molest it or something. And, I mean, I think there's, like, some principled reasons why people can be against surrogacy, but the truth of the matter is is that Elon has also had

Several children via surrogacy and nobody is saying anything about that. They're only attacking gay people. It's getting the amount of homophobia you've seen lately has really gone off the rails in a way that I haven't seen on the internet in like 10 years. Yeah. Um,

Yeah. And there's a lot of other examples, but it's just a few. Okay. And so the people who are doing this would defend themselves by saying that this is trolling, they're shitposting, this is not serious. It has a flavor of an in-joke. So to me, that makes it not necessarily totally analogous with what we were seeing on the left. Right.

Like the left's version of this was like, you know, that they would, they would say that they were punching up. Like the conservatives had power, the right wing was in power. So they were punching up, they were making fun of whoever it was on the right. And they were sort of asserting their, their queerness or their otherness or whatever it was. And it had a, it had a different flavor. So can you talk about that?

like where are these people coming from on the right? How many of them are joking or think they're joking? I mean, I think some of them maybe started out joking. I don't think a lot of them are joking anymore. I mean, you don't like post pictures of Oshwash and like post like six paragraphs about how it's fake. That's not a joke. You know, um, it's not even conceivable as a joke. Um, uh,

I don't there's also a victim of conflict on the right that I don't think people realize that they don't really seem to believe that they actually are in power now. In some sense, I think that the left is still in charge of everything and therefore everything that they're doing is justified. Everything they say is justified. Mm hmm.

I think a prime example of that was when Elon rehired Marco Ellis, the Doge employee who was saying, like, normalize Indian hate. I wouldn't date somebody outside of my race, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, this was framed as a journalist trying to cancel a kid. And it's like, well, he's not a kid. He's a government employee. And he said some crazy racist stuff on the Internet. Now, does that...

necessarily mean that your life should be ruined forever and it should be permanently unemployable no but does that mean that you mean you get to immediately go back into a very important position in government like i don't i don't think so um and you know they're still sort of positioning themselves as the victims of this hyper liberal culture which is on the backslide i mean corporations are taking up their gi policies i think all of this is good um by the way but it it

It's this weird sort of thing where the left would also always argue that we're not really in control because corporations still run everything. But the truth is that the corporations were totally amenable to their sort of cultural politics of the left. And they're not really opposed to the cultural politics of the right either. Corporations are interested in making money. And whatever the sort of mood of the day is, they're willing to go along with it.

Who are these people? Are they bots? Are they Americans? Are they teenagers? How do we know who they are? I mean, a lot of them are not teenagers. Some of them are anonymous accounts.

And I know they're not teenagers because they've been posting for years. So if they were, even if they started. Okay. I mean, my impression is that the majority of them are anonymous. I mean, at least the really in your face, ugly ones, Auschwitz jokes. Like, I don't even know if you would call it a joke. Just, I mean, the shocking stuff. It seems like it's a cartoon avatar or like a Grecian, you know, like some kind of like ancient Rome reference avatar. Yeah.

And who are these people?

So, I mean, it's a mix of anonymous accounts and non-anonymous accounts. That was kind of true with the left too. I mean, you had a lot of like big accounts that nobody really knew who they were exactly. Yeah.

Okay. But like with the left, you had this kind of thing, but then you had people, you had university professors retweeting it and amplifying it and sometimes generating it. You had people who were sort of fairly high up in cultural institutions. You had people of influence on the left and it was, it was, it was normalized. I mean, it was sanctioned, you know, and it was, again, like it was seen as,

This is progress. We are so by definition, our otherness makes us downtrodden. So anything we say, the personal is the political. It's all OK. This has like the bullying is is more it's just less subtle. Like it's it is so in your face that, again, I cannot figure out like.

how this is how they are not going to completely lose the room like very very soon and I know that was the the gist of your article like they are going to the right is going to eat itself the way the left did I mean is that is that an accurate summary yeah yeah I think so I mean like even if you look at like Trump almost kind of seems to get this a little bit too like if you uh

If you've always followed his campaigns, I mean, he would say like off the cuff stuff that a lot of people found offensive. But when it came to really weird stuff, he always stayed away from that. He was never the type of person who was like,

Oh, like we need to ban like abortion should be illegal everywhere. We need to like track people when people have come out against like IVF and things like that. He's gone the opposite other direction. There's a sort of like hard line cultural conservatism, which sometimes not always, but sometimes bleeds over into the sort of like racial stuff that.

that he has always kind of stayed away from because he knows that it is not a winning message and that it puts people off and that it weirds people out. And I don't think that that Elon gets that, you know, and I think maybe that's in some reason, it's kind of smart for Trump to let Elon take such a, you know, big position in, in,

the first couple of months of this administration because he's sort of acting as like a sort of human shield for everything that goes wrong. And everybody's just like blaming it all on Elon. Um,

But yeah, that's maybe off topic a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it is like in some ways a lot less subtle than what the left was doing. And so that probably means that people will catch on and be freaked out with it, by it a lot quicker. I mean, I know that you're not like a scholar of Elon Musk or presumably you're not personal friends with him or anything, but what is your interpretation of his approach?

or even his mental health at this point? I don't know. I mean, I hate to speculate because I don't know his life. But I mean, he does...

