Nancy Mace did not come to defend Lindsay Clancy.

The Republican congresswoman from South Carolina told TMZ this week that mental illness “doesn’t excuse murder,” that Clancy “murdered her children,” and that she will “walk free, because of this pink mob.” Then the interviewer asked whether the reaction would be different if Clancy were Black. Mace answered without hesitating. “Nobody would be supporting her if she were Black,” she said. “Liberal white women aren’t going to support a Black woman who murdered her kids.” She pointed to a case in New York, a Black mother she said killed her children and drew no comparable crowd, and reached a verdict on the people she was describing: “I think the left is inherently racist.”

Mace’s claim is testable, because the case it needs already exists, and it sits in the same courthouse. In 2018, Latarsha Sanders, a Black mother in Brockton, killed her two young sons, Marlon, 8, and La’son, 5. She was tried in Plymouth County, before Judge William Sullivan, prosecuted by the office of District Attorney Timothy Cruz. The same judge and the same office now handling Lindsay Clancy.

Sanders had paranoid schizophrenia that clinicians said went undetected and untreated for decades, and a neuropsychologist found her grossly psychotic when she killed her children. Her defense was the one Clancy’s lawyers are running now, that she lacked criminal responsibility because of her illness.

Here the two cases part. Judge Sullivan ruled Sanders’s psychiatric records inadmissible, so the jury never saw the thousands of pages documenting her illness. Prosecutors recast that illness as something else, telling jurors she practiced “Voodoo,” that the killings were a “ritual,” that she was “evil” and “playing the crazy card.”

The jury deliberated about four hours and convicted her of first-degree murder. She got two life sentences without parole.

There was no pink outside the courthouse and no million-dollar fund. In August, weeks into the Clancy deliberations, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out Sanders’s conviction, ruling that keeping her medical history from the jury was an error grave enough to require a new trial.

Clancy’s supporters, by contrast, have raised close to a million dollars for her family, gathered outside the courthouse in matching pink, and turned her case into a national conversation about postpartum psychosis and the failures of maternal care. Sanders drew near silence.

Over the past two weeks, as the Clancy jury deadlocked, that silence became its own story online, much of it driven by Black women naming Sanders directly: same judge, same county, records locked out, no crowd. More than one noted they had not seen a single Black woman in the pink crowd for Clancy.

Our Take: I want to ask my feminist readers the question without Nancy Mace’s partisan baggage. If Lindsay Clancy were Black, would you still be wearing pink? And I don’t mean theoretically.

Imagine that Lindsay is Latarsha. She is Black. She is poor. Her mental illness does not arrive wrapped in the language of postpartum advocacy and a medical history everyone immediately recognizes. Her psychosis is frightening and messy. She talks about conspiracies and the Illuminati. The killings are extraordinarily brutal. Prosecutors call her “evil.” There is no photogenic suburban family at the center of a national conversation about how medicine failed mothers.

Do you still begin with compassion? Do you still insist that mental illness can destroy a person’s grasp on reality? Do you still tell people that understanding her illness is not the same thing as excusing the deaths of her children?

If you say yes, where were you in 2022?

Notice that every one of those differences makes Sanders harder to feel for. Those differences are the test. A principle that only holds for the mother who is easy to feel for, easy to picture as yourself, has stopped being a principle. It has become a preference wearing a principle’s clothes.

The argument many women have made around Clancy is bigger than Clancy: that serious maternal mental illness is poorly understood, that women can seek help and still fall through enormous cracks, and that a horrific act does not automatically tell us whether someone was criminally responsible when she committed it. If those principles are principles, Latarsha Sanders belongs inside them too.

And this is an old fracture inside feminism, whether anyone wants to call it that or not: which women are easily recognized as wounded, which women receive complexity, and which women first have to prove that they are sympathetic enough to deserve it.

Nancy Mace is no help here. She would deny Clancy and Sanders both the mercy she thinks neither has earned, and she wants Sanders to prove only that liberal white women are hypocrites. The evidence does not get her all the way there. But Sanders does something more useful than anything Mace intends. She removes the comfort of answering Lindsay Clancy’s case in isolation.

If your compassion depends on the mother looking like Lindsay Clancy, sounding like Lindsay Clancy, living like Lindsay Clancy, and having an illness whose story can be narrated in a way you recognize, then the question is no longer only how much compassion women deserve. It is which women you had in mind when you asked for compassion in the first place.

By Tuesday, after four days of deliberations in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the jury had reached an impasse.

“After many hours of deliberation, we are unable to come to a unanimous decision,” the 12 jurors told Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan. Sullivan sent them back to deliberate, and after they finished the day without a verdict, he ordered them to return Wednesday morning.

The jury consists of nine women and three men, a fact that quickly became its own story online. By the time the jury announced it was deadlocked, a narrative had already taken hold across the gender-war corners of X: the three men were supposedly holding out for a conviction while the nine women favored finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility because of her mental state at the time of the deaths.

There is no public evidence that this is how the jury is divided. The jury deliberates in secret, but it hardly mattered.

On Sunday, commentator Lauren Chen wrote that she was “sadly convinced” deliberations were taking so long because the three men were trying to explain to the nine women that “hormones don’t excuse triple child murder.” Her post drew 6.7 million views.

As the deadlock continued, conservative commentator and tradcon figure Jack Posobiec repeatedly cheered on the male jurors. “Sending power to the 3 men on the Lindsay Clancy jury HOLD THE LINE,” he posted. Later came another version: “Hold the Line, boys.”

Others went further. Laurence Fox, the British actor turned anti-woke activist, said that if Clancy were found not criminally responsible, he hoped “men finally take back the leadership role in society.” Nick Freitas, a former Virginia delegate, wrote that he did not think women understood how the case was affecting “the way men see women.” Another viral post reduced the deliberations to “3 men” trying to convince “9 women that hormones don’t excuse child murder.”

Soon the anonymous male jurors had acquired personalities, convictions and even a mission. They were rational. They wanted accountability. They were protecting children. They were standing against women who supposedly preferred empathy for another woman over justice for three dead children.

Some users noticed the rather large evidentiary problem.

“You don’t know it’s the men,” one woman replied. Another pointed out that the three men could theoretically be the jurors favoring Clancy while women were holding out for conviction. Others argued that women on the jury might themselves reject Clancy’s defense. One response put the problem more simply: “Reducing a trial to a culture war proxy undermines the justice system.”

They are right about what we actually know: almost nothing about the deliberations.

Prosecutors accuse Clancy of killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, and argue that she was not psychotic and planned the killings. Her lawyers maintain that the Commonwealth has not met its burden and argue that, if jurors conclude she committed the acts, she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible at the time. The jury can consider first- or second-degree murder, manslaughter, or a verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.

Our Take: I have spent enough time reporting on the manosphere and the gender war to recognize what happened here. The fascinating part is not whether those three men really are holding out for conviction. We don’t know. The fascinating part is how badly a part of the internet needed them to be.

Three anonymous men inside a jury room became useful characters because they fit a story many people already believe about men and women: men impose consequences while women make excuses for one another; men follow facts while women are governed by emotion; when institutions lose their nerve, men have to “hold the line.”

The actual Clancy case is much harder than that story allows. Three children are dead, and the jury must decide whether the Commonwealth proved its case against Clancy and what the evidence about her mental state means for criminal responsibility. A juror can hear the evidence and conclude that prosecutors proved murder. Another can conclude that the evidence supports a finding that she was not criminally responsible. Neither conclusion requires believing that men possess reason and women possess sympathy.

Something else happened online, though. The uncertainty inside that jury room became unbearable, so people filled it with the gender war they already knew.

Even the pushback is revealing. Women appeared in Posobiec’s replies insisting that they, too, wanted Clancy convicted. Other users kept reminding everyone that no one knew how the jurors were voting.

For now, the three men exist mostly in our imagination. We do not know whether they agree with one another, whether they favor conviction, a finding of no criminal responsibility, or something in between

But online, they have already been drafted into a war they may not even be fighting.

We’re heading into Labor Day weekend, when summer closes and the grind comes back and the midterms sit close enough now that the whole country is picking a side about everything. Into all of that, one thing I keep watching: the gender war online has rarely looked more alive than it does right now. Men and women blame each other reflexively, and every case becomes a referendum on the opposite sex. Lindsay Clancy turned into a loyalty test you administer to your girlfriend. A $40 Uber request became a public trial with millions of jurors. The feeds cannot stop.

And yet the people who study this for a living can’t even agree that it’s real.

Richard Reeves, who runs the American Institute for Boys and Men, looked at the numbers around Father’s Day and asked, more or less, what gender war? Fathers are doing more at home than they ever have, women are at record highs in the workforce, and on the long-run surveys men and women drift toward equality almost in step. His reading is that the war is largely an online spectacle, and that ordinary people, far from the frontlines, are quietly getting on with their lives.

A peer-reviewed study in Social Science Quarterly reached a cousin of that conclusion this spring, drawing on twenty-four years of Gallup data to show the gender gap on most issues holding steady rather than splitting apart. The word those researchers used for the polarization all of us feel was elite-driven framing.

Then Lisa Britton said the reverse. Britton is a writer for Evie Magazine and a longtime advocate for boys, men, and fathers who has spent years on Capitol Hill arguing that men and boys matter too, often, by her account, getting laughed out of the room for it. Writing for the same outlet that published Reeves, she argued that the war has never been confined to the screen. It has leaked into hiring and classrooms and dating, into how a boy gets handled by a school system built for girls, into the fertility timeline women were sold that their own bodies would not honor. Dismiss all of that as “just online,” she says, and you gaslight the people living in the aftermath.

Here is where my own reporting comes in, because for more than two years I’ve been on the ground and online, in the space between exactly those two claims, and both of them are missing something you can only find in a room with a real person.

On the surface, almost everyone is fine. I sit down with a teenager, a young man, a father, and the first pass is always calm: things are okay, no war here, nothing to see. Then I dig. I tell him what other men and other boys have told me, the loneliness, the sense of moving through the world presumed guilty, the feeling that the rules changed and nobody handed him the new ones, and something shifts in his face. He nods, and he says it’s true, and then his own list starts coming out, one grievance after another, until somewhere inside it he says the thing nearly all of them eventually say: things have changed. The calm was real, and so were the grievances underneath it.

Among the men I’ve interviewed, one pattern comes up again and again: they believe in roles, that men have a role and women have a role. They often can’t name the thing cleanly, fumbling between “traditional” and “gendered” and eventually giving up, but the belief itself seems to steady them, like a handrail reached for in the dark.

Among the women I’ve interviewed, another starting point appears repeatedly. They begin somewhere else entirely, not with theory but with memories of years spent living under men’s authority, described from the inside. Most never once say the word patriarchy, because they don’t need the word. They lived the thing the word is trying to name.

The surveys can look calm while individual conversations are full of friction, because the two methods are measuring different things. A survey can tell us where millions of people land on a question. It cannot always tell us what sits underneath the answer. That is the reason I’m writing this.

So let’s have the conversation no survey will ever capture, and let’s make it an honest one, which is another way of saying an uncomfortable one. Think of one specific person you’ve quietly filed under the enemy. Not a category, a person. The man you’ve written off as entitled, a chauvinist, a sexist. The woman you’ve written off as a man-hater, a feminazi, hypergamous, whatever word you reach for when you’re angry. Someone real, someone you’ve actually watched up close.

Now tell me one true thing you admire or respect about them. Something they get right. A concern they raise that actually deserves attention. A quality or a skill they have, even if you reject everything about their worldview.

That’s the whole ask: one man, one woman, one honest good thing about each. It can be small, and it should probably cost you a little to say it, because the admissions that cost us something are usually the only ones worth anything. If you find you can’t do it at all, tell me that too, because that’s its own kind of answer.

I won’t argue with what you write and I won’t correct it. I’m going to gather all of it, and two weeks from now I’ll write about what it says about us, about whether we can still find one good thing in the person we’ve decided is the problem, and whether the enemy survives the moment we’re forced to look at an actual face.

Come as you are. The box is open.

Our Take: The numbers suggest men and women may not be drifting as far apart as our feeds make it seem. My reporting tells me that doesn’t mean the grievances are imaginary. They are sitting there, often beneath otherwise ordinary lives. So before we spend the fall deciding which sex ruined everything, I want to try something smaller: Can we still find one true thing to respect in someone we’ve already cast as the enemy? And what does it say about us if we can’t?

Week of August 24, 2026 | Edition 71

Welcome back to The Manosphere.

Two courtrooms did the gender war’s work this week, and they pulled in opposite directions. In Miami, Andrew and Tristan Tate asked a federal judge to see them as harmless performers: the wealth was rented, the yacht was an ad, Top G is a character who says things nobody should take seriously.

In Massachusetts, the same broad movement that treats Tate’s every word as theater spent the week demanding that women face real consequences for a single opinion, while a jury quietly weighed whether Lindsay Clancy is a murderer.

Accountability for her sympathizers; performance for his machete videos. Both arguments ran all week, often from the same voices.

Let’s get into it.

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell

• Top G takes the stand and disowns the brand.

• The Clancy backlash turns on the women who feel sorry for her.

• Two verdicts, one week. A judge could free the Tates on bail and a Massachusetts jury could decide Clancy’s fate in the same stretch of days, and both outcomes hand the gender war fresh ammunition.

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🚨 Signal of the Week: The Cars Were Rented. The Yacht Was a Promo. Top G Was a Character

For years, Andrew and Tristan Tate sold one of the internet’s most recognizable visions of male success: Bugattis, watches, private jets, international mobility, cryptocurrency and enough money to live beyond ordinary rules. This week, some of those symbols landed in a Miami federal courtroom, where the brothers are asking to be released from jail while they fight extradition to the UK.

Prosecutors are using the image the Tates created against them. They argue that men who have described themselves as extraordinarily wealthy, claimed access to multiple passports and displayed a globe-spanning luxury lifestyle have the resources to disappear. The defense response is remarkable because it asks the court not to believe much of the mythology.

In an August 21 filing, the Tates’ lawyers called their social-media output “theatrical” and argued that prosecutors had supplied videos and boasts rather than proof of ownership. The $50 million superyacht Andrew promoted did not belong to the brothers, according to the filing; they were paid to promote it. The $2.1 million Aston Martin and $5 million and $7 million Bugattis featured in Tristan’s videos were rented. And the filing says the brothers have an obvious commercial reason to look richer than they are: they operate businesses “‘teaching’ men how to earn money,” so “it is in their interest to portray themselves on social media as uber-wealthy.”

The lawyers also challenged the crypto numbers. Prosecutors had pointed to Andrew’s DADDY meme coin as evidence of financial resources. The defense says the government used the coin’s overall market capitalization rather than Tate’s personal holdings and says Andrew controls roughly 1% of the supply, worth about $70,000 at the time of the filing. My own trace of the wallet Tate posted publicly put it near $71,000 at the start of August.

The same brief acknowledges that Romanian authorities have seized or restrained much of the brothers’ assets; Tristan has previously claimed that nearly $20 million was taken from him.

The passports received the same treatment. Andrew has publicly talked about possessing passports and driver’s licenses from numerous countries. His lawyers say those claims were jokes or satire. According to the filing, the brothers actually have five passports between them: U.S. and British passports for each man, plus a Vanuatu passport belonging to Andrew. Their lawyers say they have physical custody of all five and would surrender them as a condition of release.

Then there is Top G himself. The filing quotes Andrew from an April deposition saying: “Top G is a character.” He described his trillionaire claim as a comedic exaggeration and said nobody genuinely believes he is a trillionaire any more than they believe he has been to the moon. Tristan testified separately that he routinely backed his brother’s trillionaire boasts even though “of course that’s a lie.” Of other things he had said on podcasts, Tristan offered an explanation that may be even more revealing: it was self-promotion and “sounded cool at the time.”

The same argument surfaced again at Thursday’s bail hearing. Both brothers took the stand. Tristan told the court, “I play a character,” and described Top G as a vehicle for saying outrageous things. Prosecutors rejected the distinction, playing a video in which Andrew brandishes a machete while describing violent pimping techniques and arguing that the rhetoric cannot simply be dismissed as performance when it becomes legally inconvenient. Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis ended the marathon hearing without ruling.

Our Take: The filing does not prove that the Tate brothers are secretly broke. Quite the opposite: court records elsewhere have documented businesses generating millions, and even their own filing describes substantial assets being seized. The interesting revelation is not the size of their bank accounts. It is how explicitly their own legal defense describes the commercial construction of the image.

That distinction matters because the wealth was never incidental to the Tate proposition. The cars, the watches, and the travel were all evidence. The message to young men was look at how I live. Their lawyers have now put the mechanism into unusually plain English: when you sell men instruction on making money, appearing “uber-wealthy” helps sell the instruction.

A rented Bugatti does not make every Tate business fraudulent. A paid yacht promotion does not mean Andrew Tate has no money. But the courtroom has forced a separation the brand itself rarely encouraged: the appearance of success and the underlying success are not necessarily the same thing.

📚 Power Plays: The Jury Paused, But the Retaliation Escalated

The jury has the case now. Nine women and three men have been out about ten hours, went home Friday without a verdict, and come back Monday. Both sides agree Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill. What the panel has to decide is whether she could still tell right from wrong when she killed her three children. Two psychiatrists gave the jury opposite answers on exactly that. On Friday the jurors asked to see the pill bottles and the knife. The manosphere is not waiting for them.

While the jury deliberates, the argument online has moved off Clancy and onto the women who feel sorry for her. The clip of the week is a man who called off his wedding two weeks out because his fiancée said she supported Clancy.

The post cleared seven million views, and the replies read like a receiving line: Smart man, some say. Dodged a bullet, others argue. Start asking your girlfriend where she stands, one wrote, or you might be marrying a serial killer. The ugliest suggested her supporters should be hunted. Thomas Corbett-Dillon, who commentates for Fox, Newsmax and GB News, pinned his own version to the top of his feed: the women defending her have lost their minds.

The fullest version came from a podcaster named Steve McGrew, whose “hormones precedent” bit ran close to a thousand words. If a jury excuses Clancy because her biology overrode her, he argued, then women can’t be handed guns, or surgical tools, or air-traffic headsets, or judgeships, or nuclear codes, or, in a custody fight, their own kids. Equal rights come with equal wrongs, he finished.

The glass ceiling becomes a padded one. Tradcon Matt Walsh supplied the doom: a killer walking free, women celebrating in the street, millions flowing to her in donations and lawsuits, a nightmare he said he couldn’t bear to picture.

Our Take: The power play is the purity test. The case handed the movement one question it can put to the woman across the dinner table, and “where do you stand on Lindsay Clancy” now sorts fiancées into keepers and bullets dodged. Notice the timing. These men have reached a verdict while the jury is still asking to see the evidence. McGrew’s joke is the argument said out loud. It travels from “this one woman might be excused” to “women cannot be trusted with authority” without stopping at a single floor in between, and that trip is the move worth marking: a triple killing used as a lever under everyone’s rights.

The unease underneath is not invented. Thousands of strangers rallying around a mother who admits she strangled her children is a hard thing to look at, and disgust is a reasonable first response. The women in pink outside the courthouse are reacting to something real too, a labor-and-delivery nurse on a dozen psychiatric medications who wrote in her phone that the medicine stole her motherhood. Both the revulsion and the sympathy point at facts in the record. The loyalty test flattens them into one yes-or-no and calls the answer a character reference.

Walsh’s millions deserve a footnote, because he has the money wrong. The fund is for Clancy’s parents, and its own terms bar a cent of it from reaching her defense. The catastrophe he can’t bear to picture is one the paperwork already prevents.

⚔️ The Narrative War: When Does “It’s a Character” Stop Working?

There are now two Andrew Tates competing in the same federal case.

One is Top G: the man who boasts that he can move markets with a tweet, describes himself as one of the most powerful humans alive, talks about passports and bank accounts scattered around the world and presents extreme wealth as the natural consequence of understanding how power really works.

The other is the Andrew Tate his lawyers want the judge to evaluate: a businessman and entertainer whose online persona is saturated with satire, promotion, exaggeration and deliberate absurdity.

His own testimony draws the line explicitly. “Top G is a character,” Andrew said in an April deposition quoted in his bail filing. He told lawyers that he makes stories as entertaining as possible and expects viewers to recognize sarcasm and hyperbole. His trillionaire claim? Comedy. Tristan made the same argument about his own material, describing one set of podcast boasts as a “gratuitous attempt at self-promotion” that should not be taken seriously.

The defense wants that distinction to matter legally. Its August filing argues that years of social-media bravado should not become evidence that the brothers will flee. It says prosecutors are attempting to transform “obvious satire, hyperbole, and promotion” into evidence of real-world intent. The lawyers point instead to the brothers’ actual conduct under Romanian judicial supervision: 1,193 days, 34 international departures, 34 returns and zero failures to appear.

Prosecutors are making almost the opposite argument: the persona cannot become fictional only when its creator needs it to be. At Thursday’s hearing, they used Tate’s own content to challenge his claim that the online character and the real man can be cleanly separated. That disagreement reaches far beyond whether the brothers receive bail.

Our Take: “It’s a character” is a legitimate explanation for some of this. Anyone who has watched professional wrestling, reality television or influencer culture understands that a public persona can be exaggerated without every viewer being deceived. Tate saying he is a trillionaire does not require an investigation into whether he has literally accumulated a trillion dollars.

But Tate’s business creates a harder question because Top G was not merely entertainment sitting beside the product. Top G helped authenticate the product. Millions of young men were being offered a model of the world: how women work, how money works, how powerful men behave, why ordinary society keeps men weak and how to escape it. The apparent lifestyle supplied the proof. A man surrounded by supercars could claim to know how to make money with more authority than a man standing beside a rented Toyota.

That is why the line between character and person matters here. If the extreme rhetoric was theater, which parts were instruction? If the trillionaire claim was obviously a joke, which wealth claims were meant as evidence? If the cars were rented and the yacht promotional, what exactly was the student supposed to understand when those objects appeared on screen?

