Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The comedian Maria Bamford has always been alarmingly frank about her obsessive, intrusive thoughts—imagined scenarios where she murders someone or commits wholesale genocide, for instance. In Paralyzed by Hope, the new documentary about her life from Judd Apatow, Bamford talks about faking her own suicide as a kid, using ketchup as a prop.

In all of her work—which includes stand-up, a Netflix sitcom, a YouTube series, and a memoir—Bamford generously samples people and incidents from her own life. The documentary, co-directed by Apatow and Neil Berkeley, connects the dots in a way that reveals a deeper layer of meaning. For example, despite talking about her struggles, Bamford doesn’t like the narrative that she’s up there on stage actually struggling.

“I think it reminds me of when people say, you know, ‘inspiration porn,’ like, saying, Oh, it’s just amazing that you’re doing this,” Bamford says on this episode of Radio Atlantic. “Like, the person is so delicate, and I’m like, You don’t know me.”

Bamford explains the actual relationship between OCD and her comedy. She talks about why she doesn’t do political comedy, and why she no longer does imitations of her sister. She discusses her divorce and getting on the apps. She does all of that from a car, buzzed on nitro cold brew.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Veteran comedy writer Judd Apatow has taken on a kind of second job as comedy historian.

[Music]

Rosin: He’s been making documentaries about comedians who are legends or brilliant in some particular way or just not like anyone else: Mel Brooks, George Carlin, and now, coming out on Netflix Friday, Maria Bamford.

Maria Bamford: My name is Maria Bamford, and this is a gift. My gift to you.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you know Maria Bamford’s comedy, then you already know a lot about Maria Bamford. Her OCD and bipolar diagnoses come up a lot in her comedy routines. Also, her childhood in Duluth, Minnesota, with her mother, who she does impressions of a lot.

Bamford as her mother, Marilyn Bamford: Maria, remember what we talked about. Gonorrhea; syphilis; herpes 1, 2. Watch the cold sores. Date rape is a lot more common than people think. You look so gorgeous.

Rosin: And her dad.

Bamford: My dad is really just a series of sound effects. (Coughs, hacks, wheezes.)

Rosin: And of her older sister, Sarah.

Bamford as her sister, Sarah: Maria, want something to drink? Want a Diet Coke? Or a string cheese? We could do, like, two Skinny Cows from Weight Watchers, those ice-cream sandwiches. Put two of those together, put Bailey’s ice cream on top. Make a fat cow. Come on, Maria. Seize the day, Robin Williams! What do you want?

Rosin: She recently retired that impression of her sister. We’ll talk about why later. And her parents both died in the last several years, which comes up in the documentary. Apatow interviews her mostly at her house in Altadena, California, which, at the time, she shared with her husband, Scott, and a couple of pugs.

Later in the film, we learn she almost lost that house in the wildfires in 2025. And she’s no longer married.

When I talked to her last week, she was parked somewhere in her neighborhood outside a church.

Bamford: I’ve just had a nitro cold brew, so my brain is skipping ahead light-years.

Rosin: Did they say you were sitting inside a car?

Bamford: I am inside a car.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: Is that okay?

Rosin: Well, I’m just wondering what it’s like to be inside a small space having just had a nitro cold brew.

Bamford: Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s so delightful. I’m compact. I’m not out of control. I’m not driving. I’m just sort of filled with a delightful hope. And I believe that’s caffeine.

Rosin: I’ve been watching Bamford for years. I’ve seen her live, seen her TV show, her YouTube series. I’ve read her book. Bits and pieces of her life come up in all these places. And the documentary connects all the pieces in a more linear way. It’s called Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story and it’s co-directed by Apatow and Neil Berkeley.

[Music]

Rosin: All right. I’m gonna start in a way that one is supposed to start.

Bamford: Okay. Of course.

Rosin: Press the “Reset” button. Maria, welcome to the show.

Bamford: Thank you so much for having me on.