He doesn't seem to be sleeping a lot. I don't know. He seems to be tweeting many, many times per day. I think somebody counted last time. He tweeted like a thousand times last week or something. A thousand times? Something like that. It was like some crazy number. Maybe that was paid out, but it's a lot. I mean, I feel like every time I refresh my Twitter feed, there's something else. Yes. But he's also supposed to be running the government and he has like 15 kids. And I'm like, what are you... Are you...

And if you're not sleeping, are you, what's, are you using Adderall or like, like what's, I don't know what's going on, but it's very chaotic. Um, I think the chaos too is, you know, that a lot, I mean, this is a completely different subject, but I just think the chaos of, uh,

what's going on right now is going to bother a lot of people because people like the idea that they want change, but they also want the idea that somebody's in control and it doesn't seem like anybody really knows what's going on right now. When they sent that letter out last week, it was like everybody was all over the place. It was like, do we reply? Do we not reply? Everything I'm working on is classified. Can I even reply to this? If I don't, am I going to lose my job? It's like...

And then all the different agencies are like, don't reply, do reply. It's just complete chaos. You know, my, I write our newsletter. My job is to keep up with everything that's going on and I can barely do it. So, I mean, if you're just a regular person, I can imagine how overwhelming it must be unless you're just, you know, completely tuned out. And there's something to be said for being completely tuned out. I think I wish I could do it. Yeah. This is the new flex, as I've been saying.

When Elon did the very awkward sort of half-baked Nazi salute in that famous moment, was it during the convention? I can't remember when it was exactly. Was

What side were you on with that interpretation? I mean, I have to admit that my initial reaction was that he's so awkward. This is like a very spectrumy guy. He's kind of like trying to make a joke, but it doesn't land and he didn't really do it right. He's kind of flailing around and he didn't he didn't mean it. But now I'm thinking, oh, well, maybe he's just like thinks this is a kind of like

IRL version of a shit post and he sort of means it. What do you make of that? I mean, honestly, that was always kind of what I thought. I thought he was just trying to be like an edge board and, um,

Now everybody seems to be doing it, right? Like Bannon did it the other day. Yes. Which, you know, it's kind of funny because Bannon hates Elon. He went on like a tirade the other day and called him like an illegal immigrant and a parasite. It was like wrecking the country. Because he's so, I mean, say what you will about Steve Bannon. He is like very, he's catty in a way that I kind of appreciate and think is funny. But

Yeah, yeah. Everybody's kind of doing it now. And as Richard Tenenia wrote for us, it's kind of like, you know, you won. You're acting like what you're doing is still subversive or whatever, but it's really not. Your side won. And

Moreover, it's just weird. It's like, oh, it's the Roman salute. It's not the Nazi salute. I'm like, it looks like a Nazi salute. Nobody knows what you're talking about. This is where like the niche stuff gets in where like if maybe if you're on right wing Twitter 17 hours a day, you know what the difference between a Roman salute and a Nazi salute is. But the average person does that. You just look like a fucking Nazi. Right. Yeah.

How old are most of the people doing this? I mean, I know I asked you this at the beginning, but like, again, I know Steve Bannon is old, but like the people, like, because I always feel like this is something that is rooted in meme culture, in a vibe, right?

My most generous interpretation is that a lot of the people doing this are young enough that they don't really connect this stuff with actual events. They see it as sort of it's a meme. It's a gesture. It's it's a joke. It's a feeling. Is that am I being too forgiving there? Yeah.

Probably, yeah. I think everybody knows what a Nazi salute looks like. Actually, but yes. But they're doing it, they want to seem edgy or whatever, but it's like, I don't know, to me it's kind of cringy. To me it doesn't even really code as super young, it codes as an older sort of like...

early 2010s kind of like internet where there were actually, I think a lot more people who were just posting like groipers and like Hitler memes and stuff who weren't actually Nazis. They were just doing it because it was like,

They genuinely liked irritating people on the internet. And that was kind of a new thing to do back then. It sounds weird now. Right, right. But now, I mean, that's just par for the course. It's like what our politics are now. It's just like doing things to spite people on the internet. So...