The easiest response is that everyone knew Tate was exaggerating. Some undoubtedly did. But his own defense has now supplied the question the larger manosphere has to answer: How much of an influencer’s authority survives once the audience is told that the evidence establishing that authority was part of the performance?

🤯 Bro Meltdown of the Week

The trial has produced thousands of pages of psychiatric transcripts. It took a video clip to completely detonate the timeline. The clip that set this off runs twenty-one seconds. End Wokeness, an anti-woke account with 3.9 million followers, posted footage from the pink rally outside the Clancy courthouse under a caption built to detonate: Lindsay Clancy strangled her three kids, current scene outside the courthouse. On screen, women in pink make heart-hands and one holds a baby. Caught on the audio, a woman at the rally says: “I don’t know if you’ll ever have this many women in one place at one time who may understand all of us on a level that others don’t.”

The post cleared 23.5 million views.

The replies did not stay on Clancy. They turned on the women in the frame. The gentlest register was apocalyptic. “If you didn’t believe in Satan before here you go.” “We’re living in the end times.” Another user called the crowd evidence of a society that had abandoned God. One demanded that Clancy be put in the electric chair with “no postpartum discussion.” Another looked at a mother carrying a baby in the crowd and asked what her presence said about her fitness as a parent. One response simply said: “Sterilize them.”

The streamer Asmongold, one of the most-watched on the platform, walked nearly half a million viewers through a full sequence: seize the rally mothers’ kids, commit the women, use the commitment to rule them unfit, then strip their voting rights. Problem solved, he wrote. Peachy Keenan, an advocate for traditional family life and critic of modern feminism, flipped the scene into a threat, promising that if she ever killed her own children these same women would see her drawn and quartered. Former youtuber and conservative commentor Lauren Chen filed Clancy alongside the trans “craze” and eating disorders as symptoms of social media. A chorus called the rally mass formation psychosis, the crowd that never took its masks off.

Notice who is talking. Keenan and Chen are women. So is the account sneering about white liberals in Massachusetts. The meltdown over a rally of women is being run, in part, by women.

Our Take: The clip is the machine: 21 seconds, with no context, and a caption that does the reading for you, so 23 million people arrive already told that heart-hands outside a courthouse mean a party for a child-killer. The optics are a hard watch, which is exactly why it travels. Then the anger skips past the woman who actually killed her children and settles on the strangers who felt something about it. The killing was Clancy’s, but the punishments on offer were for the audience.

Two things cut against the story the clip is selling. The people calling the rally a mass psychosis were themselves inside a 23-million-view outrage event, diagnosing everyone but the crowd they had joined. And the harshest calls to punish these women came, in part, from women, which is the detail the hysterical-females reading cannot hold.

What the woman on the audio actually said was that she felt understood. The account set her voice under a caption about strangling, and told 23 million people which one to believe. Most of them did.

💬 Quote of the Week

“The degree to which common women will come to the defense of a triple homicide of children illustrates just how much we’ve pandered to the Sisterhood Über Alles. It’s time for men to say ‘NO!’ to women. Firmly, loudly, we draw the line here. Women need to be shaken, physically, with their eyes held open, and be told by men, THIS IS MURDER!”

Rollo Tomassi, August 27, 2026, on X.

Tomassi, author of The Rational Male and one of the foundational writers of the modern red pill, takes the Lindsay Clancy backlash one step beyond disgust at the women supporting her. His target is now what he calls “common women” and a culture that, in his telling, has indulged female solidarity for too long. The response he proposes is explicitly male: men must finally say no, draw the line and force women to confront what happened.

Our Take: Watch the sentence travel. It opens on three dead children and closes on grown men putting hands on women. “Sisterhood Über Alles” does the setup, borrowing a fascist anthem to recast women’s sympathy as a supremacist bloc, because a bloc is something you’re permitted to put down. Then the remedy arrives, and the remedy is force: shaking a woman until she sees it his way. “Eyes held open” is the Clockwork Orange image, a person strapped in and made to watch until she is corrected.

Tomassi began by condemning a killing and ended by prescribing coercion, in capital letters, as though the coercion were the high ground. It is the whole week’s move in one breath. A single woman’s crime becomes a license over all of them.

📈 Platform Moves: With the Tates Sidelined, Tradcons Move to Capture the Alpha Vacuum

While Andrew Tate spent the week on a witness stand insisting he is a character, another figure moved into the space he left. Jack Posobiec, a MAGA operative with a large following and no prior claim to the men’s-advice lane, spent eight days building a campaign on the Clancy case. He opened on August 20 with a post styled as a news bulletin, telling four million viewers that feminists were lined up cheering a woman who killed her three children.

The next day he handed the moment a banner: twenty years of “toxic masculinity,” he wrote, and now it is time for “Toxic Feminism.” He resurfaced Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in 1994, and her ex-husband’s words at her parole hearing, stacking a second case behind the first.

Then he gave orders. On August 24 he told men to leave any woman who sympathizes with Clancy: dump them, break off engagements, make it public. Talk to your bros, he wrote. We are bringing back public shame. When an ally answered that communities should be made inhospitable not just to “supporters of murderers” but to “all enemies of our culture,” Posobiec replied, So true. By August 28 he had steered the same case into a different war, asking why hormones supposedly dangerous enough to make Clancy kill are fine to give people who transition.

Our Take: The register here is organizing. Posobiec issues directives, coins a banner meant to outlast the trial, and revives a tactic by name. The timing is the move. The manosphere’s biggest draw is in a Miami cell testifying that his whole persona was a bit, its second tier has spent the summer feuding with itself, and into that quiet steps an election operative who usually works precincts, folding the gender war into recruitment. The Clancy case is his door. The reply from an X user shows the size of the room behind it, the target widening from “Clancy fans” to “all enemies of our culture” in a single exchange, with Posobiec nodding it through.

The numbers tell on the movement he is convening. The rage bulletin cleared four million views. The actual marching order, dump her and shame her in public, drew a fraction of that, and the trans-hormones pivot outpulled it too. What he has assembled behaves less like an army than an audience. It shows up for the outrage and thins out when he starts handing out instructions. The call to bring back public shame is the tell. You announce a movement when you are still trying to summon one.

👀 What to Watch: Two Decisions Could Set Off the Gender War Next Week

Next week, two American courtrooms answer questions this newsletter watched the internet answer for itself all month.

In Miami, Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis owes a written ruling on whether Andrew and Tristan Tate walk out on bail, and it could arrive any day. Release pending extradition is rare, reserved for defendants who clear a “special circumstances” bar most never reach, so the smart money says no. If she says yes, the defense this edition opened on will have worked: the wealth downgraded to promotion, the persona downgraded to a character, sold to a federal judge and bought. The brothers rejoin their feeds on their own terms, and the martyr becomes a victor. If she says no, they stay in the Special Housing Unit while Britain’s September 16 deadline to file its formal request ticks down, and the persecution story writes its next chapter from a cell. Either ruling scripts the month that follows.

In Plymouth, the Clancy jury comes back Monday morning, roughly ten hours into deliberations with nothing decided. The slip gives them five options. In practice the fight is among murder, which carries a life sentence, manslaughter, and a finding that she was not criminally responsible, which sends her to a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison. Each answer arms a different side. A murder conviction lets the accountability chorus claim its win. A not-responsible finding hands the “no accountability for women” crowd the proof text they have spent all week writing toward. A deadlock and a mistrial leave everyone where they started, angrier.

The panel deciding her fate is nine women and three men, with a woman as foreperson. The feeds spent the month certain those women would spring her out of sisterhood. Twelve of them just spent the weekend unable to agree. Whatever they return, they did the work the timelines skipped.

Our Take: These are legally unrelated cases. Online, they are converging around the same question: who gets held accountable, and who gets an explanation? That is why next week matters. One judge could decide whether the most famous men in the manosphere walk out of jail. Twelve jurors could decide whether the woman who became its latest symbol of “female accountability” is a murderer in the eyes of the law.

Either way, the gender war is going to have material to work with.

🙋🏾‍♂️ Reader Intelligence

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The video stays with the feeling underneath all of it, the one I run into everywhere I go. What is a man supposed to be now? A lot of boys and men carry that question around with nowhere good to take it. So they take it online, to the one corner that acts like it already has the answer.

The injury is real. A lot of boys grow up without a map, without a model, sometimes without the words for what’s missing. The manosphere hears the question and hands them an answer. A lot of the time, it works. That last part is the one that usually gets left out.

Take a look, and tell me what you’re seeing with the boys and men in your own life.

I’m in Pittsburgh right now, sitting in rooms with men, young and old. The wound is real. When the talk turns to women and relationships, the feeling comes up raw. Men are hurting.

What happens next is the part worth watching.

You could sit with it as what it is: one bad night, between two imperfect people. Instead, online culture is right there with an answer. One woman becomes all women. One rejection becomes the way it always goes. And it’s fast, almost frictionless. The manosphere gets something churches and schools and fathers keep missing: it doesn’t try to talk you out of the pain. It tells you the pain is real, then it hands you someone to blame.

When you’re hurting, that can feel like clarity. One rejection is a story about one night. It gets sold to you as a story about half the world.

Then comes the familiar story: the manosphere is full of grifters selling anger, resentment and easy answers.

Many of the young men I talk to already know that. They know these influencers are building businesses. They know they’re being sold something.

They listen anyway, because the manosphere speaks directly to frustrations they feel around dating, masculinity, work, status and their place in the world. It gives those frustrations a language.

That is the part much of the coverage still struggles to understand.

We keep writing stories about the salesman while barely talking to the young men standing in front of him.

Week of August 17, 2026 | Edition 70

Welcome back to The Manosphere.

This week the entire gender war moved into one Massachusetts courtroom.

Lindsay Clancy admits she strangled her three children. Her trial should be a narrow legal question about one mother’s mind on one January night. Instead, it became the argument the internet has been spoiling to have. Women rallied outside the courthouse in pink. The manosphere turned “what do you think of Lindsay Clancy” into a screening question for your girlfriend. A fundraiser crossed a million dollars and the replies started forecasting the apocalypse. Matt Walsh built a week of programming out of her. Candace Owens called her innocent and blamed Big Pharma, and her own side turned on her for it.

As you read this week, one question to hold: when extreme domestic horror is weaponized as a pre-marriage litmus test, are we witnessing the legitimate collapse of relational trust, or the final stage of an algorithm that turns human ruin into ideological ammunition?

Let’s get into it.

This edition discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpartum mental illness. Support is available anytime: call or text 988, or reach the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-852-6262.

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell

• A filicide trial became a courtship filter. Red-pill creators and conservative commentators turned the defense of Lindsay Clancy into an immediate loyalty test for modern marriage.

• A million-dollar defense fund broke the timeline. News of 30,000 donors subsidizing Clancy triggered an existential meltdown across male feeds.

• The right fractured over culpability. Matt Walsh demanded absolute moral accountability, while Candace Owens split the coalition by routing the defense into anti-pharma populism.

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🚨 Signal of the Week: The Manosphere Turned a Child-Killing Into a First-Date Question

Lindsay Clancy, 36, does not dispute that she strangled her three children inside their Duxbury, Massachusetts home on January 24, 2023. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. Afterward she jumped from a second-story window and survived, paralyzed from the waist down. Her defense, led by Kevin Reddington, argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder and cannot be held criminally responsible. Prosecutors say she planned it, cleared the house by sending her husband out for medicine and dinner, and knew right from wrong. The trial is livestreamed gavel to gavel from Plymouth Superior Court. The defense rested Friday. A verdict could land this week.

The trial has become the ultimate litmus test in the gender war. Outside the courtroom, the legal debate over the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) vanished. Over the past week, Google search interest in the trial spiked into breakout territory, while social media feeds turned an unspeakable domestic tragedy into the fiercest proxy war between online feminism and the manosphere.

On one side, the defenders. On August 20, roughly 300 supporters, nearly all women, gathered outside the courthouse in pink, holding signs reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace For Lindsay.” It was the first large turnout of the month, and the judge afterward polled the jury one by one to check for exposure. “Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up,” a 52-year-old paralegal from Rhode Island told reporters. Candace Owens went further on her show, declaring Clancy “obviously not guilty,” the victim of an “intentional psychosis” induced by a “cocktail” of pharmaceuticals when she “probably just needed to give her kids away for a weekend.” The clip cleared 1.9 million views.

On the other side, the manosphere convened a tribunal on the defenders.

Two of its biggest voices turned the trial into a dating screen. “Men if your girlfriend is pressing for a family and marriage, ask her what she thinks of the Lindsay Clancy trial,” wrote Richard Cooper (@Rich_Cooper, 68.8K views), author of The Unplugged Alpha and last week’s Quote of the Week. “If she shows any support or sympathy for Lindsay, dump her immediately.” Zuby (@ZubyMusic, 699K views) offered the same instrument: “find out how she acted during Covid and get her opinion on the Lindsay Clancy case first. Just trying to save you some pain.”

Others read the entire episode as proof of a system that never holds women responsible. Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson, 845.7K views) itemized the killings, then delivered the verdict: “Feminism has always been a death cult where the end goal is the power to murder your children out of convenience... These demons need Lindsay to get away with murder.” Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog, 1M views) mocked the diagnosis directly: “I never knew that you could plan your psychotic break like that. Just pencil it into your calendar.” Of the people defending her, he wrote: “They’re demons. They’re nearly as bad as she is.” Nick Fuentes called it “pure evil.” Sneako, the movement’s resident Muslim heel, added a racial frame: “a Christian white woman... her predominately white Christian fans made her a millionaire. They will play dumb and continue to scream about Muslims.”

That millionaire claim, repeated by Fuentes and Johnson, describes a GoFundMe that has raised over $1 million. The beneficiaries are Clancy’s parents, and GoFundMe’s own rules forbid routing it to her defense.

Beneath the defenders sits a wing the defenders would rather disown. A vocal set of TikTok creators has decided Patrick Clancy, the children’s father, is the real killer. “I do not believe that Lindsay Clancy committed these crimes. I fully believe that Patrick convinced her that she did,” one posted. Investigators cleared Patrick early on CVS surveillance, phone records, and GPS. He was the prosecution’s first witness, and a Duxbury officer testified that when police reached the basement, Patrick looked up and screamed that she had killed the kids. His attorneys are now warning of defamation suits against everyone “from minor influencers to major celebrities.”

Our Take: The Lindsay Clancy trial stopped being an inquiry into criminal sanity the moment it hit the digital feed. It has become a brutal cultural referendum on the fundamental social contract between men and women.

For the manosphere, the online defense of Clancy represents the terminal stage of what they term the female accountability void. In their view, if a mother can methodically take the lives of three children and still receive million-dollar fundraisers for her family, sympathetic courthouse rallies, and internet campaigns exonerating her, then the culture has abandoned objective morality in favor of gender-based absolution. Figures like Walsh and Cooper are presenting the public reaction as living evidence that modern society will pathologize female agency while demanding male accountability for the fallout.

The counter-reaction demonstrates the sheer extremity of online tribalism. Because the reality of a mother destroying her own family is too terrifying for certain corners of the internet to confront, the algorithm conjured a sinister patriarchal villain out of a grieving father with an airtight alibi.

This dynamic cuts to the deepest anxiety driving modern male disengagement. Red-pill creators point to Patrick Clancy as the ultimate cautionary tale: a man who worked, provided, supported an ailing spouse, stepped out for the better part of an hour to pick up dinner and medicine for his family, and returned to find his entire world obliterated, only to be audited and defamed by millions of strangers on the internet.

By turning Clancy into a pre-marriage litmus test alongside pandemic behavior, the manosphere is codifying a new rule of digital courtship. The case has been absorbed into the permanent ideological arsenal, cited by men as definitive proof that the risks of marriage and fatherhood have never been higher.

📚 Power Plays: “If a Father Did This.” The Chris Watts Test, and the Case No One in the Fight Will Name

Two words have done more work this week than any argument: Chris Watts.

Watts murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters in Colorado in 2018, pleaded guilty, and became one of the most reviled men in America. Nobody convened a conversation about the pressures on fathers. Nobody built him a defense fund. The manosphere has spent the week holding him up as the control variable. In their telling, Clancy did something comparably monstrous and received vigils, a million dollars, and a diagnosis, while Watts got a cell and a nation’s contempt. A widely shared essay this week reduced it to seven words: “It’s only women who get this sympathy.”

The same name is flying the other way. On TikTok, the wing convinced that Patrick Clancy is the real killer has taken to calling him “Chris Watts 2.0,” recasting the surviving father as an annihilator who framed his wife. One dead man, aimed at whichever parent the poster already hates.

Grant the movement its strongest point, because it is partly true. Studies that show people an identical child killing and flip only the parent’s sex find that evaluators reach for mental illness to explain the mothers and for rage or revenge to explain the fathers. Watts was never going to get the psychosis conversation.

Now set Clancy beside the case the movement never mentions, the one that holds sex constant.

In 2018, Latarsha Sanders, a mother in Brockton, in the same county as Duxbury, stabbed her two sons, eight-year-old Marlon and five-year-old La’son. She admitted it. Her lawyers argued she was not criminally responsible, that a psychosis had convinced her a secret society was coming for her family. A psychologist who examined her found her “grossly psychotic” and diagnosed a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. Her case was charged by Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, the same prosecutor now trying Clancy, and heard by Judge William Sullivan, the same judge now presiding over Clancy. The jury deliberated about four hours and convicted her of first-degree murder. She received two life sentences without parole.

No women in pink stood outside that courthouse. No million-dollar fund materialized. Sanders is Black, was a single mother, and had no documented psychiatric history before the day she killed her children. Prosecutors even floated that she might have been after money, pointing to talk of an online fundraiser for her family.

On August 6, in the middle of the Clancy trial, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out Sanders’ conviction and ordered a new trial. The reason: Sullivan had kept thousands of pages of her psychiatric records from the jury. The same judge, in the same county, is now running the most-watched insanity trial in the country.

Our Take: The manosphere reaches for Chris Watts because Watts turns the case into men versus women, the only frame the genre knows how to sell. And the asymmetry they point at is real. A father who kills is a monster by default. A mother who kills gets asked what was done to her first.

Latarsha Sanders breaks that frame, which is why no one in the fight will say her name. She is a mother too. Her psychosis finding was at least as strong as anything Clancy’s team has put on the stand, arguably stronger, since Sanders carried no prior treatment history to muddy it. She confessed, like Clancy. Same county, same prosecutor, same judge, same defense. Hold sex steady and the sympathy still runs in one direction only. What moved was everything the movement leaves out of its equation: Race and class. A nurse’s résumé against a single mother’s. A family that photographed well against one the prosecution called ritualistic.

Call it what the evidence supports: a sympathetic-victim economy, and it runs a strict door policy. Clancy clears it. Watts was turned away at the entrance, while Sanders was never on the list.

One judge decided both women’s trials. A month ago, the state’s highest court ruled he had denied the first mother the chance to show a jury she was sick. This week he sits, on livestream, over the second, whose family has raised more than a million dollars. Same bench, same county, the same illness on paper. The country only ever learned one of their names.

⚔️ The Narrative War: Lindsay Clancy Became Exhibit A for “Women Are Never Held Accountable”

For the manosphere, Lindsay Clancy closed an argument. The claim that the culture will excuse any woman of anything has been a load-bearing wall of the movement for years: “accountability” has been one of the most reliable words in the online male vocabulary. It appears in arguments about divorce, single motherhood, dating, abortion, infidelity, obesity, workplace disputes and criminal cases. The recurring complaint is that modern culture explains female behavior while judging male behavior. And the pink shirts outside the Plymouth courthouse arrived as the proof the manosphere had been waiting for.

Benny Johnson, the tradcon whose post also anchored this week’s Signal, supplied the thesis: feminism’s true goal, he wrote, is “to never hold a woman accountable for anything.” His account of what Clancy did read like a closing argument. She “baited her husband” out of the house and “lured her children to the basement.” Both lines track the prosecution’s theory. Neither is settled fact, and the defense disputes the planning outright. One of Johnson’s own readers pushed back that the errand was a real prescription for a sick child rather than a trap, and that the retelling had hardened a contested psychiatric case into cold premeditation.

The fullest version of the narrative arrived two days later, from an account called Dvorstone, in an essay that opened with a warning. “This is the moment ladies. Right now. This is it.” From there the case became a hinge for everything else. Clancy, he wrote, “embodies the threat that women have been holding over all of our heads,” and her killing proved that women “wanted the ball and got it, and promptly fumbled it and refuse to accept accountability.” He climbed from one dead family in Duxbury to a verdict on the entire sex: no great women leaders, no female Einstein or Caesar, women who “haven’t produced in business or politics or science.” He landed on prophecy. “Real oppression is coming,” he warned, women “stripped of all of the contributions to society except being broodmares.”

Beneath the essays, the chorus climbed the same ladder. One account called for “a serious discussion about letting liberal white women vote.” Another said Clancy should be “put to death no matter what.” A third located the remedy in the Catholic Church, where “only men can rule,” and had since “33AD.” An account posting a photo of the pink-shirted crowd invited readers to “notice anything similar about these women other than the colors they’re wearing.” A confessed filicide had become an argument about the franchise, the priesthood, and the racial makeup of a rally.

Then came the pushback, from a direction the narrative does not account for. Much of it was conservative women. One told Johnson to his face to delete his post, citing the defendant’s own psychiatrist: Clancy “did NOT control her own thoughts and actions.” Another called Clancy “GUILTY of MURDER” while insisting in the same breath that “the system DID in fact fail her.”

Our Take: The narrative never required Clancy to be representative, only usable, and an extreme, confessed, still-contested case is the most usable exhibit there is. That is why the argument travels so fast and so far from the courtroom. “This specific woman should answer for a specific horror” is a position nearly everyone holds, including most of the people the manosphere is shouting at. A post or two later it has become “women should not vote” and “there are no great women leaders.” The distance between those two sentences is the entire trick.