Rosin: When Judd Apatow approached you, was there anything you said was off-limits? Like, You can film this dog, but not that dog? Like, anything where you said—

Bamford: (Laughs.) Not the pug chihuahua! Only with her harness on. No, as far as I know, I didn’t. I think I have pride about that, where I go: Ask me anything and that I am messy. My brand is messy. It’s all right. It’s okay. You know, no one’s gonna be surprised that there’s a layer of dust on something or my face is smudged with a little bit of cake and frosting.

Rosin: Was there any scene when you watched the documentary that you didn’t really recognize yourself? You were like, Who is that person?

Bamford: I think just being described by some of the people that I don’t know super well, like Conan O’Brien when he said I was like a lobster without a shell.

Conan O’Brien: Sometimes it feels like you’re talking to a lobster whose shell has been removed, but it’s still alive, and it’s just feeling every single molecule in the room.

Bamford: He’s an extremely wonderful person. Everything he does is hilarious, wonderful. But I think people mistake that. I really don’t agree with that. I feel like I’m tough as nails. You know what I’m saying? Like, I’ll cry and have all the feels and all that stuff, but yeah, that to me is not true at all.

Rosin: You think of yourself as tough as nails? Because you’re in control of the vulnerability? That actually surprises me. Not that I don’t think you’re tough as nails, but because you are the most vulnerable, maybe that extreme vulnerability is tough as nails. What do you mean by that?

Bamford: I guess I just feel like I have the personal sense that I’m good. There’s plenty—my God—there’s just so many things. If you go online, if you’re any sort of entertainer or anything public, there’s gonna be people telling you to kill yourself, you know?

Rosin: You’re ugly. Whatever, yeah.

Bamford: Or whatever. Or people coming up to you after whatever it is that you’re passionate about and say, Yeah, I don’t really like that at all, and I think you should be ashamed of yourself, or whatever it is. So yeah, things feel bad, of course, but I know within myself I’m good.

The parts of me that have experienced mood issues, that kind of stuff, or the fact that I have a bit of a tremor, that’s only embarrassing—where people are like, Let me take that for you before you spill it all over everything.

[Music]

Bamford: I think it reminds me of when people say, you know, “inspiration porn,” like, saying, Oh, it’s just amazing that you’re doing this. Like, the person is so delicate, and I’m like, You don’t know me.

There’s some part of me—it also, I think it brings up stuff from childhood, where it’s like I have a high voice. Always kind of underestimated, like, You’re dumb; you’re fragile. I think that was triggering me to go like, What?

Rosin: So much of your work is about intrusive thoughts. And for the blessed people out there who do not deal with those or know someone who does, can you just explain what is an intrusive thought? How does it work?

Bamford: Well, everybody has them. So if you’ve ever had something flash in my mind like, Oh, I wanna jump off this building. I’m on the Empire State Building, and I just—what if I jumped off? Like, just that’s all it is. What happens with somebody with OCD or more obsessive is that somebody says, Oh, that means something. I am gonna do it.

Rosin: Like, you take it too seriously. You talk to it. You take it seriously.

Bamford: Yeah. So for me, it was intrusive thoughts about when I was a kid, around about 9 or 10, I got a fear that I was gonna be a serial killer.

Bamford (from the Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome album): When I was a kid—I was about 10 years old—I stopped being able to sleep at night, because I was worried. I was really anxious that I was a raper or a murderer or a genocider.

Bamford: I don’t know where I got this. I think I was watching a ton of TV, and I think there were a couple things where I was like, Oh, that’s the worst thing you can possibly be.

So I’d have a weird thought like, Oh, what if I reached out and touched someone’s genitals? And instead of just going, Yeah, I’m never gonna do that. That’s not gonna happen. Interesting, but not that interesting, I took it in as Oh, it means I should isolate myself from people. I had physical tics, like gripping my fists, sitting on my hands.

Bamford (from the Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome album): I thought I was trying to control myself so I wouldn’t genocide anybody. And I would clench my fists at odd intervals and try not to make any eye contact, and then later, no human contact at all.

