Peachy Keenan, author of Domestic Extremist, traces her shift from atheism to conservative Catholicism after a miscarriage, framing traditional homemaking—a Proverbs 31-inspired rejection of workplace feminism—as a bulwark against leftist cultural erosion. She advocates large, faith-based families as a demographic counter to birth control-driven "self-sterilization," dismissing modern dating culture while promoting chastity and classical Christian education to combat transgender ideology and racial guilt in schools. Her movement positions domestic resistance as the ultimate weapon in the culture war. [Automatically generated summary]
This is this week's interview with yet another brilliant woman.
We bring a lot of brilliant women on because they are saying some of the most important stuff that's going on.
This is really true.
This is, I think, where the hinge of our troubles is, is in the treatment of women and in what women have been taught to do.
In my book, The Truth and Beauty, I write about the rise of feminism in the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution stripped women of a lot of what were called their cottage industries because they were things that they did at home.
This is charted in the famous Bible verse in Proverbs about a virtuous woman, which says, it starts, everybody always quotes this, who can find a virtuous woman for her price is far above rubies.
But listen to what it says about what a virtuous woman does.
She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchant ships.
She bringeth food from afar.
She riseth while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household and a portion to her maidens.
She considers a field and buys it with the fruit of her hands.
She plants a vineyard.
She perceives that her merchandise is good.
Her candle goes out, not out by night.
She lays her hand to the spindle and her hands hold the distaff.
She stretches out her hand to the poor.
Yea, she reaches forth her hands to the needy.
She's not afraid of the snow.
This is not just a homemaker, but a homemaker who is also an economic engine.
And when this was taken away by the Industrial Revolution, all these jobs, making clothes, which was a huge economic boon, making food, growing food, all of this went out to factories and children too, which were of great value.
They used to be called the poor man's wealth.
They were also taken away to the factories.
And this is when feminism started to rise.
I mean, this is when feminism started to become an issue, which it really had not been before.
And when women lost so many of these economic cottage industries, the answer at first was to sort of idealize her role in the house.
This is the Victorians had the angel in the house, a terrible, terrible poem that a guy named Coventry Patmore wrote about his first wife, or his late wife.
I just quote a bit, I guess it's just a terrible poem.
Her beauty was a godly grace, the mystery of loveliness, which made an altar of her face was not of the flesh, but a most pure and living light.
And, you know, I'm not sure that women really want their faces used for an altar.
And so feminism came along with an answer.
That answer was wrong.
It was the answer because it became infused with leftism.
It was the answer to push women into the workplace, tell women that they could be everything and should be everything that men could be, and to basically take them away from that valuable role they play as not just homemakers.
Home, I think, is this essential aspect of freedom, but also their role as people creators and soul nurturers.
So that's why I think right now we are missing all of that.
And I've invited so many intelligent women.
Mary Harrington was on.
We'll have more.
But today I want to talk to Peachy Keenan.
Peachy, that's obviously a pseudonym, but she is a contributor to the American Mind and the Federalists.
She's the author of this new book, which I've been reading, and it is just delightful, Domestic Extremist.
Domestic Extremist, A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.
Peachy, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
It's good to meet you finally.
Yeah, you too.
Thank you for having me.
I'm really enjoying this.
It is just absolutely hilarious.
But also it's important because it talks about something that I think women are finding out for themselves, which is that what individuals do is what turns a culture.
So maybe you could start by describing what a domestic extremist is.
Yeah, I mean, the title is a little bit of a play on words.
I like to say that I'm not a domestic extremist.
I'm just extremely domestic.
But these days, you know, women who choose to quit their jobs to stay home with a newborn, maybe work from home, maybe not work at all while the children are little, who have more than, you know, the legal limit of two children, which is what it seems like it is.
Women who go to go to religious services with their families.
I mean, we're kind of treated like we're real extremists these days.
We're kind of living this sort of taboo lifestyle that is totally looked down upon.
So that's really why I wrote the book to kind of empower people.
Like, no, this is okay.
This is this is normal.
You know, I keep hearing, I always hear people say they're just a homemaker or just a mom.
And, you know, I always think, have you ever seen, have you ever actually seen this done?
Because, and not only, not only the doing of it, but also the rewards that it gives to society as a whole.
Did you, you weren't always like this.
You weren't born.
I mean, you would, you would have had to have been born on an island, given the culture's, the message that the culture is sending.
Oh, yeah.
Domestic extremists are made and not born.
At least in my case, I did not wake up like this.
Okay.
I was raised, you know, a secular atheist.
I, I mean, my mother was a homemaker, but I sort of rebelled against that.
And I just kind of like, by osmosis, absorbed all the messages from the culture, from feminism.