The fact-handling gives the game away. To make one defendant carry a verdict on half the species, the story has to sand a disputed psychiatric case down to premeditation, which is why even Johnson’s allies corrected him. The narrative needs a monster, and a monster cannot also be a patient.

🤯 Bro Meltdown of the Week: A Fundraiser Hit $1 Million, and the Replies Reached for the Apocalypse

The killings have been public for three years. The number was new.

On August 21, the aggregator Daily Loud pushed an update to 4.6 million views: “Over 30,000 fans have now raised over $1,000,000 for Lindsay Clancy and her family. She is charged with strangling her three young children to death with exercise bands.” The post left out that the fund’s beneficiaries are Clancy’s parents, and that GoFundMe forbids routing a dollar of it to her defense. It offered a body count, a donor count, and a seven-figure total, with nothing in between.

The figure detonated something the crime alone never had. The register was end-times. “The influence of Satan is the only logical reason,” one account wrote, trying to explain how thousands of people could be “this evil, thoughtless, and void of all morals.” Another read the total as prophecy: “Jesus is coming back soon to fulfill divine prophecy, defeat evil, and judge the world.” A third pledged his life against the outcome. “If she gets away with this, I pledge my own life. I’m done with this world.” Satan, the millstone, the last days, hell. The million-dollar mark did not start an argument. It triggered a revelation.

A second wave fixed on two words in the post. “And her family?” one replied. “She doesn’t have a family, she strangled them to death.” Others hammered the same key. “Her family? They’re ALL DEAD.” “There ain’t no family left.” From there the outrage found its perverse-incentive frame (”Kill kids, get a million dollars,” “being a murder suspect is a better lifestyle than working a 9-5”) and its enforcement fantasy, with one user proposing a tool to surface every donor’s real name so they could be “publicly ridiculed.” Some read the crowd racially (”She’s white, that’s why”). One asked whether the donors were moved by “suicidal empathy” or something more engineered. A wing past all of that turned to open cruelty and death-wishes, which is as much of it as belongs in print.

Our Take: The crime was three years old. The seven-figure total was hours old, and that is what broke the timeline. A postpartum-psychosis defense is close to illegible on a feed. A number is not. You cannot cross-examine 30,000 strangers, so the replies stopped reasoning and started forecasting the end of the world. Apocalypse is the one frame that demands no engagement with the particulars, because once it is the last days, postpartum psychosis and a contested trial and the difference between a defense fund and a parents’ fund are all beneath notice.

The figure everyone is reacting to funds something other than what they assume. The money goes to Clancy’s parents, who sit in the gallery every day, and by the platform’s own rules it cannot reach her defense. “Kill kids, get a million dollars” describes a transaction GoFundMe prohibits. The correction will not travel, because the number is doing emotional work that the facts would only interrupt. The unease beneath it is real and worth saying plainly. Tens of thousands of people chose to move money into the orbit of a woman who admits she strangled her three children, and a great many onlookers find that grotesque. The meltdown took that genuine discomfort and inflated it into a bounty on infanticide.

💬 Quote of the Week

“Fellas, what would you rather meet in the forest alone: a postpartum psychotic, heavily medicated mother of 3, or a grizzly bear?”

Rollo Tomassi, August 19, 2026, on X.

Tomassi, author of The Rational Male and one of the foundational figures of the modern red-pill movement, was repurposing the “man or bear” debate that exploded online in 2024.

Our Take: The line hijacks the man-or-bear debate, the viral 2024 question in which women, asked whether they would rather run into a strange man or a bear alone in the woods, kept picking the bear. It became its own gender-war referendum, with women describing their fear of male violence and men responding that the comparison treated ordinary men as predators. The manosphere read that as proof women hold an irrational contempt for men.

Tomassi flips the terms and hands the fear back across the aisle. Now the woman is the thing in the trees, and she out-scores the grizzly.

Watch how much the compression is carrying. For the joke to land, Clancy has to stop being a specific defendant on trial for the deaths of her own children, in the grip of a psychosis two psychiatrists spent the week disputing, and shrink to “mother of 3,” a category, a shape on a path. The single most extreme and least representative case in the country gets promoted to the default woman. That move took the rest of this edition several thousand words. Tomassi does it in one sentence, which is roughly how he earned the title.

There is a concession hiding inside the flex. The man-or-bear question was women naming, clumsily, a fear of male violence. Tomassi’s reply is to manufacture a woman so dangerous she beats a bear, which accepts the premise of the whole game and only insists the men should win it. More than a decade of his writing rests on one claim, that female nature is the hazard a man must learn to manage. Here it is at full compression: The woman is the bear.

📈 Platform Moves: Matt Walsh Turned Lindsay Clancy Into a Weeklong Programming Block

Matt Walsh has four million followers on X, and a bio he wears as a joke: “Theocratic fascist, bestselling children’s author, world renowned DEI consultant.” For much of this week his account ran as the tradcon news desk on the Clancy trial, and the desk was doing more than reacting to the case. It was building something out of it.

The thesis arrived on August 17 across three escalating posts. Postpartum depression, Walsh argued, comes “not so much [from] hormones” as from the reality that babies are demanding and force parents to subordinate themselves. He aimed it straight at the defendant. Clancy had more help than most, he wrote, and her “depression” stayed unsolvable because “its real source was a selfish hatred of her children.” He closed with a rule for any mother who has ever had such a thought: “You aren’t a victim at all. Nobody should feel sorry for you.”

Then the platform answered him. X appended a Community Note to the first post, citing the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic: postpartum depression is multifactorial, driven substantially by the sharp post-birth drop in estrogen and progesterone along with sleep loss, and “not primarily attributed to selfishness.” One of the most-followed voices in the culture war had his premise corrected in-line, beneath his own words, by the site’s own machinery.

Walsh kept feeding the desk. He quote-tweeted a clip of a licensed therapist saying “many of us see ourselves in Lindsay” and added two words, “This one was great,” installing the therapist as the day’s villain for four million people. He spent the rest of the week taking return fire from two directions. A viral post set his treatment of male mass shooters, where he reaches for psychiatric drugs, against his treatment of Clancy, where he reaches for evil. “Precisely zero contradiction,” he answered, insisting he has said for years that drugs “probably play a role in these massacres” and that moral responsibility survives the pharmacology regardless. Then his own colleague stepped in. Joel Berry, who edits the Babylon Bee, warned of “a new emerging strain on the right that has zero interest in limiting government power.” Walsh replied that every real conservative “wants to wield and even expand government power” in the areas that count.

Our Take: Walsh’s feed is where the manosphere’s news desk does its clearest work, and this week put the method on display. The account spent seven days building rather than covering. The doctrine it built: postpartum suffering is mostly selfishness, the mothers who kill are simply evil, and no one should spend sympathy on them. Clancy is the occasion. The rule for “any mother who has ever entertained the idea” is the product.

Watch the slippage that powers it. Walsh litigates “depression,” in scare quotes, all week. The defense at trial is arguing postpartum psychosis, a different and far more severe condition, the one where a person hears a voice and loses contact with reality. Knock down the smaller claim and the audience never registers that the larger one was the actual question. The Community Note is the rare instance of the platform stepping into that maneuver, and it will not dent the reach. The note becomes part of the artifact, screenshotted next to the post, proof to his readers that the medical establishment is the thing on trial.

Grant Walsh the part of his logic that holds up. “Psychiatry does not erase moral responsibility” is a defensible position, and he does point the drug argument at male killers too. What gives the game away is the direction of the sympathy. For the man, the pills are the story and the evil is a footnote. For the woman, the evil is the story and the pills are an alibi she is working. Same chemistry, opposite verdict, sorted by sex.

The Berry exchange is where the joke in the bio curdles. The Clancy posts are ammunition in a larger campaign, the one where the state should wield and expand its power to enforce a moral order, and this was the week Walsh made that case in earnest, out loud, until a fellow conservative felt moved to flag it. He calls himself a theocratic fascist to mock the people who call him one. For seven days he showed them their receipts.

👀 What to Watch: Candace Owens Blamed Big Pharma. Will Lindsay Clancy Become a MAHA Cause?

The gender war organized most of this edition. The fight to watch next cuts straight across it.

On her show this week, Candace Owens took a listener’s question about Clancy and delivered a verdict that runs further than Clancy’s own lawyers will go. “Lindsay Clancy is obviously not guilty,” she said. The real criminals were “a fleet of doctors who should be imprisoned for what they put her on.”

Big Pharma, in her telling, gets “away with murder all the time, and in this case, they are getting away with the murder of really her three children.” Clancy “was put into an intentional psychosis” by “a cocktail of 10 pharmaceuticals,” Owens said, when “she probably just needed to give her kids away for a weekend to get better.”

Clancy’s attorney argues she was not criminally responsible, a legal finding that still opens with the fact that she killed her children. Owens went to “innocent,” and named a culprit the courtroom has not: doctors who, she says, manufactured the psychosis on purpose. The trial has established no such intent, and even the pill count is contested, with Owens saying ten, other accounts saying thirteen, and prosecutors at the 2023 arraignment describing three at the time of the killings.

The right did not close ranks behind her. It came apart. Nick Fuentes, who had spent the week calling the pink-shirt women demonic, turned the same fire on his own side’s biggest star. “Have you lost your f---ing mind?” he demanded. “You’re a mother yourself, you sick bitch.”

Others reacted with plain disbelief. “What the actual fuck,” wrote one commentator. “That video of Candace Owens saying Lindsay Clancy is innocent is fake, right?” asked another, unable to accept she had said it. One critic managed to attack Owens and still demand Clancy “be hanged by the neck until dead” in the same post. A fourth catalogued Owens’s recent run of unpopular defenses, from Harvey Weinstein to Hunter Biden, and asked what was wrong with her. Another summed up the damage in eight words: “there goes the neighborhood for the Clancy narrative.”

None of this is a fringe quarrel. The frame Owens is using now runs through the federal government. Her Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., launched a plan this spring to wean Americans off antidepressants, has directed his department to assess the “threat” posed by SSRIs and antipsychotics, and has repeatedly linked psychiatric drugs to mass shootings, a claim researchers reject and that no SSRI label supports. Owens applied that doctrine to a filicide.

Our Take: The line this case is opening on the right has nothing to do with gender. It runs through Big Pharma, and Candace Owens is standing on the fault.

The tradcons’ central charge against Clancy’s defenders, from Benny Johnson to Matt Walsh, is that the culture will never hold a woman accountable, that “the system failed her” is a coward’s exit from responsibility. Then the single most-viewed conservative woman in the country looked at the same defendant and produced the purest no-accountability verdict in the entire discourse. She skipped past “she was sick” to “she’s innocent, the drugs did it.” It is the exact absolution the tradcons spent the week calling demonic, rebranded from feminist to pharmaceutical.

They cannot wave her off as a blue-haired stranger on TikTok. She is one of their own, carrying a movement that reaches into a cabinet department. That is why the venom aimed at her reads identical to the venom aimed at the women on the courthouse lawn. When accountability politics meets MAHA absolution, the collision does not respect the team jersey.

Three things to watch as the verdict lands. Whether “Big Pharma killed them” spreads across the right as a general-purpose defense once a jury rules. Whether the Owens and Fuentes split hardens into a real MAHA-versus-tradcon realignment rather than a week’s food fight. And whether a movement can keep demanding personal responsibility with one hand while its health secretary hands out chemical alibis with the other.

🙋🏾‍♂️ Reader Intelligence

What are you seeing in your corner of this ecosystem? Reply with a name, a trend, or a tip. The best reader submissions will appear in next week’s edition with attribution.

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Shaun Peterson, 45, first appeared to me the way David Lawler did, as a name under one of my stories. He commented on my follow-up about the Turkish dating joke, the piece where many readers argued about whether the greedy woman in the punchline exists. His comment did what the best reader comments do. It refused to fit either camp. He described an emotionally abusive mother, a serially cheating ex-wife, an escort who ambushed him on a second date, a doctor who assaulted him when he ended a bad evening early. Then, when I wrote back, he answered with a single sentence that has been rattling around my head ever since: “Hurt men and women have way more in common than either of them want to admit.”

So on the evening of August 11, we talked. He joined from Oklahoma City, a little out of breath, just home from a client meeting that ran long. He works in commercial banking, a vice president at a small startup bank, with a master’s degree. An only child, no kids, divorced. And, by his own half-embarrassed accounting, the physical inventory the manosphere treats as a winning lottery ticket. “Six foot, six figures,” he said, reciting the checklist with an audible shrug. “I got all that.” Female friends tell him he sits in the top five percent of men they see on dating apps. Getting dates, he said, has never once been his problem.

Hold that fact. It is the reason this conversation matters. The manosphere tells young men that if they build the body, the salary and the frame, women will finally treat them well. Shaun Peterson built all of it. What happened to him anyway is the story he wanted to tell me, and it is also, in his telling, the reason an ideology he refuses keeps finding new customers.

A word before his story, because it is his story. Peterson gave me this account over nearly two hours. His ex-wife and his mother, the two women at the center of it, did not take part and do not speak here. I am not naming them. What could be checked against the public record, I checked. Oklahoma court records confirm the marriage and the divorce, and the dates line up with his telling. Smaller details held too, entity names, an address in Florida. So the marriage and its ending are documented. The reasons behind it, including the affair, are his account, and his ex-wife would tell them another way. Read the rest knowing which is which.

Andrew Tate marries Hillary Clinton

Start where he started, in Wichita, Kansas, in a house he describes as a matriarchy with a ghost in it. His mother was the breadwinner, a healthcare director, a progressive feminist who called the shots. His father was physically present and otherwise gone, withdrawn, quietly misogynistic, a man who had been abused in his own childhood and brought the wreckage home. Peterson reached for a comparison and landed on one I will not forget.

“If Andrew Tate and Hillary Clinton got married,” he said, “that’s how I would describe my parents’ marriage.”

He calls his mother an “emotional terrorist.” He also, in the same breath, refuses the clinical vocabulary the internet loves. “I hate to get into diagnosing people,” he told me. “I think it’s a slippery slope.” He was well fed, financially supported, never deprived. And, he said, constantly criticized, constantly corrected, recruited from a young age as the audience for his mother’s moods. An only child has no siblings to compare notes with. “I didn’t really have anybody to process it with,” he said. What it built, in his telling, was a pleaser. A boy who learned that having his own needs was selfish, who grew into a man who sought approval from women covertly, through charm, through sex, through service.

Two stories from him about her, decades apart. When he was 27 or 28, laid off in the Great Recession, he signed a lease on an apartment he could afford. His mother went to the leasing office while he was at work, canceled it, demanded the deposit back, and signed him a lease somewhere else before the day ended. He had not asked. He was a grown man, and she rearranged his housing the way you would a child’s furniture.

The second story he called bonkers, and he is not wrong. In a recent conversation, his mother told him she knew her marriage to his father was over before Peterson was born, that she never loved him. He asked why she married him at all. Her answer, as he paraphrases it: in her day, an unmarried woman in her thirties risked being thought a lesbian. “Did you just say you married my father because you didn’t want people to think you were a lesbian?” he asked her. “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said. He pointed out that she had just put it exactly that way. They are not currently speaking.

“I feel like I’ve been her emotional janitor my whole life,” he said.

The marriage

His ex-wife came from the same high school. They fooled around as teenagers, drifted, and she married someone else after college. That marriage ended, and at the close of 2011 the two of them finally got together. In 2013 they moved to Spokane, Washington, for his job in specialty finance. She kept her accounting position remotely. They married in December 2014.

Then her income detonated. From $125,000 to $250,000 to $350,000 in a matter of a few years, by his numbers, on her way to a CFO title. He wants to be precise about what he felt, because he knows what the manosphere script says here. “It’s not like I was ever jealous of her,” he said. “I was actually very supportive.” What he noticed, starting in 2015, was subtraction. She got short with him. She stopped doing things with him. He tells it through ski slopes: he learned to snowboard that first winter, she tried skiing, got frustrated, threw her skis, made a scene at the resort, and never went again. She flew back to Oklahoma City constantly and left him in Spokane for weeks. When he asked whether all the trips were necessary, she snapped that he needed to deal with it.

Labor Day weekend of 2015, she called him from the airport in tears and said she could not do it anymore, she wanted to move home. He said yes on the spot. He walked away from his career to follow her back to Oklahoma City, planning to retrain in data science while she took a less stressful job. The retraining never happened, because in 2017 his father got esophageal cancer, and Peterson spent the year driving back and forth to Wichita to sit with him in hospice.

His father died on the Fourth of July. Two days later, by Peterson’s account, his wife told him, in so many words, that his dad was dead and he needed to get over it. He remembers the date the way you remember a burn. July 6. He told her he wanted a divorce.

“She threw up,” he said. “And then begged me on her hands and knees not to leave her.”

He gave in. The marriage, he says now, limped along for five more years, through marriage counseling where even the therapist lost patience with her rotating grievances. He always felt he was chasing an imaginary line, something haunting the marriage he could never name.

In the fall of 2022 he named it. She came home two hours late from a yoga class in full makeup, he told me. The family SUV had a tracker she may not have known about, and by his account it showed the car sitting somewhere she had not mentioned, engine running. On the phone that night, a friend told him what he was already thinking, that she was probably cheating. When he set a few quiet verbal traps and watched her walk into them, he felt, of all things, a little peace.

The rest, he says, came out fast. In his telling there was another man, a coworker, and the detail that separates his story from the generic one, a secret apartment. He says he asked her one raw question, whether it had ever happened in their bed. Her answer, as he remembers it: “Oh, hell no. I would never do that. We had an apartment.” She said it, he told me, as if it were a courtesy.

Then she vanished. His word. And her leaving voided something that had nothing to do with the two of them: the couple had taken in a foster child, and the foster agency’s contract required both of them. When she walked out, the placement collapsed, and the boy went back to his shelter. Peterson has not seen him since.

The divorce took roughly 62 days. She married the other man almost immediately, and they are together still.

Right out of the playbook

Here is where Peterson’s story stops being a divorce story and becomes a document about why the red pill sells.

His ex-wife, he told me, was a visible feminist. She marched after the 2016 election. She wore Elizabeth Warren t-shirts, the “nevertheless, she persisted” kind. She was a proud professional woman earning $350,000 a year. The man she left him for is older, wealthy, a Republican, a Trump voter. She quit working. “She went from being a CFO making $350,000 a year to being a housewife to some old Republican dude with money,” Peterson said. “That’s right out of the red pill playbook.”

He knows exactly what he just handed the manosphere. He hands it over anyway, and then he does something the manosphere never does. He declines the conclusion.

Did she use you, I asked. “I think she used me,” he said. “I don’t think she consciously or intentionally used me. I think she was just a dummy who just couldn’t handle communicating.” His theory of his own marriage has no villainous mastermind in it. He thinks he was a trophy she was supposed to win from her younger years, and once she won him she had no idea what she wanted. He thinks she got scared and isolated in Spokane, and he empathized with that, and his empathy bought him nothing. “It’s almost like she punished me for being nice,” he said.

Then, when I put the red pill’s core doctrine to him directly, that niceness makes women lose respect and only hard men are safe, he pushed it away. “I think that’s a gross simplification of what’s actually happening,” he said. His real problem, he thinks, was that his mother trained him out of knowing what he wanted, and a man who does not know what he wants cannot hold steady with anyone.

“My mom and my ex are the types of women that keep red pill alive,” he told me. “I don’t think all women are like that.”

Both halves of that sentence are him. He repeats versions of it all conversation. The ideology is wrong, and the women who raised and married him are its best recruiters, and he is done pretending the second part is not true.

The dating notes

His comment under my piece mentioned two incidents, and I asked him to walk me through both. The first: a woman he matched with on a dating app who revealed, on the second date, that she had what she called expectations. She wanted her rent paid. She pressed the point while rubbing his leg and crotch, and he froze. “I’m not going to pay you to fuck me,” he eventually told her. “We met on a dating app. You don’t get to renegotiate those terms after the fact.”

He has seen profiles openly listing hourly rates, and after we spoke he sent me a handful of screenshots. One is an explicit ad, a flat rate for an hour and a higher one for the night, posted under a real first name and age. Others are tamer but point the same direction, pushing matches off the app toward a Snapchat handle, an Instagram account, a private dating email. One cuts against the rest entirely, a woman asking only for a non-sexual, church-centered friendship. I am not publishing them. They belong to real, nameable people, and putting them in front of this audience would do those people harm for no good reason.

I should also be straight about what they prove, which is less than it might seem. They are other people’s profiles, not his marriage or his dates, and I cannot tell you when he captured them, where, or how hard he had to look to find them. They show that this kind of thing exists on the apps he uses. Four screenshots cannot tell you how common it is, and I am not going to pretend they can.

The second incident he calls an assault, and I would too. A trauma surgeon, met through an app while he was visiting Kansas City, who looked nothing like her photos. He stayed polite through the evening and tried to end it at the door. She shoved him and called him a pussy for refusing to go home with her. She phoned a day or two later to ask about a second date, and got angry all over again when he declined. Reverse the sexes in that story and every reader knows exactly what to call it. Peterson’s larger complaint, the one that made me reach out in the first place, is that when the sexes are not reversed, dozens of women told him he must have done something to deserve it.

I pressed him on his generalizations, because there were plenty. When he said women who want to come over right away just want sex, I reminded him this is the exact charge women make about men. He conceded more ground than I expected. “Women are not really allowed to own their sexuality in a way that men are,” he said. “I do think that’s a fair gripe that a lot of women have.”

He spent years, by his own description, playing the six-foot, six-figures persona like a kid in a candy store, more one-night stands than he can count, swinger parties, the works. He does not tell those stories with pride. He tells them like a man describing an anesthetic.