Bamford: Most of it was isolation, like not making eye contact with people. But oddly, the one place where I didn’t have those was onstage, was when I could perform or be in front of people where you have so much, you know, different chemicals running through your body. I wasn’t able to have those intrusive thoughts. I just was enjoying myself too much onstage.

So, yeah, but it can really devastate people. It attacks whatever you love. So let’s say you’re having postpartum depression. Many new mothers will fear that they’re gonna kill their child or somehow harm them or molest them or whatever, even though that’s the last thing, of course, they would ever do. But it’s really scary to tell somebody you have these weird thoughts.

I remember I did tell a therapist, I wanna say, like, 30 years ago, and she didn’t know what it was. And she’s like, You know what? I’m a mandated reporter, so I need to tell somebody that you’re—

Rosin: Stop.

Bamford: Yeah. Because it was just not a known thing at that time. And especially if you go to Christian or religious counseling, they might say, Oh, you know, that’s a sin, and, you know, It’s clearly just the devil, or whatever it is.

But then I think I was 35, and I finally had money. You know when you have money and you can pay for good therapy? And I googled my symptoms, unwanted thoughts about sexual assault or violence, and up came OCD therapists all over the world, tons of literature about it.

I went and made an appointment immediately. He did exposure therapy. And it was terrifying to have that kind of thing. For me, it was like, Spend time with family and friends with a sharp object in your pocket, and see if you do kill them. And, I mean, it was just hilarious enough too.

Like, the great thing about having any kind of therapeutic support is that the therapist will laugh at some point and go, Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Rosin: So in the beginning of the documentary, in one of the very first scenes, Judd Apatow comes into your house and hands you a pile of cash.

Bamford: Yes.

[Knocking sound]

Bamford: Oh, hello.

Judd Apatow: Hi, Maria.

Bamford: (Laughs.)

Apatow: We don’t know if you want to take part in making a documentary, but regardless, you wanted money for today.

Bamford: Yes.

Apatow: I don’t know if that’s how it works, but maybe we have no ethics here.

Rosin: And that’s, I suppose, because you need to get paid. Like, he’s taking up a huge amount of your time, and you need to get paid. Did you keep the pile of cash?

Bamford: Oh, of course. Here is my—I’m older. I’m in the back nine of life. I don’t wanna feel mad about any time that I’ve spent. I’ve done a lot of work in show business, for which I’m extremely grateful for. And at the same time, show business is drunk and will come to your house at midnight and go, We gotta do it now, or, you know, This is vitally important.

So I wanna accept the industry as it is, which is unpredictable and sometimes punishing, and say, Well, I’m gonna get paid for whatever this is and not have any expectations of it, because I think that’s where, for me, bitterness comes in—where I go, Oh, they said it was gonna become something, and it isn’t, and I spent, you know, seven years on it. So yeah, it’s sort of more of a personal emotional responsibility for myself. I want to really appreciate my own time.

And you never know when things are gonna fall apart. Los Angeles is—people say it’s flaky. I think it’s geographics. It’s that you see someone, you go, “God, wow, you’re a brilliant star of Jehovah, and you’re gonna be everything and everything and anything. But then you gotta drive home 50 minutes, and you kinda forget about it, about what you said and what you promised at a meeting at Netflix with water bottles.

So yeah, if he was gonna do it for one day, and it’s my day, Sunday, I usually have to hang out, hang out with friends, then I’d like to be paid. I’d like to be paid.

Rosin: The important lesson in there, and I and probably many people will always remember your University of Minnesota commencement speech:

Bamford (in commencement speech): Let me begin by talking about the elephant in the room at a liberal-arts graduation ceremony, and that is money. As a Minnesotan, I am ashamed to admit that I love money. I love a fair exchange of goods and services. I love to buy things.

Rosin: If you’re working, you should get paid. That’s, like, a good lesson for the youth and everybody.

Bamford: Yeah, and I think there’s especially—this could just be for women or artists or where people will say, Oh, it’s an honor, or, You’re so lucky. And it’s like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If somebody asks you to perform somewhere or to be somewhere, it’s because they desperately want you.

