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While the Trump administration wages war against Iran and broadens their military scope in the northern hemisphere, there are more subtle campaigns being pushed here at home – like the one to convince women to do nothing more than have babies and stay at home. This week, Alex speaks to former trad wife and host of “The Wake Her Up Podcast”, Sharon Johnson, about her upbringing in the Mormon Church, what it was like to discover she could have agency and choice in her late thirties, and how she feels about trad wives trending. Then Alex is joined by host of Crooked’s “Hysteria” podcast, Erin Ryan, to talk about the broader political goals behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2026 plan, and how it attempts to punish women who don’t fit their ideals.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Alex Wagner: Hello from the present day. I have been recovering from hip surgery for the last two weeks, which I do not recommend in case anyone out there is thinking of getting a new hip just for fun. But not even the incredible anesthetics they put me on have muted the news from the home front and the extraordinarily dangerous moment we now find ourselves in. The Mad King, together with Benjamin Netanyahu, has launched a war in Iran that has spread throughout the region and killed, as of this recording, over 1,000 people, six of them American. But the vast majority of those killed are Iranians. We know, for example, that 175 people, many of them Iranian students, were killed in the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh Girls’ School. But there is essentially an information blackout in Iran that has made coverage of this war distressingly asymmetrical. So we don’t know how bad it is inside Iran, but we know it is very, very bad. Then again, we don’t know a lot of very essential things about this war, like for example, why Trump started it. Already, just in the last five days, the White House has shifted its explanation for a war that really nobody asked for. Trump started it for regime change. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was assassinated on Saturday, and it’s now utterly unclear who will lead the government. Or Trump started because Israel was going to start it anyway, and so the U.S. decided to join in because that seemed like the best thing to do. Or Trump’s started it because Iran has ballistic missiles that could have been headed our way soon. Or maybe… Just maybe Trump started it because he was anointed by Jesus to start Armageddon. I wish I was kidding on the last one, but that is legitimately being reported out this week. In other words, we just don’t know. All we know is that it is a shit show. And you can rest assured that we will be digging into this with some fresh firsthand perspective and brilliant analysis next week. But now for this week, We have a great and very compelling show on a topic that remains eternally relevant and distressing and confusing, and is a reminder that as fucked up as international relations are right now, man oh man, we are doing a real number on the domestic front as well. So please take a listen and I will see you next week with some rapid response videos on our YouTube channel and a fresh new podcast about the strange turns our world has taken between now and then. Thanks for listening. Hi, everyone. What a week, or so I would imagine. Though I am technically still out of office this week before I left the podcasting studio, the crackerjack Runaway Country team put together an episode on an issue we thought would probably not be resolved by the air date, the repression of women. Happy Women’s History Month, 2026. If you have been spending a lot of time on social media recently, which please don’t, you might actually be confused right now. About what year it is.

 

[clip of Nara Smith]: When I told my husband my favorite sandwich is a French dip sandwich, he said he doesn’t recall ever having one, which sounded so ludicrous to me that I had to make him one. I started by salting and peppering my chuck roast, searing it off on both sides before transferring it over to my crock pot. I added in some onion with my roast topped it with beef broth, my onion soup mix. A little bit of Worcester sauce before letting that go for 6 hours on low. This was absolutely divine and Lucky rated it an 8.5 out of 10 which is amazing in his book.

 

Alex Wagner: Not even a 10 with a homemade roll. That is the internet’s most notorious tradwife, Nara Smith. Her retrograde lifestyle has gone viral and become emblematic of a growing interest we see across the culture. The return to a simpler time. Women as homemakers managing their sphere of influence and child rearing and cooking and supporting and dare I say, indulging their spouse. Accounts like Nara’s and Ballerina Farms’ Hannah Neeleman make motherhood and housework look beautiful and glamorous and even relaxing, which as someone who lives in a house with two young children prone to wild messes, surprisingly violent fights and endless negotiations, I can assure you, is not the full picture. But these 21st century Betty Drapers are not the only ones selling the trad life. Right-wing think tanks including the Heritage Foundation are now pushing for women to forego higher education and return to the home. Because centering families and heterosexual marriage, they claim, will stave off the collapse of the United States.

 

[clip of Heritage Foundation representative]: So we had the sexual revolution, we had upheavals in the 60s, you had no-fault divorce, breaking down of so many social norms, and out of wedlock, births skyrocketed. Part of that was a cultural decay. That was supercharged, fortunately, by government policy. So you had Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, welfare programs, that was actually paying young women to have kids without getting married. So when the Great Society and welfare programs said, we’re gonna pay a whole lot of money in the tens of thousands to single unwed moms, you’ve got more single unwed moms. And that helped to break down the marriage culture.

 

Alex Wagner: Okay, that Heritage VP is not wearing sexy cocktail dresses and making elaborate French dip sandwiches for his spouse, but the Heritage Foundation is a powerful force when it comes to shaping national politics. Remember that this is the group that authored Project 2025, and now Heritage is releasing new plans like Saving America by Saving the Family, which came out earlier this year. And it has some ideas that you can bet Stephen, sorry feminists, Miller. Is pretty excited about. Eliminating welfare for non-married parents, restricting tax benefits to women who marry and have kids before the age of 30, and no tax credits for women who return to work after having only one child. In this report, Heritage argues that the country’s education policy should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials. They’ve even suggested a marriage boot camp for couples. Run by the Department of Health and Human Services. So lessons on love from yogurt and cocaine enthusiast, RFK Jr. Sounds awesome. If any of this sounds far-fetched, it is not. Sitting here in 2026, we can see the ways the Trump administration has followed Project 2025 nearly to the letter. Dismantling the federal bureaucracy and expanding presidential power, check. Shredding environmental regulations and expanding oil and gas exploration, check, enacting highly questionable tariffs, check! Is it a stretch to think that Heritage’s vision of the Handmaid’s Tale is now a distinct possibility? No, it is not. Especially when you have a guy like this in the Oval Office.

 

[clip of Donald Trump]: You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab him by the [bleep]. / You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out her wherever. / Quiet, quiet piggy.

 

Alex Wagner: So the question is, will MAGA misogyny successfully turn back the clock on American women? Or will we be able to put MAGA patriarchy back in its place first? I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, we are going to be digging into the conservative movement that wants to rewind our clocks to the 1950s, or maybe even earlier. I’ll be joined by Crooked’s own Erin Ryan, host of the Hysteria podcast, to get into what retrograde lifestyles actually do to women, as well as the power and influence of groups like the Heritage Foundation. But first, we wanted to talk to someone who really understands the trad wife life from the inside out. Why it’s not all homemade butter and hand-knit backpacks or whatever happens there. Sharon Johnson is an influencer and she’s host of a podcast, Wake Her Up. She lives in Utah with her husband and their six children. Here’s our conversation. Sharon, thanks for joining me. I’ve been so eager to speak with you because I feel like your history is so different than mine and I wanna know more. You are a self-identified former trad wife. So how did that come to be? What was your childhood like? What was you young adulthood like?

 

Sharon Johnson: So I grew up Mormon, which I guess the church now likes to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Alex Wagner: The LDS Church.

 

Sharon Johnson: The LDS Church. And my entire childhood, I grew in Utah, so just in the thick of Mormonism, I grow up being taught that my calling was to be a wife and to be mom. And I like to say that I was essentially a tradwife even before I was a wife. You know, at 12 years old, I was writing letters in my church class to my future husband.