Yeah, I don't know if – I don't think it's people are just being young and naive and dumb. I think a lot of it is, you know, trying to get a rise out of people but doing it in this hand-fisted way and then also some of them mean it. And it's kind of difficult to tell which is which. And, you know, if you're posting like Holocaust now on the internet, like I'm kind of like –

I feel like I don't have to give you a lot of grace because like, you know what you're doing. It's like, if you're doing it as a joke, then,

find something else to joke about, you know? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, you say, um, I mean, we see the Holocaust denial, greedy merchant memes, the idea that Jews are pushing interracial marriage. I saw, um, I mean, and these are people with, these are big accounts. Like I saw a big account yesterday, um, posting the old, like, uh, no Jews died in nine 11 because they were told to call in sick that day thing. I mean, that's, that's old, old stuff. Yeah. Um,

So what do you do with somebody like JD Vance? Okay, because he's somebody who should know better. He's a smart guy, obviously. Why do you think he is dabbling in this? I think JD spent like a little too much time on like Twitter group chats, to be honest. Yeah. And I've also like been, I've been in the group chats. I've been, you know, it's weirdly like,

I'm not going to say the name of the podcast because... But he went on a niche internet podcast of somebody that I used to kind of know on the sort of dissident left. It's like, once you're in that deep, it's unbecoming in a weird way. But it's... I'm like, why are you...

two degrees removed from me or from where I was like three years ago. Uh, not necessarily in ideas, but like hanging around these weird internet people. Um, I think it's going to be more common. I don't know if there's anything you can do about it. I think like the generation of like up and coming public, uh, politicians, especially on the right and to, uh,

probably actually more on the right because if you're on the left, then you can like go work for an NGO or whatever and find all the same stuff. But if you're on the right, like you're going to end up in these weird internet spaces being, you know, three degrees removed from a guy who's like talking about Holocaust denial or, you know, crazy racial stuff. And then, then what do you do? And I don't know the answer to that. Um,

I would say that people just need to log off, but you can't really log off. Nobody's allowed to log off anymore. You have to be on the internet, otherwise you're irrelevant. So it's a real catch-22. How old are you? Can I ask how old you are? 29. You're 29. Okay, great. So this has been going on essentially for all of your adult life. Yeah. How

I mean, you're obviously a smart person and you're thinking a lot and you can step back and look at the big picture. But when you look at your friends, your peers, what do you think is going on in their minds? And how do you think they imagine the world and their lives in it? That's a tough question to answer because when it comes to...

When it comes to like the, so I have like, there's like two, I have two different worlds. I have like this sort of online, like media world. Like those people I hang out with, those people are really engaged. And there's a lot of different, a lot of people are like super thrilled about Trump. They think everything is great. A lot of them really hate it. And they're freaking out when it's like, when it comes to my friends in real life who are not online, they're not media people.

A lot of them are just sort of, there's just this sort of ambient anxiety that I think is characteristic of my generation. The sort of zillennial, whatever you want to call it, generation where nothing seems very stable. Our adult lives have been sort of rife with all of this political instability, then COVID, then COVID.

BLM riots, this weird swing back to the right. And like, it's like, everything is just sort of up in the air. A lot of people check out from politics and then, you know, something weird happens and it freaks them out. They get sort of like spooked and then that, you know, drives them to the polls or whatever. But I think a lot of it is a sort of nihilism and like a retreat into, into culture. And by that, I don't mean political culture. I mean, very, very,

you know, sort of like niche online celebrity. You know, if you go on TikTok now, like, you know, there's people who sit around all day and like post about nothing, but they have these giant followings. And there's all these different subcultures where a lot of people,

I'm not saying this is negative or anything, but they retreat into like a sort of like wellness thing. I think the wellness, you know, the RFK, that's kind of become politicized in a weird way too now with the RFK. But, you know, that's something I've seen a lot of my generation is, you know, people becoming obsessed with their own health and their own bodies, I think in a way, because you can have a certain degree of control over like how you look and how fit you are and like how,

well you eat and how much you go to the gym and this sort of discipline because you don't actually have control over your life. You can't buy a house. You can't find somebody to settle down with, but at least you can have a six pack. Like, I think like that's where a lot of like young men in my generation are. And in a way it's, I guess it's, it's better than them just like doing drugs or,

you know, getting addicted to video games or to porn or whatever, but it's also, um, it becomes neurotic sometimes. Um, and I find it just kind of sad because I feel like it does come from a place of, you know, a broader sort of powerlessness over your own individual life to whereas, you know, I, I feel like, you know,

Maybe 20 years ago, they'll be like, yeah, I'll like have a beer and smoke a cigarette or whatever, because I have a house and a wife and a kid. And, you know, I don't have to like be the best. I don't have to live forever. Like, I feel like nobody has like nobody. Nobody's allowed to be mediocre anymore, you know, or nobody. Well, there's no margin for error or something like that. Right. Yeah.