The questions he did not duck, and the one that stopped me

I put the hard ones to him, because that is the point of this series.

Some would say your mother and your ex-wife were simply strong women, I told him, and that your problem is with strong women. “I would not define being conflict-avoidant and passive-aggressive as being a strong woman,” he answered. His current girlfriend, he pointed out, is an HR executive, warm, direct, strong in her own way, and he adores her.

When I brought him the feminists’ receipts, the persistent data on men in top positions, the obstacles women still describe in the workplace, he cited Title IX, hiring mandates and recent studies he reads as showing bias now running the other way. Then he added something more revealing than the statistics. “If they feel it’s true, it is true. It doesn’t matter.” He meant it about women.

I will note, because fairness cuts in every direction here, that nearly everything Peterson told me over two hours is also a report of how things felt. He would probably accept the observation. He said the same reflex has spread to men, and offered what he flagged himself as a controversial opinion: that a lot of today’s angry, reactive men learned the style “from watching women do it for a long time.” He grounded it in Robert Glover’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and in the men he knows, a stepbrother, a friend who spent a decade as a federal regulator and is now unraveling, men raised inside what he called the maelstrom of their mothers’ emotions.

And once, he stopped me cold. We were talking about the Lindsay Clancy case, the Massachusetts mother on trial right now, this very week, for strangling her three children, a case in which much of social media has rallied to her side. Peterson brought it up as his proof that a certain segment of women believes women cannot fail, they can only be failed.

Then I raised a hypothetical about a wife who gave up her career for a marriage a husband later leaves, and he answered with a story about a friend whose wife, upon being asked for a divorce, cracked his skull with a frying pan and put him in a coma for 20 days. And then he asked me a question. His ex-wife, he said, wasted his best years and dangled a child in front of him as a carrot. “Do I have the right to crack her skull open? If so, why not?”

He was making a debater’s point about double standards, and he knows it landed like something else. I am leaving it in because this is what the wound sounds like when it talks, even in a calm, employed, articulate 45-year-old banker with a girlfriend. Especially then.

Betrayed, not broken

What did the divorce take from you, I asked near the end. He did not say money, though the settlement he initially thought favorable has soured with the real estate market, and he let her keep the entire 401k he had stopped funding so she could build hers.

“The fantasy,” he said. He had cast himself as the guardian of the marriage, the man holding it all together, half of a power couple. “That story was a lie,” he said. Coping dressed up as purpose.

His definition of masculinity now runs three words: “Calm, steady, decisive presence.” He rejects the word dominant. He says his masculinity was never stolen from him because he never had it, that a boy who becomes his mother’s emotional caretaker abandons himself before any woman gets the chance. His formula for what went wrong across his whole life is one a therapist and a red pill streamer would both nod at, for opposite reasons: “I tended to react instead of respond. I think that was 90 percent of my problem. I think it’s 90 percent of most men’s problems.”

He still reads the spaces where betrayed men gather, partly, he admits, because he has nowhere offline to talk about any of this. He knows men who killed themselves. “The fear is that nobody cares what I think,” he said. “But obviously that’s not true, because here we are right now, talking.” When I asked whether the manosphere’s cold framing of relationships as risk management had claimed him, he laughed it off. “It’s not like I’m buying options on my marriage.” Vetting a partner, he said, is just what adults do; the manosphere simply describes it in the most callous words available.

I asked him if he was a broken man. “No,” he said. “I would say I’m a betrayed man.” Healing, for him, looks like the last scene of “A Beautiful Mind,” the delusions still standing at the edge of the lawn, acknowledged and unfed. He wants to be, in his own metaphor, a ninja rather than a castle. The castle hides behind walls and invites siege. The ninja walks around in the open, fine, until something goes down, and then he can handle it.

Four months into his new relationship, the fear he named is the one I have heard from betrayed women my entire career, word for word: everyone is wonderful when they are in love. “All I ever think about is, yeah, but what are you like when you’re angry?”

What they have in common

Here is what I keep from Oklahoma City. In June, David Lawler, a pro-feminist men’s-work veteran, told me the manosphere had correctly named the wound and was selling poison for it. Then came Elle Beau, a feminist reader who has spent years tracking what she calls the myths women are fed, the narratives that seem to arrive on cue whenever women get more independent, there to tell them independence was never what they wanted.

Where Lawler saw men being sold a story about their wound, she saw women being sold one about theirs. Now comes Shaun Peterson, whose biography reads like a red pill recruitment brochure, the dominant mother, the absent father, the high-earning wife, the secret apartment, the Republican with more money, and whose verdict on the ideology built precisely for him is that it is a gross simplification told in deliberately callous words. Three readers, three vantage points, one diagnosis. None of them will buy the cure on offer, and each can explain, better than any influencer, why other people do.

Peterson’s mother and his ex-wife will never read themselves in his account, and if they did, they would surely tell it differently. I said that to him, more or less, and he did not flinch, because his whole argument was never that men tell the truth and women lie. It was the sentence that made me call him in the first place, the one I am handing back to him to close: hurt men and women have way more in common than either of them want to admit.

Readers in the Room is a series where I sit down with the people who fill my comment sections: the ones who push back, bring their own sources, and won’t let a point go unchallenged. The first profiled David Lawler, a pro-feminist men’s-work veteran who says the manosphere named men’s pain correctly and sells poison for it. This is the second. Elle Beau had been arguing with me in the margins for months, so we finally talked.

Correction: an earlier version of this preface mischaracterized how David Lawler came to men’s work. He did not come to it through the manosphere.

The young man did not know what to do with the hand.

He was about 17, big enough that Elle Beau remembers him as a strapping football player, and he was walking through a store beside Elle’s autistic son, who had known him for years and regarded him almost as a brother. Elle’s son likes physical affection when he trusts someone, and at some point during the outing he reached over and took the other boy’s hand. The boy turned to his mother.

“He’s holding my hand. What should I do?”

His mother gave him the obvious answer: hold his hand. So he did.

Elle has been thinking about that moment ever since, because she sees something in her adult son and the mostly male group of autistic young people he has spent years around that she rarely sees in the arguments about masculinity consuming the rest of us. They are affectionate with each other, she told me. They help one another. They show care without first checking whether care might make them look weak, feminine or gay. In her interpretation, they seem less preoccupied with performing manhood for an audience.

“I’ve known them for 10 years,” she told me. “They’re all just people, which I think is lovely and shows what’s possible.”

Elle said it herself before I could: this is anecdotal, a mother observing a small group whose neurological differences complicate any sweeping theory about socialization. Still, she wonders whether they reveal something about what happens when the usual instructions about manhood fail to land.

I have spent much of the past two years listening to men who would hear that story very differently.

Many of them have told me that being “just a person” is precisely the problem. They want a male identity. They believe men and women are different in ways culture cannot simply erase, and they are suspicious of a progressive project that seems to have become comfortable telling men what manhood should no longer be while offering little that feels distinctly male in its place.

Elle knows that argument because she has been having it with men for years.

“What’s the incentive?” some have asked her when she tells them to loosen their attachment to traditional masculinity. If the old male identity is supposed to go, what replaces it?

Her answer can sound almost provocatively simple.

“How about just being a person?”

Arguing in the margins

Elle and I had been talking for months without ever actually speaking.

She is one of those readers who enters my Medium comment sections carrying footnotes, arguments and enough words to turn a reply box into a seminar. On Medium she calls herself Elle Beau, describes herself as a social scientist writing “research driven stories,” and has more than 13,000 followers. Her writing about men predates Andrew Tate. In February 2020, before Tate became the global face of the manosphere, she published a prompt asking men about the contradictory cultural messages they had received about how a man was supposed to behave.

We disagreed often enough that eventually the comments began feeling inadequate.

So we talked.

I am calling her Elle Beau because that is the name under which she writes, and I am withholding where she lives and other details that could identify her offline. That boundary matters to her. Men online have occasionally said they wanted to find her, a few in ways that sounded threatening, which is why she keeps her physical life separate from the arguments she makes online.

What I encountered was more complicated than the feminist antagonist much of the manosphere constructs. Elle has been married for more than three decades. She has an adult autistic son who lives with her and will probably continue to need substantial support. At one point in her marriage, she stopped working outside the home and took on the domestic role that the internet now packages as “traditional.” She talks about her husband with affection and about the slow evolution of their marriage as both reconsidered who should notice the dirty floor, carry the mental inventory of a household and decide whose exhaustion counted.

She is also furious. Sometimes those two Elles appeared in the same answer.

The two Elles

I asked her about something I hear constantly from men when I report on the ground: that feminism may have begun as a movement for equal rights but eventually became hostile toward men, especially in its second, third and later waves. Elle did not hesitate.

“That it’s a deflection and an intentional misrepresentation so that you don’t have to deal with what women are actually saying.”

Then she started supplying the context she believes men routinely omit. She talked about sexual assault beginning in childhood, about women being groped, harassed and coerced and then told by men that the prevalence is exaggerated. She spoke about her own experiences, and as she did, the register of our conversation changed. The theoretical vocabulary was still there — patriarchy, socialization, dominance hierarchy — but suddenly there was a body underneath it.

She told me there was a kind of continuous stress she carries, “a constant, low-lying hum,” something she sometimes feels physically in her solar plexus. She knows that spending so much time online can make the hum louder. Her husband has asked whether she really wants to expose herself to so much of it. She has wondered the same thing.

Leaving the internet would also mean leaving one of the places where other women tell her that they recognize what she is describing. That exchange stopped me because I knew the machinery. I have spent two years reporting inside and around online male spaces where a young man arrives carrying a wound — loneliness, humiliation, rejection, anger at a parent, fear that he will never become financially independent — and encounters hundreds of people telling him they know exactly what happened to him. The feed then supplies another clip, another betrayal, another woman behaving badly, another study, until what begins as pain acquires an explanation, an audience and eventually a community.

Elle would reject any easy equivalence between feminist spaces and the manosphere, and the differences in ideology, conduct and consequences are substantial. But listening to her describe why she remained online even when it was hurting her, I could hear a mechanism I had encountered before: injury becomes easier to carry when other people recognize it, while the community built around that recognition can also keep furnishing reasons to remain injured.

Elle understands at least part of that paradox in herself. Some of her writing, she told me, is education, some is “blowing off steam,” and some is healing through contact with people who have been through similar things. The internet can aggravate the wound and tend to it in the same sitting.

What the studies actually say

During our conversation she referred to research showing, as she remembered it, that feminists “actually like men better than men like men.” The paper exists. Its conclusion is a little narrower. A 2024 paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly, drawing on six studies and nearly 9,800 people, found feminists’ attitudes toward men were positive overall and no more negative than men’s own attitudes toward men. That supports Elle’s objection to the stereotype of the man-hating feminist, though claiming feminists like men better than men like themselves stretches the paper’s actual finding.

Elle also sent me research to support one of her strongest propositions: the psychological differences between men and women are far less categorical than popular culture teaches. Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis’s 2013 paper Men and Women Are From Earth examined 122 characteristics across 13,301 people and found that most did not sort human beings into two clean male and female categories. Average sex differences exist, the authors stressed, but they generally do not let you infer a person’s psychological profile from sex alone. A broader body of work, including Janet Shibley Hyde’s review of 46 meta-analyses, points the same way.

None of that establishes that male and female psychology is entirely created by culture, or that bodies, hormones and average differences are irrelevant. What makes it harder to sustain is the internet habit of treating “men” and “women” as two internally uniform psychological species.

The identity men fear losing

That is where Elle plants her flag.

When men tell her that they require a specifically male identity, she hears evidence of how thoroughly the culture has persuaded them that maleness needs a border around it. I hear something else too.

I hear men trying to describe an identity they fear is disappearing.

Elle believes the boxes themselves create much of the trouble. If masculinity requires being dominant, stoic, independent, heterosexual in the correct manner, sexually competent, economically productive and visibly unlike women, then every boy spends part of his life being inspected for violations.

Her preferred destination is a culture where people keep whatever traits feel authentic without those traits certifying membership in a sex. She likes makeup and painted nails, she told me, and once tried discarding some of it after recognizing how much femininity had been taught to her, then decided she actually enjoyed it. For her, liberation did not require becoming less feminine. It required telling the difference between preference and instruction.

I pushed her on the obvious problem. Nobody grows up outside a society. A boy cannot simply announce that he has transcended cultural expectations and then walk into a school hallway, a locker room, a date or a job interview as though those expectations have disappeared. The men I interview understand this instinctively because they experience masculinity socially: there are rewards for performing it well and penalties for failing.

Elle agreed that nobody becomes completely free of socialization. Her answer is awareness: Teaching children enough sociology and media literacy to notice the hands operating the machinery before they mistake every instruction for instinct.

When a theory can't lose

But I kept noticing another problem.

Elle becomes frustrated when men tell women what women “really” want. She sees this constantly in manosphere discussions of dating, where women describe the qualities they find attractive only to have men explain that those women are confused, dishonest or unaware of their own preferences.

“I find it extremely condescending to be told you don’t know what you want or what you think,” she said.

Then, elsewhere, men who told her they experienced a meaningful psychological distinction between men and women were themselves read through her framework: socialization had taught them the distinction, and insecurity explained why some clung to a separate male identity.

The two situations differ in their evidence and their stakes, but the question is worth putting on both sides of the table. At what point does explaining another group become explaining that group away?

A red-pill dating coach can construct a theory so complete that a woman disagreeing with it becomes proof that women do not understand themselves. A social theory can face a similar temptation when a man’s disagreement is read primarily as evidence that the culture has prevented him from understanding himself. The danger begins when the theory becomes impossible to lose.

Measuring the wound

Then we got to male loneliness.

Elle cited a statistic she had recently encountered: men with no close friends had increased fivefold since 1990. That number checks out, with a timestamp attached. A 2021 Survey Center on American Life report found 15 percent of American men said they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. More recent evidence complicates the simple “men are uniquely lonely” story. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found men and women reporting loneliness at roughly equal rates. The clearer gap was in what they do with their relationships: 54 percent of women said they would be very likely to turn to a friend for emotional support, against 38 percent of men.

So there is a wound, though defining it takes more care than the internet usually gives it.

I asked Elle what she says to women on her own side who hear all this and answer, essentially: men created patriarchy, men still hold most institutional power, men can fix themselves. She did not defend that response.

“I counter that every time I hear that coming from a woman,” she told me.

Elle understands the appeal of women deciding to stop organizing their lives around men, and knows women who have done exactly that and are happier. She understands the exhaustion behind “men are trash,” but will not allow the phrase in her own spaces, because she considers it both untrue and useless. She has a husband, a son and male friends she cares about, and sees no plausible society in which women simply detach from half the population.

“We can vent and rage and de-center men as much as we want,” she said. “That’s not going to improve our society.”

This was the Elle who some of the men reading her essays might never imagine exists. It was also the Elle I wanted them to have to contend with. Her anger does not disappear simply because she recognizes male pain.

The temperature of the room

During one stretch of the conversation, Elle told me about the sexual violence she has experienced and the experiences women have recounted to her, then described how exhausting it is to have men argue that these events are rare, exaggerated or politically weaponized. There is abundant evidence the underlying violence is widespread. CDC data say more than one in three women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, with an enormous gender disparity in intimate-partner homicide. Elle also cited the widely circulated RAINN estimate, based on federal crime data, that an American is sexually assaulted nearly every minute.

Her anger has facts beneath it.

But anger also changes the temperature of a room, including when the person across from you did none of the things that caused it. I asked her how she reconciled the fury in her writing with her insistence that boys need spaces where they do not feel accused before they have even spoken. She thought those functions had to be separated.

A group intended to help young men, she said, “cannot be infused with anger and finger pointing because that’s just going to shut everybody down.” In the larger culture, she believes women still need room to express anger about what has happened to them, and she bristles when people tell them the problem would be easier to discuss if only they sounded nicer.

That leaves an unresolved problem at the center of the gender war. The boy experiences the whole culture, not the carefully separated rooms. He sees the viral post saying men are trash, the teacher talking about toxic masculinity, the woman explaining why she would choose the bear, the influencer telling him feminism despises him, the podcast host offering revenge disguised as self-improvement, the dating app, the pornography, the rejection and the comment section beneath all of it.

Women experience the whole culture too, including the men joking about rape, the influencer describing women as property, the stranger following them home, the politician discussing their bodies and the endless men online explaining that their fear is propaganda.

Neither arrives at the conversation empty.

The boy in the room

Near the end, I asked Elle to imagine that a 12-year-old boy had walked into the room. He has been watching the videos. He has begun repeating things about women. Maybe he thinks girls only want the top 10 percent of men. Maybe he thinks feminism has made him guilty simply for being male. Maybe he is lonely, angry, frightened about his future and thrilled that someone online has finally told him that none of his confusion is actually confusing because there is one enemy behind all of it.

What would she do?

After everything Elle had told me about patriarchy, harassment, violence and the anger in her body, I expected the answer to contain considerably more theory. Instead she started with the boy.

“You’ve got to hear them first and you’ve got to meet them where they are.”

She said she would ask questions rather than immediately correct him, because telling someone what to think rarely creates the opening to examine where a belief came from. She would want him to encounter actual women rather than the composite woman assembled for him by a feed, and women to understand the pressures boys actually face rather than the version they meet through the worst posts online.

She also wants him to learn how algorithms and marketing funnels work, because an adolescent who understands that somebody is making money from keeping him furious has at least one more fact for weighing the fury.Then she widens the bargain.

Women would have to listen too.

“I’ve definitely had guys say that women don’t really understand what we’re facing,” she said. “So, yeah, but let’s have it be reciprocal.”

By then we had been talking for almost two hours, and nothing in those minutes had disappeared. Elle still believed patriarchy was the central system organizing much of what we had discussed. She still believed men often mistake social conditioning for biological destiny. She still carried anger about what men had done to her and to women she knew, and I still had questions about whether her explanations of men left enough room for men to explain themselves.

The 12-year-old boy she imagined entering the room would eventually hear about all of that.

She just did not want it to be the first thing he heard.

Week of August 10, 2026 | Edition 69

Welcome back to The Manosphere.

This week, the feeds kept circling one question: what exactly are men supposed to do with themselves now?

A woman told men who play video games to find another hobby, and within hours the timeline had put women’s free time on trial too. A cartoon about an ugly man with flowers and a handsome man with status reopened the argument over whether kindness earns attraction, whether women’s standards are too high, and who gets told to settle. Jon Hamm announced a baby at 55, and the audience ran the actuarial tables on male agelessness. Even Brad Pitt’s passing quip about theatrical standards in adult film triggered a panicked defense of universal male vice.

Down in Miami, Andrew Tate turned sidewalk push-ups and federal inmate mail into a daily scoreboard, while his defense team rolled out an unexpected racial persecution script ahead of August 27.

As you read this week, one question to hold: are young men walking away from modern courtship because the standards are broken, or because the digital bunker feels safer than the marketplace?

Let’s get into it.

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell

• A woman told male gamers to find another hobby. Men answered by auditing women’s hobbies.

• The timeline litigated digital dating entitlement.

• Facing an August 27 detention hearing, Andrew Tate gamified his federal prison mail.

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🚨 Signal of the Week: An “Internet Princess” Told Men to Drop the Controller. 3.2 Million Views Later, Both Sexes Convened a Tribunal on Each Other’s Free Time

On August 9, an account called holisticbaddie (handle @holisticbaddie, a self-described “internet princess” and Florida journalist with 13.1K followers) posted a ten-word directive: “Men that play video games please stop get another hobby.”

No study attached, no distinction between the guy disappearing into Call of Duty for twelve hours and the guy playing Madden after work. No explanation at all. It did 1.8 million views.

Two hours later, an account called s.a.m.e.m.e.m.e (@st_louis_stan, 17.3K followers, followed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen) picked up the post with a counter-question: “Is there ever discourse about what hobbies women should stop doing so they’re more attractive to men?” That reply drew another 1.4 million views.

The second post made the symmetry question explicit, and the answers got uglier fast. If men were being told which hobbies made them unattractive, what should women give up? “You wear make up so give up your fairytale world and we’ll consider doing the same.” “How many hours of Love Island have you watched?” “Bitches who like to go to the bar please get a new hobby.” Another framed the controller as a shield: “a video game a day keeps the holistic ‘baddies’ away.” One commenter went after the market dynamics: “You should try being more interesting than games, if you’re having trouble competing with them for male attention.”

The quote tweet opened a second front, shifting the thread from defending games to auditing modern womanhood. Men lined up with a retaliatory list of female leisure: astrology, tarot cards, collecting crystals, owning stuffed animals, “traveling,” “dog ownership as a substitute for a child,” “borderline alcoholism (because it’s so girlboss to drink!),” gossiping about partners, and reading dark romance. “Their issue is not stopping unattractive hobbies,” one decreed. “Their issue is returning to attractive hobbies.”

Underneath the pile-on, one user named Win answered with an unadorned confession: “I did stop at 17. Well over a decade ago. But I never found another hobby. I just do nothing.”

Our Take: A ten-word complaint about video games landed on one of the most sensitive questions surrounding young men right now: what exactly are they supposed to be doing with themselves? The loneliness debate keeps circling the same cluster of facts and anxieties. Men socialize less; young men are more likely to be single.

Video games function as an emergency bunker in the modern gender war. For a generation of young men navigating a frozen dating market, disappearing third places, and an economy where entry-level effort rarely buys independence, the console offers predictable rules. You put in the hours, you level up, and you win with your friends. The software requires no credit score, asks for no ride home from dinner, and passes no moral judgment on your presence. Millions of men log on to Discord at 2 a.m. to find shelter from the social and financial costs of modern life.

The speed of the counter-inquest reveals how the machinery operates.

A ten-word provocation from a small account metastasized into a three-million-view tribunal on female leisure within hours. The moment a woman questions male downtime, the timeline responds with an itemized indictment. His gaming gets coded as arrested development; her travel gets coded as narcissism; his screen time is checked-out apathy; her pet is maternal evasion. Both sides pathologize each other’s private comforts because the genre demands a villain in every room.