 

Alex Wagner: Really?

 

Sharon Johnson: Yes, we were writing down the traits that we wanted in our husband. And we were learning how to iron white shirts at 13 years old. And we we’re trying on wedding dresses, you know, at a church activity at 14 years old so that’s my reality. I didn’t know that I had a choice. I mean, I guess I did, but the choice was to. Have a career and get an education, and that was seen as the lesser choice and something that you only do just in case something happens to your husband and you have to go back to work or, you know, you’re in a financially stressful situation, you have go to work. But I was kind of taught that, you know, where you need to be and where you should be and what’s best for yourself and your children’s society and for God is for you to be in the home. And that’s all I saw, too. I didn’t, you know, that was my mom, that was mom’s friends, it was my aunts, it was, it my whole world. I didn’t see anything else.

 

Alex Wagner:  And this is, I mean. Um, I wonder how much outside non-traditional non-Mormon culture seeped in, right? Like there was the internet and sure, your youngest years, social media was not as pervasive as it is now, but like when, when movies or songs or, you know, seepage from the outside non Mormon world came in, how did you reconcile those gender roles with what you were being taught and, and what was being celebrated in your religious culture.

 

Sharon Johnson: No, that. How you reconcile is that it’s wrong, right? That they don’t know, they don’t have the whole truth. That it’s sad, that these kids don’t have a mom who’s at home, it’s hurting them. And I just didn’t relate to it, I didn’t understand it and it kind of looked like pretend. Like I just went out to get a drink with two friends for the first time in my life. I’m 39 years old, I’m gonna turn 40. And for the first time in my life, we had a meetup and I said, who wants to get a drink?

 

Alex Wagner: Wait, when was this?

 

Sharon Johnson: A month ago? No—

 

Alex Wagner: You went out for your first drink with your friends a month ago?

 

Sharon Johnson: So it wasn’t my first drink. I’ve drunk before in the last four years since leaving the church. But it was my first time of not going out with my husband, not going with a group, just saying, hey, who want’s to go get a drink?

 

Alex Wagner: Wow.

 

Sharon Johnson: And we’re sitting down and it hit me like, oh my gosh, this is like the movies. This is like TV.

 

Alex Wagner: This is Sex and the City.

 

Sharon Johnson: Right, like I didn’t know that was real.

 

Alex Wagner: Wow.

 

Sharon Johnson: Does that make sense?

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, welcome.

 

Sharon Johnson: Thank you. It feels like you’re coming in. I mean you’re being 39 years old. It’s very bizarre to suddenly feel like I’m becoming an adult that I can make choices for myself. It’s a very confusing and disorienting. It’s not just a change of beliefs, it’s your whole reality shifts. And it’s very weird.

 

Alex Wagner: Just to go back to being on the inside for a second, what do we not get? I feel like, you know, there’s like big love, there are shows about Mormon culture, there’s also a new, and we’re going to talk about this in a second like the zeitgeist of trad wives on social media, which is not necessarily affiliated with the Mormon church, but is. About sort of very traditional and I would say retrograde gender stereotypes about women being at home and primarily keeping the hearth and raising children and decidedly not working. That’s its own thing. And then there’s kind of like the political tradwife thing, which we’ll get also into in a second. But like, what are we getting wrong about it? Because I feel like we have this buffet of stereotypes to choose from and I wonder if there’s something we’re missing in all of that.

 

Sharon Johnson: I think that. What I see the most getting wrong is people not understanding that it’s not it when you’re in it, it doesn’t feel like a choice of a belief. It just is. It just is your reality. I like to use the example of if somebody came up to you and said, hey, here are two different chocolate bars, you can have the choice of which one you would like to eat. But just letting you know, this one is poisonous, and it’s going to like, send you and your entire family to hell forever and ever and ever. But you totally have the choice.

 

Alex Wagner: Right. Got it.

 

Sharon Johnson: That’s what it feels like. So it’s, it’s this cult mindset. And you don’t really get to choose that. And once people see it, like truly see it I think that determines kind of like their character if they choose to choose differently. But before that, you don’t feel like you have a choice. It just is reality.

 

Alex Wagner: It’s the only option.

 

Sharon Johnson: It’s the only option and it’s the good option. It’s a loving option. You’re trying to do what’s right. You think that it’s a way that God is and love is and you think it’s the better choice. You’re trying to do the right thing.

 

Alex Wagner: What do you, okay, so that, I feel like religious indoctrination is a huge part of that.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yes, absolutely.

 

There’s a phenomenon though that’s happening, which I alluded to just a second ago, which is the tradwife role on social media, which is not necessarily affiliated with a church. Many times it is, but not necessarily just the Mormon church, which is more about really like lifestyle grooming. It’s these women who think everything is simpler and better and the way it should be in the natural order of things for me to stay at home, for me to be the tender of the hearth and the children and to not work and to not be overeducated and by all means to not challenge my husband. What do you think about those sort of popular internet memes of trad wife?

 

Sharon Johnson: Dumb. I think that that culture shift, which is new to me, because I’m coming out of it and I’m like, what? Why are people going back into it?

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah. Yeah.

 

Sharon Johnson: I think it’s a direct result of women like me leaving Christianity and leaving high demand religions in huge waves. I would say like 90 percent of the people that I know are ex-Mormon are millennial women. It’s a huge population that is leaving the church. It is women saying, oh, I saw what this did to my mom and I see what this could do to my children. We’re not doing this. So I think that this new trend, if we want to call it, of women going back to it is these people in power pushing this narrative. Because so many of us are leaving and they need to fight back against it, and they’re not using the same kind of idea of, oh, God’s going to punish you. They’re making it look wonderful and pretty and beautiful. So that that kind of tricks us back into the mindset. And, you know, there are things that I love being, I loved being a stay at home mom in so many aspects, but it’s the idea that you don’t have a choice and that it’s hurting people, it’s hurt society, it’s hurting your children, that’s really harmful and that you should be there and everyone should be there. That is the part that I’m like, absolutely not, absolutely not.

 

Alex Wagner: Look, as someone who is a mom and is working and feels constantly between a rock and a hard place and understands the notion of sacrifice and mom guilt very acutely, I can understand how just operating on a binary, the simplicity of the choice to do it or not do it, to just like not work or work and sticking with a decision and saying, this is the way it should be and I’m not going to even try to achieve balance and maybe that’s even impossible. I understand the lure of that. Why ultimately, if you were kind of satisfied, you have six kids, is that right?

 

Sharon Johnson: Yes.

 

Alex Wagner: That’s like six jobs right there. How and why did you decide to be, shall we say, a modern wife rather than a trad wife?

 

Sharon Johnson: Um, it kind of came at us accidentally. My husband was in the corporate world, um, in healthcare administration, and he was laid off a year and a half ago and I was doing influencing and it was like, okay, well we’ll do this until we like you find another job and we found that we both loved it, that he needed a break, we needed a dad to be a part of our lives, like he finally was working 70 hours a week, we saw him, he could have a relationship with his children and I love working. I love working, I love doing whatever this weird influencing life is. I’m a huge mental health advocate. So that’s where a lot of my work goes. And it just, it works, it feels like we get a life now and it’s beautiful seeing these stereotypes, like gender roles, like flop.

 

Alex Wagner: Reverse

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, it’s it’s quite fascinating to experience in real time. And yeah it’s—

 

Alex Wagner: Is he okay with it? I mean, I just think it’s like, not only is his wife working, he’s not working. That’s like a real inversion of the trad wife stereotype.