There's nothing, there's no, there's no baseline for a normal life anymore. And I think like that's a big problem for a lot of people. And I think it manifests in a lot of different ways, but politically and otherwise. What you just described with men being obsessed with their bodies and what they look like and health.

That is how we have traditionally talked about women with anorexia. I mean, it's, it's all encompassing. It's neurotic. It's solipsistic. It's, it's narcissistic. It's incredibly, it just, it,

It belies a real sense of personal devastation and desperation. Right. And it's so interesting that men are doing this now. It's that's fascinating. Right. Well, I find it interesting, too, because the way that it's always talked about with women is that it's society's problem. Like it's it's.

The idea is that it's a societal problem and it isn't just narcissism. It's that society has these unrealistic beauty standards for women. And part of that is true. They play off of each other. Right. Yeah, that's half of it. And I think that just sort of gets ignored. Yeah.

you know, with a male thing. But eventually if you talk to anorexics, like female anorexics, a lot of them will tell you that it's not actually about societal beauty standards. It's about like feeling in control. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of that was like, like really ignored by people who really wanted to push this cultural narrative. And it's like, no, these young women are telling you that they, they don't feel in control of their own life. So the only thing he controls is like what they eat and, or how much they throw up or whatever. Yeah.

A trauma response also. I mean, it's all kinds of things. Sure. But I think, you know, we've always seen the body issues, the male eating disorders and all that. We, you know, it was always kind of a thing among gay men, but we're seeing it a lot and like straightened into, and that's how I feel like, you know, something is kind of happening in the culture where it's not just vanity. It's there's something deeper and more psychological going on here, in my opinion. That's great.

That is, that is so interesting. And so they're doing this and yet they can't, well, they can't find a mate. Can they, can they hook up? I mean, can you speak to this? Like, why is nobody having sex thing? Is that a moral panic or is that true? Well, I, you know, I think that I come in for this one, like the perspective of a gay guy, which is that, you know, gay men have never had a problem by cooking up famously. I think that,

What straight people are like sort of living now is they're basically like everybody's living in a gay guy's world, as it were. And I don't think it's very good for straight people because, you know, men, I think, are able not all men. But I think men, generally speaking, are sex is more physical and you're able to sort of separate it.

Um, in a way, and that's not necessarily true for women. And a lot of women, like they don't want to just hook up, uh, or if they do, because, you know, they have a lot more options because it most generally speaking, like a straight man is not going to say no. If a woman, a decent looking woman is propositioning him, you know, they tend to go for like these very, uh,

sort of extremely attractive, successful men who are basically getting, having tons of sex and then everybody else, even like normal, pretty decently like good looking men aren't. And that creates a lot of like resentment. I think that's fueling a lot of the,

The crisis in heterosexuality, I guess, that we see today. I mean, this is like Louise Perry has talked about the homosexualization of heterosexuality. And it's exactly what you describe. And I mean, there's a lot of factors. I think that the birth control pill played a huge role in this, which I've talked about. And she's she talks about a lot, too. And just this idea that.

men and women have equal sex drives and everybody should, the sexual revolution represented progress and old fashioned courtship was a form of oppression and et cetera, et cetera. But those guardrails were there for a reason. And not to say that the lanes weren't perhaps narrower than they should have been in the past. But yeah, I mean, I think we have had 50 years of

a huge social experiment with this stuff. And we're now at a point of real reckoning. Yeah. Yeah. But I think one thing that like ties that both straight people my age and gay people are going through is this sort of like dating gap, social media fueled idea that there's always something better out there.