The single sentence from Win cuts through the entire food fight: “I did stop... I just do nothing.” The feed presents this as an argument about personal ambition versus wasted potential. On the ground, for millions of men navigating isolation, the console simply fills empty hours that would otherwise remain completely dark. The timeline spent two days litigating who holds the more embarrassing pastimes, while both sides stayed behind locked doors, keeping score against people they have already decided never to meet.

📚 Power Plays: She Said Ugly Men Feel Entitled to Beautiful Women. The Replies Put Women’s Standards on Trial

The image is one of the oldest visual parables on the internet. On the left stands a slumped, balding figure clutching a bouquet of wild flowers and a cardboard tag that reads loyal, kind, stable. On the right stands a chiseled six-foot-three avatar with a Louis Vuitton belt, a Lamborghini key fob, a smartphone displaying a hundred thousand followers, and a woman gazing up at his jawline under the headline: “I just want a good man.”

On August 15, an account named Deeqa (@not_active06) dropped the drawing onto the feed with six words: “Is there even more I gotta say?”

Then an account named xoeeie (@xoeeie, bio reading “22. delicate chaos”) quote-tweeted the post and flipped the entire indictment: “Funny how ugly men feel entitled to beautiful women, but women aren’t allowed to want handsome men. somehow men are told to ‘know their worth’ while women are told to lower their standards.”

The prompt detonated across the timeline, drawing hundreds of men to litigate who broke the social contract first.

One faction attacked the definition of female beauty itself. “Most women are not beautiful,” wrote SgtZim. “They put overpriced paint ontop of their average face to chameleon their way into hiding their imperfections... Bunch of 5s thinking they’re 9s.” Another cited the standard red-pill Pareto distribution, claiming that eighty percent of women fight over the top twenty percent of men, leaving the remaining majority of both sexes to end up alone.

A quieter group of replies pointed to the bait-and-switch at the heart of modern male socialization. Noah G laid out the generational disillusionment: “Their frustration comes from the fact that men were told by feminists, Hollywood, their teachers, and every other cultural forum that women wanted loyalty, stability and kindness above everything else. So they strove to be those things. Then they get out into the real world...”

Another user, Her Husband, mapped the asymmetry in how each sex calculates value: “Men are taught to know their worth… like if you don’t have an income, no house, and no car.. you are worthless.. Women are taught that because they can give birth and men want them, to guard their worth from greedy men. Worth that was gifted at birth.”

Our Take: The drawing endures because it sketches the primary wound of modern dating. A generation of young men entered adulthood believing that basic decency, employment, and fidelity formed a complete resume for romance. When those traits fail to generate interest in an image-driven digital marketplace, the disappointment quickly hardens into resentment. To that man, the woman choosing the six-foot-three influencer looks like a hypocrite trading substance for vanity.

xoeeie’s quote-tweet exposes the vanity operating on the other side. When men complain about being overlooked, they often demand that women ignore physical attraction, even while those same men evaluate women almost entirely on youth and beauty. Her post turns the grievance around, accusing average men of wanting supermodels while offering little more than resentment and a bouquet of flowers.

The real trap sits in the terms of the debate. Both the cartoon and the replies treat human courtship like an adversarial trade negotiation. The man arrives with his balance sheet of kindness and stability, expecting a guaranteed return. The woman arrives with a checklist of status and aesthetics, terrified of settling for someone below her perceived market tier.

Social media feeds have supercharged this anxiety by displaying the top one percent of wealth, fitness, and beauty twenty-four hours a day. In that environment, ordinary reality looks like defeat. The average man feels underpriced, the average woman feels condescended to, and both retreat to their screens, convinced the other side has priced them out of love.

⚔️ The Narrative War: Jon Hamm Is Having a Baby at 55. The Timeline Did the Math

On August 10, Page Six reported that 55-year-old actor Jon Hamm and his 38-year-old wife, Anna Osceola, are expecting their first child. The piece noted that Hamm had spent nearly two decades in a previous relationship without children, married Osceola in 2023, and was now entering fatherhood well into middle age.

On paper, Hamm’s announcement looks like the living blueprint of red-pill doctrine. For years, manosphere creators have told young men that male value peaks late, that biological clocks only tick for women, and that a man who builds status and wealth can comfortably start a family in his fifties with a younger partner.

The public reaction refused to celebrate the script.

Instead of treating late fatherhood as a triumph of male longevity, the replies immediately ran the actuarial tables. One user, Fae (@hybridfae), captured the widespread disorientation: “the concept of having your first kid at 55.” Another account, ZENITH POINT, did the retirement arithmetic: “His child will only be 20 when his in a nursing home.”

The commentary quickly turned biological. One user described the pregnancy as “old expired sperm.” Another, Mar (@JaneCousteau), added: “imagine letting a geriatric get you pregnant. ew.” Other accounts used the occasion to pull thirty-year-old police reports from a 1990 college hazing incident involving Hamm, ensuring that even a standard celebrity milestone arrived with an attached indictment.

Our Take: The response to Jon Hamm exposes the central flaw in the online myth of male agelessness. Red-pill influencers regularly promise boys that men exist outside the pressures of time, framing fertility as an asset women lose at thirty and men retain indefinitely. Hamm followed that theoretical path to the letter, establishing a major Hollywood career, accumulating wealth, and waiting until his mid-fifties to have his first child.

When that theory meets the public square, the fantasy collapses under basic arithmetic. A fifty-five-year-old father will be seventy when his teenager learns to drive and seventy-seven at college graduation. The timeline did not see an alpha male exercising his biological options. It saw an aging man taking on the physical exhaustion of infancy at the age most people begin planning for retirement.

The double standard in modern dating cuts in multiple directions. Women face relentless public scrutiny over aging and fertility, yet the cultural promise that men can defer family life forever carries its own hidden costs. The manosphere treats youth as a liability for young men and an expiration date for women. Jon Hamm’s baby announcement proves that while wealth can buy time, the real world still keeps score on the clock.

🤯 Bro Meltdown of the Week: Brad Pitt Said He Can’t Watch Porn. Men Told Him He Was Lying

In an August interview with Esquire, 62-year-old Brad Pitt made a passing comment about performance standards that quickly detached from the rest of the profile. While talking about soccer players exaggerating fouls on the field, he connected athletic flopping to melodrama: “It’s one of those things that’s accepted but that no one likes, like forties acting, when the female actors would swoon... Bad acting drives me crazy. It’s why I can’t watch porn.”

The line took off on X immediately, where men gathered to defend the universal baseline of the digital vice.

Rather than taking the quip as an actor poking fun at his own occupational neuroses, the replies rushed to convict him of perjury. Matt Britton spoke for the skeptical majority: “yeah he watches a shit load of it. every dude has tried some form of thet excuse in their lifetime. Brad, its ok to admit you like watching vids... we all do from time to time.”

Another user, Dan tan, calculated the mechanics of celebrity privilege: “How often does he jerk off? Doesn’t he just have to walk outside and his swing it around and a woman would take care of it for him?”

Other commenters moved to downgrade Pitt’s filmography in retaliation: “Guess he can’t watch his own movies.” “I never considered Brad Pitt a great actor. He’s okayish.”

One account, Axel off Topic, managed to spot the comedy of professional deformation: “Profession vs movie. Gun guys: that gunplay is unrealistic. Lawyers: wouldn’t happen in a courtroom. Actors: I can’t take this porn seriously, the dialogue is too bad.”

Our Take: The digital male ecosystem treats adult content as an unavoidable law of nature. Red-pill spaces, comedy feeds, and mainstream comment sections run on the assumption that every man alive is chained to high-speed digital stimulation, making the behavior feel like a mandatory biological tax.

When a global sex symbol casually mentions that he skips the medium because the staging is ridiculous, the timeline experiences an immediate glitch.

The defensive panic in the replies exposes the stakes. If an A-list movie star can dismiss the entire industry with a laugh about bad dialogue, the excuse of universal male biology falls apart. Men in the thread demanded that Pitt confess to watching anyway, because preserving the myth that “every dude does this” keeps everyone in the room off the hook.

“Every dude” does it. He must be lying, or he doesn’t need it because he is Brad Pitt and can get sex whenever he wants. Those were the two exits the thread kept offering him. Either he consumes porn like other men or he has graduated from porn because his access to women is unlimited.

Look closely at what both explanations preserve: male sexual appetite as a constant. The only variable is supply. That idea runs much deeper than porn. Across this ecosystem, men are told that testosterone means wanting sex constantly, that a successful man accumulates sexual options, that being desired by women is evidence of rank, and that a man without access to women is losing some larger competition. The incel sits at one end of the hierarchy, while Brad Pitt occupies the imaginable opposite end. Put him there and even his television habits have to obey the system.

There is an irony here because another wing of the same online male world has spent years telling young men to quit pornography. Porn is dopamine poison; porn makes you weak; porn steals ambition. Stop masturbating, go outside, lift, approach women, build the real thing. It is one of the few subjects on which religious conservatives, self-improvement influencers and parts of the manosphere regularly meet.

Then perhaps the most famously handsome actor of his generation says he can’t watch porn, and men rush in to assure him that of course he does.

💬 Quote of the Week

“Again, I remind you, women should not be allowed in law enforcement roles.”

Richard Cooper, August 12, 2026, on X.

Cooper is the author of The Unplugged Alpha, a foundational red-pill text, and a longtime creator advising men on status, dating markets, and physical capability.

Our Take: The rhetorical weight sits in the opening four words. “Again, I remind you” presents a sweeping policy ban as settled common sense, framed as though the author were simply reciting an established law of nature that the culture keeps foolishly ignoring.

The prompt was a viral clip of a female Toronto police officer backing away while a suspect pelted her patrol car with rocks. In the online ecosystem, single clips of operational chaos rarely get analyzed as tactical errors or staffing failures. They get drafted into service as biological proof. A twenty-second video of an officer retreating becomes an open-and-shut case against female participation in the state’s monopoly on force.

This is where the manosphere’s domestic arguments bleed into civic governance. The movement began by claiming women should not lead households, and it routinely extends that logic to the public square, arguing that physical asymmetry makes equality impossible wherever violence is a factor. One chaotic interaction on a city street gets elevated into a universal verdict, giving a million viewers another reason to believe modern society was built on an unworkable lie.

📈 Platform Moves: Andrew Tate Turned Prison Mail into a Scoreboard

On August 13, a crowd of young men gathered on the concrete outside the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, where Andrew Tate has been held since July. As cars passed, the group dropped in unison to pump out push-ups on the sidewalk. Video of the demonstration cleared millions of views, drawing instant ridicule from onlookers across the timeline. “There are grown-ass men doing press-ups in front of the jail where Andrew Tate is being held, trying to impress him,” wrote commentator Mukhtar. “They may as well be twerking for him.”

Inside the facility, Tate’s social media operation converted the sidewalk gathering into a triumphant prison dispatch.

On August 14, his account told 10.8 million followers that neighboring inmates had crowded the windows to chant along: “cell next door to me said ‘Tate, this for you? Man you the Top G for real.’” He claimed his 80-year-old uncle drove from Alabama to attend, called the legal case a setup, and issued a direct call for verification: “To anyone who was at the protest make sure to DM me a selfie or video proving you were there. I will NEVER forget those who had my back in the heat of battle.”

By the following afternoon, the account moved from legal defiance to audience engagement, publishing a competitive scoreboard between the two brothers: “I received 34 more letters than Tristan today. But he received 3 more women asking to marry him. We’re debating who won.” The post closed with his federal inmate register number (52354-506) and the facility’s post office box, inviting the feed to mail in their votes.

Our Take: The sidewalk push-ups illustrate how thoroughly the movement has replaced political organizing with physical performance. In the manosphere playbook, calisthenics serve as the universal currency of masculine discipline. Dropping to the asphalt outside a high-rise federal jail is designed as a public demonstration of ideological fitness, offering physical exertion to a leader locked behind soundproof glass.

Tate’s response highlights the mechanics of a modern attention business operating under federal custody. A standard defense strategy treats detention as a legal crisis requiring silence. Tate treats detention as an operational constraint, using his platform to convert a routine bail holding into a serialized reality broadcast.

The instruction to submit photo proof of attendance turns a street rally into an audited database of loyalty. The letters competition with his brother gamifies the federal mailbag, transforming inmate registration numbers into interactive call-to-action buttons.

While outside observers see a dozen men exercising on a curb as public humiliation, the digital operation extracts exactly what it requires. The demonstration generated millions of impressions, reinforced the narrative of unyielding brotherhood, and kept a locked-down creator at the center of the timeline without spending a dollar on advertising.

👀 What to Watch: The Tate Defense Found a New Argument Before the Bail Hearing: Race

Watch the vocabulary between now and August 27.

For most of the Tate brothers’ public campaign since their detention, the script has been familiar: political persecution, a corrupt system, Britain trying to destroy them, prosecutors punishing men who refuse to submit. On August 13, outside the Miami detention center, their lawyer Joe McBride added something new. He made Andrew and Tristan Tate’s case a Black-man-in-America story.

“The real experience for a black man when it comes to the system in this country is, if you speak out, you speak power,” McBride told the crowd. “If you speak out against the party narrative, they will lock your black ass up and throw away the key in six seconds flat.”

Then he went further, supplying the voice of the system himself: “Boy, how did you get in this room? Boy, why are you talking so much? Boy, don’t you know that you don’t come from this type of family?” The repetition was deliberate. “We’re gonna make an example out of you,” he said, so that “every other black man in the world shuts his mouth.” By the end, incarceration had become part of a historical continuum: “we will incarcerate you, whip you, chain you.”

This is a remarkable turn in the defense campaign because race has not been the language through which the Tates have traditionally explained themselves. They are biracial, sons of a Black American father and a white British mother, but their public identity has been built much more around masculinity, wealth, Christianity, anti-feminism and opposition to what they describe as establishment control. McBride has now opened another door: Andrew Tate as a Black man being punished by an American system with a long history of punishing Black men.

The timing is hard to miss. Their bail hearing is set for August 27. Between now and then, watch whether this stays McBride’s argument or becomes the brothers’ argument too.

Our Take: Watch the rhetorical migration as the August 27 hearing approaches. For half a decade, the Tates sold an absolute doctrine of personal agency, telling millions of young followers that hierarchies are natural, the strong dominate, and claiming victimhood is the mark of a loser. In their videos, legal consequences were framed as Matrix persecution targeting masculine power, carefully detached from race to protect their standing with a predominantly white, right-leaning base.

Faced with a federal magistrate, fifty-nine charges in Britain, and the prospect of indefinite detention, the defense reached for the exact civil rights vocabulary the manosphere spent a decade attacking.

The invocation of chains, whips, and historical racial oppression exposes the transactional nature of internet ideology. When ideology functions as a marketing tool, doctrine lasts only until the courtroom doors swing shut. The movement built its brand telling young men that racial grievance was an excuse for failure. On the pavement outside FDC Miami, with extradition on the line, that same grievance became the lead argument. Watch whether McBride brings that speech inside the courtroom on August 27, or leaves the racial persecution script on the sidewalk.

🙋🏾‍♂️ Reader Intelligence

What are you seeing in your corner of this ecosystem? Reply with a name, a trend, or a tip. The best reader submissions will appear in next week’s edition with attribution.

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For more than 30 years I have kept these memories where they could not reach me. They tried. Every time a domestic violence case made the news, they came up, and I pushed them back down. The last two years were the hardest, with femicide finally at the center of the public debate in France, the country where I became an adult and a journalist. I resisted. I almost never told my friends what I lived through as a boy in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I suspect that people who have been through such things will recognize the reflex.

Then I sat with Calliope Krinelos.

Readers of this series met her earlier this week, the woman in her eighties who runs a small pension above Sappho’s beach in Skala Eressos, on the island of Lesbos. She gave me the inventory of the old order: the feast tables set for men only, the girls who could be killed for shame, the women who died ending pregnancies they could not refuse. And she gave me one memory that went through me like a blade: Three children asleep in one room, and through the wall, a neighbor beating his wife. The next morning the village closed around the man. Nobody named him. The story was smoothed over by lunchtime.

I kept my reporter’s face. I wrote it down. And somewhere between her sentence and my notebook, a door I had held shut since childhood came open. She was describing her village in Greece, most of a century ago, an ocean and a continent away from anything I knew. She was also describing my street.

I decided, listening to her, that the moment had come to tell this. It burns every time I see my mother, as I did last September and October in Cameroon. Seeing her is an enormous joy. Her face is not. It still carries the marks of the blows given to her, on many occasions, by the man who shared her life after my father. I look at her, I rage, I smoke from the inside, and I pray my way back to calm so the rage does not take the room. Her scars make every visit an ordeal inside a pleasure. Calliope convinced me I could not keep carrying this alone.

The tray of manioc sticks

I must have been 10. I came home from school one evening to our family house in Fanta Citron, one of the quarters of the Mvog Ada slum in Yaoundé, where I was born and grew up. My mother was not there. My aunts and uncles were. My mother should have been too. The local market had closed, the market where she and most of my aunts resold the goods, the vegetables and the sticks of manioc they bought wholesale at dawn from village women. She should have been home making sure everything was ready for the evening. In those days I had my own post: most nights after school I loaded a tray with manioc sticks and sold them at the roadside until 10pm.

I went to Auntie Blandine and asked where my mother was. She did not answer. Her face was shut, and I understood that something had happened, something serious I could not put my hand on. The adults had a talent for hiding the truth from us. They filtered what we were told. You listened at doors to fill in the blanks.

I had taken my post behind my tray when my cousin Ayi, Auntie Blandine’s son, came to find me.

-“Something serious happened to your mother,” he whispered in my ear. “I heard my mother say she is at Papa Jean-Claude’s family.”

Papa Jean-Claude

“Papa Jean-Claude” was my mother’s new companion. They had been together perhaps six months. He spent most of his evenings and nights at our house. His own family lived in another quarter of the slum, thirty minutes away on foot. He was tall, close to two meters, slender, and my aunts called him a handsome man. I do not know what he did for a living. What I know is that he did not provide. My mother provided. The manioc sticks and the goods we sold were what kept us alive. He arrived around 8 or 9 in the evening. My mother served him his meal. He showered and went to bed. I never saw him in the morning because I had already left for school. On weekends he slept until 11 am. By then we had walked ten minutes to the natural spring and back, so that he would have water to wash with.

My brother and I did not exist for him. He was not trying to replace our father, and he was not trying to be anything to us. We were his servants. My mother demanded that we show him the respect owed to our father.

To understand why, you have to understand something about Cameroon. Women are very often the ones who keep the households running. They run the small commerce at the heart of the informal economy that feeds more than 80 percent of Cameroonians. And the honors still go to the men. It remains a patriarchal society. In it, a woman without a husband has no status, whatever she has built. None. My mother, like some of my aunts and many of the mamas of the quarter, was consumed by the idea of finding a man, of marrying. They forgave everything to any man who passed through their lives, even briefly. The men understood the arrangement perfectly. Officially they held the traditional roles of protector and provider. In practice, the providing was done by our mothers, our aunts, our sisters and our cousins.

For a woman with children, it was worse. Few men would accept another man’s children. My mother was prepared to swallow a great deal. Papa Jean-Claude knew it.

Cousin Ayi kept me informed at my roadside post. Auntie Blandine and Auntie Bebe had gone to see her. Two hours later he came back with their report. My mother was in a terrible state. One eye swollen shut. Bruises and wounds over her whole body.

-“I heard them say she can’t move,” he said. “Her ribs hurt.”

-“But who did that to her? Attackers?” I asked.

-“They say it was Papa Jean-Claude. He beat her when she went there to ask why he hadn’t come to the house last night.”

That was my first encounter with what I would much later learn to call domestic violence. I had no frame for it. Adults punished children; we were spanked, we were whipped with the chicote. I had seen men fight men and women fight women. I had never seen a man work over a woman with the violence my cousin was describing. I turned toward the house and saw Auntie Blandine in tears. She seemed not to have stopped crying since she had seen my mother lying there, unable to move.

My parents had separated when I was about four. My mother had custody, as is usual in Cameroon when the children are young. My father lived in the same slum, in a slightly less disadvantaged part of it. We visited him often.

My mother came home a little more than a week later. She had trouble walking. She had trouble speaking. Every effort came with a cry of pain. She could barely look us in the eyes. And when I looked at her, I felt I had betrayed her. A few years earlier I had passed the ritual that makes a boy a man, and from that day my maternal uncles called me the man of the house. The man of the house protects. My mother’s body said I had failed. I carried it as if the blows had come from my own hands.

The demon

Two weeks later, to our astonishment, Papa Jean-Claude appeared at the house. I expected my mother to throw him out. She did not. He pleaded his case. He swore he would never do it again. He begged, he explained that a demon had possessed him at the moment he was hitting her. He flattered. Two days later he was sleeping in our house again.

A month after that, heavy fists hammered the door. It must have been three in the morning. He was drunk. My mother went to open and asked him to lower his voice so as not to wake the household. That was all the demon needed. I remember my mother on the floor. After the punches came the kicks, and the insults with them. I got up and ran and tried to put myself between his blows and my mother’s body. He stopped his foot when he saw he was about to strike me. He apologized. To me. He said he had nothing against me, that all of this was my mother’s fault. My uncles and aunts arrived, the men pulling him aside, the women gathering around my mother while Auntie Blandine heated water to massage her.

“He is going to end up killing her one of these days,” Auntie Blandine kept repeating through her tears.

My uncles said nothing. It was afterward, listening to the adults, that I understood: this was simply the lot of women. Tongues loosened around me and I discovered a face of our patriarchal society I had not known. It was normal, we were told. A man who hit hard, someone explained to us, was showing the force and vigor of his love for the woman he beat. Apart from my aunts, nobody was truly concerned with my mother’s health or her safety. It occurred to no one to report it to the police, perhaps because the police would have reacted the way my uncles did, which is to say not at all. They would have laughed in her face.