 

Sharon Johnson: He loves it and he is so incredibly proud of me and he hypes the kids up to be proud of me and it’s been really empowering for me. It’s been good for our relationship. He doesn’t see it as a knock on like his ego at all. He, he loves being like the trophy husband. [laughter] And I love having that support, it’s really incredible.

 

Alex Wagner: I have to ask you because there’s obviously a huge political movement and what undergirds a lot of the ascendant conservative ideology right now is, in essence, tradwifery to sound Old English about it, right? It’s this notion that we need to return to this, again, retrograde, very binary idea of where women should be and where men should be. And I want to bring up you know, one of our focuses in the last couple of weeks is in the news industry is this report from the Heritage Foundation, which is a right-wing think tank that very much influences this administration. They are the authors of Project 2025, which in many ways was a blueprint for the first year of the Trump administration. They are centering marriage in their agenda. And earlier this year, they released a report called Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years, which is long time. So, I just want to highlight a few points from it for people who are unfamiliar. In the report, they advocate for eliminating welfare for non-married parents, offering benefits to women who marry and have children before the age of 30, but not women who don’t. They want women who return to work after one child lose future tax credits, so it’s incentivizing stay-at-home motherhood. Divorced parents are ineligible for certain tax benefits, and also the report stipulates that education policy should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials. First of all, what’s your reaction to that raft of policy proposals? And I mean, sort of like, I don’t need to get, you don’t have to offer a treatise on the economic impact of that, but the sort of using the arm of the federal government to encourage women not to be educated at the higher level and to stay home and have children young.

 

Sharon Johnson: It sounds familiar. It sounds the church, the LDS church has something called the Proclamation of the Family. And it sounds like that. And it is heartbreaking to me. It is terrifying. Like I get why men want a tradwife. I have a trad wife, I have husband now. I walk into my bedroom and I have my clothes laid out and folded and washed and cleaned.

 

Alex Wagner: Where did he learn how to do that?

 

Sharon Johnson: Me?

 

Alex Wagner: Watching you. Watching you.

 

I walk into the bathroom and it’s clean like magically. I like not having to think about dinner at night It is amazing, but he got to choose that he asked for that. He wanted that. No one should be forced into that. Nobody should be guilted into that and we don’t have to do that. If we wanted him to go get a job, he could go get job right now. We’re not doing that. He could leave and do whatever he wanted at any moment and it has never been for women. Women have never benefited from these gender stereotypes. Our mothers were stuck, our grandmothers were stuck. They didn’t have choices. And now that we do. Churches and politicians are losing their minds over it and they’re trying to do something about it by shaming us back into the role.

 

Alex Wagner: Mm hmm. Guilt saying that your children aren’t going to turn out, society is askew, the power balance is off, and it’s destroying our society.

 

Sharon Johnson: Absolutely.

 

Alex Wagner: I mean, to your point, it really does feel like a mechanism by which men can control women.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yes.

 

Alex Wagner: And I wonder, I’m sure you know lots of tradwives. Do you think that people living the tradwife lifestyle see this as a control thing? Do they, would they acknowledge that? And okay, and do they acknowledge that? Men have more, at least, choosing power. Do they want that? Talk to me a little bit about how—

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, that’s a lot of the rhetoric of, so like in Mormonism, particularly, there’s something called like the priesthood and men hold the priesthood. A few years ago, there was this huge wave of women saying we want the priesthood as well. And they were quickly shot down by the church. But a lot the rhetoric from other women saying, I don’t even know why you would want that responsibility. Like why that’s like so much work. And we have so much work on our end and if we take on that responsibility as well then men won’t like they need to be incentivized in order to like take the helm and be good people. We need to teach them and rear them. There’s a lot of like infantilizing of not only just adults, I think in Christianity, but men in particular.

 

Alex Wagner: That’s interesting.

 

Sharon Johnson: We need to hold them their hand and teach them how to be good leaders. And if we take on too much leadership.

 

Alex Wagner: But don’t be leaders themselves.

 

Sharon Johnson: Oh yeah, no, we can’t be leaders. We need to like teach them and support them to be leaders. Otherwise they won’t be good people. They won’t.

 

Alex Wagner: So there’s never a sense of loss of control. This is about. Sort of like low-key matriarchy expressed through patriarchy—

 

Sharon Johnson: Yes, it’s the whole, like, you’re the neck and they’re the head, right? Like, behind every successful man is a hard-working woman or whatever. Exactly. And that’s our role, to be supportive to the men so that they can do what they can, but we aren’t supposed to be loud about it.

 

Alex Wagner: Um, you live in Utah still, I believe. Is that right?

 

Sharon Johnson: Small town, small town, Utah.

 

Alex Wagner: So you, you, I mean, you must know some Trump voters. You must know some women who voted for Trump. And I kind of like, given his track record with women, his number of divorces and remarriages, considering who his advisors are, and I’m, these don’t have to be trad wives, just like Trump supporting women in that state conservatives. Given how regressive the picture is for women, if Trump and Project 2026 have their way, like, why do you think they still support Trump? What is it that’s so intoxicating about him, given who he is as a person and the policy that he’s pushing for women? Why do women still support him?

 

Sharon Johnson: At least in my social circles, which I’ve lost pretty heavily in the last four years around here, there aren’t a lot of true Trumpers. It’s like the lesser of the two evils. It’s, oh, both parties are corrupt. Both parties are awful. Yes, he’s done X, Y, and Z, but the Democratic Party is pro-life and Trump is better for the economy. And it’s all of this mental gymnastics and—

 

Alex Wagner: They’ve created a permission structure.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah.

 

Alex Wagner: For themselves to vote for him.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah.

 

Alex Wagner: But they’re not looking at what it means for them and their lives, I guess, huh?

 

Sharon Johnson: No, because I think that in Mormonism, that doesn’t change much in their eyes. It’s like, well, I’m already a stay at home mom. I already want these things. I’m all ready doing these things so it doesn’t impact me as much as it does people who are pro-choice and have a full career and are not interested in getting married and not interested in having kids. Those are, even though they see them as extreme, ideas and I I would say that most of my Mormon friends don’t want to push and force those ideas on anyone they believe in them to some extent that yeah your your place is in the home and how we should be having babies. We should be getting married young.

 

Alex Wagner: You decided to, you know, change the game as it were. What was the biggest adjustment you had to make?

 

Sharon Johnson: Oh, that is a big question. I would say learning to make decisions.

 

Alex Wagner: Wow.

 

Sharon Johnson: Because all of your decision-making, you are trying to find outside of yourself. You’re looking to a God and to a church and things outside of your self to choose for you.

 

Alex Wagner: You mean back in the… Version 1.0 of your life.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, I mean, from zero to 36 years old, it was never like look inside of yourself and decide what feels right and what you want to do. It’s look outside of yourself for all of the answers to everything. And so in therapy, a lot of our work is in trusting yourself in learning to be an adult and make decisions without someone telling you what to do, it’s very odd. You feel like a child and you feel stupid because you realize, oh, I’ve never made an adult decision in my entire life. I don’t know how to do that. And and you have also the caveat that you don’t trust yourself anymore because you’re like, I lived this life for 36 years and it was a lie. How can I trust myself?