And so I popped out of college, just sort of this fully formed feminist, pro-choice, you know, and I just wanted to spend my 20s having fun, working, girl bossing around.
And I didn't really figure this stuff out.
You know, the feminism didn't like fall from my eyes until much later.
And I wrote this book in part to sort of help maybe other young women avoid some of these like wasteful mistakes that my generation made.
And that young women now are making, you know, even more.
I mean, this is one of the things that, you know, who was it?
Camille Pogley, I think, who said a woman is born a woman, but a man has to find out how to become a man.
That's true.
There's something like about having an area of expertise that women essentially have that they're being taken away from.
They're being told that this thing that they are is not important in and of itself.
Did, I mean, you went through this experience.
You got married.
Did having children change you?
Or by the time you had children, were you already on this path?
I was already on the path.
I was already more of a political conservative from being like a crazy liberal.
And I was already pro-life, basically.
But really the process of having a baby.
And before that, I had a miscarriage at three months.
And that really woke me up.
I mean, anticipating a child, seeing it on the ultrasound, heartbeating.
I mean, the myth, the left says that a 12-week fetus is just a nothing.
You can't see anything is such an obvious, they were, that was like a story last year.
What an obvious, insane lie.
They're gaslighting everyone.
It's a little tiny baby.
And we lost the baby.
And that was like, wow, you can do this, but women can do this voluntarily.
How, how, how, how macabre, how, how awful.
And then becoming a mom, you know, when you hold that baby, I had been working in an office my whole life.
And after that, I was just like, no, you can't, like, you can put a gun to my head and I'm not handing my baby to anybody.
Like, I'm not outsourcing this.
Now, the thesis of the book, Domestic Extremists, a Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.
So the thesis of the book is actually simply by becoming what you call a domestic extremist.
That's right.
You are actually turning the tide of the culture war and you're very optimistic about it.
I mean, the first half of the book, the first half of the book is all about the destruction the left has done.
Right.
But you're very optimistic about winning.
Tell me why just that choice is going to change things.
Well, I try to stay optimistic because otherwise, you know, what's the point of being up in the morning?
Like, that's true.
We've got to be happy warriors.
We've got to keep going.
I have five children to raise and I'm very hopeful that I'll have a lot more grandchildren.
And I need to sort of do this for them.
You know, I mean, otherwise, what's going to happen to everybody?
But I think that this is really the only path that I see.
I mean, is there a political solution?
Like, maybe, yes.
It's feeling more and more harder to reach a political solution.
One election, you know, doesn't really seem like it will fix what's ailing all of us individually and what's ailing families and what's ailing, especially women.
So I feel like becoming a little bit more domestic is really the only path.
And this is not a win by that we can have by like next Tuesday.
This is not like an overnight thing.
They've had a 100-year head start.
And so we've got to start now by forming families that are a little bit more immune, inoculate them to the worst excesses of this culture, inoculate young girls to feminism.
And I think over time, we will see a change.
I mean, I see my friends, they have large families and they're forming their children with faith.
And I am sure that they will be blessed with an abundance of grandchildren.
And the benefit to us is the other side is voluntarily self-sterilizing.
And they're sterilizing their own children.
So, I mean, you know, we're going to win.
It's just numbers.
So now, this is something I'm really interested in.
And Mary Harrington was talking about this too.
And you talk about it in your book.
And it has startled me because one of the things I thought was never going to go away was birth control, birth control pills.
They seem to me to have changed the game of life entirely.
And yet, and yet, Mary Harrington says we should make sex dangerous again.
You also say that this is basically self, as you put it, self-sterilization.
What I want to know is what do you think a young woman's life should look like?
Does that mean that you think that a woman should just remain chaste until she's married, which is one solution?
Or do you think that she should use other forms of birth control, but not that?
Yeah, I've actually talked to Mary about this.
I think she's doing some excellent writing about birth control.
And really, it's birth control has been treated for so long, at least in my lifetime, it's just like taking an aspirin.
It's nothing.
You know, it's just take it every day.
They would hand it out to us at college orientation.
You know, it was like, no big deal.
You had to be on birth control to just to be a young woman.
That was just, you know, avoiding pregnancy was like job one.
Okay.
And there was no talk to side effects or consequences, but now we know that it can trigger all kinds of things, especially breast cancer.
You know, artificial hormones staying on them for 20 years is not a good idea, really.
And then there's all the emotional consequences.
You know, what is that birth control?
What is the lifestyle?
It's underwriting for you.
You know, 10 years on Tinder, which I'm reading stories, women have been, they downloaded Tinder the day it came out and they're still on it thanks to birth control, you know?
And so what I, I mean, look, I'm a Roman Catholic.
So obviously, like, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to instill in my daughters, yes, the virtue of chastity.
That's a, that's a trigger word, trigger warning.
