Sam Adler-Bell recently published a profile in New York magazine about women who have left, or are quietly leaving, the New Right. Alex Kaschuta, an influential writer and former host of the podcast Subversive, publicly split with the movement after years of genuine intellectual engagement that included interviewing many of its architects, from Curtis Yarvin to Darryl Cooper. Another woman, a mother and former true believer who wrote for right-wing outlets and worked for conservative institutions, requested anonymity because she fears for the physical safety of herself and her children.

Both describe a movement that once promised women a place at the table and now openly treats them, in the anonymous source’s words, as “subhuman: subrational, non-agentic, cattle.” Adler-Bell, who hosts a podcast that provides an excellent history of right-wing ideas, reported the piece well, and I believe he wrote it in good faith.

The backdrop is a debate that has consumed the online right over the past few years: whether biological sex differences are so profound that women’s increasing presence in professional and institutional life has degraded those institutions, and whether women are, by nature, too irrational or too consensus-oriented to participate meaningfully in intellectual or political work.

What matters is not whether the argument is sound, but whether the person making it is your ally

The women leaving aren’t doing so over policy disagreements. They’re leaving because they feel like a movement they helped build, or promote, has arrived at the conclusion that women like them shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What makes this harder to narrate cleanly is that women are not only the targets of this debate but, in some cases, its most prominent voices. The conversation is not simply men saying these things about women.

It is, in part, women saying these things about women – which is precisely why some of the people who’ve pushed back feel not just disagreed with but trapped.

That being said, I understand why some right-wingers were uneasy. The piece ran in New York magazine. It will be read by progressives as confirmation of everything they already believe, in ways that don’t require them to reckon with why these women were drawn to the right in the first place: real frustrations with liberal feminism, real observations about institutional culture, real experiences of being condescended to. The piece compresses figures who share very little into a single narrative arc.

Scott Yenor is a family policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation; Nick Fuentes is a self-described “incel podcaster”; Douglas Wilson is a pastor in Idaho whose church community has attracted controversy for decades over its teachings on gender hierarchy. These are not the same projects, and not all of them are pro-Trump or MAGA. The question of who counts as “New Right,” who’s MAGA, who’s conservative, and who’s a fringe (often media) figure tolerated for tactical reasons is genuinely complicated, and it’s a debate most Republican voters have never encountered and would find alien. The ordinary people, men and women alike, who vote Republican without ever listening to a podcast or posting on X are absent from the story entirely.

Full disclosure – I also have some skin in the game. I was quoted in Adler-Bell’s piece, making the point that the old conservative bargain for women, submission in exchange for protection, no longer holds in some of the most popular right-wing subcultures, like the “groypers” – young, chronically online followers of Fuentes – or the masculinist orbiters of figures such as Andrew Tate. What’s changed in these newer subcultures is that the protection half of the bargain has been dropped. The submission is still demanded, but the reciprocal obligation – that men owe women provision, loyalty, respect – has been replaced by open contempt. For this I was accused of throwing friends under the bus by people, who, ironically, oppose the specific communities I was critiquing.

The most common response I’ve seen from the online right is: “Why don’t you attack the ideas?” I want to take that demand seriously. Many of the women in Adler-Bell’s piece have attacked the ideas, at length, in public, for years. The ideas are not hard to attack. What’s hard is being taken seriously – getting the attack to count, because the online arenas where this debate is actually happening have been structured so that no criticism from a woman registers as legitimate.

The request to “debate the ideas” is, in most cases, not a real plea for open debate. It is a move in a game whose actual logic runs on a version of Carl Schmitt’s famous, and famously abused, friend-enemy distinction. What matters is not whether the argument is sound, but whether the person making it is your ally. This is the defining pathology of online debate, and it’s the same one the center, right and “politically homeless” have spent the past decade complaining about when the left did it.