So like, even like gay guys that I know, um, I'm, I'm unique in that. Like I got married at like 25 to, you know, a guy that I met in college, like basically child bride and gay years. You're a straight gay guy. Yeah. You're wearing flannels. You've got, you, uh, you're, this is the heterosexualization of your homosexuality. Yeah. Right. But a lot of, you know, a lot of people, especially in like,

the professional classes. They're like, oh, this guy doesn't make enough money or this girl doesn't make enough money or shoot. We don't have the shared interest. We don't have enough. Like, and then you can just go on a nap and you can keep looking at people. And it's like this endless, it's like if imagine, um,

You just need a shirt and then you go into a mall and there's 3000 shirts and you keep, Oh, this is a better one, but you can only buy one shirt. You can't buy them all. And like, that's like the bigger problem. I think even more so in some cases than hookup culture is just, you know,

I'm not telling people to settle necessarily, but my grandpa was a Baptist preacher. So you can imagine how the gay thing worked out. But he was a Baptist preacher. And I remember in a sermon one time, he once said that love isn't a feeling, love is a choice. And I think that I've always thought about that and I've always remembered that. And I don't think people...

realize that today they you know they've been sold this idea of love it's a super fleeting thing and that you can always fall in love with somebody else and people just get addicted to this you know this endless sort of cycle of options and and different people and feelings and um they they they're unwilling to uh

To miss out. It's this fear of missing out, fear of FOMO that just permeates our culture in all sorts of ways, but especially in dating. But we've got we've gotten so far off topic. This is great. We will circle back to the to the online. Right. But this is fascinating. But when you say that they've been sold the idea that love is fleeting, where are they being sold that? Because we also have this.

um, concept that, you know, there's, you have a soulmate and one true love and the romantic comedies that ruined, you know, women's lives thinking that they were going to like have the ultimate meet cute on the, on the sidewalk and live happily ever after. So these are sort of two competing narratives. Yeah. But my generation didn't grow up with rom-coms really. We grew up with like euphoria and skins and, uh, you know, all of these like elaborate sort of highly sexualized, like dramas where, you know, uh,

Like people like really want to believe that their lives are tragic because a tragic life is so much more interesting than a happy one. You know what I mean? And I think that there's a lot of people who get caught up in that cycle where they're creating narratives in their own mind of like,

uh, you know, if I'm hurting, if I, if my heart is broken, if I'm, you know, on this sort of Tolkien quest to find love and I keep following through all these pitfalls and all that, like that just makes me so much more interesting, most of all to myself. And I think there's a sort of like different type of narcissism at play there, because if you've just fallen in love and like, you know, you end up with the person of your dreams, then, well, then you just become like everybody else and you become like,

You're middle-class parents, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a normie. So is that why we have the crying TikTok videos in the car? Like, everything is a trauma and I'm devastated at all times. Yeah, the urge for people to turn the camera on themselves in their worst moments is like something I just, you know, I can't even...

I understand it like cognitively, but like, it's just so far removed from like anything that I would ever do that. It still baffles me even as somebody, you know, my age, but yeah, I mean that you have been, you know, if you were on social media documenting your life, you have, um, it's almost like you are the star of your own TV show. Um, and if you end up happy, um,

and everything is all goes well, then your story ends unless you can find a way. The show's canceled. It's the end of the run. They're not renewing it. Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Okay. So where do like the incels fall into all of this? Like, are they, because they are obviously very into their victim status, but they're also, they can be quite aggressive and there's a huge overlap between the incel culture and a lot of this like, you know, you know, really ugly right wing bigoted culture.

So where are they at? I mean, obviously, they is a big word. Yeah, I think a lot of them don't really understand women. Like they there is something to, you know, the idea that like, you know, if you are gay,

a super 10 out of 10 good looking guy or super rich or super whatever, the dating is going to be a lot easier for you. And that if you're just sort of average looking, then it's going to be harder, especially in the social media age. But I know a lot of normal, even kind of ugly straight guys who are like with beautiful women. It's like, if you have a good personality, women are a lot more amenable to that than I think people think. There's

It's another example of like the gayification a little bit of where they, because they have sort of like a very physical sort of male idea of sexuality and they're projecting that onto women to like a really extreme degree. Um,

And I think like the apotheosis of this is the chat beam. Have you seen this? It's like a German guy. He's actually a real guy, but he looks, oh, it's cartoonish, almost like the super...

lantern jaw square jaw line and the big brow and the grease back hair and he's you know got like a ripped sort of like dehydrated six-pack just what every woman wants right yeah it's what every gay guy wants yeah barely even not even more but yeah it's um it's a very like um porny uh

sort of gay guy like idea of like male beauty is cartoonish in a way but they think that this is what women actually want when i don't know like i feel maybe it's because i'm in the south but like uh the women i mean they just want a guy who's like got big arms and um is funny i don't know yeah so just work on biceps even has a car has an apartment has a job and like you know is you know

treats her well and i don't know i feel like women want a lot less than than people think that they do um yeah and and it's more of a it's just if you the incels they just think that it's another to get back to like the narcissism thing and like the the tragic story once you adopt this identity of an incel this has happened to people like

