Misogyny, Breeding, and the Right's "Sacred" Family
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We are thrilled to introduce an audio essay by Anika Brockschmidt, a Berlin-based journalist who spent three days at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon). Anika's insights critically examine recent trends within the American right, particularly focusing on themes of misogyny, fertility, and family values. The discussion spotlights notable figures like J.D. Vance and Kamala Harris, and addresses the resurgence of patriarchy and natalism in American politics. Anika also highlights the influence of global right-wing alliances and the problematic rhetoric of folkish ideology. The episode sheds light on the mainstreaming of National Conservatism within the GOP and its implications for the future.
The articles quoted are this piece by Sarah (Jones):
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/women-national-conservatism-conference.html
And this one by John Ganz:
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-land-is-mein-land
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it.
The saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made.
And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
And it's just a basic fact.
If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.
And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and today I am thrilled to bring to you an audio essay by my friend and colleague, Annika Brockschmidt.
Anika spent three days at NatCon a couple of weeks ago, and it revealed to her a number of troubling trends about misogyny, fertility, and the American right.
Some of you may have heard of the clips of Vice Presidential nominee J.D.
Vance saying that people who are parents deserve more of a voice in the public square, that their vote should count more than others.
Well, Annika brings a foreign perspective to this.
She's a Berlin-based journalist who writes and analyzes the American right and Christian nationalism in the United States and around the globe.
And her insights from NatCon, I think, pertain to larger trends on the American right related to these ideas of patriarchy, Fertility and family.
These, of course, go back a long time to the 50s and 60s and the real heyday of the religious right and the family values movement.
But we're seeing a resurgence of it, and it's often coming from sources and in forms that perhaps are unexpected, or at least unexpected to the uninitiated.
There is a large scale Catholic insurgency into Christian nationalism at the moment that is injecting ideas about family and contraception and reproductive rights and sex and gender and is really shaping the discussion among Christian nationalists about how to move forward.
Well, what you're going to hear from Annika are, I think, just incredible insight and enlightening comments about not only NatCon and Al Mohler and Doug Wilson and many others, but what we're seeing playing out on the presidential ticket and the ways that Kamala Harris is being attacked in sexist but what we're seeing playing out on the presidential ticket and the ways that Kamala Harris is being attacked in sexist and racist language, not to mention for the fact that she is not somebody who has biological children of her own, though she is part of a family where she
All that to say, I really think that Annika is a singular voice on these issues and just so thrilled to share this with you.
So, with no further ado, here's Annika reporting on NatCon and the American right.
I spent three days in humid, thunderstorm-stricken Washington, D.C. to report on the fourth National Conservatism Conference.
And Brad, I know that you and Dan have talked about the NatCons multiple times on this podcast already, so I thought I'd summarise some of my impressions from this three-day right-wing extravaganza.
And I'll try to keep it brief and to the point.
First of all, to set the scene, What struck me was how small the scale was.
The main ballroom where all of the speeches took place was maybe only a third of the one I spent another three days in last year during roughly the same time in Philly at the Yearly Mums for Liberty conference.
Now, does that have to mean something?
Not necessarily, but it struck me as a bit odd.
The first thing I noticed when I passed through the security checkpoint was the ratio of men to women.
Now, that's not particularly unusual for a right-wing event, but I would say a charitable estimate would be 80% men, 20% women, which I'll circle back to in a minute.
There were three big themes that were repeated again and again and again over the three consecutive conference days.
The first was unity and mainstream.
Chris DeMuth, the conference chairman, really set the tone in his opening speech where he claimed that national conservatism, once derided as a fringe radical ideology, had arrived truly in the mainstream, had successfully captured the Republican Party.
And considering who was there, many a senator, some real political heavyweights from the GOP, and the Project 2025 booth from the Heritage Foundation set up in the hallway, DeMuth and his fellow NatCon followers might actually be right, at least when it comes to his assertion that they have arrived and truly settled in the mainstream of American conservatism and therefore also the GOP.