Rosin: Right.

Bamford: It’s not because they feel sorry for you or whatever. I think it’s definitely a good time to question, you know, just to go, Hey, ask for money. Because they’re not gonna miss it.

Rosin: Yeah.

Bamford: Or, if they are, if there is an issue, because people are very emotional about money, myself included, you know, people have asked me for raises or have asked me for money, and it’s like I go (Whimpers.). You know, it’s some weird survival instinct.

Might as well give it a shot. And it’s also interesting information to see what will happen when you ask for money. Just as an experiment. Like, it’s just hilarious.

Rosin: Yeah.

Bamford: Ooh, ooh, ooh. (Squeals.)

Rosin: It’s a very good way to open the documentary. You’ve talked about this way you have of workshopping new material. You do one-on-one with strangers. You pay them for an hour of their time. Why? Like, why is an audience of one? Because that feels good? That’s safe?

Bamford: It feels great, feels very safe. Because my stuff is theatrical, I memorize everything. I’ll practice saying things to myself, like new material. I’m starting to write new material, and it’s like I practice hitting the beats over and over again so that when I perform, it’s like muscle memory.

And the people who agree to do it are either being paid or I’m giving them a T-shirt, and they’ve agreed publicly to do this. So if they don’t enjoy it, it’s kind of on them.

I’ve definitely had people not laugh at all.

Rosin: Oof.

Bamford: I’ve definitely had people not smile or whatever, but it doesn’t worry me, because I genuinely think I’m very funny. And I’ve definitely worked very hard at it, and it’s okay. I mean, if you read The Atlantic, then you know that almost every major artist has a biography of alcoholism and nobody knowing who they are or liking their stuff for decades at a time.

So it’s like that whole thing of, like, if I was never hired again as a comedian, I wanna say that I would enjoy what I do for the few people who would enjoy it. The arts aren’t fair. It’s not fair.

And I’ve definitely gotten breaks that definitely were not worked for. You know, like at the time when I was a hot, young blonde—I think that’s a category of species—I think things were handed to me. I mean, I was good, good, but racism, sexism, ableism, all the things are in play all the time.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Bamford does not do politics, and she’s kind of ashamed of it. Also, the end of her marriage, the beginning of dating again. That’s in a moment.

[Break]

Rosin: What is the relationship between this flood of intrusive thoughts that you had since you were a kid and comedy? Like, is comedy a way to educate people about OCD? I just don’t understand how it rolls in with the sort of therapy or feeling better or just how they’re related to each other.

Bamford: I think the imagination. Like, the fact that as a 9-year-old, I could think of, like, Oh, I am a serial killer in a tiny little body, and they just don’t know yet as I was playing my violin for hours at a time—just the ridiculousness of that, that’s where people laugh. Going to the nth degree, where you go to something at the ridiculous level.

I have a new joke saying my husband and I, we love each other—we just had to break up because each of us thought that the other one was going to change profoundly, and instead we both just doubled down.

And I don’t know—that gets a laugh because people do do that. You fall in love with people and go, Oh, but that one huge thing about their personality, they’re gonna really tamp that down once they get to know me over time. And you take something to the nth degree. Yeah. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.

Rosin: Oh yeah. That’s the opposite of what I thought. I just realized as you were explaining that I was in the Conan O’Brien frame of mind, which is like, Comedy is healing the tragedy. But you’re actually saying the opposite, that the OCD and comedy, they run down the same track. They’re both insane acts of imagination, and it’s just sort of one tone or another tone, but they’re kind of friends with each other. They’re not that one is trying to heal the other or kill the other.

Bamford: Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. I think it’s really [that] they’re all trying to work together, I would hope. And it’s also what you find funny.

Like, some people hate any jokes about suicide, you know, death, sad topics. But then those things are happening in the world. Like right now, what seems like the death of democracy, it’s not really a laughing matter at this point. It’s like, Oh, hey, when are we supposed to storm the Bastille? Is anyone gonna lead us? It feels like there shouldn’t be a lot of laughs.