They develop these followings in these incel communities, and then they get a girlfriend, and then the other incels turn on them. So it's almost like once you adopt this identity, it's really hard to get out of it. Because one, it's like a psychological barrier where you're like, I'm an incel. I'm never going to get a woman. And so you don't even bother looking. Or you happen into it, and then you're like, oh, am I going to lose all of my friends because we don't have this shared identity?

misery anymore. And this is a big problem. You know, if you want to take it back to the left, you know, misery loves company, but it takes, it creates terrible community and terrible politics. If all that you can organize around is a sort of like hopelessness because, you know, this country is always racist and

And we'll always be racist. I'll never date women. And I'll always be an incel. Like these are sort of two sides of the same coin. Yeah. And it's not actionable prophecy. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And like, once you get into these communities and like you form an identity based around that, nothing is ever going, one, it can't accomplish anything because you've already accepted defeat.

as built in. And two, it's going to make you look insane and creepy and weird to everybody else. Yeah. I mean, one thing I also think is that

A lot of these guys, they see girls with only fans. They see hyper-sexualized women, the very small minority of women who are making money on their looks and their bodies, women with only fans, women who are on sugardaddy.com or whatever it is. And because those are the only women they see, they assume that those are all women.

And there's like an entire, you know, most of the population of women, they're not noticing for some reason, either because these women are not as online or they're not like presenting themselves in as noticeable a way or whatever it is. And so it's like everybody, everybody is just reacting to a tiny, tiny minority fringe that happens to be very present online. And it's really just a distorting way to go through life.

Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's why I like, uh, I always like watching, uh, British TV shows because they're brave enough to have like ugly people on TV or maybe just ugly people. They're like regular looking people and just like a sitcom or whatever. Whereas, um, in America, like, you know, this started in Hollywood and it's just kind of become the internet now where like, uh,

you will see people who are like so beautiful that like, you don't want to look at them because it makes you feel terrible about yourself. Or you see people who look really, really bad. And then it makes you feel better about yourself and everybody else just kind of like the algorithm. I don't know if it's the algorithm or they just post or what, but they just kind of,

filter into the background. And so it's like almost only like these two types of people exist, the super hot people and the super ugly people. And that makes you think that you must be one or the other when chances are you are neither.

Yeah, really. Don't flatter yourself one way or the other. But but this is happening in like the UK, for example. Right. I mean, we do have incel culture and a lot of this stuff overseas and Europe and elsewhere. Yeah, there's there's they can still watch like, you know, British comedies and that doesn't seem to be helping them.

That's true. That's true. It helps me though sometimes. Okay. That's good. Pro tip. Yeah. I mean, you know, and just again to sort of circle back, but before we wrap up, I mean, for the last couple of years, the online right stuff that I was really noticing the most was this

misogynist stuff, pronatalist stuff that veered into misogyny, obsession with the trad wife thing, posting pictures of beautiful women and saying that they're mid or that they hit the wall. Because if you're over 25, you're not going to be like, you've lose your fertility and you're of no use. I mean, this kind of this conception of the world that I think these guys are really enamored of,

that has to do with like, we must procreate. You know, we need to, everything is so terrible that we have to get back to this like very, very basic primal way of living, which they do have a point. Like I understand on a kind of cellular level where they're coming from. And it is true that I think several generations were misinformed about their own fertility. It's, I'm always shocked by sort of millennial women who,

were never told that there's a biological clock somehow because that was like unfeminist. I mean, that's just completely irresponsible. But obviously they took it too far. And I mean, the empty egg carton meme, I'd see that all the time, which is to signal that a woman is old, she's past her prime because she has no eggs left in the reserve. I mean, I don't really have a specific question, but what do you make of that stuff?

Yeah, I mean, to be, you know, politically speaking, I think that a big problem is that it's almost impossible to afford to have a family now if you're a person who wants to be upwardly mobile. And that there's never really like a good time to have kids if you're, you know...

a sort of striver type who's really focused on their career, especially if you're a woman. Um, and I think a lot of that could be remedied by things like paid maternity leave being man, which is not mandated in this country. Um, universal daycare, you know, I mean, I'm like a Bernie bro. Like I'm like, when it comes to economics, like I am very much on the left and always have been. Um,

But, you know, as for it is also a cultural, a cultural problem where, you know, people do have a hard time settling down. And by the time they settle down, it's, you know, maybe you can have one or two kids. And what the solution is to that, I have no idea. I don't.

I don't know how far... I think all the things around universal daycare and everything should be done in principle because I think it's the right thing to do. I don't think that having a kid in this country should be... Should incur... Should mean financial ruin. And it kind of can if you're really living on the edge. But I don't know. It's tough. I certainly don't think that the solution...

is being mean to women. Because in my experience, women are more interested in having kids than men are. I wonder if that's starting to change.