Patriotic schooling and a revival of faith, family, and fertility are not far right.
They are the new mainstream.
Our atomized, feminized, self-absorbed culture, where individual autonomy is the holy grail, is not a progressive invention.
But it is highly advantageous to those who would replace nation and community with homogenizing diktats.
You might have already perked up or maybe your hackles rose like minded when DeMuth mentioned fertility or when he railed against bodily autonomy and bemoaned a, quote, feminized society.
In fact, the dominance of male supremacy language and politics was quite jarring in its obviousness throughout the whole conference, as well as the zeroing in on fertility and breeding specifically.
And Demuth was far from the only one to speak like this.
While there were also some female speakers, including a pretty wild panel that championed natalism as well as the Comstock Act, it was mainly the men who talked and talked and talked about fertility.
about the necessity of procreation, of making more babies for the cause.
Children that would have to be birthed by the bodies of the women that they plan to control, that they talk about controlling.
I'm not going to lie, it did feel pretty dystopian.
Here is Yoram Hazoni scolding the young men in the audience who haven't fulfilled their patriotic duty yet.
Our goal is restoration.
The kids say all the time, there's nothing left to conserve.
How can you be conservative?
There's nothing left to conserve.
I understand that question.
Our civilization is to a very significant degree, rubble.
I understand that question, but I say to you personally, that if you think that restoration is impossible in this country or in your life, that's because you're lazy.
That's because you're lazy.
It's because you're not willing to read.
A lot of the people saying, we didn't inherit anything.
I'm sorry, a lot of you young people, you know this very well.
You don't read books.
and then you're telling me you didn't inherit anything.
Young man, get a young woman, get married, join a church, join a congregation, join a place where the great inheritance is being handed down or a synagogue, join a place where the great inheritance is being handed Join a place where it's happening for real, in real life.
And if your church is not a place where it's happening, move to a different church.
And if it doesn't exist in your state, move to a different state.
Because without Without restoration of you personally, your spirit, your family, your connection to a congregation, to a tradition, and to God, and to Scripture, without that you will not end up being what it is you think that someday maybe you could be.
There is a way to do it.
There is a way.
But it requires restoration.
First, you restore yourself, you restore your community, and then once you have a community, we'll hear about that at this conference also, once you have a restored community, then you try for a state, a whole state that's restored, and then a whole country.
That's clear.
If we're united, we can achieve that kind of restoration.
He kept coming back to the necessity of procreating and of entering into a marriage.
And so this is not just a matter of government policy.
This is a matter for every home, for every individual, for every church and synagogue.
For every movement, for every educational institution.
If you're not teaching people to have children, you're not in the game.
You don't understand what this is all about.
What this is all about is that America has now followed Europe into an inability to guarantee even one more generation of Americans.
The shrinkage is... We're down to 1.6 women... 1.6 children per woman in the United States.
This is suicide, my friends.
So let's be clear about this.
Absolutely everything about National Conservatism has to be focused, one way or another, on convincing people that the only honorable thing to do, enlightened self-interest, as people used to like to say, the only honorable thing to do, as I think National Conservatives would like to say, the only honorable thing is to get married and have children, lots of children, and raise Right, and if you're not doing that, then what you're doing is dishonorable.
All right, but now let's talk about those kids.
If you're raising a lot of kids and you're sending them to schools, you know, where they're being turned into woke neo-Marxists, and many of you are, I don't think, we're not talking about like people outside of this room.
We're talking about people in this room.
You're sending your kids to those schools with woke neo-Marxist teachers?
And then to universities where they're cut off, entirely cut off from where they grew up.
Do not expect your children to come home and be your children.
Because they're going to be their children.
So we need much more focus on this.
And what really struck me about this is the way Hassani phrased it, get a woman, as if you're picking up a pint of milk from the shelf at the supermarket.
But in a way, I think this is really the perfect encapsulation of the way national conservatism, now the dominant force in the Republican Party, sees women.