The “woke” or progressive version: your criticism reflects your privilege, which prevents you from perceiving structural oppression. The conservative version, now ascendant in the X and podcast-dominated gender debate: women who disagree with claims about feminine irrationality are exhibiting the feminine irrationality being diagnosed. They aren’t accused of being wrong. The defecting woman is not treated as an intellectual, even a failed one, but as a sexual presence who wandered too close to serious ideas and couldn’t follow through. Read plainly, they are calling her a tease – or worse, a whore. This rhetorical tactic should be familiar by now.

When author Robin DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” in 2011, the most common criticism, and I think the right one, was that it was unfalsifiable. Agreement proved the theory and denial was itself a show of fragility. The online right’s “great gender debate” now operates the same way. Agreement from women validates the thesis. But disagreement validates it, too. But that’s the ecosystem, not every thinker in it.

Whether you agree or disagree with their underlying claims, not every anti-racist thinker was, or is, DiAngelo, and not every sex realist – that is, someone who believes biological sex differences have meaningful social and political implications – is a podcast reply guy equating women with cattle.

Helen Andrews, an American social commentator, and one of the most dominant voices in this conversation, engages with arguments. She debated journalist Leah Libresco Sargeant on author Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast. Real survey data does show gender gaps in attitudes toward free speech, and the question of whether institutional norms have eroded as demographics shift is worth asking.

So let me engage with at least one of Andrews’s answers, because I think it illustrates how even serious versions of this argument slide into the same structural trap.

On the Triggernometry podcast, hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, Andrews said that increasing female representation in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which is damaging, because the law is the one field where you really want people to be as literal-minded as possible. “And so if the law is corrupted, that’s something that I’m very, very worried about.”

The problem is that this description of law is a fantasy of what the legal profession actually is. The common law tradition is built on interpretation, not literalism. What Andrews frames as feminine contamination (interpretation, discretion, contextual reasoning) has always been constitutive of legal practice.

So, ostensibly, in this version of history, when male judges interpret the law, it is called jurisprudence. But when women do it, it becomes evidence that women are corrupting the institution.

Andrews may not intend to build a trap – in fact, I don’t think she does. I have argued with her online before, and she remained in good faith throughout, even when I was snarkier than warranted. The ecosystem she’s operating in, though, turns her argument into a trap every time, because any woman who pushes back on claims about feminine irrationality is immediately filed as a case study. The serious version and the unserious version end up reinforcing each other.

Nobody likes a struggle session. Parts of the online right have built the same thing pointed in the other direction

Libresco Sargeant identified what’s missing in the conversation on Interesting Times. Andrews’s thesis accounts for male virtues, male vices and female vices, but has no place for female virtues. When pressed, Andrews deflects: “It’s a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes.” But Libresco Sargeant did not ask Andrews about her “likes and dislikes” or her feelings. She asked about a gap in her argument.

Not everyone argues by laying traps. Libresco Sargeant is one conservative thinker who doesn’t. Legal scholar Erika Bachiochi is another.

Bachiochi also believes sex differences are real, that biology “impacts us all the way down and all the way up,” but that differences cannot become destiny, because each person possesses rational nature and irreducible individuality. Her quarrel with progressive feminism is that it adopted a masculine model of freedom, autonomy from dependence, rather than demanding institutions accommodate the reality of human need.

You can disagree with Bachiochi – about anti-discrimination law, about reproductive rights. Progressives and conservatives both do, regularly. But disagreement with her argument does not automatically become evidence that the critic is irrational or unserious. The argument survives contact with opposition. It can be argued.

The important distinction between these women, at least from my vantage point, is not between people who believe in sex differences and people who don’t. It’s between people willing to make arguments that can be challenged and people who treat challenge itself as proof of their own positions.

We spent the better part of a decade pointing out that the left had done exactly this. That was the core complaint behind “wokeness.” It was a good complaint. It still is. Nobody likes a struggle session. Parts of the online right have now built the same thing, pointed in the other direction. That the left did it first doesn’t make the right’s version less intellectually bankrupt. It makes it more depressing, because the people building it are the same people who told us they were against it. They told us they wanted a culture that could tolerate disagreement without treating it as heresy. But they didn’t. As it turns out, they just wanted a turn.