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

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........

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