It sees them as mere vessels.
Either for children or at the most for the message of national conservatism as ambassadors of the patriarchy.
And this was really striking throughout the whole conference.
My lovely colleague Sarah Jones who sat with me through most of the conference and suffered through it with me, summed it up like this in her piece for New York magazine.
And I quote, "NatCon women aren't merely props.
They do speak, but they often restrict themselves to traditionally female concerns like sexuality or reproduction." The Dobbs panelists included three women, more than I'm used to seeing at NatCon.
One, Mary Margaret Olihan of The Daily Signal, dedicated her time to gender ideology, or trans rights, which panelist and long-time anti-abortion activist Tom McCluskey identified as an impediment to the production of children.
We breed, they don't, he said.
Instead, he said, liberals neuter and sterilize their children.
After Olahan finished misgendering collegiate swimmer Leah Thomas, Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation began her remarks by emphasizing her own motherhood.
She went on to praise tradwife influences on social media and urged cultural solutions like matchmaking and arranging dates for your children.
End quote.
Quite fittingly, the church bells near my apartment have just started tolling, so please apologize for the noise in the background.
She did also say that she prefers young women following tradwife influences to following Khloe Kardashian.
Which felt odd, given Khloe Kardashian's gender politics, but I digress.
Sarah continues in her piece, "Women had power here of a sort, but it was dependent on whether they made the right choices: to marry a man young and reproduce with him." Abortion is disgusting, Talento said during the Q&A.
It's against nature.
It's against every woman's desire.
A woman's decision to keep or abort a pregnancy in, quote, large part comes down to the man, the father involved, Waters told one attendee.
The idea that a woman may not want children for her own independently formed reasons seemingly didn't occur to the panelists.
She had only the two options to be a nursemaid at home or a scold to discipline others.
For Natcons, women have little worth outside sex and reproduction.
End of quote.
The third big focus of the conference, after celebrating the mainstreaming of National Conservatism and all the fertility and marriage talk, natalism is only good if children are brought into the world within a heterosexual Christian godly marriage, which by the way might have led the famous creepy Silicon Valley natalist couple the Collinses, who are apparently comfortable with hitting their kid in front of reporters,
And we're actually present, not kidding you, in the audience during the talk to exit the talk early, and porn fear-mongering, which led to my editor asking me if the title of the panel that I jotted down had really been Big Tech and Big Porn.
Yes, it had been indeed.
The third focus point of the conference was international networks.
That might sound weird, given the intensely nationalistic nature of the conference, but as Brad and Dan have often mentioned in this very podcast, the right is mobilising globally.
And they learn from each other.
It was no coincidence that Suella Braverman, former member of the Tory government who'd been sacked by Tory, former Tory Prime Minister, sorry, Rishi Sunak, Gave a speech that was so untethered to reality, so bigoted, that even I was shocked at times.
And it was therefore, not really surprising, that I did in fact encounter some Germans at the conference.
Young men from a right-wing, German, quote-unquote, news website, which dabbles in conspiracy theories and Covid denial mainly, who were happily networking with their American counterparts and other conference goers.
But even when it came to these international networks, international relations, some speakers managed to tie it back to fertility and breeding.
Like Saurabh Sharma, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing his name, the president of American Moment, an organization that was founded not too long ago with the backing of JD Vance and whose goal it is to essentially flood the very lower tiers of administrative bureaucracy with ideologically vetted Republican staffers, again with the backing of JD Vance, who is at least for the moment
Don't know what's happening when this podcast is released.
Trump's pick for VP.
Schama's talk was titled We Need Nationalist Alliances Across Borders to Win.
And let me tell you, as a German historian, the verbiage Schama used – he, by the way, talked right after Stephen Miller, mind you – Made my Spidey senses go off because the rhetoric he uses in the following clip, it's cut together from his speech, is deeply rooted in folkish rhetoric.
The world became smaller in the post-war era because of everything from telephones to airplanes.