 

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

 

Sharon Johnson: That I’m gonna make the right decision. So it’s a lot of work. It’s a lotta therapy. It’s lot of time.

 

Alex Wagner: But at the same time, it’s so interesting that you explained it that way because it also, it goes a long way in opening the door to why people stay in that lifestyle, right? They don’t have to ask themselves tough questions. There are predetermined answers. The sort of choice matrix is much more limited and less overwhelming, I would assume. And life is simpler if not quite as rich.

 

Sharon Johnson: Yeah. It lays out this whole idea of this is how you live.

 

Alex Wagner: And you just have to do that. But look at you, going out for drinks with your friends for the first time.

 

Sharon Johnson: I know, right? [laughter]

 

Alex Wagner: You’re on the road, sis. [laughter] You’re on the road. Sharon, it’s so valuable to get your perspective on all of this.

 

Sharon Johnson: Thank you so much. It’s fascinating because I’m still in small town, Utah, and I forget that it’s weird. I forget that it is different because this is my whole life.

 

Alex Wagner: It’s just different. Let’s not call it weird. You came up in a different way and you made different choices and now you’re having Cosmos. What did you drink when you went out with your friends?

 

Sharon Johnson: My drink of choice is a gin and tonic, which I found out my grandma is in LDS. I recently found out that that is her drink and I got to have a drink with her for the first time ever just a few months ago. It was amazing.

 

Alex Wagner: I love that for you. Well, have a gin and tonic on us.

 

Sharon Johnson: Thank you so much, Alex.

 

Alex Wagner: Thanks for coming on the podcast. Good luck with everything. Thank you. That was former tradwife Sharon Johnson. We’ll be right back with Crooked’s own Erin Ryan right after the break to unpack the political motivations of pushing the tradwife life.

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Alex Wagner: Erin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on this podcast. And what people won’t know, unless our editors are very malicious, is that we began this sit down talking about pregnancy scammers and divorce filings and all manner of strange, like, I guess, marriage dynamics and unmarried dynamics.

 

Erin Ryan: Reproductive dynamics.

 

Reproductive dynamics, which is such a brilliant segue to the thing we’re gonna be talking about today, which is the resurgence of, what do we even call it? Let’s just start with the big sociocultural resurgence, which is like the tradwife phenomenon. And I guess I’ve been consuming, well, A, far too much content on the internet, but especially as it concerns this group of women, and I would say men, who are really interested in and turned on by the idea of super retrograde gender roles and the, you know, hold on to your poodle skirts because we’re rewinding the clock back to 1954. We’re Before we get into the sort of political aspect of all of this, why, I should say, not where, but why are we at a moment where we’re talking about tradwives?

 

Erin Ryan: I think that’s kind of two pronged. Like on one hand, if you think about, you know, why a person who doesn’t know very much about life would be attracted to the idea of tradwifery and I guess has never like read a book about the 1950s and how like mentally unwell women were who were trapped in that lifestyle. Somebody coming in with very little knowledge or information in a world that is very complicated, in a word that has a lot of decisions to be made that are stressful, in a world where your success and your comfort is not guaranteed. The illusion of having a life accessible to you where you’re just taken care of like a house pet and your only job is to like take care of the kids and look pretty. There’s something very appealing about the idea of being like, I don’t wanna have to deal with any of the complications of the modern world. I don’t wanna have earn money. This sounds great. And again, this is something that someone would assume knowing very little about what that actually does to the human psyche if you’re put in that situation. Now the other side, which is more insidious, is there has been a push from entities that have a vested interest in trying to incentivize tradwifery to make it look like it’s more appealing than it actually is. So like, for example, Evie Magazine, to which I am a subscriber for work [laughter] Evie Magazine is a conservative women’s magazine, but if you get a copy of it in your hands, it is beautiful. It looks like those, the magazines I used to buy at the airport before I got on a plane.

 

Alex Wagner: The magazines I used to buy, period. There are no magazines left at the airport.

 

Erin Ryan: I know. And if they have magazines, they’re like so thin and just really sad. I just want there to be magazines from 1997 for me to buy. Why can’t I just do that?

 

Alex Wagner: Sassy, please.

 

Erin Ryan: Right. I would love. Yes, let’s relaunch that. But Evie does like a print magazine once a year, and if you hold it, it’s beautiful. Like the last year’s issue had Ballerina Farm in it, and it was like a 50 page spread of her looking amazing. Like some of the pictures are a little hokey, but she looked amazing. And then there’s these articles and it’s they’re talking about cooking and they’re talking about sex and they are talking about fashion. And it’s all the things that you would expect from a women’s magazine, except there’s this undercurrent of like, have a baby, have baby, don’t put out having a baby. Have a baby have sex with your husband, have sex only with your husband, only do it with your husbands. Have babies, have babies, have babies have babies. Don’t wait. Have babies. Have babies don’t go on Ozempic. Be skinny, don’t be on Ozempic. Have babies it’s very, very insidious. But who it’s funded by is not like this, this organic up swelling of young women that are like, I want to read this stuff. It’s major advertiser when it first started was Evie 28, which is an app, a fertility app, that Peter Thiel bankrolled. And so if you think about the actual money behind it and the mechanisms behind it, it’s like this creepy gay dude from Silicon Valley who’s obsessed with spying on people and launched a fertility app who’s suddenly very interested in women in their periods. Like it is a very, very creepy backstory to Evie Magazine. That’s also like at play here. So we have like real interest in, you know, kind of avoiding the complications of modernity from people who don’t know any better and a push to try to convince people to have more babies.

 

Alex Wagner: I think also, I guess, and I am not playing devil’s advocate by any stretch, I think it’s also because modernity is fucking complicated, right?

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, absolutely. I totally get it.

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah. As a mom, as a working person, as divorce person, it is a fucking really complicated balancing act. Especially if you are, you know, depending on where your income is at, being a parent, being out there in the world, it’s just all expensive. It feels undoable. It feels really tough. And when you’re offered a solution that’s like, but there’s another way. And that way is to simplify your life and let your man bring home the bacon and like just have one role instead of three and you’ll be so much more fulfilled, right? It’s like this intoxicating prospect of like, just like simplifying everything. You don’t have to make the choice between achievement and children. The children are your achievement, you know? And like, that to me seems like the most pernicious, right? Because it’s proposing a solution that’s, first of all, not, I mean, it really undermines the idea that women may want to do things other than raise children or have ambitions that could be balanced hand in hand and that men maybe also want to stay home. Or maybe they don’t want to be married to, you know, you don’t want to have a heteronormative relationship or whatever it is. Like all these gains we’ve made in the last 50 years are totally wiped away in favor of this really honey-hued idea about the way life used to be and how much better it actually was.

 

Erin Ryan: Right. But the only way that works is if the people being messaged with that don’t have any real world experience. Like example, I had two babies in the last five years and with my second one I was working a full-time job, so I took maternity leave. And before I took a maternity leave, I was like, oh my gosh, I’m so looking forward to this. I know what I, you know, I’d been through the newborn stage before I knew it wasn’t going to be like a break, but I was, like, it’s going to really nice to just have one thing that I have to do during the day and I’m really looking forward this and by the end of maternity leave, I was like… I need to get—

 

Alex Wagner: Get me the fuck out of here. Yes, preach.

 

Erin Ryan: Because mothering to like a small baby is, you know, there are some people that absolutely love it and, you know more power to them. That’s great. I would love for them to have the option and the choice to stay home and devote their lives to that if that’s what they truly want. But for most people, it is both overwhelming and incredibly boring at the same time. You can never, you can never not be parenting, but parenting is not mentally stimulating for an adult woman with a brain.