I have to be honest with you. Well, I think that a lot of women were sort of bullied into denying that they wanted to have a family. I think that was going on for a long time. So they were ashamed to admit it because it was slapping the face of feminism or something like that. And I think that that's starting to change. I mean, there is obviously like this whole, this whole pronatalism movement that JD Vance is a part of, and I guess Elon is part of in his own weird way. Yeah.

A grassroots activist, if you will. Yes. I think it's fascinating. But it's like...

I think that this economic piece needs to be talked about more because people make fun of it. They say, oh, well, you just, there's never a good time to have kids and your parents managed to, you know, have kids and everybody, you know, lived in a two bedroom house and they, six people shared a bathroom and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, my mom had me when she was 16 years old. If like three things in my life had gone differently, I'd be addicted to drugs and prisoner in jail. Like, you know what I mean? Or dead.

You know what I mean? There are bad times to have kids. I mean, I got out lucky in part because my mom became very... She was raised by a preacher. She sort of returned to a sort of hardline Protestant conservatism, which saved my life probably. I mean, my dad was a drug dealer. So there was a good thing that came out of that. But to say there's no...

I go back and forth on this because I'm like, on the one hand, you know, my parent, you know, my mom, my stepdad, they didn't have a lot of money and they still worked it out. They still had kids. And I don't think they regret it. I don't think that most really anybody who struggles, you know, financially when raising kids regrets it. But on the other hand, you can't really blame people when they have, you know,

$600 in savings if they're lucky. The average American has what, 400 something? It's like some really small amount. And to look at that and to be like, I can't bring a kid into the situation. I can barely take care of myself. Um,

And so to just brush those concerns aside, I think it reeks of a sort of elitism to where like you're not really worried about money and you're only talking about these people who their concern is, oh, well, you know, if I have a kid, I may not be able to, you know,

make 200 grand a year instead of 150 or whatever. And for those people, it's like, yeah, you should probably, you know, if they want to have kids, they probably just need a reality check and just be like, you need to pull the trigger because time or send them to private school or something like that. Right. But that is not most people in this country. And I think a lot of people in this discourse, because those are the only people that they interact with, they get a twisted idea of like, what's what people's actual motivations are for not having children.

Right. Yeah. And actually, this is what I was about to say about men possibly wanting kids more than women. Women can have a kid by themselves now. They don't need a man for that. And so that's been a huge game changer. And I know a lot of women who say, well, men are...

more trouble than they're worth. If I'm going to have a kid, I want one kid, not two kids. And if like, I'm going to have to babysit this guy all day and support him and deal with him, I don't want to do it. Um, and that's like another sort of downstream effect of the success of the women's movement. Right. I mean, women have just like made stratospheric, um, uh, they, they have their accomplishments have been off the charts and,

And they're doing much better than men across almost every metric. So I think that, again, the frustration on the part of men that they can't

They can't sort of get the basic things that used to be necessary to be an adult. They can't have it. And women can kind of get a lot of that stuff by themselves. They're buying houses by themselves if they can. They're having a kid. They are pursuing careers. They're not living with their parents. And you can't say that about some, if not many men. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And, um, and I think that there's a lot of, uh, that that's probably led to a lot of issues too, where a lot of men feel like, you know, women, they, a lot of them don't want to be the breadwinner, but they are, or they would be in a lot of these relationships that they run into. And I think maybe this is where the homosexualification of, you know, straight people's relationships might come into handy where, you know, maybe you can just tell yourself like, Hey, it doesn't, it doesn't matter that much as long as the bills get paid. Um,

Uh, if you really want to be a team, you know, maybe this isn't what you wanted, but this is how the world works now. Um, the minute the man isn't necessarily going to be the breadwinner and, um, you know, that's a good thing for you. If you know, he ever dies or something happens in a relationship, he leaves you whatever, like you're not at, um, sort of the mercy of, of a man. And that is a good thing, even though it may not necessarily feel great to you.

in the moment. Um, but there is, you know, I, that comes with more pressure, you know, for women to, um, when they're not their breadwinner. So, so, okay. So to wrap up here, what do you think is going to happen to the political right now? Are they going to, um, fall on their face? Uh, is, is it imminent? Is it going to take a few years? Like what's the, what's the, uh, prognosis here?