Left-wing movements around the world found themselves embracing each other.
What started as these motley gangs of convening communist academics became a highly organized constellation of influence networks, think tanks, pressure groups, and global organizations.
Make no mistake, the political left draws enormous Resources, knowledge, prestige, and power from this global network of allies.
And if the right is going to succeed, it has to do the same.
Many of our allies and enemies on the right alike would like to dismiss these networks as simply make-work jobs for neurotic queer literature and climate change majors from colleges around the world that need to be shut down.
And don't get me wrong, they are that.
But these patronage jobs matter.
In any given nation where everyday voters kick out their failed left-wing government, the functionaries that constituted that government find easy and immediate homes in the left's global infrastructure.
They don't have to go get a real job.
They pivot their abilities to influencing public life in a very different way.
Imagine if the right had the same.
Imagine if The National Conservatives in this room built a global constellation of organizations that keep our people whole when the degenerate coalition of the socialist left and the feckless right push us out of power.
It would make it possible for talented people to commit their lives to our work, knowing that a patronage network is waiting for them if they need it.
so that their talents do not go to waste.
And we need this a lot more than the left ever did.
While their side is largely made up of miserable, lonely losers with no genetic future, most of our best people have families to look after.
This country is the most powerful one in the history of the world.
Total victory will take time.
So to my American friends, we will save enormous time, energy, and heartache if we take the example of our colleagues around the world seriously.
Experiments in securing borders, in building industries, and encouraging demographic revival in our brother nations are valuable examples we can learn from when it comes time to reform our own regime.
I think that all too often we forget that what binds these different factions of the right together globally is not necessarily just, or at least not always only, white supremacy.
That can be one part of lots of these alliances, sure, but what the presence of many BJP members, the far-right Hindu Nationalist Party, emphasised, as well as the rhetoric in the clip I just played, is that what connects them at their core
is a way of thinking that can only be described as völkisch, which means that their nationalism is one of blood and soil, where ethno-nationalism and fascist imaginings of the body politics merge into a toxic cocktail of nostalgia of a golden age that never was, a definition of the Volk, the people, the rightful people, the real Americans, Germans, British, whatever nationality you want here,
Through an esoteric connection between ancestors, ethnicity and the soil of the land.
It was this spirit that was echoed in JD Vance's closing speech of this conference.
He, by the way, used the part I'm going to talk about in his RNC speech as well.
And Vance closed on the notion that he wants to be buried On the land his ancestors bled on and for, and that his children should be laid to rest there too.
That cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky, if you drive down Kentucky Route 15 and go to Jackson, Kentucky, that's my family's ancestral home.
Before we migrated to Ohio about 60, 70 years ago, that's where all of my relatives came from, is the deep part of Central Appalachia.
This is Kentucky coal country.
By the way, one of the 10 poorest counties in the entire United States of America.
Of course, our elites love to accuse the residents there of having white privilege.
to Bertha County, Kentucky, and tell me that these are privileged people.
They are very hardworking people, and they're very good people, and they are people who love this country, not because it's a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children's home, and they would die fighting to protect it.
That is the source of America's greatness, ladies and gentlemen.
And I get to represent millions of people in the state of Ohio who are exactly like that.
In that cemetery, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the American Civil War.
And if, as I hope, my wife and I eventually are laid to rest there and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky, seven generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built seven generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they They, that, that...
That is not just an idea.
That is not just a set of principles, even though the ideas and the principles are great.
That is a homeland.
People don't go and fight and die just for principles.
They also, importantly, they go and fight and die for their home, for their families, and for the future of their children.
If this movement is going to go anywhere, and if this country is going to thrive, we have to remember that America is a nation.
We're going to disagree sometimes about how best to serve that nation.
We're going to disagree, of course, even within this room about how to best accomplish the reinvigoration of American industry and the renewal of American family.
That's fine.