Rosin: I think I maybe understand the title Paralyzed by Hope, which is the title of the documentary, a little better. That comes from a comedy routine you did 20 years ago.

Bamford: I never really thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope.

Rosin: Can you explain what “paralyzed by hope” means, just so I am sure I get it?

Bamford: The thing was, being diagnosed as depressed, I never thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope, is like—I make vision boards. You know those vision boards where you cut out things from magazines? I make those.

Like, that’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that I make those. (Laughs.) And I think those are things only to make myself feel good on some level, because there are unhoused people in my neighborhood. There are people fighting for their lives, living on the street right outside my door, and yet I’m cutting out a picture of a baby bear and saying, “Connected.” Like, what?

And, yeah, so that those things can both be true, the possibility of change—like that maybe we’ll have a resurrection of our democracy, of a New Deal where bridges are somehow being built and everyone has health care—and at the same time acknowledge what is also happening, which is: My friends who travel on the road who are of color often have to bring guns when they’re doing the road as comedians, ’cause they’re terrified for good reason.

Rosin: But I don’t think of you as a political comedian.

Bamford: No, no, which I feel ashamed about, too. Like, part of the reason I’m theatrical is that I don’t speak very well off-the-cuff. I don’t know the facts.

I wasn’t raised in a debating household.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: I remember I tried to do parliamentary debate in college, and I was like, What if I just agree with everyone at Brown University? It seems like at Brown, everyone seems like they know what they’re talking about. So it’s not my best skill.

I’m definitely very good at being passive-aggressive.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: But having well-thought-out arguments that include facts, not so much.

Rosin: You mentioned this, so I feel like I can ask about it: A big chunk of the documentary focuses on your marriage. Was it weird to see it in the documentary, since you’re—

Bamford: Oh. Yeah. I mean, it’s always that sense of, like—I don’t know if you’ve felt this, but that shame of, like, Oh, you know, could’ve worked it out. You know, the love for the person but then also the truth of, like, it not being tenable.

And I think we really found that out after the fires. Yeah, that was really, really, really tough.

Rosin: Because you dealt with it differently, or just because?

Bamford: Yes. Yeah. Yes, we dealt with it very differently. And I don’t talk too much about it. It just, I think that one thing I told you, that we both hoped the other one would change profoundly.

And so, ’cause he’s delightful. He, Scott Marvel Cassidy—he’s so many cool things, does beautiful painting, is a fine artist, very funny, and is an excellent co-parent of our two doggies. But it doesn’t mean that it’s good to stay together. So yeah, it was good.

I think the most meaningful part for me was, I think, seeing my sister and my mom and dad, and that was just wonderful.

Rosin: That was my next question. It was interesting to see your sister talk for herself. I mean, you tell the story that she actually wanted you to stop doing impressions, but you didn’t take her seriously.

Bamford (from the Ask Me About My New God! album): My sister has become a life coach, and so I’m trying to challenge her with negative thoughts.

Bamford doing an impression of her sister: Hey, Maria, you got one for me?

Bamford as herself: Sure. I’m worried I’m too old to be in show business.

Bamford doing an impression of her sister: Mm. Betty White. Dame Judy Dench. Joan Rivers. You’re not old enough. Hit me.

[Crowd laughter]

Bamford: Oh, God, no, I didn’t. Well, I took her seriously, but I was like, Yeah, but you’re my older sister, and you’re great, and you get to have everything awesome. So why can’t I, why can’t I still? And Scott, that’s actually part of our divorce agreement, is to not talk about our marriage, and which I totally understand now.

Like, I go, like, my sister finally told—she was like, Hey, I don’t tell you a lot of things, because I’m worried it’s gonna become something. And I was like, Oh, I’m missing out. Oh, I’m such a jackass. And, you know, that’s sad that it took me around 25 years to realize that. But oh well, I finally did.

And now we talk to each other every day. We have a really wonderful close relationship I’m really grateful for.