 

Alex Wagner: Or it could be isolating, even if it is stimulating, it can be incredibly lonely, it can be incredibly.  I mean, there’s so many feelings you have in those early years. And I think the idea that there is a key and a lock where women feel automatically fulfilled and that this is their destiny, it really short changes the complexity of women’s emotions and ambitions, you know, but, but nonetheless, we are at this moment where the trad way archetype is ascendant, I guess. And we have, I think, to your to your first point, an entire political infrastructure that’s being built around it to encourage support and like further this this idea of retrograde femininity and really insanely traditional and regressive gender roles. So like, let’s talk about the Heritage Foundation, because they in recent weeks have been making waves for a report that came out in January called, wait for it, Saving America by Saving the Family: a foundation for the next 250 years. Erin, just hold onto your cone bra because I’m gonna read you some highlights. To end America’s family crisis, the Heritage Foundation writes, policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice, driven by two truths. The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right in a loving and stable home is, .I’m not reading this correctly at all. This is my hangover. Okay, the second The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents. In contrast the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood. This is a fascinating reframing. And they’re using the same argument to go after Obergefell and gay marriage. Children are due the right of being raised by a man and a woman in the home. And anything less than that short changes children. This is about children.

 

Erin Ryan: Well, it’s interesting that they’re also willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, pun intended, when it comes to adoption here, it sounds like. It sounds like they don’t want babies to be adopted out at all. It sounds because they don’t want gay couples to have babies—

 

Alex Wagner: They want adoptions to work for married, I’m not going to say white, but I think that’s probably ideal, married heterosexual couples only, which is kind of how they get around the IVF thing, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But yes, I mean, generally the idea is that children, this is a child’s rights issue, which dovetails really quite nicely with their stance on abortion and giving fetuses personhood. It’s all about child first and thinking, and if you don’t think of the child first, you are a selfish person.

 

Erin Ryan: That’s interesting that it doesn’t that doesn’t I mean whatever they don’t really care about being hypocrites because they just like they do it all the time. But it’s really interesting that that child first thing doesn’t apply to like things like gender affirming care or things—

 

Alex Wagner: Education.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. Education. It’s very interesting. That is that is an inconsistency. The first and only in the heritage Heritage Foundation ideology. It is really interesting to position it that way, but it’s also, this is a word salad. Alex. This is a lot of words that are disguising the true insidious intent behind this and the true, insidious actions that they’re suggesting achieve this. But I’m sure we’ll get into that in a little bit.

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, I just my first like issue with all of this, even if you set aside the gender stuff and the the sort of socio cultural aspect is that like, you are a government that is really encouraging people to have children at the same time that you’re shredding the social safety net.

 

Erin Ryan: And at the same time, you’re kicking out immigrants.

 

Alex Wagner: Exactly. Well, right, which is a great way to increase the American birth rate is to like keep immigrants in the country. Right.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah.

 

But I, but I, I want to get into some of the, the sort of policy prescriptions from this report, AKA time machine back to the Eisenhower era. They want to eliminate welfare for non-married parents. They’re suggesting offering a $2,000 a year bonus for married parents who do not use daycare, but only if you’re married. By the way, average child care costs are between—

 

Erin Ryan: That’s like how much it costs a month for daycare.

 

Alex Wagner: Exactly.

 

Erin Ryan: For one kid.

 

Alex Wagner: Yes. It’s usually like, I think, between $11,000 and $15,000 a year, average. They’re offering benefits for women who marry and have children before 30, but not women who don’t. We only want young eggs. I love this one. Education policy, Erin, should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials. That’s a twofer, because not only is it an assault on women’s autonomy and bodily autonomy, it’s also an on colleges and universities. And women who want to return to work after only one child would lose future tax credits and of course divorced parents, the scourge of our society, are ineligible for certain tax benefits. Do any of these stand out to you as particularly onerous? Like, what are your thoughts about some of these ideas?

 

Erin Ryan: I mean if you kind of look at it like a Magic Eye poster where you just stand close to it and then back away and you’re like, what is the picture within the picture? The picture within the picture here is that Heritage Foundation wants to promote marriage by making life more difficult for women who don’t get married and have children. Not by making life better for anybody whatsoever except for the men who are within these marriages because this traditional form of marriage is beneficial only to men. It is not beneficial to children, It is not beneficial to women. And if we’re gonna bring back 1950s style marriage, the least they can do is bring back Quaaludes, right? We’re gonna need—

 

Alex Wagner: Honestly, that’s how you could get more people to stay married.

 

Erin Ryan: I would a hundred percent, like I think that that’s what they need. That should be item number one. It’s actually like the.

 

Alex Wagner: You maybe have me if you bring back quaaludes.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, so item number 1, okay, Heritage Foundation, I’m listening. The amounts of money that they’re suggesting are- sort of along the lines of, it’s a banana, Michael, what could it cost $10? Like a complete lack of understanding of how much children cost, how much childcare costs. And it really betrays this vision. I think that ultimately Heritage really wants only men to work. I don’t think that they want, they think that women should have jobs. I think they think that women shouldn’t stay home and take care of children. That’s it. And the way that they’re trying to do that is by making life. More difficult if you choose not to do those things. Also, getting them to have children before 30 is really an interesting thing and I think it also gives the game away a little bit because we talked about Evie Magazine earlier and I said I think its aimed at very young women who don’t know anything. And. I think one way to trick women into doing this is to get them in before they have enough life experience to be like, hey, this is actually pretty sweet. I kind of love living in my own apartment. I kind love having everything exactly the way I want it. I kind don’t think that I really want more than one child. You know, they’re trying to get in before people have enough information to make a rational decision.

 

Alex Wagner: Before they get educated. Before they’ve seen the world and talked to their friends too much.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, before they have friends that are over 35 who are like, don’t do it.

 

Alex Wagner: We say this as two mothers who love our children. Yeah, absolutely. Love the shit out of them.

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Alex Wagner: You’re right about the negative incentive. And I just think that’s where it’s like, that, first of all, government pushing people to have babies is like, I don’t know, I just feel like it doesn’t usually work very well, very Orwellian. We’ve seen it around the world in autocracies. It’s fucking freaky and it doesn’t work. And negatively incentivizing it seems problematic as well. Just like we’re gonna make life so miserable for you. And we’re going to devalue you in society and in the tax code to the degree that you just are forced to stay at home and have babies because that’s the only option. That doesn’t seem like a great recipe for a happy society.