There was one thing Papa Jean-Claude feared, and I learned it later. He feared that if he ever struck me, my father would come. It would become a matter between men. That, he wanted to avoid at all costs.

He begged forgiveness again in the days that followed, repeating to my mother that he would never do it again. He did it again. And again, and again, for the two years that followed. Any excuse served. He beat her in front of us. He beat her in public, at the neighborhood bar. He was almost always interrupted, by me, by one of my aunts, by a woman of the quarter. Never once by a man. My mother’s skin became a nest of scars. My little brother stopped crying. He had none left.

The bar

Just before my thirteenth birthday, my mother was sitting one evening with Auntie Blandine, Auntie Bebe and some neighbors in one of the quarter’s bars. The quarter crawled with bars. Papa Jean-Claude appeared and ordered my mother to follow him home. She obeyed. She had barely crossed the doorstep when he started on her with the words, whore, slut, and then with his fists.

I ran at them and punched him from behind. He turned and saw me.

-“You want to fight me?” he screamed.

-“Yes. You think I’m afraid of you?” I answered. “Come on. I’m waiting.”

My mother was on the ground, lifeless, blood running from her mouth.

Papa Jean-Claude hesitated.

-“What are you waiting for? I am not afraid of you,” I shouted. I knew he feared my father and would never touch me. “If you touch my mother again, you will see what I do to you.”

His eyes went from my mother to me. A crowd was forming. I did not move, and he decided to leave.

It is the last time I ever saw him, because after he left I ran to my mother and tried to help her up. She could not stand. Auntie Blandine joined me, and with two neighbors we carried her to her bed. The women set about heating water, massaging her body, dressing her wounds. Once more.

When I was alone with her, I spoke.

-“Maman, if he ever comes back into this house, I will kill him. I will kill him with a knife or the machete, and I will run to my father’s.”

My mother said nothing.

-“You know he will come back, promise he will never do it again, and then do it again. This time I will not let him,” I went on. “I will kill him, I’m telling you. I will kill him.”

She stayed silent. But her silence sounded like recognition. She knew me. I was not a boy who talked. I rarely spoke first, and I never threw threats around. What I was known for, what earned me compliments and warnings from the adults in equal measure, was finishing whatever I started.

What I remember from the weeks that followed is Papa Jean-Claude’s sisters coming to plead his cause. My mother held firm. She showed them her body, marked with their brother’s violence. She told them that this time she had chosen life, and she had chosen us, her children. I arranged to always be present when they came, and they came mostly in the evenings, for two or three months. Every day I repeated my threat to my mother. She had a choice to make. She held.

The worst of it is that what my mother lived was, as far as I could tell, the daily life of a large part of the women of the quarter. How many of my friends and playmates were watching what I was watching, done to their own mothers?

The words came later

It was years afterward, in France, where I immigrated, that I understood that none of it was acceptable. That women die of the blows given to them by their partners. The word femicide entered my vocabulary years after that.

The words have finally reached Cameroon too, and so has the counting. The government recorded roughly 77 femicides in the country in 2025. Then came 2026. In the first four months alone, according to figures presented by Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa, the minister for Women’s Empowerment and the Family, authorities recorded another 50, women killed for the most part by partners, ex-partners and male relatives. The minister herself cautioned that the official numbers are a floor. Violence against women goes unreported, she said, under family pressure, stigma and fear of what comes next. I do not need a minister to tell me that. I grew up inside the unreported numbers. Nobody counted my mother. Nobody counted the women of Fanta Citron.

My mother and I have never spoken of any of this. We have never needed to. Her skin speaks for us. I have never dared ask her why she endured it. I think I am afraid of her answer. I am afraid of what the question might set loose. I am simply afraid. I have never discussed it with my little brother either, and I wonder what he was living through, inside, during those black years of our childhood.

Calliope Krinelos told me she had watched the old order operate at full power and that her knowledge was not from reading. Neither is mine. When the boys on their phones mourn a world where men ruled the household without question, I know exactly which household they are describing. I sold manioc sticks at the edge of it.

I do not know if I am ready to open up about everything I lived and what it left in me. I hope this text is a first step. I would like to talk about it with my mother one day. I have not found the courage. I do not want to reopen her wounds to close mine.

My mother is still alive. I do not know how, given the beatings she took. What I know is that her skin tells the story.

Every reporting trip has a first conversation, and mine happened with the meter running.

July 10, Athens, a long ride with a taxi driver named Hristos Koutsovoulos, my friend Andreas riding along to translate. Hristos has been in this city 41 years and behind the wheel for 15 of them. Before the wheel, he was a banker. He’ll tell you himself how that ended: his own mistakes, big ones, personal ones. They cost him the career and they cost him the industry. So the man who once moved money now moves people, all day, through a capital where half the country lives.

And in one week, he told me, his daughter, Nicoletta, was getting married. She is 32. He said it with half pride, half disbelief that the date actually came.

I started with a taxi driver because nobody takes the temperature of a city quite like the person paid to drive through it. And in Greece the temperature-taker sees more than you’d think. Powerful unions forced Uber years ago to abandon its gig model and run through licensed taxi drivers, so a single Athens cabbie now carries the whole cross-section: the 20-year-old tapping an app, the old local hailing from the curb, the late-night crowd. Twelve hours a day in the close intimacy of the front seat, absorbing the unvarnished noise of a capital, listening to real lives in real time. If the idea that men had become suspects were loose in the city, Hristos would have caught it long before a sociologist could measure it.

So I asked him my question, the one I’d carried across the Atlantic. In America, some young men believe the whole society has turned on them, that women are protected and men are presumed guilty, and an industry of influencers grows rich confirming it. Does Greece have that?

Hristos didn’t hesitate the way the Metaxas family on Lesbos would hesitate days later. He lit up. It is exactly the same here, he said. Exactly like the US. Then he did something none of my American interviews ever do. He built the whole machine for me, part by part, from the driver’s seat, in traffic. The machine, according to Hristos.

Start with the media, he said, and he didn’t mean television, he meant the phone; social media; X; Instagram; Facebook, TikTok, and the television limping behind them. They run one story on a loop: the woman is the victim, the man is the predator. Not some men, but “The Man.” Run that loop long enough and two things happen at once, he said: Women learn to see every man as a threat, and men learn to feel guilty before they’ve done anything. Guilty by default, Andreas translated, and Hristos nodded at the phrase like a man signing for a package.

It has an age limit, he said. This thing lands on the young, 30 and under. By 50, you’re formed, Hristos said. You’ve lived, you know what’s real and what’s a feed. But a boy is still wet cement, and the loop writes itself straight into him.

It has a geography too, Hristos continued. Athens, Thessaloniki, the big cities. Not the villages. In the village, he said, life is different, slower, people still see each other as people. In the city a boy isn’t seen at all. They don’t see the boy, I offered. They see a man. Yes, he said. A potential abuser. He used the phrase more than once, testing it. A boy in Athens walks around inside a presumption, and the presumption walked in years before he did.

It started, he said, with the Greek #MeToo, and here he was careful in a way that surprised me. The movement surfaced real abuse, real women, really hurt, finally heard. He granted all of it. And then the pendulum kept going until it reached the far wall, where every man hangs.

And it starts at home, he said, before the phone ever gets its turn. Families fight, children watch. A girl watches her parents at war and learns her first lesson about men from the loser of the argument, her father, diminished in his own kitchen. Then the state finishes the lesson, treating every girl as a potential victim to be guarded, which sounds like protection and works like instruction. Everything, Hristos said, starts from the house.

I’ve interviewed sociologists who map this terrain with grants and datasets. Hristos built the same map between traffic lights, for the price of the fare.

The cat

He gave me one piece of evidence from inside his own house, and it was so small it was perfect. He teases the family cat, and someone at home tells him, only half joking, watch it, that’s abuse, I’ll report you. For the cat. Hristos is 63, a grandfather-in-waiting, and in his own living room the vocabulary of the predator has arrived to referee his relationship with an animal. He laughed telling it. It was the laugh of a man who has decided to find something funny because the alternative is to find it insulting.

Then he told me a story that wasn’t funny at all, one he’d picked up from the news a couple of weeks earlier. A teenager, knifed to death in Kallithea, a working-class neighborhood of Athens, by other kids. In his telling, the killers were rich boys who came down from Kifissia, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country, and killed for nothing. What shook him wasn’t only the death, it was the affect. No sense to it, he said. Like a video game, you finish the kill, you continue to the next level.

The case is real, and the record is worse than his version in every way that matters. On the night of June 24, at Agia Eleousa Square in Kallithea, two groups of teenagers, fifteen to twenty years old, went from trading insults to open battle, according to reports. One side called for reinforcements; a black car pulled up and five more got out, among them a fifteen-year-old boy. Knives, stones, collapsible metal rods. The boy took a single stab wound just below the heart and died at the hospital. A 17-year-old confessed to the blow and said it was self-defense. Police identified seventeen participants, arrested seven, went hunting for ten more. Street versions like Hristos’s bent the details, the age, the Kifissia angle, the way stories bend as they pass from phone to phone; the paper trail says the two groups were feuding over control of a public square.

And here the record handed Hristos his own argument back, better than he’d made it. Prosecutors opened a case against 18 more people over that night. The parents. Charged with neglecting the supervision of their minors. Everything, he had told me, starts from the house. The Greek state, in its own bureaucratic language, had just filed the same conclusion.

For a man of his generation, Greek kids killing Greek kids over a square is a violation of something older than law. There are no values anymore, he said. No limits, no stop, people fighting in the middle of the street, in their cars. We never had that, he told me.

And under all of it, the squeeze. Fifty euros at the supermarket for one small bag. Politicians who, in his telling, think about one thing, and it isn’t the people. A beautiful country, he insisted, and he meant it, good people, gentle people, polite people, you saw it yourself. Governed, always, by men who count money. When a country’s fathers can’t out-earn its influencers, the influencers raise the sons.

Somewhere in there he mentioned that people don’t even speak up anymore. Don’t speak, they’re told, at home, at work. Why? Because people are afraid. A banker who lost everything to his own mistakes, telling me the whole country has learned to keep its mouth shut. He kept talking anyway, the entire ride.

The question he thanked me for

Near the end, Hristos stopped mid-thought and thanked me. It’s a very nice question you gave me, he said. Because he had never put it together before, not out loud, not in one piece. And now, assembling it for a stranger with a recorder, he could see it whole: the system, all of it, turning against men, slowly, slowly, he said. The last few years.

What happened in that car is why I do this on the ground and not from a couch. The Kasidiaris flood on Greek TikTok, the manosphere feeds: those belong to boys a third of Hristos’s age. He was doing the opposite. He had a lifetime of loose grievances: the lost bank career, the 50-euro bag, the dead boy in Kallithea, the cat, his daughter’s generation and its wars. My question just gave him a shelf to organize them on. The system is against men: suddenly, everything fit. I watched a 63-year-old man discover, in real time in his own rearview mirror, the exact story an industry sells young men every night. Nobody sold it to him. He assembled it himself, gratefully, out of parts his own country provided.

That is what makes this thing move. It doesn’t only travel down from Elon Musk’s feed to a 20-year-old’s phone, the way I’d watch it land on Lesbos a week later. It also grows up from the ground, wherever men are carrying loss with no story to put it in. The feed supplies the story, or a stranger’s question does. The shelf is always ready.

The wedding

And here is where I have to leave Hristos, because life refused to cooperate with his theory, and he didn’t seem to notice, and I’ve decided that’s the most Greek thing about him.

The man who told me every man in his city is presumed a predator, that women are taught to fear, that the young can’t find their footing and the values are gone and nobody can afford anything, that man spent our entire ride one week away from giving Nicoletta, his 32-year-old daughter, to a young man in front of everyone he knows. Music, food he’d sweat to pay for, a church, a groom. The full old ceremony, in the middle of the collapse he’d just mapped for me. He described the country as a machine for turning men into suspects, and then he went home to finish planning the day he’d hand his daughter to one.

I never asked him how those two things live together. Some questions you save, and some you leave in the cab with the receipt. He’d already given me the honest version anyway, without meaning to. The theory is total. The life goes on underneath it, weddings and all. In Athens, as in Houston, as in my own living room, men can hold the whole dark story in their heads and still dance at their daughters’ weddings.

Whether their sons still can, that’s the part nobody in the cab could answer.

Skala Eressos keeps appearing in this series, and it earns it. The village where Sappho was born, on the far western edge of Lesbos, a long drive from anywhere, where women from all over the world still come to sit on the poet’s beach.

I ate my first dinner of this trip there, with a young surgeon and his girlfriend, and heard a country described as still belonging to its men. What I didn’t say then is that above that beach sits a small family pension, and in it lives the person who can testify to what that ownership used to look like, because she was there for most of a century of it.

Calliope Krinelos is in her eighties. She and her husband run Pension Krinelos, rooms they built up from a time she summarizes in one sentence: when we came here, we had nothing. I sat with her twice. Once with her husband and her son, a policeman. Once alone, when the stories came out. Everyone else on this trip gave me opinions. Calliope gave me the inventory.

Everything below is her telling, through my translator, an old woman reaching back across eighty years, and I am giving it to you the way she gave it to me.

The village the men ran

Start with the feast days, because she did. Saint’s days, the village in celebration, and here is how celebration worked. The women came down from the fields, where they’d spent the day bent over tobacco, exhausted, headscarves on, the way you’d see in Turkey, she said. The men sat at the kafeneio. The table was set with ouzo and small plates, four or five meatballs, a cut tomato. And the plates were for the men. Only the men. The women stood by. The children stood by. On the feast day of the village, in front of everyone, the arrangement performed itself: the ones who worked the fields watching the ones who didn’t, eating.

She remembers being a child, three kids sleeping in one room, and hearing through the wall a neighbor beating his wife. She remembers the next morning better. The village closed around the man. Nobody would name him, nobody would shame him, the story got smoothed over by lunchtime. The beating was ordinary. The covering was the custom.

A girl who went with another man could be killed for it, she said. The shame fell on the girl, the knife too. And still, she added, with something between a smile and a shrug, we found our chances. We did things. Not everything. The rules were iron and the girls were water, and water finds the gap. It is the only light moment in this part of her century.

The darkest has no light in it at all. Women then had child after child after child, she said, because the arrangement demanded it, and when a woman could not carry one more, she ended it herself, with practical things, her phrase, and some of those women got infections, and some of those women died. And it was counted a shame, hers, not anyone else’s. She has watched today’s argument about who is oppressing whom, and she carries, in living memory, the version where the losing side got buried.

The prisoner

The boys of Marios’ generation, the ones I wrote about in the first piece of this series, are being taught by their phones to venerate a political prisoner, a Golden Dawn man in a cell, packaged for them by a Norwegian activist and stamped by Elon Musk. Calliope did not learn about political prisoners from a phone. Her mother was three months pregnant with her when her father, a communist in the years when that could cost you everything, went into military custody. Word was gotten to him in prison: your wife should end this pregnancy, you have two children already, no one knows if you will live. He sent word back. Keep it. Maybe they won’t kill me.

They didn’t. A court-martial gave him ten years. He served five, forced labor at Nafplio. She told me about the day the hunger got specific, her father working, bean soup every day, and he slipped a single onion into his pocket, and was caught, an onion, and it went badly. She told me about what he would not do, which was give names. He had fed men hiding in the hills. He was beaten for the names and he ate the beatings, she said, because a name given was a man killed. He kept the names. He kept them through everything.

She was carried into a prison at forty days old, her first visit to her father, her mother holding her. When the village baby needed baptizing, no family would enter the communist’s house to do the good deed. Her grandfather baptized her himself. And when her father finally came home, five years gone, her grandmother walked the children to the bus stop, one of those old snub-nosed buses you only see in old films now, and a tall, handsome man stepped down, and Calliope watched him come, a stranger, until he wasn’t.

I make no argument here. I put her father next to the man on Greek TikTok and let them stand in the same paragraph.

The court

The village enforced its sexual order in both directions, and she gave me the case that proves it. A young man got a girl pregnant and would not marry her. So the communists of the area convened what they called a people’s court, and the verdict came with teeth: marry her, or be dealt with. He married her. Then he went to the house, said he was collecting his work clothes, and never came back. He refused to recognize the boy, who grew up carrying the family’s name and the father’s absence.

The boy made himself into an answer. Built in Athens. Came back and built a hotel here. Found his father late, she said, only so his own wife and children could see the accounts settled. And the father, at the end of it, went blind, and the village, which keeps its own ledger, said out loud that he had earned it. His people ended badly, she said, all of them, with illness. She reported this the way you report weather that came and went. The old system had cruelty running in every direction, and its justice was crueler than its crimes, and everyone stayed to watch.

The village the phones run

Now walk to the village school with her. There was a year, recently, when one child was born in Eressos. One. Twenty years ago the school was full of children; her own son remembers it full. Nobody wants a family, she said. The young are single. They’re on their phones. They don’t want responsibility, her husband and son chorused, they have nothing at all, and the “nothing” covered savings, plans, and prospects all at once. The men at that table talked land the way men talk when a place is emptying: plots with a hundred and thirty, a hundred and sixty olive trees, prices that would insult a parking space in Paris. In Eressos, they’d give you the square if you promised to raise children on it.

The phones carry more than loneliness, and the table did not dodge it. At the sitting with her husband and her son, the talk turned to what the men of the village do with those phones now, and the answer came plainly: porn. Men here, they said, even here, in a village at the end of the road on Sappho’s island, have become addicted to it, watching on their phones. Then Calliope, in her eighties, teased the two men sitting with her, her husband and her son the policeman, that she knows perfectly well they watch it all the time. The men took it the way men take a charge they can’t contest. I have met this plague at every stop of this beat, in my son’s generation in New York, in the fathers I interviewed in Houston, always described as a big-city affliction, a symptom of fast connections and faster feeds. The connection reached the last village on the road. In Skala Eressos the person filing the report on it is an eighty-year-old woman, at her own table, naming her own men.

Her verdicts on the present are not gentle, and they are not what either side of the gender war would order for itself. Couples today split over anything, she said; of the pairs she knows, few are left standing. Relatives prescribe a baby as glue, and she scoffs at the prescription, the baby fixes nothing, the child just ends up owned by two separated people. Young women, she said, have demands now, and some have lost their minds, and, she joked, the machine that made the loyal old women has been shut down, they don’t make them anymore.

She also thinks young women today can’t cook and can’t keep a house. The American manosphere would applaud every word of that paragraph. It should wait for the next one.

Because when I asked her the direct question, in a family, what should the man be and what should the woman be, the woman who was born under the old arrangement, who watched it eat her mother’s generation, gave me one word. Equal. The ideal is equal, she said, both of them working, and the wallet belongs to whoever fills it, which is now both. Eighty-some years old, a pension on Sappho’s island, a policeman for a son, and her considered position, after the feasts and the beatings and the buried women, is the position the boys online call the poison.

The grandson

She has a grandson, 19, and he is in love with a girl named Katerina, and Calliope has given him the full counsel of her century. You are in love now, she told him. In a month there may be another girl and you will forget Katerina, and it will hurt, and it will pass. You will grow. You will get serious. You will establish yourself in your work, and then you will weigh things, and discuss it with your mother, and ask like a gentleman, and there will be an engagement, and a wedding, and you will marry into a family that is known, because you are the child of someone and she is the child of someone, and that still counts. The old sequence, intact, offered with total love, to a boy with a phone in his pocket.

I had dinner with a 19-year-old on this trip, and I asked him what a man should be in a family. His answer, in his own searching English: decent. A good husband. Someone who gives the wife and children freedom, who offers direction and strength, who steps in only when things go really wrong. And then, unprompted, the sentence his great-grandfathers would not have understood: but not the boss of the family. No.

Between Calliope’s father, who chose a daughter’s life from a military prison, and a 19-year-old who volunteers that the man should not be the boss, runs the whole distance this series has been trying to measure. The throne shrank to a chair in three generations, and almost nobody died of the shrinking, which is more than can be said for the throne.

When we finished, Calliope told me why she’d said yes to all of it, the recorder, the stranger, the questions. I have lived these things, she said. It’s not from reading.

The boys scrolling Kasidiaris at night think something was taken from them. Calliope can describe the thing precisely, because she watched it operate at full power: the feast tables women stood beside, the beatings the village smoothed over by morning, the girls buried for shame, the men buried for names. She lived in the country the algorithm is nostalgic for. She built a pension on top of it, asked for equality, and counseled her grandson to marry well. It’s not from reading.

Week of August 3, 2026 | Edition 68

Welcome back to The Manosphere.

One jobs report set the table. For the third time on record, American women hold more of the country’s jobs than men, and the feeds read the number as a scoreboard for manhood itself. Everything that followed circled the same nerve: who provides, who gets kept, and who pays when it ends. A househusband panic. A $40 million rumor about an NBA star’s ex. A thread where men admitted to leaving the women who love them, until a second wave arrived to call the love fake.

Beneath the ledger ran a quieter question about who’s even allowed to speak. One border crossing in Spain passed through two of the biggest names in this world in a single week, one cheering it, one calling for lethal force, and the platforms, not the audience, decided which of them got punished.

Let’s get into it.

As you read this week, one question to hold: when she out-earns him, does the power move too, or only the blame?

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell

• Women now hold more U.S. jobs than men for the third time on record.

• The manosphere toasted men who get “kept” at home, branded an NBA star’s ex a “whore” for wanting support.

• Musk floated deporting Sneako

🚨 Signal of the Week: “Stay-at-home boyfriends”

As of June, American women held roughly 304,000 more jobs than men, the third time on record they’ve been ahead. Sixty years ago, men outnumbered women in the workforce by 24 million; by the 1990s the lead was still about 7 million. Women took roughly 95% of the positions added over the past year, with no crash to blame this time. Leading Report compressed all of that into one line built for the feed: “Stay-at-home boyfriends and husbands are on the rise as women overtake men in U.S. payroll jobs.” It cleared 16.9 million views in a day.