I can't say exactly when it'll happen. I think it'll be sooner rather than later. If they really get into the heads of the Trump administration and they start doing things like, I believe it was like two state legislatures just passed a resolution calling on the Supreme Court to overturn gay marriage, for example. I think if something like that happened, there would be a massive backlash in the midterms because...

uh, you know, that's a million marriages deserved overnight. That's chaos dissolved overnight. That's chaos. There's going to be, there's a lot of gay people who work in the Republican party. I don't think people will realize this. Like a lot of gay Republican apparatchiks, they're going to go crazy over that. The stories that will be leaked out of spite will be insane. Um,

And more of our, like everybody just knows everybody has a gay person in their family. Everybody has a gay friend. And if they see like something like that, like somebody's life just being blown up on a whim, uh, like that's going to, I think have a similar effect that the overturning of Roe v. Wade did during the midterms last time. Um, and more than that, I mean, even when it just comes to culture, um,

I think if a lot of the things I'm seeing on Twitter start, you know, being trickling, start trickling down to, to the masses, it's, it's going to be ugly. I don't know when that's going to happen. I don't know how it's going to happen. I just know it will happen because this is that way that the internet works. It's the way it's always worked. And yeah,

When it happens, the backlash will be very swift because what's happening is freakish and people will only suffer a freak for so long. You really don't know how it's going to happen? I would like to know because it's not going to be like how it was on the left with the gap making woke ads. It's not like...

you know, your favorite, you know, gene company is going to post white supremacist memes. Well, I think it's going to be people... They're not going to work it into their ad campaign. Well, if I had to guess, I think it will be something like, you know, people doing Nazi salutes. Like, you know, people at CPEC doing Nazi salutes. What happens when Republican members of Congress start doing that because they've jumped on this weird train? What happens when...

you start hearing Republican politicians and like high profile people in the right wing commentary, more of them anyway, start talking about things like interracial marriage. When that sort of thing starts happening and you get, cause you know, Joe Biden was not like a blue haired non-binary, you know, whatever, but like he became associated with that by proximity. So,

Once you start seeing more and more of these things and the people doing the weird, freakish things are in closer and closer proximity to Republicans in power, like that's how it's going to happen. It's not necessarily going to be Trump like denying the Holocaust or whatever. It's going to be somebody like two degrees from Trump.

You know, denying the Holocaust and then somebody four degrees removed doing a Nazi salute. And then, you know, some Doge employee, another one, I don't know, another Doge employee talking about interracial marriage and, you know, some weird leaked group chat where a bunch of Republican congressmen are saying something crazy. It's like things like that that just build and build and build and build.

And, you know, nobody can quite say for certainty, like, what was the straw that brought the camels back with like, whatever you want to call quote unquote, openness. But there was a straw somewhere along the way. But what matters more was all of these different things that got piled on again and again over the years to where people just finally said enough. And it'll be it'll be a process.

Um, but, but eventually like the pendulum will swing back and I think it's going to swing back really, really hard. Um, great. And then we'll, the cycle will start again. Uh, you know, there's like, you find a political science have done charts on this, like the oscillation of, um, like politic, cultural politics from like left to right. And it's just goes back and forth and it's become, it's become more and more extreme. Um, you know,

since the advent of social media. And, um, is there a way to break that cycle? I have no idea. Um, but I wish, I hope there is, I hope somebody figures it out. So would your advice be to people on the left or people in the center to actually amplify this stuff as much as possible? So they get, um, exposed sooner than later. No, I'm not an accelerationist. Um, no, I, I think I, I,

I don't know if I'm terrible at giving advice. I'm a critic at heart. But I think, you know, I'm glad that I wrote what I wrote in part just to say this is happening. And I think just pointing out like this is not normal when you see it to a certain extent. Like, I think that that.

helps get the message across. You know, I'm not calling for like a reinvigoration of Trump derangement syndrome or whatever. I think a lot of that went too far. I'm not calling for panic in some ways because I feel like there's just all this is somewhat inevitable because of the way that social media works. But my advice, I guess, would be to the left when the pendulum swings back your way.

Don't do what you did last time. Remember that we still live in a democracy and that the people that you talk to on Twitter are not the average person, but that the things that you say to each other and the weird party lines that you push will eventually make their way, will eventually break containment. And when that happens, you don't want it to be the most indefensible, crazy thing possible.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's well said. And I'm really glad you pointed this out. I did notice in the comments in your piece that a lot of people were saying they never saw this stuff. They didn't know what you were talking about. And I thought, wow, that's that's all I see. But that's because I click on it and I engage with it. So it just keeps feeding it to me. But I was pretty surprised the number of free press readers who claimed or at least pretended not to know what you were talking about. Well, they'll see it soon enough.

Well, thank you for doing your part there. River, thanks for writing the piece. It was excellent. And thanks for talking with me. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's been a great conversation. Okay. Thank you.

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