 

Erin Ryan: It’s not. It’s doesn’t work. Like it does. And let’s talk about the most extreme example of it ever being tried in recent history. And that was like in Romania in the 60s. And like I’m obsessed with this. I’m like morbidly obsessed with this and was laughing because I talk about it all the time. When Nicolae Ceaușescu took power in Romania, he instituted this thing called Decree 770. Now, if you were alive in the 80s, listeners, viewers, if your alive in the 80s you probably remember Romanian orphanages. Those were a direct result of Decree 770, which made abortion completely illegal. It made birth control illegal and also like secret police would spy on women when they went to the hospital, when they went to doctor. I think if you were over 45 and if you had more than four children, you were allowed to be on birth control eventually, but it was really, really horrible. So now in the first couple of years, the birth rate went up in Romania, of course, because suddenly you get pregnant, you’re going to stay pregnant and that baby’s coming out of you and you’re going to raise it. But. After a few years, women of means and education in Romania figured out ways around it. It’s not necessarily that they were having sneaky abortions. They just were figuring out a way to evade this. If they didn’t want to have a baby, they would not have babies. The people that couldn’t figure out ways round it were women that were more disenfranchised, younger women, abuse victims, et cetera. People who were less equipped to parent their children were more likely to have children. And so a lot of these excess children that they couldn’t take care of ended up in Romanian orphanages, not being looked after, being completely neglected, and an entire generation of just absolute national shame. These children were just completely emotionally non-functional once they reached adulthood. So I think that that should be a lesson to anybody who’s going to try to carrot and stick women into doing anything. Even in the most extreme version, Where you know? Medals are given to moms with six kids and you know all of these things. It doesn’t it doesn’t actually work in the long term and what it does do is it increases the birth rate among people that are less equipped to handle the work of parenting and increases the burden on the state when some of those children are you know not being adequately cared for by their parents.

 

Alex Wagner: You’d think I think it’s almost as if the right wing has not looked at historical precedent. [laughs]

 

Erin Ryan: Or current precedent or what’s happening currently like there are there was a study that came out a couple years ago by a woman named Claudia Golden that actually looked at what does increase the birth rate looked at different countries around the world like Okay, so Germany was having a really hard time. And so what did they do free daycare? You know all of these special things and they were able to stop it from dropping as fast as it was dropping, but they weren’t able to the drop entirely. And then they, you know, what actually increases the birth rate she found or keeps the birthrate from dropping is men helping.

 

Alex Wagner: Oh, don’t tell anybody that.

 

Erin Ryan: Men helping. It’s like this, but the Heritage Foundation, it’s like, it’s right there. If you Google how to raise birth rate, it’s one of the most recent, you now, this like flurry of press around this paper by Golden. It’s one the like top results. Like, I’m sure they have the same Google I do at the Heritage foundation.

 

Alex Wagner: Maybe.

 

Erin Ryan: Really, what they should do if they really want to increase the birthrate in the US is male-focused education designed to train boys and men to provide an environment where their wives and female partners want to have children because they know within their home they’re going to be supported. But I don’t think we’re ready for that.

 

Alex Wagner: I don’t think we’re… Men helping? That seems radical. I mean, one of the things they do prescribe, however, and this is maybe my favorite, is a marriage boot camp for couples run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Let’s just like envision that for a second. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Running a—

 

Erin Ryan: He’s been married a couple times, he’s been married like twice or three times. He’s got experience being married.

 

Alex Wagner: I mean, I can’t, first of all. Like, this is the same group of people that are, like, Obamacare is going to bring us death panels, government’s going to be up in, and now that the government can be in your gynecologist’s office, and apparently you’re marital bed. Like, the cognitive distance between what the right has railed against for years and years and years, and what they’re actually suggesting, which is a form of like the most heavy-handed socialism, like. What are you talking about?

 

Erin Ryan: You know, it’s also funny, they’re backing into like, being like, oh, actually, you know what? Why don’t we do sex education? It’s like, you guys spent an entire, like you spent 50 years being like we’re not gonna tell anybody about their bodies at all and kids shouldn’t know and blah, blah, bla, blah. Now one of the suggestions is what if we educated women on their like menstrual cycles and their fertility? It’s, like, that’s called… Sex education and you guys got really mad when we tried to give it to people. Like it is very, it’s so interesting that they’re trying to do this. And also like boot camp. Why is there an army component to this? Like, are we doing reps? Like, what are we?

 

Alex Wagner: I’ll load the dishwasher. Honestly, I’d be for a fucking boot camp about like doing the fucking dishes, but that’s so lame of me. It does beg the question though, Erin, because as you point out, some of this stuff, there is a shared value, I think, or increasingly on the right and certainly on the left in terms of like, oh, I don’t know, education around sex and sexual, basically sexual empowerment in a way. But even some of the proposals on a tax level could be advantageous, not if they weren’t. Only limited to married couples. The idea of having a more robust social safety net is something that the, like, child care, like, deframing the costs of child care. Giving tax credits to people. Like, these are not anathemas. These are not bad ideas if you are a liberal or a progressive. And I wonder if you think there is a way to try and find common ground on this. Like, or is the ground so poisoned that it’s not worth walking on at all?

 

Erin Ryan: I think that we can agree as progressives that giving people that have children money is good. I think it’s good. Even though they think the money is going to be enough to convince people to have children, let’s just let them think that. Let’s let them thank that and let them give people money. Great. Because it’s been shown that children who have parents that have the means to care for them tend to have better outcomes. For different reasons, you know, they’re able to buy what the kids need. Kids need stuff all the time, but also…

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah, or support services or whatever it is.

 

Erin Ryan: Exactly, and also having financial security reduces parental stress and maternal stress especially has poor outcomes in children. So, you, know, reducing apparent stress and making things easier for them is going to be good for kids. So it’s actually going to probably be good for kids to incentivize. Having children. I just wish that they weren’t saying they’re only doing it for married couples or whatever.

 

Alex Wagner: Or women under 30.

 

Erin Ryan: This is going to increase lavender marriages. Let’s just say it. Like people are just about to, they’re going to get married to their gay bestie. Like I’m a single, you know, have kids with whoever they want, get married with their gay bestie, be like, oh yeah, that’s totally his kid. And then like raise the kid together. You know, there’s, there, people are always going to find ways around.

 

Alex Wagner: It’s true.

 

Erin Ryan: Incentive structure. And so I think it’s very, it’s almost like cute that they think that this will work. Um, but I just, I can’t see it working, but I also feel like, yeah, just, yeah. Let them, they want to start giving people with kids more money. I I’m actually kind of in favor of that.

 

Alex Wagner: Do you feel like I’m sort of obsessed that they have the worst possible figurehead for a movement like this, which is Donald Trump, right? Project Heritage like pumps this stuff out and they like give it to Trump and he takes it and then pretends he never got it in the first place, right, that’s certainly the case with Project 2025. This is Project 2026. Trump is obviously twice married, notorious philanderer. He’s been found civilly liable for sexual assault. He’s not exactly who you would recruit to be the avatar for a Christ-loving marriage. And by the way there is a white Christian nationalism that undergirds all of this stuff coming out of heritage. But I do think JD Vance, our vice president, congratulations on your coming fourth child, Mr. Vice President, is actually not only a great avatar for this movement, but is a true believer. And I wonder how much you think, well, first of all, what do you think about JD Vance as an interlocutor for this moment? Does he make it more palatable because he’s less palatable, is this something, can you talk about this in national politics? I mean, he’s going to be running in 2028, like, can you run on this and find resonance? Can you, can, you win support if you talk about this as a national issue? I mean he would elevate it from like the freak show at the Heritage foundation to, you know, a piece of the RNC platform.

 

Erin Ryan: Um, well, I kind of disagree with you that he’s a true believer. I think that he believes he says whatever he says he has to say in order to get closer to power. And I think this is something that he has realized that if he embraces it, he can sort of, he can kind of run to the right of Donald Trump on it because he does actually have the like bona fides in his personal life. He seems like he’s had the same wife for a long time and been faithful to her. They have four children, you know. But there are some things that I bump against, which is one, I don’t think JD Vance tells the truth about anything at all. I think he’s kind of a hollow man. And also, I think that, you know, you brought up white Christian nationalism. I think there are components of the American right that truly have a problem with the fact that his kids are biracial.