The thread sorted into camps fast. The conspiracists saw a plan: men “no longer being hired anywhere,” employers “paying women more for the sake of diversity and laying off men.” The blackpill saw a scoreboard: “Make your foid do the hard work and pay the bills. Equality is beautiful,” and, from another account, a country that supposedly calls the arrangement “dick-only provider.” The doom crowd went biblical: “3rd wave feminism will destroy this society. This is the beginning of the end.”

One reply routed it straight to the dating beat, women in their 30s and 40s who “can’t get dates” while the stay-at-home husband gets “celebrated like progress.” A quieter minority shrugged, “If the household runs better with her earning and him home, who cares.” And one man just saw an upgrade: “maybe I’ll be able to break 130 on the golf course if I don’t have to work all the time.”

The argument was about what work has come to represent. For generations, being a provider sat near the center of many men’s identity. News that appears to challenge that role now travels through a culture already primed to interpret economic change as evidence of a broader struggle between men and women.

Our Take: Start with the headline’s own word. “Overtake” implies a race someone won. The study underneath describes a forfeit. Female labor-force participation is down slightly since 2000; men’s fell four times as far. And the “stay-at-home” part is mostly a mirage. Laura Ullrich, who wrote the report, says flatly that the numbers don’t show men picking up caregiving. “It really is a decline in just work activity.” The vacated hours go to opioids, disability, depression, parents’ spare bedrooms, and video games. She calls the trend “very depressing,” which is not how anyone in the thread read it.

The one figure that actually feeds the conspiracy is real: since Trump’s second inauguration, women have taken 86% of the payroll jobs added, 403,000 against 65,000 for men. To the manosphere that’s a thumb on the scale. To the economists it’s healthcare and education hiring while manufacturing and tech go cold. The thread spent a day fighting over who’s winning a contest one side is quietly walking away from.

📚 Power Plays: The Manosphere Sold the Kept Wife for a Decade. This Week It Choked on the Kept Husband

For a decade the manosphere sold one arrangement as the natural order: she keeps the home, he provides. The stay-at-home mom, rebranded tradwife, was the aspiration. This week the payroll numbers flipped the picture, and the movement had to look at its own ideal in a mirror.

Part of it recoiled. A househusband was “emasculated,” a man who might “as well castrate” himself to “own the feminists.” “It’s men’s work to toil, tire and suffer to feed their families,” one reply held. “The opposite should never be an option.” The reversal became, once again, a sign of collapse: watch, one warned, “how long before the world crumbles when women take the reigns.”

Another wing signed up on the spot. “You telling me there’s a woman out there that wants me to stay home, take care of the kids... cook, clean and that’s it? Shit where she at?!” One rebranded unemployment into a corner office: “I’m not unemployed, I’m a domestic CEO.” Another laid out the full fantasy, her at six figures, him “gaming on ps5, while still bitching to her about the wifi not working.”

A few skipped the meme and described the thing itself. One man had lived it: his wife out-earned him, a child was born with special needs, so he quit, raised the kids, did the night feedings. Her verdict after all of it, he wrote, was that she “wishes we swapped” and wants to be the one at home.

Watching from outside, a woman named the contradiction plainly. Women spent decades defending the stay-at-home mom while men worked doubles, she wrote, and now that some homes run the other way, “suddenly people act like civilization is collapsing.”

Our Take: The tradwife was doctrine. The househusband reads as heresy. But look at what survived the flip. The manosphere didn’t retire the rule that one partner provides and one serves. It started fighting over who gets assigned which seat. The volunteers want the couch. The hardliners want her back in the kitchen. And a growing faction keeps the provider hierarchy fully intact while reversing its target, demanding, as one put it, that she now clear six figures because a man “shouldn’t be stuck with bums who can’t properly provide.” The standard once aimed at men gets pointed at women, and the crown stays exactly where it was.

The women in the thread clocked the crown. “Y’all won’t last a YEAR,” one wrote, asking who stays pregnant under the new deal. Another checked out completely: “we don’t need husbands at all... enjoy your male loneliness epidemic.” The single arrangement almost no one in the thread defended was the even split. A household has “a male head or vice versa,” one decreed. “None of this 50/50.” The gender on the throne is suddenly up for negotiation. The throne is not.

One of the oldest promises in the manosphere is the return of traditional gender roles. The internet celebrates the stay-at-home wife as an ideal. The stay-at-home husband exposes how conditional that ideal can be. If the principle were simply that one parent stays home while the other earns, swapping the genders wouldn’t provoke such resistance.

⚔️ The Narrative War: TMZ Said Luka Doncic’s Ex Wants $40 Million. The Manosphere Heard the Fall of Civilization

TMZ dropped it as an exclusive Wednesday: Luka Doncic’s ex-fiancée Anamaria Goltes had filed a new claim in Slovenia and wanted $50 million to settle, $40 million for herself and a presumed $10 million for their two daughters, plus a cut to his custody from two days a week to one. The post did 16.6 million views.

Every load-bearing detail rested on “sources with direct knowledge,” and TMZ filled the gaps in the open, writing that it “assumes” the $10 million is for the kids. Neither Doncic nor Goltes said a word.

The thread didn’t wait for them to. Within hours it had a verdict, a motive, and a moral. “Another great man got taken down by a whore.” “Men are in love women are in business... ALL MEN PAY.” “Imagine a Man sacrificing everything to get to the top, and up there is nothing but whores who want to backstab you.” The practical wing moved to logistics: download a prenup, demand a paternity test, put “all of his assets including money in his mom’s name.” One reply skipped the courtroom entirely and proposed spending $10 million on “an absolute pristine level HITMAN.”

The facts took friendly fire the whole way. Posters placed the couple together “since they were 12,” then 13, and built the gold-digger case on a childhood that didn’t happen. They met as young adults and were together about a decade. Others were sure this was a divorce. “I thought you actually had to be married lol,” one wrote, correctly, since they were engaged and never wed, which takes the alimony and the prenup talk down with it.

A minority read the same rumor backward. If a woman who’d been with him since their teens was “taking him to the cleaners this hard,” a few reasoned, the likelier story was that “our boy cheated and now he’s paying for it.” Same absent facts, opposite conviction. One reply cut through the pile: “you don’t know the details of their relationship,” it said of a couple whose entire adult lives were being adjudicated by strangers.

Our Take: The sentence arrived before the evidence. Strip the thread down to what’s actually sourced and you have a gossip outlet’s unnamed tipsters plus that outlet’s own stated guesswork, none of it confirmed by either parent. That was enough to convict. The parable runs on two inputs, a rich man and a large number, and treats everything else as set dressing it’s free to get wrong: the marriage that never was, the childhood romance that wasn’t, the ages of two kids under three.

The one detail nobody could bend into the script got buried. Behind the $40 million sits a request to halve a father’s time with his daughters, and behind that sits a man who skipped his national team this summer and is running a Lakers minicamp out of Slovenia to stay near two girls, one of them seven months old. A father reorganizing his career around seeing his kids is close to the rarest thing the manosphere claims to want. It scrolled right past, because “all women are in business” has no slot for it.

Set it against this week’s earlier pages. The movement spent two sections cheering men who leave work to be kept at home and christening it a domestic CEO title. Then a woman is reported to want support, and the same rooms reach for the word “whore.” The provider ledger only balances when a man is holding the pen.

🤯 Bro Meltdown of the Week: Men Admitted They Push Love Away When They’re Drowning. Then the Replies Decided the Love Was Fake All Along

On August 6, an account called riley, handle @rileyapparently, posted one line: “men be like aw my life is getting hard lemme get rid of the girl who loves me unconditionally.” 8.6 million views. It’s the kind of line this section usually watches men swarm to punish. This week they mostly agreed.

What followed read closer to a confession than a fight. Men lined up to describe the machinery from inside. “A lot of guys are taught hard times = handle it solo = don’t be a burden,” one wrote, so the woman who loves them “feels like another thing they’re failing at,” and they “self sabotage and push her out.” Another: “We get stubborn and refuse to let a woman see us at our lowest.” One named the reflex as a movie instinct: “Men be like ‘I need to fix my life alone’ like they’re in a training montage.” One reduced it to capacity: “The breakup wasn’t because love disappeared. The emotional bandwidth did.” “Men will self-sabotage a good thing like it’s a competitive sport,” ran the bluntest of them.

The women who agreed did it with a scar. “And then they come back 6 months later like ‘you were the best thing that ever happened to me,’” one wrote. “We were there holding your hand while you fell apart and you left because being loved felt too heavy.”

Then a second wing arrived to take the confession back. Where the first group said men flee a love they feel unworthy of, this group said the love was never real, so fleeing is only arithmetic. “Women do not love men unconditionally which is why they leave men who are struggling,” one instructed. “Lose your job & all your savings & see if she steps up to support you or leaves.” A one-line version kept circling the thread: “No woman loves a man unconditionally lol.” From there it curdled. “Getting rid of everything female softens your life.” “Life just gets better once you leave that leech.” And a warning to the men still nodding along with riley: “This never happened. If your girl likes or retweets this, run!”

Underneath all of it, at a fraction of the views, one man answered the prompt with his own life instead of a theory: “Actually just had the opposite happen to me… I’m so hurt.”

Our Take: For a few hundred replies this was the healthiest thread this section has ever covered. Men were handed a woman’s accusation and, instead of reaching for the usual weapons, they finished her sentence. The handle-it-alone script, the refusal to be seen at the bottom, the training-montage fantasy of fixing yourself in private and coming back whole. Real self-knowledge, offered unprompted, about one of the quieter ways men wreck what they want.

The meltdown is what came next. The moment vulnerability got a foothold, the second wing moved to seal it off, and it did the sealing by recoding the unconditional love in the original post as a con. If she was going to leave once the money ran out, then a man who pushes her away first got out ahead of the swindle. “Softens your life.” The reflex this section exists to document is exactly that one: the thing that can’t let the sad, honest version stand. A man says I push people away when I’m drowning, and the room answers good, she was a leech anyway. The confession gets filed as a warning, and the next boy reading it learns the lesson backward.

Set it beside the rest of the week’s ledger. The jobs numbers, the househusband fight, the Doncic pile-on all circled one buried belief: that a man’s worth and a man’s income are the same account, and love is whatever he can afford. riley’s thread put that belief under glass. Men flee when they can’t provide; the blackpill insists women flee men who can’t provide; both are haunted by the same equation, love as a line item that either clears or bounces. One reply ran the equation through an actual person and came out the other end just hurt. It got almost no views. The theory always outdraws the man.

💬 Quote of the Week

“There are no ‘waves’ of feminism. It’s always been female supremacism interrupted by wars and civil unrest.”

Rollo Tomassi, August 8, 2026, on X.

He wrote The Rational Male, the manosphere’s closest thing to a founding text.

Our Take: The work is done by the word he deletes. “Waves” is how you mark what feminism wanted in each era: the vote, the workplace, the credit card in her own name. Erase the waves and the demands and the dates go with them, leaving one unbroken plot that has simply always been. “Interrupted by wars and civil unrest” does the quieter half, reinstalling male authority as the natural order, the thing that returns whenever the world stops burning. A century of specific arguments, filed down to a grievance with no history attached.

📈 Platform Moves: “Elon Musk Endorsed Deporting One of His Own Creators. The Creator, a New York Native, Said ‘Come and Get Me

Regular readers met Sneako in Edition 66, trolling Tate’s arrest with a snake photo. Since then, he’s done something stranger and more consequential. He’s turned himself into the manosphere’s Muslim heel and aimed the act at the one figure he can’t out-follow, the man who owns the platform.

The trigger came July 30. Sneako, the 27-year-old New Yorker Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, cheered a mass migrant crossing into Spain and added that the rest of Europe was next. Drew Pavlou screenshotted it: “Sneako needs to be deported.” Elon Musk, replying to Pavlou, wrote two words: “He will be.” 10.3 million views. The owner of X had just endorsed deporting one of its million-follower creators.

Sneako, who was born in New York and is a US citizen, didn’t flinch. He treated the threat as a gift. “Come and get me,” he posted, quoting Musk. Then “Mogged.” Then a two-minute video captioned “LLLS.” A man with no authority to deport anyone had handed him the biggest opponent of his career, and he spent the day spiking the football.

This ground is familiar to him. Back in June he’d dared Musk to a one-on-one, offering to renounce his own citizenship if Musk could explain why Sneako is more harmful to America than he is, with the loser decided by poll and Musk sent back to South Africa if he lost. Musk never took it. The dare pressed the irony Sneako keeps working: Musk was born in South Africa and naturalized in 2002, and he has spent the summer fielding deportation calls of his own, from Donald Trump and from Steve Bannon, who wants him “tossed back” to South Africa. The immigrant billionaire endorsing the removal of a native-born citizen is a photograph of the entire moment.

Around the Musk fight, the rest of the repositioning ran at full volume. Sneako staged Bronx gospel-choir bits as performance-art trolling, needled Nick Fuentes, and turned on Tate without mercy, accusing him of having “twerked for white and jewish approval” only to land in a cell, and signing off, “Never turn your back on the ummah.” Fuentes fired back with the week’s most quotable overstatement, that Sneako’s arc is doing more damage to Muslims in America “than 9/11.”

Our Take: This section usually tracks how a creator uses a platform. This week the creator used the platform’s owner. Sneako’s method runs on a single rule, pick the largest enemy available and turn the fight into content, and he’s climbed the ladder in public: Tate, then Fuentes, now Musk himself. “Come and get me” is the business model said aloud. Every threat pointed at him is inventory.

The threat is also empty, and the emptiness is the story. X was sold as the platform where your views can’t get you removed. Its owner just told ten million people that a citizen’s views should get him removed from the country, invoking a power no private citizen holds. The free-speech platform turns out to have an off-switch after all. It’s wired to one man’s mood, and it fires at the speech he personally dislikes. Musk can’t deport Sneako. He can do the thing the old platform bosses only dreamed of, which is make ten million people watch him wish he could.

Then notice the verb everyone reached for. Pavlou, Musk, Fuentes, Alex Jones before them, all landed on the same word, deport, now aimed at a native-born American over a tweet, by an immigrant dodging the identical demand from his own side. On this beat the words keep outrunning the people. Here the ugliest word in the immigration fight got picked up as a punchline by the crowd most likely to face it next.

Sneako took the one seat in the manosphere nobody else wanted, the Muslim provocateur the rest of the movement can’t stand, and parlayed it into the biggest week of his career by goading the platform’s owner into playing the villain. Musk built X on the promise that no one gets silenced for their views. He spent the week proving he’s the exception to his own rule, and Sneako walked off with the views.

👀 What to Watch: Asmongold Said Border Guards Should Shoot Children. Twitch Took the Channel, and the Feed Argued About Hasan

On August 6, Twitch pulled Asmongold’s ZackRawrr channel offline. Visitors got the boilerplate: the channel can’t stream due to a Community Guidelines violation. The Dexerto post announcing it did 29.8 million views. Twitch, as ever, published no reason and no length, which leaves the story exactly where the platform prefers it, in the streamer’s hands.

Why a Twitch suspension lands in this newsletter: Asmongold is the manosphere’s news desk. One of the most-watched streamers alive and a co-founder of the OTK org, he runs a reaction format, the day’s footage rolls and he narrates, and for a vast share of young men that narration is the politics, common sense in a hoodie instead of doctrine from a man at a lectern. He doesn’t recruit for the ideology so much as pre-digest it, which is a bigger job. Regular readers last saw him on this beat trading shots with Nick Fuentes. That reach is the whole reason what he says over a migrant clip is a story at all.

The clip nobody had to guess about came three days earlier. On an August 3 stream, Asmongold reacted to footage of migrants crossing from Morocco into Ceuta, the Spanish enclave. This is the same crossing Sneako had cheered a section ago, and Asmongold ran at it from the opposite pole. He called the children in the footage “emotional blackmail” and said anyone coming across should be shot, kids, women, men, to stop the rest from trying. The consensus cause of the ban wrote itself.

This is his second ZackRawrr suspension this year; an April ban ran a week. Twitch escalates penalties that fall in the same category, so a repeat starts where the last one stopped and climbs. It may not cost him much. Through past bans he’s decamped to Kick or a backup account and kept streaming, and he once called a two-week Twitch ban the “greatest two weeks” of his life.

The replies ran on rails everyone has ridden before. Critics, Hasan Piker loudest among them, called it a call to shoot children. Supporters mostly skipped the content and went after the referee: Hasan says worse and stays up, they argued, reciting his file, while one satirist ranked Twitch’s tariffs, crimes worth twelve hours, genocide advocacy worth a day, wanting borders enforced worth a lifetime. Tectone, no friend of his, cut it shortest: “100% Asmongolds fault. No sympathy.”

Our Take: Watch two things, in ascending order of importance. The small one is the ban, which will resolve into a length Twitch never confirms and a martyrdom clip Asmongold probably will, the enforcement doing for him roughly what Musk’s threat did for Sneako, turning a penalty into a highlight. The escalation ladder is the only hard fact in it, and even that only bites a man who stopped needing Twitch years ago.

The larger thing is the pattern this edition backed into. One piece of footage, a border crossing at Ceuta, ran through two creators on two platforms inside seven days. Sneako celebrated the crossers, and the owner of X floated deporting him. Asmongold said he’d shoot them, and Twitch took his channel. Opposite politics, opposite platforms, same result: the platform, not the audience, handed down the verdict, on its own clock, for reasons it declined to give.

The movement’s standing grievance is that moderation is arbitrary, and on the mechanics it has a case, since the reasons are sealed, the lengths are sealed, and the appeal is a locked room. The grievance just keeps arriving welded to the thing it’s meant to pull your eye from. “What about Hasan” is a real argument about consistency and a clean way to never repeat the sentence that triggered it: the ecosystem’s most-watched reactor said border guards should shoot children. Both are true in the same breath, and the feed will only ever try the first. Watch which half gets the views. It’s the same half every week.

🙋🏾‍♂️ Reader Intelligence

What are you seeing in your corner of this ecosystem? Reply with a name, a trend, or a tip. The best reader submissions will appear in next week’s edition with attribution.

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You fly into Lesbos from Athens in about forty-five minutes, low over the Aegean. The island sits so close to Turkey that on a clear day you can see the other country. On its far western edge is Skala Eressos, the village where Sappho was born, the poet whose island gave the world its word for women who love women. Pilgrims still come to sit on her beach. It is a strange place to spend a week asking men whether they are losing a war.

I went anyway. And while I was there, the war came to me.

On July 17, midway through my stay, Elon Musk posted four words. “This is messed up.” He was boosting a Norwegian woman named Rebecca Mistereggen, who wanted his 241 million followers to hear about Ilias Kasidiaris, a former Greek member of parliament she cast as a political prisoner, trapped in one of the most controversial cases in Europe. The post did 5.7 million views.

Kasidiaris is a political prisoner in one narrow sense. He is in prison, and he used to be a politician. He was the spokesman and one of the top figures of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party that rode Greece’s debt crisis into parliament under its founder and leader, Nikos Michaloliakos. In 2020, an Athens court ruled the party a criminal organization and convicted its leadership, Michaloliakos and Kasidiaris among them. Thirteen and a half years for Kasidiaris. Michaloliakos sits in prison too. The case turned on the 2013 murder of an anti-fascist rapper, Pavlos Fyssas, stabbed by a party member. Kasidiaris has a swastika tattooed on his arm. He runs a following from his cell.

Mistereggen calls herself a journalist. She has also told an American anti-Islam outlet she would sooner die than see her country become Islamic. Her story never changes: an establishment silencing a man who dared to speak. Kasidiaris fit the frame. Musk stamped it. And it moved the way these things move now, fast, borderless, downhill, until five days later it surfaced at a taverna table in Thermi, a village outside the island’s capital, in the mouth of a 20-year-old named Marios Metaxas.

That is the machine I write about every week. A grievance manufactured in America, translated in Norway, amplified from Texas, delivered to a Greek teenager’s phone before the ouzo hits the table. For two years I have watched it work on American boys, my son among them. Young men in the U.S. have swung right while young women swing left. They date less, marry less, talk to each other less. Half the country’s young men believe everything is arranged against them, and an industry of influencers gets rich confirming it. So I came to Greece with a question. Does the fracture stop at the water? Is the gender war an American condition, or does it travel with the phone, arriving even in places where the facts on the ground should kill it on contact?

Greece was a good place to ask, because on paper Greece should be immune. This is a country where men still hold the ground, and the ledger says so in every column. Greek women earn roughly 13 percent less than men. The gap between men’s and women’s employment runs 18.8 percentage points, the second-largest in the European Union. About 95 percent of the CEOs at the largest listed Greek companies are men. At home, Greek women put in more than four and a half hours a day of housework and child care against 59 minutes for men, the lowest male share of fifteen European countries surveyed. And in a 2025 European Institute for Gender Equality survey, 64 percent of Greek men said it was acceptable for a husband to control his wife’s money. Nearly half of Greek women agreed with them. That is the soil.

I spent my week with one family to see what grows in it. The Metaxas men, three of them, split by forty-five years and two hundred kilometers. Orestis, the father, about to turn 65, retired this year after a lifetime working for the Greek state. George, the older son, 28, an orthopedic surgeon finishing his residency in a small town in the north. Marios, 20, two years into university in Athens, where half of Greece now lives. Same house. Same island. Same mother and father.

Ask them whether men are under attack, and you get three different countries. One sorted by age, one by geography, one by the screen. The father’s country, where nothing fundamental is changing. The doctor’s country, where men still own the field and the referees have started calling fouls anyway. And the boy’s country, the one that exists mostly on a phone, where every young man is a defendant. Three men, one bloodline, and the distance between their answers is the story.