It's very hard to pitch that to women who aren't growing up with in some kind of religious faith or in a religious community because chastity seems like so oppressive, so hard, so old-fashioned.
But I mean, you know, I just because perfection is unattainable doesn't mean that we can't at least aspire to it.
I mean, I'm seeing you're, and you are probably too seeing on TikTok young women listing their body counts, you know, the list of their sexual partners into the hundreds.
Okay.
So I think it's reasonable to ask people to maybe, you know, let's, let's, let's scale it back.
Like I like to say a good body count number is somewhere between like OJ Simpson and Charles Vanson.
Okay.
Let's get, try to get those numbers down, you know, if you can.
I mean, not everyone can have like, you know, be chased till marriage.
I get that.
I live in the real world, but I don't think it's a bad goal.
One of the things that I hear from women, and I don't talk to women about this too much because I'm afraid I'll get arrested, but one of the things I hear from them is, well, if you don't put out essentially, then you're out of the competition because the girl next to you is going to do that.
So what's your response to that?
I mean, if, yeah, you see that in how young women dress.
They're dressing like they're for sale.
I mean, let's just face it.
I've gone shopping with my, I have a teenage daughter.
We go shopping and the dresses look like they come with their own birth control pills, like in the pops.
They're, you know, and I think that, you know, if you do that for a man, a guy's attention, you might have his attention, but how long are you going to have that attention?
You know, you're going to have that attention for a night, a day.
I mean, we saw that story two years ago, West Elm Caleb, you know, the guy who had been ghosting like dozens of women in New York on apps.
None of them knew about the other one.
And he was having two, three, four dates a day.
And I have, I have male friends on dating apps and they're doing the same thing, you know?
And so women need to be a little smarter.
Just giving it up doesn't guarantee you anything other than maybe like, you know, a nice dinner.
It does, it does, that does seem true to me.
Now, now, what about the role of men?
You talk about, I mean, you write the things you write about men being basically neutered.
It seem to me true.
And I have to say, you know, when I read people who grew up 10 years later than I did, who are 10 years younger than I am, they grew up under feminism, which I didn't.
And so when feminism came along, I just ignored it.
I sort of thought, yeah, that may be good for some people, but I'm not paying any attention to it.
And that really worked out well for me.
But they can't because they were inculcated with lies about what women are like and what women want and all this.
And they're angry.
I mean, we talk about women, men talk about women.
And I talk with affection.
You may roll your eyes at the opposite sex, but you talk with affection.
Whereas younger people, younger men are angry, you know?
What is it that men need from women?
And can women give it to them without losing themselves?
That's such an interesting question.
Recently, I was at a book event and I actually met a bunch of young men.
These are men in their early 20s who somehow are fans of mine and came to the reading.
And these are like guys in college, grad school, and they were good looking, smarter, funny, great.
They're catches.
And they were complaining to me about the women that they meet, the women they encounter, their age cohort.
It's really hard for them to find someone they want to like have us be in a serious relationship with.
I mean, I think that like short-term arrangements are easy for them, but I think that these are guys who are more conservative, obviously, and they know they have some awareness that, you know, just being on the dating marry-go-round is destructive to them.
Natural Roles Embraced00:02:49
They don't really aren't really comfortable in that role of like Lothario, but it's very hard for them to find a woman who hasn't been totally degraded by feminism.
And that's, I mean, and I keep saying to that, that's why I wrote this book.
Like, just, you know, let's, let's get it into the college libraries.
Like we have to try to peel off some of these girls, I think, before they go too down the road and become, you know, someone shouting their abortion, you know, when they're 38 years old.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it is, it is funny.
Even when I hear guys, Christian guys talk about submissive wives.
I get a little antsy.
I mean, I believe a man should be a leader, a leader in the home.
I do believe that a man should have a leadership role in the home.
But obviously, a leader, in my view, is somebody who's serving the people that he leads.
He's trying to give them the life that they want.
So what should men be looking for?
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, I have gotten pushback like, oh, you Christian wives, you just want to be submissive.
The husband is in charge.
I'm like, excuse me.
What?
Like, my husband and I are total equals.
We're best friends.
It's a partnership.
I do some of the stuff.
He does some of the stuff.
Sometimes we do all.
We switch.
Like, it just, you got to get it done.
It's so preposterous that argument.
And I know a lot of, you know, trad wives, women with, you know, half a dozen or more children who stay home and the husband is the sole breadwinner.
And these are not submissive wives.
I mean, you could argue that they're really in charge of like basically everything.
So that's just such a funny argument to me.
It's such a straw man argument that we're just these little wives kept in the kitchen.
That's just, that's just, that's not real, you know, at least not the ones I know.