Rosin: And she tells you all the things?

Bamford: Yeah, she tells me, I think, everything.

Rosin: Like what? No, I’m kidding.

[Music]

Bamford: No, you can’t! I can’t. I can’t possibly tell you.

Rosin: One last question: I heard in another interview that you’re now exploring online dating.

Bamford: Yeah, so I’m on three sites: I’m on Facebook Dating, I’m on Match.com, and I’m on Hinge, and I only date within the 90042 zip code. But if you do live within 90042 or -41 and you wanna ask me out, I’m available. I’m 56. I do not date anyone below the age of 50, over the age of 65. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Rosin: And how should this man get in touch with you?

Bamford: Just through those sites, or DM me on Insta. No problem.

Rosin: Okay.

Bamford: I’m avails.

Rosin: We can end on an ad. That’s perfect. Thank you, Maria, so much for joining us from your car.

Bamford: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day. Bye.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

When some clever cultural historian writes the story of the Donald Trump years, this summer’s Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary will be a marker of … something: The 90-foot open-air “Claw,” near-naked gladiators, bloody faces, fireworks, and flyovers, with the most enduring remark coming from the heavyweight Josh Hokit, who told the podcaster Joe Rogan in his post-fight interview: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” The spectacle, the staff writer Helen Lewis says on Radio Atlantic, represented “a level of masculinity that was … so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.”

The second Trump administration rode in on a wave of masculinity-obsessed media. But the White House is unpopular, the podcast bros have withdrawn, and the midterms are only weeks away. Is it possible that the cultural-political force of extreme masculinity is losing its power?

Lewis and her fellow staff writer Sophie Gilbert joined me in a live Radio Atlantic taped at this year’s The Atlantic Festival to discuss the intriguing hypothesis that the culture has reached “peak testosterone” and may soon perhaps enter a more balanced phase.

We discuss evidence on both sides. Yes, the Tate brothers are facing extradition and prosecution abroad, but no, the U.S. does not feel all that much closer to electing a female president. Yes, James Talarico, mocked as “Low-T Talarico” by Texas Republicans, is ahead in the U.S. Senate race. But the requirement that all candidates prove their high-T quotient by filming themselves working out at the gym has been so widely accepted that Democrats are doing it too. The live debate went on, until it reached an absurd conclusion of encouraging women in the audience to buy more meat.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I had a thought. Maybe it was when I was watching race car after race car zoom loudly down Pennsylvania Avenue this summer—and a very buff man standing next to me, dressed in very tight red-white-and-blue overall-shorts getup, cheering. I had the thought that maybe we have reached peak testosterone. That is, this long era we’ve been living in, fueled by Donald Trump but also other cultural forces, such as the manosphere, has reached its organic comical extreme. And thus, the era might be on its way out.

It’s just a theory, but one I recently got to test.

[Music]

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

At The Atlantic Festival last month, I talked to two of my favorite writers on all things masculine and feminine, staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Helen Lewis, for a live taping of Radio Atlantic. Here is our conversation:

[Audience applause]

Rosin: We’ve all been living through an extended period of, let’s call it, masculinism. And by the way, I don’t even know if that’s a real word, but, you know, as in the opposite of feminism, like the general promotion of manly things. So there’s Pete Hegseth’s push-ups, J. D. Vance’s cat ladies, and a-lot-less-funny stuff, like the broad influence of the Tate brothers on teenage boys or the rollback of Roe v. Wade. And this has been building for maybe five, 10 years, depending on where you locate its origins. But there are signs that we may be shifting out of peak testosterone.

So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Is that true or not? I’m joined here today with Sophie Gilbert, who’s author of the book Girl on Girl and a Pulitzer finalist. Clap for Sophie.

[Audience applause]

Rosin: And Helen Lewis, whose first book is Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, and more recent book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and more recently, the June Atlantic cover story, “The Men Who Fear Women.”

[Audience applause]

Rosin: Helen, I’m gonna start with you. What in your mind represents peak testosterone? What event or thing?