 

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

 

Erin Ryan: And that his wife is not a white person and that he was married.

 

Alex Wagner: Or Christian.

 

Erin Ryan: Or Christian, he was married in a Hindu ceremony. And I am fully in favor. That’s like the only cool thing about him. Like to me is the fact that he’s actually had this like life experience that’s very unique and that it sort of expresses this really wonderful thing about America, which is that people from different backgrounds come together and make a life together here. But unfortunately, that’s not what he’s taking forward. He’s taking for this like pro-life, pro-life, pro-life thing. You know, he spoke at the March for Life. Did you watch any of the speech that he gave?

 

Alex Wagner: I did, I saw some of it, yeah.

 

Erin Ryan: Well, the Trump administration kind of danced around this thing that the Trump administration is in trouble for. Um, anti-abortion activists right now are really gunning for the abortion pill. They want the abortion pill to be illegal, but they want to take them if a person out of the market. But the problem with that is the Trump administration. I mean, Donald Trump used the pro-life vote to get elected. And now that he’s been elected twice, he’s kind of like, you know, pound sand.

 

Alex Wagner: Like, he’s got a Roe v. Wade overturned and they should be happy with that.

 

Erin Ryan: Exactly. You got what you wanted. You got your Supreme Court. Now I don’t really care about anything else. He doesn’t care about the abortion pill. And the pro life movement in the U.S. has been really screaming about this. And in his speech, JD Vance was like, look, look. He did that thing that he does that’s very like HR, where he’s like, I know, I understand.

 

Alex Wagner: He’s so the administration’s HR, chief HR officer. Oh my God, that’s so accurate.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, right. So now every time you see him, you’re gonna be like, this is the fucking HR guy just being full of shit. No offense to the HR Crooked Media. I’m talking about other experiences I’ve had with HR in the past.

 

Alex Wagner: Amen, sis.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, but he has this kind of HR thing where he’s like, oh yeah, let’s address the elephant in the room. And then he talks, he mentions something or alludes to something and then doesn’t do anything about it. He never once mentioned the abortion pill. Like he never like called it out. He was like we could be doing more but he never like spelled out what the administration is going to do. I think that his big talk and the fact that he’s about to have his fourth kid is not going to be enough to convince the super hardcore pro-lifers that he is doing something or he’s pushed the administration to do something that they just haven’t done. And it’s kind of right there for them to do too. Like you know try to make an executive order that that eliminates he can’t even he hasn’t even taken those like big swings that are going to be overturned in court. So I think that on one hand, J.D. Vance is, appears to be more of a true believer, but I think on the other hand, if you actually analyze what he has done versus what he had said, there’s a pretty wide gap there that’ll be hard for him to negotiate going into 2028.

 

Alex Wagner: Well, and to your point, I mean, getting rid of Mifepristone is a political dead ender. Like you’re, it’s a wrap. Like I think it’s the majority of abortions that still happen in this country are medication abortions. And if it really would change, I mean already dismantling Roe changes the notion of bodily autonomy in this county, but it would really, I would change the dynamics of our society in such a profound way. And it is a non-starter for national election.

 

Erin Ryan: It is, but it also wouldn’t really change care available to abortion seeking patients because as a prostol can also be used to induce abortions. It’s not as, it has like a slightly higher failure and complication rate, but like, it’s still like—

 

Alex Wagner: Right. Yes. People will find a way. We know this from the era when abortion wasn’t safe or legal, and that is a terrifying, but I mean, women should not have to go through unnecessarily difficult and dangerous procedures because JD Vance is trying to score political points with a fraction of the right wing. Even if they have to only rely on one part the two-drug regimen. If something goes wrong, then they have to go to the emergency room. And if something’s going wrong in the emergency room in the middle of a botched abortion, good luck if you’re in a red state. I mean, that’s like a death sentence for women. More from my conversation with Erin Ryan right after the break.

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Alex Wagner: I guess to go back to the idea, though, of abortion, because I do think that’s, I mean, that is the elephant in the room, right? We started talking about IVF, and I think that this is where the right gets twisted up in its own sort of ethics, right. They want fetuses, they want an egg at fertilization to have personhood. And if you do that, that makes IVF a lot more complicated, right, and you saw this play out in Alabama. Because if that egg has personhood rights and it gets destroyed or isn’t carried to term in the course of an IVF round, that creates a whole set of legal complications. At the same time, there’s some women, some people who wanna get pregnant who cannot have a baby without IVF. So where does that leave you in your pronatalist movement if you both wanna encourage the building of families, but you wanna take away one of the main tools by which people have families in the 21st century? I wonder what you think about the ethics of that and whether that’s a problem for them. I mean, I think the IVF thing is just a really super thorny issue generally for the right and they’ve managed to skirt over it. But the more you have this conversation about families and family building, the more complicated it becomes and the more convoluted their position on IVF becomes.

 

Erin Ryan: Mm hmm. Well, like we were talking about earlier, the Heritage Foundation has decided that the way to boost the birth rate in the U.S. Is to get them young, get them having babies before they can think about it.

 

Alex Wagner: Right, to neutralize it.

 

Erin Ryan: Exactly. And IVF is something that enables people who have delayed parenthood to an age where maybe getting pregnant is slightly more difficult, which by the way, I think the fertility cliff is just like propaganda, but that’s a whole other topic. They want IVF to be difficult to access because they have decided that the way forward is to trick women into having babies young and IVF gives them the idea that they can have babies later. And it’s also something that is used by LGBTQ couples.

 

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

 

Erin Ryan: And so this is a way for them to both be homophobic and to limit LGBTQ couples’ ability to have children. And it also is a ways to further scare women into thinking that they need, you know what, you gotta do it now, because otherwise you’re gonna lose your chance. You gotta do before you’re 35, otherwise you gonna lose you chance.

 

Alex Wagner: 30 ideally, Erin. Really like early 20s.

 

Erin Ryan: So I cannot imagine what a nightmare mother I would be if I had a child at 30.

 

Alex Wagner: Oh my God, like 24? Like I… No. Mm mmm.

 

Erin Ryan: My mom was 23 when she had me and I’m like, if, if she, like, I was, when she was my age, she had a 19 year old, like what? What? That is crazy. But I also think that like, you know, there’s, there have been plenty of resources or research into children’s development that has found that parents that are older actually do a better job of parenting because they have financial stability. They have emotional stability, emotional maturity.

 

Alex Wagner: I was going to say, they’re less whacked out. I was so whacked-out in my 20s. [laughter]

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, nobody should have handed me a baby. I should barely have had a cat.

 

Alex Wagner: That’s the next movement. In its essence though, I think when we get back down to all of this, right, this is about men. Like they’re making it about what women can or can’t do, but ultimately it is about rebalancing the power dynamic and making men, as you said, like back to head of the household, back to the sort of primary breadwinner, back to sort of the masculinity of yesteryear. And that is what is, I mean, that is the thing of, the Trump 2.0 is like, where, what did we miss? What went wrong that allowed for the space to develop where men have felt like it’s a zero-sum game, that women’s empowerment, that feminism, that women being equal earners is a direct threat to them and their lives. Instead of something that should be seen as complimentary and maybe even rewarded as evidence of a more inclusive and equitable society. I mean, like the whole game with this heritage report and even the pro-natalist movement is just really about making men, putting men back at the top of the power pyramid. That’s all it is.