But I mean, I think that, no, men should not be necessarily looking for someone who's submissive and a woman doesn't really want a man who's going to like bust her around and be this like nasty guy.
It's, it should be out of love, but each person should be comfortable embracing the kind of like natural role.
So like you said, the man can like protect the family.
The man can like make some like tough, scary decisions or whatever.
And the woman can be the nurturer, can be the, you know, provide for the children.
I mean, I think it's really just a beautiful partnership.
It's very, it's totally harmonious.
It's how God designed.
And we just need to like accept that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is, it is funny how love transforms so many things that, you know, look, that might look from the outside one way, but when you see it from inside and inside the heart of love, it really is, it works beautifully.
Yeah.
One of the things that kind of cracked me up in the book is you talk about you don't really like housework all that much.
No, I don't.
I am not.
I am not to the manner born.
I am not like, you know, no, I don't enjoy it.
Laundry Chaos00:03:05
I, you know, I grew up, I had a fairly privileged, you know, childhood.
We had a, we had a housekeeper and like, that was fine with me.
So, you know, with five children, for example, I read about like my laundry, the laundry situation.
It's, it's never ending.
And I was not prepared for that.
Like I have, I was really not prepared for the laundry load.
And, you know, but this is the thing.
You're doing housework, whether you live alone, whether you have one kid, whether you have two kids, people have to eat.
You have to have clean dishes.
You have to, you know, go to the grocery store.
So, I mean, there may be more dishes, maybe more laundry, but you're still doing the things.
Like being a fully empowered feminist girl boss, you're still changing your cat's litter box.
You probably are changing it a lot because you probably have a lot of cats.
All right.
So here's, here's, I guess, I guess this is my final question.
I would like to have an idea.
I want to have an idea of what it looks like to, now you have these five kids, which is a lot of kids.
I mean, my father used to say that one is one, two is three, and three is five, you know?
So five must be 10 going by that math.
Now, we hear so much about our schools basically destroying the lives of children and doing it with a will so that when parents show up and protest, they proclaim the, they send the FBI out to get them.
I mean, it's really, it's an intentional and very dedicated attempt to destroy our children.
What are you going to do about it?
Well, my advice that I give people all the time in real life and in the book is to, you know, at the first sign of, you know, at the first whiff of the perfume of the drag queen walking into your child's kindergarten classroom, you have to flee.
Like you have to get the kids out of any school that is promoting, you know, transgender ideology or teaching them that, you know, if they're white, they're evil.
Like all of that stuff, you, you just, there's no way to kind of counter program that after school with your children.
They're getting it on in movies and on their screens.
They should not be immersed in that eight, nine hours a day.
So my advice is to get them out of those schools as quickly as possible.
And, you know, sometimes you can't do that, but more people should try.
And I think you just people have to turn to different alternative methods of educating their kids.
I mean, we're in a kind of a golden age of homeschooling.
And also, there are these amazing, beautiful classical Christian and Catholic schools popping up everywhere.
I mean, there's, you know, the Chesterton Academy, there's all of these Hillsdale, there's all these small, we found a beautiful small Catholic school that my children, you know, if you put them in, if you like their gender, they'll be able to keep their gender by the time they graduate.
You know, like that's hard to find.
You know, my brother's kids go to a local LAUSD public and it's full, full-on Pride Week.
And, you know, they're basically trying to encourage children to experiment with different pronouns and in public school, in elementary school.
And that is just not, you know, that's not appropriate for little kids to be taught, in my opinion.
Golden Age of Homeschooling00:01:24
So my advice is to get out.
And, you know, if you can't find a local school, I mean, there's so many resources.
You know, I actually have to ask you one more question.
I was going to make that the last one, but there's one other thing.
You also became a Catholic in the course of this.
I know.
Now, where did that fit into the puzzle?
Did you become a domestic extremist because you were Catholic or did you become a Catholic because you were a domestic extremist or were they separate or parallel tracks?
It was like the final level.
You know, I achieved, I finally like achievement unlocked.
The cocoon broke open and here I emerged as this fully formed domestic extremist.
Yeah, I became a Catholic.
I converted about 10 years ago.
My husband had actually converted after we had that initial miscarriage.
And so just by the process of going with him, I was this committed, devout atheist, you know, so it was sort of a shock to my assistant, but I started going through the process with him.
And, you know, it was wonderful.
And then we baptized our babies.
And then by the time I could find, you know, a pair of matching shoes, I went to RCIA and converted myself.
Ah, wow.
Okay.
Peachy Keenan, the book is Domestic Extremist, A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.
It's absolutely charming and also very optimistic and hopeful.
I hope you come back and we'll talk again next time you have a book.
Thank you so much, Andrew.
All right.
Great talking to her.
Come on Friday and listen to or watch the Andrew Clavin show at the Daily Wire.