Helen Lewis: Well, if we’re gonna talk culturally and politically, then it has to be the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] cage fight on the White House lawn, which is one of the most American things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Rosin: Thank you.

Lewis: But it was also one of the most testosterone-fueled. It was like a movie you could’ve shown inside the film Top Gun.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: That’s how I felt about it. But for those of you who don’t know: So Donald Trump has for a long time been friends with Dana White, who is the head of the UFC. That’s been a mutually very beneficial relationship to the two of them. And one of the things that he wanted to do was create this spectacle on the White House lawn, so he builds an octagon. And you have this, you know—the fighters walk in. One of the fighters starts in the Oval Office, right? Which to me, feeling slightly pious about it, is kind of, like—slight desecration to have some guy in leopard-print shorts strolling out, you know, to get seven bells punched out of him.

And it was just this very, like, hoo-rah masculine event. There was blood on the kind of tiles. And that’s when you get, immediately afterwards, one of the fighters says on the camera, you know, Michelle Obama’s a man. So you get this immense, like, disrespect for a kind of a beloved first lady with the other half of America. So, to me, it was this peak moment of, I guess, a level of masculinity that was, as it always happens, so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Which is what always happens with these things. It became absolutely, incredibly camp.

Rosin: No. 1, I feel slightly embarrassed having two people from the U.K. talk about this. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: It’s like, I do feel somehow responsible and like I have to apologize for it. And No. 2, it’s interesting what you said, because maybe peak and decline, they’re like—once you reach camp, maybe that’s not the sign that things are on the up, but the other direction. Do you have anything to add to the cage fight, watching it from over there?

Sophie Gilbert: No. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Gilbert: I mean, yeah, exactly everything that Helen said was exactly true. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing. It’s so primal and so bloodthirsty and so absurd. But, as Helen said, we’ve hopefully peaked at this point.

Lewis: But the Tate brothers, who you’ve written about, they also sit on that line, where they’re at the same time very scary alleged sex traffickers, but also inherent to that is the campness, the incredibly tight trousers—

Gilbert: The tight trousers.

Lewis: —and the sockless [indecipherable].

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: They coast that same line of peak masculinity, don’t they?

Gilbert: Well, in terms of thinking about peaks, yes. I think the moment when it became clear to me that things might be changing or going at least in a slightly different direction was the moment that the Tates were arrested, because they had seemed Teflon for so long. They obviously have political connections. They have connections inside the White House. They had felt protected. There have been so many cases against them in Romania, in the U.K., in the U.S., so many charges. I did not know that I would ever see Andrew Tate be arrested or have any kind of measure of justice for the things that he’s been alleged to have done. And so the fact that he has been arrested, he and his brother, and they are still in jail months later, I think is perhaps a sign that things are beginning to change.

Rosin: I wonder if they ordered their prison pants—

Gilbert: Tailored.

Rosin: —extra tight. Yeah. Is that a privilege that you can have in prison?

Okay, I wanna talk more about the trajectory of masculinism, but first I wanna spend just a little bit of time defining our terms, because as I’ve been preparing for it, one line that’s really stood out to me is that there’s two almost opposite brands of what masculinism is. There’s the very civilizing brand, like the religious sort of patriarch, J. D. Vance brand. And then this other sort of pagan, Man must be free to roam without the chokehold of the female HR executive, you know?

So in your cover story, you wrote a lot about the American religious-evangelical side of it. Can you talk about what that was like and what they believe?

Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about since at least 2018, when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, who was very early to some of these ideas. And he kind of synthesized the two of them, this idea of man’s raw essential nature, which was essentially like yearning towards violence, and then you had to have the correct kind of mastery of it.

What masculine education meant was tempering your essential violent, uncontrollable nature. And it’s not surprising to me that he ended up moving more towards Christianity, because there is a kind of operating set of ideas that you will find in the work of, for example, people like C. S. Lewis, which is about the sort of civilization force of Christianity on men.