But never forget that why we exist, why we do this, why we care about all those great ideas is because I would like, eventually, for my kids to lay to rest in that cemetery, and I would like them to know that the United States of America is as strong and as proud And as great as ever.
Let's get to work to make that happen.
God bless you guys, and thank you.
Now, it might seem like a strange choice to close a political speech on a matter so morbid as to where you want your own children to be buried.
But it makes sense if we look at it through the lens of Folkish ideology, because what Vance had previously argued in his speech is that his ancestors, the people of Kentucky, of Appalachia, were of the land, that they therefore had more rights to it than those who are, as he put it, foreign-born.
Mind you, you can be foreign-born, in big quotes, and still be an American citizen.
But in Vance's mind, you're not a real American then.
Or you are at the very least just tolerated, but you have not earned the same rights as those that he considers native-born, those that are of the land.
And don't get me wrong, all of this, in the US and in many other contexts, has a distinct white supremacist connotation or tinge to it, to put it mildly.
But in order to realise how these international alliances of this rising fascist tide will function globally, we need to recognise that the connecting core of it is focused thinking.
It is the idea that the ground under our feet is earned by blood, by ancestry.
And that this is an exclusionary message.
This conception of land, of country, of home, of Volk, is not welcoming to those it doesn't consider part of the in-group of the Volkskörper, as the Nazis called it, of the body politic.
This fascist conception of a homeland, this odd obsession with blood, which he shares with Trump, is not completely new for Vance, by the way.
Maybe some of you have read his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, because while it was lauded by many a liberal in 2016 as an explainer for why certain parts of the country had turned to Trump, it's actually not just full of stereotypes.
And a blatant example of Vance's inability to think structurally, to recognise that the causes for poverty and addiction and violence are structural, systemic, not personal failings.
You can also find pretty open hat tips towards race science stuff in there.
Because Vance considers hillbillies basically as their own ethnicity.
And this, to him, is the root cause for all of the suffering the people of Appalachia have endured over the decades.
And again, Vance didn't invent this.
His understanding of quote-unquote hillbillies as a distinct ethnic group and his emphasis on his what he calls his Scottish and Irish blood is borrowing pretty blatantly and pretty openly from the unsubstantiated theories of historians Forrest Macdonald and Grady McWhiney.
Namely, that white southerners formed a distinct ethnic and cultural group due to their alleged descent from Kelts.
Speaking in big air quotes here.
And their theory is best summed up like this.
Descendants of the Kelts, a violent... Again, I'm paraphrasing their stuff.
This is...
Blatantly untrue.
But just go with it for a second.
Descendants of the Celts, a violent, passionate people, built the American South, conquered it, won it with their blood.
But the destructive aspects of their own blood also led to their own proud destruction in the Civil War because they fought like the Celtic tribes, not like the dispassionate, organized Union army.
So it might not come as a big shock that these two who made this quote-unquote theory up were in fact founding members of the League of the South, a neo-confederate hate group.
And this is the stuff that Vance is echoing in his book.
Now both on the NatCon stage as well as on the RNC stage, Vance is doing As author John Gans put it in one of his recent newsletters, a sort of dog-whistly version of Furkish ideology.
Gantz writes, quote, it's likely that Vance's version of American folkish is just too watered down for the real hardcore.
But the smarter ones of them know about him, what they knew about Trump.
He's singing their type of music.
End of quote.
And given that Vance lauded the followers of national conservatism and the speakers of the conference as the, quote, place of the intellectual leadership of the American conservative movement, end quote, this is quite telling.
It's quite the statement, given that the three days had included quite shocking displays of open white nationalism, even on the, let's say, Stephen Miller scale of things.
And I'll leave you with this.
Ben Lobo of PRA and I wrote detailed daily summaries for religion dispatches.
If any of you want to dive in even deeper into the minutiae of the conference.
Thank you, Brad, for letting me share these findings and back to you.
Thanks, Annika.
Appreciate your insight and appreciate you analyzing so many of the different threads from NatCon and this contemporary moment in American politics.
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