The son in Athens

Dinner in Thermi, on July 22, was Marios, his father, and his mother, Georgia, a lawyer who divorced Orestis last year and came to dinner anyway. She was the only woman at the table.

Dinner wound down, and when dessert came up, Georgia had a better idea than the menu. There is a man named Takis who makes the best sweets on that side of the island, and Takis does not sit in a shop waiting for you. He circulates, taverna to taverna, and it happens that he has an arrangement with this one that lets him offer his desserts in their dining room. So Takis was summoned. He appeared at our table and recited his inventory like a liturgy. Galaktoboureko, still warm. Baklava. Walnut cake. Semolina cake. Orange-syrup pie. Ekmek. Chocolate pie. Profiteroles. Takis works hard, the table agreed. Takis also doesn’t pay his taxes, the table agreed to that too, and waved it off. The problem in Greece is not the small fish. It’s the big fish.

Marios is the one who lives online. I didn’t have to explain the manosphere to him. I said Andrew Tate and he nodded like I’d named the weather. On Greek TikTok, he said, you cannot scroll without hitting Kasidiaris. Every video, his photo. Every comment section, his name. The kids love him. Why? Because he’s against the system. Because he’s charismatic. Because he went to prison. Because he feels like the guy from the next street. Marios reached for a comparison and produced two, back-to-back, no pause between them. The Andrew Tate of Greece. The Hitler of Greece. Then he kept eating. A jailed neo-Nazi is the most admired man among the boys he knows, he can hear the echo himself, all the way to Hitler, and the admiration survives the comparison. I put my fork down and wrote that down.

Then Marios said the thing his father and brother would not. Here too, he said, a young man has to watch his mouth. A woman can call a man anything, the worst words, and nothing happens. A man answers in kind and he’s a sexist. There are things you now say carefully, politically, or you get misread on purpose. In school, a boy who speaks up is lecturing, mansplaining. A girl who says the same thing gets praised. He never claimed the label for himself. He simply said, quietly, that he understood the pull. That a boy his age, scrolling at night, could reasonably conclude the whole culture had been arranged so he would spend his life apologizing.

I have heard that speech before, almost word for word. From my own son, in New York, when he was a teenager and Tate was pouring through his phone; his words are the reason this newsletter exists. From the high school boys I sat with in Houston in April, boys in a Christian school built specifically to reach them before Tate does, who used the exact language Marios used. Watch what you say. Everything gets turned against you. A boy in Athens, a boy in Texas, a boy in my own living room, all reading from the same script, and none of them wrote it. The script travels. It doesn’t check passports.

Georgia didn’t let it pass. She has no patience for the loudest feminists, the everything-is-patriarchy reflex, and she said so flatly. Same here, she told me. I don’t like it either. But women in Greece had a real problem, she added, and not long ago. Her own parents’ generation. Women who kept silent because silence was the arrangement. Yes, Marios said. And now? Now it’s different, she said. And the table moved on to Takis’s orange-syrup pie, the argument left where family arguments are left. Unfinished.

The doctor

My first dinner on the island had come eight days earlier, on July 14, at its far western end, in Skala Eressos. It was longer and drunker. George drove down with his girlfriend, Angela. He ordered ouzo from Plomari, the town an hour up the coast where he’d done his mandatory rural service, where, he said, he made good money at the price of his mental health. He kept it coming. It’s like we’re on vacation, someone said. It was, for some of us.

Is the system rigged against men? George nearly laughed into his glass. “In Greece we are really far behind in time,” he said. Behind, meaning: women are still the ones underneath. His ward is fourteen men, zero women. He offered that as biology first. Orthopedics is hammering and pulling, dislocating a hip takes strength. Angela, across the table: you can use a machine for that. He conceded the machine.

George is no manosphere man. Tate embarrasses him. But the instinct sits within arm’s reach, and I watched him reach. American hiring quotas went too far, he said. Take the most qualified person, not the one who fills the slot. The cleanest line in the whole grievance, and he believes it. Minutes later, in the same easy voice, he told me about the posting he lost with Doctors Without Borders. He interviewed well. They told him so. They took a woman. She was as qualified as him, he said, maybe more. And he’d known, walking in, that he never had a chance. The quota is unjust, and the woman deserved the job. He held both, one breath apart, and felt no collision. Multiply George by a hundred million and you have the entire Western gender argument, conducted at one table, by one honest man, against himself.

Angela argued differently. She brought receipts. Twenty-eight, a university graduate crossing into the wine trade, and she doesn’t soften it: the country favors men. The big wineries won’t hire women. They say the work takes strength. What they mean is maternity leave. She got in through a fluke. Her boss’s son studied in Italy, watched women do the job as well as anyone, came home and told his father to hire them. One winery. Everywhere else the door stays shut.

Then she told me about the woman at the police station, and at first she told it the way you tell a story a whole country has swallowed. No name needed. I’ll give it the name. Kyriaki Griva. April 2024. Twenty-eight years old, the age of everyone at my table. Her ex had been circling her home. She had reported him before. She walked into the police station in Agioi Anargyroi, a suburb of Athens, and asked for a patrol car to take her home, because she was afraid. The officers told her to call the emergency line. The dispatcher told her patrol cars are not taxis. She stepped back out of the station, phone still in her hand. He was waiting. He stabbed her to death on the threshold, in front of the guard. Fifth woman killed by a partner or an ex in Greece that year, and the year was four months old. A prosecutor has since recommended trial for four officers, among them the guard who watched and the dispatcher with the line about the taxi. Her father built her a monument on the spot.

The numbers behind her are not soft. More than 70 women killed in Greece since 2020 by partners, ex-partners, and male relatives. At least five femicides before this year had barely started. The minister of citizen protection, Michalis Chrisochoidis, counted 23,000 domestic-violence reports and 13,000 arrests in one year, and said a third of the men arrested were repeat offenders capable, in his words, of killing a woman or harming her children. Greece is currently fighting over whether to write femicide into its penal code as a distinct crime, heavier than murder. You don’t hold that debate in a country where the war is against men.

And then Angela, having laid all of it on the table, delivered her verdict, and it was not the one you’d write for her. This is not about gender, she said. The police are simply unqualified. There is no war on men here. What’s happening is quieter, and she said it without cruelty, the way you report a forecast. Women are turning away from men because they’ve looked at what’s on offer and decided it isn’t worth their time.

She stacked up a murdered woman, a locked industry, and seventy bodies, then handed the boys a wound the manosphere never mentions. Irrelevance. The influencers tell young men the system hates them. Hatred, at least, means you matter. Angela’s version offers no enemy to fight and nothing to win back. Women just aren’t that interested.

The father

I got Orestis alone in a car on July 21. We were driving to a party, a friend of his hosting at a house buried in forest, 45-50 minutes outside Mitilini, the kind of place you find by faith. One and a half kilometers, he kept saying. On the left. There’s a gate. The road disagreed with him for a long time. He gave the Greek state his entire working life and walked away from it in January, and he watches his sons’ generation from that particular altitude.

There is no war on men, Orestis told me. There is a feeling of one. And the feeling has an address: the young and the unsure, the boys who came out of the #MeToo years convinced they were permanently on the back foot, permanently apologizing. Older men don’t feel it, he said. Settled men don’t feel it. The boys feel it, and so the boys drift right, and a man in a cell starts to look like a raft. He wasn’t alarmed. The old arrangement, man at the head of the table, woman serving it, has already been overtaken by how people actually live. Boys will say the words, he said. It won’t happen. The conditions are gone.

His own left offers him no clean refuge, by the way. George quit supporting the Greek Communist Party over its vote against same-sex marriage, which the party dressed up as opposition to marriage itself, an economic arrangement. In this family even the communists are fighting about gender.

Then, somewhere in the dark between the olive trees, Orestis described a woman to me. A type he keeps meeting. Over fifty. Divorced. Out of a marriage that ground her down for years without ever necessarily raising a hand. She got free. Now she guards the freedom like a dog guards a door, and she is in no hurry to hand it to another man. He described her warmly, sociologically, entirely from the outside. A trend he’d noticed. We found the gate at the end, exactly where he said it would be.

His own gate he never saw.

The woman he described

Because the woman he was describing sat across from him the next night in Thermi, passing the orange-syrup pie. Georgia. His wife of decades until last year. The lawyer. The only woman at the table, in a story where the women keep being the point.

She told me how she spent her summer. A five-day silent retreat. No talking, no electricity, asleep past midnight, up at 4.am, three and a half hours at a stretch standing perfectly still, thinking about nothing. She did it inside her own house, the course running online. Orestis still had a key. He let himself in once while it was running. She didn’t speak to him. He came, he saw, he left. Twenty-some years of marriage, and now a man with a key and no lines.

When the five days ended she took herself on holiday. Alone. A small island south of Lesbos. She swam, she ate in the tavernas by herself, and she made a discovery that half the women in Orestis’s demographic seem to be making at once. She liked the company. “The best company,” she said. Me and me.

She went looking for what comes next and found a volunteer program in Zanzibar, restoring a school. She applied. They said yes. Then she read the fine print. The school is closed for the season. Empty. She would live in it alone, a stranger on an island off Africa with a phone. And Georgia, fresh from five days of silence and a week of solo swimming, looked at that solitude and turned it down. She isn’t going. There’s no one there.

Even the woman who left wants people. Just, apparently, not a husband.

Orestis thinks the reaction can’t take root in Greece because life has already moved past the old arrangement. He’s half right, and the proof is brutal. The old arrangement is dissolving in real time, and the person dissolving it fastest spent the evening across the table from him, planning and un-planning Africa, and she used to be his wife. He can name the trend. He just filed his own marriage under sociology.

What I carried home

So here is the ledger from the island that named women who love women.

A father, retired, on his island, certain nothing fundamental is changing, while his ex-wife builds a life that is the change. A doctor, 28, in a ward of fourteen male surgeons, who says the country still belongs to men and resents the quotas anyway, even the one that never touched him. And a boy, 20, in the capital, holding a phone, who can name the jailed neo-Nazi every kid he knows admires, who cannot point to a single structural thing his country has taken from him, and who still feels, in the country that favors him, like the one being asked to say sorry.

The youngest feels it most. The one with the most life left, the most power coming to him, the least evidence. That gradient, down the generations, toward the phone, is the whole story, and it is a bigger story than Greece. I heard it in Athens in July, in Houston in April, in my own home before that. In America we talk about having lost a generation of young men to this feeling. Greece still has time. Greece also has five femicides before spring, seventy dead women since 2020, a police station with a monument outside it, and boys who think they’re the ones under siege.

The grievance came in low over the Aegean and landed on the phones of boys who have every reason to feel fine. It didn’t need a reason. It never has. That’s what makes it move. And it’s moving.

For two years I have reported on the war between young men and young women in America. I’ve written about it from my desk, from my son’s questions, from the feeds where an industry of influencers tells boys that everything has been arranged against them. This spring I went to Houston to watch men try to build an answer offline. And all along, one question kept standing at the edge of the reporting: is this an American condition, or does it travel?

In July I went to Greece to find out. On paper, Greece should be immune. This is a country where, by the admission of nearly everyone I spoke with, men still hold the ground: the hiring, the wages, the benefit of the doubt. It is also a country that has counted more than 70 femicides since 2020, women killed by partners, ex-partners, and male relatives, and that is currently debating whether to write femicide into its penal code as its own crime. It is the country where a woman was stabbed to death by her ex on the threshold of a police station, after being told a patrol car is not a taxi. If the American grievance, the conviction that the system has turned on men, could take root in that soil, it can take root anywhere.

I didn’t go to poll a country. I went to sit at tables. A family on the island of Lesbos: a retired father, a surgeon son in a small northern town, a twenty-year-old son in Athens, three men of one bloodline who give three different answers to the same question, with the women at the table holding the evidence. A taxi driver in Athens, a former banker, who assembled the whole case against men for me between traffic lights, one week before he walked his daughter down the aisle. And a woman in her eighties in Sappho’s village, who ran me through the century the algorithm is nostalgic for, because she lived it: feast tables her mother’s generation stood beside, beatings the village smoothed over, and a father in a military prison who refused to trade names for mercy.

Midway through my trip, Elon Musk boosted a defense of Ilias Kasidiaris, a jailed Greek neo-Nazi, to millions. Days later, a twenty-year-old told me over dinner that every boy he knows admires the man. That is the machine this series is about: a grievance manufactured in one country, amplified in another, landing in a third, on the phones of boys who by every measure still hold the power and have every reason to feel fine.

Three pieces, starting this week. I don’t resolve anything in them. I took the recorder to the tables and I’m giving you what the tables said.

Gad Saad is the evolutionary behavioral scientist and author who coined “suicidal empathy,” the title of his May book “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.” The cover carries a blurb from Elon Musk and the words “an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.” The thesis is that the West is dying of misplaced compassion.

Read his feed and the direction of that compassion is never in doubt. Day after day it points at the same people: Muslims, migrants, minorities, trans person. He posts that Islam is hostile to other faiths, mocks it as a religion of “camel urine,” and boosts a Telegraph column tying “suicidal empathy” to Britain’s betrayal by mass migration. The empathy he wants cured is always empathy aimed at people who are not white and not Christian.

This summer he added a new name to the list. “White uber progressive women are the drivers of Suicidal Empathy,” he posted on July 27. It ran to 8.4 million views. A culture war that had been about race, religion, and the border opened a front in the gender war.

The examples arrived on a schedule. When Elisabeth-Jane Ross, a 38-year-old Scottish charity worker in the refugee-solidarity world, was found dead in a suitcase in Athens in July, Saad wrote that she “died swimming in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy.” A 26-year-old Afghan man has been accused of homicide; he admits hiding her body and draining her accounts but denies the killing, and the cause of death is still unconfirmed, according to Greek police. None of that reached the caption. Between the diagnoses ran the storefront: “Have you ordered your copy of Suicidal Empathy yet?”

Then Elon Musk picked it up, and the arithmetic changed. Through the last presidential campaign, the frame Musk reached for was “the great replacement,” the conspiracy theory that elites are importing foreigners to replace native populations. His phrase now is Saad’s.

Under the Ross case, circulating as a lurid “body in a suitcase” meme that stated the killing as settled fact, he wrote two words: “Suicidal empathy.” It drew 8 million views. To Saad’s poll on whether the West will “wake up” from its stupor, he replied, “Wake up, before it is too late.” Each carried millions of views.

The threads did the rest. “It was always the women,” ran one refrain, under post after post. Not everyone went along. “Sick of this,” wrote a woman named Helen Cameron. “This new narrative of blaming women for ‘suicidal empathy.’ Plenty of men to blame.” And then the machine did the thing it always does. A faction in Saad’s own replies decided the real culprit was not progressive women but Saad himself, and reached for some of the oldest antisemitic scripts on the internet to say so. The man who built the frame became, a few replies down, the thing inside it.

Our Take: I have spent two years watching this one move. Take a real injury, a real crime, a real death, and give it a target. Then let the target swell until it covers a category. What “suicidal empathy” adds is one word that lets you condemn compassion itself, as long as it is aimed at the right people.

In every exhibit, the empathy on trial runs one way: toward the Afghan, the migrant, the Muslim, the outsider. Critics call the theory what it looks like from that angle, a racial hierarchy with a self-help title. Its defenders call it common sense. Either way, the enemy list was set before women were added to it.

That is why the gender turn matters. “White progressive women” is the newest name on a theory that predates them, the same frame that condemned empathy toward migrants now turned on the women accused of extending it.

Two things power the round. The first is the storefront: every accusation doubles as an ad, routing back to a book with a checkout page. Grievance has a bestseller rank. The second is the amplifier. When Saad names the enemy, it is a professor with 1.3 million followers. When Musk repeats it, it is the owner of the platform deciding what the algorithm rewards, and the only account Saad pays to subscribe to on X is Musk’s. They work the same account and the same market, the one that pays for moments like these.

The tell is in the replies that turned on Saad. The frame he built, one person standing in for a group, does not stop where its author wants. Point it at migrants and it finds women next, and the Jews after that, and eventually the man who drew the diagram. Nothing in the movement can patch that, because the runaway is the design. The invoice always finds another name.

The facts first, because in this story the facts kept getting lost.

Sofia Ann-Buitron Drotts, 26, was a behavioral health clinician at the John A. Davis Juvenile Hall in Martinez, California. A teenage boy serving a two-year sentence there was assigned to her as a client. According to a civil claim filed by attorney John Burris on behalf of the boy’s family, Drotts began grooming him in 2024, when he was 14 or 15, using her position as his therapist to build “an inappropriate emotional connection” with “the objective of sexual abuse.”

Prosecutors in Contra Costa County charge that after his release, between April 1 and July 14 of this year, while she was still his therapist through the county health system, she had a sexual relationship with him. He was 17. She was arrested on July 14 after a probation department supervisor tipped off Concord police. She faces felony charges including unlawful sexual intercourse, sexual penetration by a foreign object, oral copulation of a person under 18, sending harmful matter to a minor, and possession of child pornography. She has been released and has not yet entered a plea. These are allegations, and she is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The boy’s mother said the family trusted a professional with their son’s healing “and that trust was fundamentally shattered.”

Then the internet got the story.

The New York Post’s post drew 12.3 million views. A day later, the aggregator Daily Loud posted it to its millions of followers with the line “26 year old therapist arrested for allegedly having sex with 14 year old patient.” That version drew 16 million views. It was also wrong twice over, in opposite directions. The charged sexual conduct involves a 17-year-old after his release; the age 14 refers to when the grooming allegedly began. And “having sex with” is the language of a hookup, not of seven felony counts. It took a volunteer Community Note, citing the DA’s office and ABC7, to fix the record under the post. Sixteen million people saw the headline. Far fewer read the correction.

What the replies looked like

The jokes came first, and they came in both threads independently. “’TheRapist’ could be here… He thought to himself.” “TheRAPIST it’s in the name.” “Therapist - The rapist. Hmm.... Looks similar.” One user summed up the mood: “ok i think i need therapy.”

Then the envy and the minimization. “Unless he’s gay, I’m pretty sure he was ok with it,” wrote one account. “He just has to learn to keep his mouth shut.” Another: “She didn’t rape him. Yall are destroying the meaning of that word.” Another: “It wasn’t rape, women cannot physically rape because rape equals penetration.” One of the charges is sexual penetration by a foreign object, a detail a frustrated reply had to spell out “for all the gooners in the replies who can’t read.”

Then the gender-war conversion. “Over and over and over and over and over again these depraved female predatory pedophiles. #ToxicFemininity #BelieveBoys #MeToo.” One account decided the case proved something about half the population: “every single female teacher in their 20s is a predator. therapists now.” Elsewhere on X, accounts tagged Rollo Tomassi, the Rational Male author who keeps a running numbered ledger of female-teacher cases, with the question: “What is the running total for this year?” A single accused woman became an entry in a spreadsheet about women.

And then, scattered through the noise, the serious minority. “I’m so tired of people so desensitized to this that they still find humor in it,” one woman wrote. A man who said he normally doesn’t comment described the real problem: people see grooming ahead of time and stay silent because whistleblowers get punished for raising alarms over “nothing.” Another woman called out the “braindead men talking about ‘wHerE wAs sHe wHEn i waS 14??’”

One reply predicted the whole thread without reading it: “I bet you the replies are full of guys wanting to trade places with the kid…” She was right. And one man cut through everything: “Don’t give a fuck if you’re male or female. All pedophiles deserve to die.”

Our Take: For two years I have reported on the manosphere, and its single most defensible grievance is this: male victims of female abusers get erased. Erased by language, erased by laughter, erased by headlines. This case handed the manosphere its proof in real time. An account with 16 million views on the story wrote “having sex with” where prosecutors filed felonies, and the correction had to come from volunteers. “Now it’s called ‘Having sex’ instead of ‘Rape,’” one reply noted, and he had a point. If the genders were reversed, no aggregator would have dared that phrasing.

Then the same men who hold that grievance disproved their own sincerity, in the same threads, in real time. The loudest case against believing boys was written by men. Men joking that the boy got lucky. Men telling a groomed teenager, through a screen, that he should have kept his mouth shut. Men litigating the dictionary definition of rape under a story about a therapist and her incarcerated patient. The same accounts that demand the world believe boys spent this thread explaining that this one was “ok with it.” The manosphere keeps asking why nobody takes male victims seriously. Its own replies are the answer.

The third move is the one I’ve watched the machine make on every front of the gender war, in both directions. One accused woman becomes all women. “Every single female teacher in their 20s is a predator” is precisely the generalization the manosphere denounces, correctly, when it’s aimed at men. The ledger reflex, tag Tomassi, ask for the running total, treats each victim as ammunition and each case as a score. The feminist internet did this with male crimes and built #YesAllMen energy out of individual monsters. The manosphere swore it was different. It is running the same play with the jerseys swapped.

Underneath the 28 million views is a 17-year-old who spent two years locked inside a facility with the adult the county paid to heal him. According to the civil claim, the case surfaced only because he kept breaking probation, skipping school and missing curfew at her encouragement, to see her. In the threads he appears as a punchline, a hashtag, a ledger entry, an object of envy. One reply asked how the boy feels. It answered its own question in the next sentence.

His mother answered it differently. “Our focus now is entirely on our son’s recovery and protection,” she said. In both threads, she is alone on that.

After two years reporting on the manosphere, I don’t think it’s mainly about nostalgia or traditional values.

Again and again, I’ve heard young men describe marriage as one of the biggest risks they could take. They fear divorce, losing their children, their savings, or the life they’ve built. The tradwife ideal becomes a way to imagine a marriage that feels “safe.”

The problem is that this idealized version of relationships rarely matches reality. Many men are left searching for something that doesn’t exist, while becoming even more distrustful of marriage itself.

What do you think? Is the tradwife movement really about traditional values, or is it driven by fear of modern marriage?