 

Erin Ryan: I think that men in America move through life being told that a marriage and family is a participation trophy that they get for just not going to jail, basically. And at the same time, they’re moving through life, through systems where boys don’t necessarily thrive. So they go to school, the girls are smarter than the boys. You know, through high school, the girls are more likely to, they talk sooner, they potty train sooner. They do all of these things developmentally.

 

Alex Wagner: They take tests better.

 

Erin Ryan: They test better, they’re better at sitting still in school, and you know, there’s a whole other conversation we could have about the system being designed around a specific kind of child and not another kind of child. But they witness girls doing very well all through school, they are outnumbering them in college, they’re outnumbering them in some professional fields now. And I think that they’re being told that there are these conflicting things. They’re told that society is set up around the idea that they are better than women and deserve to be in charge of them. And then with their eyes and their ears and their life experience, they witness that girls are actually doing better than them in a lot of ways. And I think that they have chosen, instead of being like, maybe I should improve, they want to go back to a system where whatever shines about girls and women is suppressed so that once again, they can get that shiny trophy that they were told that they were going to get just by virtue of being born male in America. And it’s very, it’s frustrating because, you know, I think that there’s a collective… Failure among some parents to raise good boys, and there is a collective failure among some parents, to raise girls, to demand a certain treatment from boys. And I also think that we’re seeing a dynamic in, I think, our generation, but especially for people that are maybe like, you know, a generation younger than us. Boys want their dad’s lives. Men, when they become young men, they want the life that their dad had. And girls are raised having their mom pulling them aside, whispering, you don’t have to have this life, and they don’t want their mom’s life. And it is a conflict and there is not a lot of communication happening around what that means. And I think, you know, I’m married to a man and I sometimes have tension in my marriage because I’m like, oh, you expect me to do this. We never talked about this. This is just something that I’m expected to do. I plan all the birthday parties. I hate that shit.

 

Alex Wagner: Well, the emotional labor of motherhood is a real thing.

 

Erin Ryan: Intense. But I think that there’s a gender dynamic in America right now where men expect certain things to be performed to them in the dynamic of a hetero relationship. And women are like, fuck no, I don’t want to do that. Nobody said I was going to do that. And I think a lot of young men are choosing what seems easier for them, which is for a woman to just be like, oh, please pick me, pick me. Put me in your house. I’ll be your little pet. I’ll raise your kids. They’ll get your name even though I let them suck on my boobs for a year. It is something that is a simple-minded solution to a complicated world.

 

Alex Wagner: I would just say I have two boys and I’m really sensitive to the idea that we need to think about parenting them different than we think about parenting girls necessarily and that you want to raise good boys and how do you do that? It’s not just simply like work harder. It’s like what should we change? What structures should be more malleable to accommodate for the ways in which boys learn but also the ways and which girls learn. But I think the work right now of being a progressive and being someone interested in like that. You know female power and equity is to not let that conversation bleed into this whole space of toxic masculinity right like the left has to come up with some answer to the the right movement the rightward movement to just make it a completely retrograde proposition right there’s got to be some kind of space to be like okay we we do care about boys we need to figure this shit out without making this a conversation about trad wives. There’s got to be some ownership of the fact that, you know, there is kind of a crisis happening here, but it’s not at it’s, not about redirecting it towards women and punishing women for their achievements, while also coming up with some solutions, which is like the most fucking I’m running for office statement I’ve ever fucking made. But you know what I mean? Like I don’t want to forsake it. I don’t want to forsake it because it’s like, what the right is proposing is like a super easy solution. Just go back to the way it was in like 1897.

 

Erin Ryan: But the way of what? I mean, they’re also lying about the way it was.

 

Alex Wagner: Exactly. Of course.

 

Erin Ryan: They’re lying about the way it was because.

 

Alex Wagner: It wouldn’t work.

 

Erin Ryan: It wouldn’t work. I mean like you, you know, Mad Men is something that people are rewatching. And I think that show does a good job of being honest about the human cost of of gendered expectations. They looked great. They dressed cool.

 

Alex Wagner: January Jones. Nobody smokes a cigarette like her, huh? Or drinks wine at 9 a.m.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, or rests a like tumbler of liquor on a pregnant belly like she does. It’s it I think that the something that we need to remind as progressives is that these are fantasies, spun fantasies around a non-reality that was initially an ad campaign. We can’t go back to it because it never was that. It never was that. That was always something designed to make people feel like buying a refrigerator. It wasn’t designed to be a blueprint for how to live a life because it’s not possible. And there may be some people who can fit into that mold. And again, like more power to you if that’s something that brings you authentic joy and fulfillment, but to imagine that every woman is satisfied just staying at home and taking care of kids and having that be her life’s work. And every man is satisfied being a paycheck for his family, that’s a very unfair set of expectations. And I think when you listen to like Man is Fear podcast, which I don’t recommend, I tried to listen to one last night and I was like, they’re dumb, they’re so dumb, but it relies on an inexperience from their audience. An inexperienced, a bitterness, a deliberate misleading of their audience because it sounds like people just make like, like LARPing masculinity without actually having to interact with women or their wife or their children as individuals. And I think that it’s just important for us to understand that like the 1950s were not good. You know, women were very ill.

 

Alex Wagner: Just ask Black people.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, just ask people, anybody who wasn’t white and middle class, like women were going to college and immediately being hustled back home and popping out kids and they were popping out, they were put in like twilight sleep and they had birth injuries and nobody knew what to do with them and like they were, their doctors were calling their husbands after their mental health appointments, like there was such a, it was so fucked up and a lot of children of that generation grew up to be emotionally damaged people.

 

Alex Wagner: And they’re now making laws.

 

Erin Ryan: And they’re now making laws, but it is very interesting having gone to therapy to be like, I can see what you would have talked about in therapy. Yeah, I think that it’s just really important for us to pour cold water on the illusion.

 

Alex Wagner: The fantasy.

 

Erin Ryan: Exactly, because it’s not real. It’s not real.

 

Alex Wagner: You know what’s been a fantasy?

 

Erin Ryan: What?

 

Alex Wagner: Having you on this podcast.

 

Erin Ryan: Oh, that’s so nice. Thank you so much.

 

Alex Wagner: It’s true. You’re such a great conversationalist. I feel like we could just go on and on. We could give each other, gift each other mutual subscriptions to Evie Magazine.

 

Erin Ryan: Do you want my login?

 

Alex Wagner: Yes.

 

Erin Ryan: I’ll give it to you. You can use my login. Because there’s an article today. Here, listen. How to trick your man into dressing more masculine. Anyone want to know any man tricking tips? They got them.

 

Alex Wagner: What? What?

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I’m about to tuck in.

 

Alex Wagner: Is that the crisis we’re facing? Men dressing too?

 

Erin Ryan: Feminine, yeah. How to trick your man int dressing more masculine. Yeah.

 

Alex Wagner: The scales are falling from my eyes, Erin.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I’m going to send you the login because you’re going to really have some fun.

 

Alex Wagner: I actually please do. Thank you for doing this podcast with me.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me.

 

Alex Wagner: You’re the best.

 

Erin Ryan: You’re the best.

 

Alex Wagner: That is our show for this week. As always, if you’ve been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, send us an email or a one minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge and sincere thank you to everyone who has written in already. And last but not least, please do not forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.