So in the piece that I wrote, I looked at both sides of them. One’s you’ve got kind of—there’s the strain that follows through Nietzsche, which is anti-Christian, which is about the idea of like the über-mensch. So Nietzsche thought that people were what he called learned cattle, what I guess we call now called sheeple or NPCs. But he thought that some people had the ability to attain, like, this will to power; they could kind of dominate everybody else. And so that is a very appealing message, I think, to young men who don’t feel a great sense of agency, who don’t feel like mini patriarchs. If you’re a 16-, 17-year-old boy, you don’t feel like the master of all you survey. So I think that is a very powerful message.

But then because it’s America, you also have this very straightforwardly Christian aspect. I talked to Douglas Wilson, who runs about—he’s the co-founder of a congregation of about 170 churches. And they are some of the—you know, he wants to roll back the Nineteenth Amendment eventually, which gave women the vote. And they draw on, for example, Saint Paul’s idea of headship. This is the idea that godly women should be quiet.

So they have a very old-fashioned Christian patriarchy, which then, as I write in the piece, blends very well with this other range of very traditional beliefs about, for example, race, about the kind of necessary, like, the Judeo-Christian heritage and the civil enforce and the European Enlightenments. So all of it kind of bleeds together. But one of the odd things is that you often find, kind of, the pagan and the Christian combined in the same person. So one of the people I interviewed—not Bronze Age Pervert, sadly—was Raw Egg Nationalist.

Rosin: Do you guys know who Raw Egg Nationalist or Bronze Age Pervert are? No. Okay.

Gilbert: They’re too online.

Rosin: We won’t go on. I really wanna talk about them, but everyone was like, No one cares, so leave it alone. But yeah. Just ’cause they are the voice of—they are like the id of the manosphere, in my mind. If you go back, they’re like the original sources of all the stuff you read in the manosphere. I went back and read them, and I was like, Aha, that’s why they all hate women. It finally made sense to me. And I’ll read you one quote from them, and then I promise I’ll move on. But go ahead. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Oh, no, go on. Give us a little bit of Bronze Age Pervert.

Rosin: Can I do one or two? Yeah. Okay. I’ll do the stupid one and then the profound one. Here’s the stupid one: “There are women who are great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians.” Good one, Bronze Age Pervert. Okay.

Lewis: Why not actual lesbians?

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: I don’t know. Okay. I don’t know what a spiritual lesbian is. (Laughs.) I have no idea. I don’t know. Okay. Here’s the one that does sort of explain the manosphere hatred of women, though. “Anyone born with a will to conquest and expansion, any specimen born to courage and the expansion of boundaries, will feel thwarted now, will awaken at a young age to find themselves in a world pervaded by an evil and smothering shadow”—that’s us—“that seeks to blot out their spirit and break them.”

Gilbert: This is what I say to myself in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.

Rosin: Yes!

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: You say it to your husband, like, How can I blot you?

Gilbert: How can I smother today?

Rosin: Yes. Who can I smother?

Lewis: It’s a really useful closed loop of reasoning, though. So when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast afterwards, and they were kind of grudgingly nice about me. They said I was a varsity-level player, right?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Lewis: But then he said that I was animus possessed, which is a concept that comes from Jung. And it’s essentially the idea that your masculine side—if you’re a woman, your masculine side is too dominant. So you have this situation in which, even if you’re a woman and you do have a will to power or a will to blather on, as I very clearly do, that’s actually because, again, you’re either spiritually lesbian or spiritually male. So you can always loop it back to the fact that actually these gender roles are actually incredibly rigid. And yes, there are some exceptions, but that’s because they’re secretly not really women in some profound way.

Rosin: Okay. All right. You’ve got the two strains down: the Rousseauian civilizing and the Hobbesian (Makes sound.) raw id, whatever. So, Sophie, after Trump was elected the second time, you wrote the article, “Misogyny Comes Roaring Back.” And is it fair to say, you seem almost in a state of shock at that moment? And I’m wondering if it’s shifted in the last two years. If you wrote that story today, would the tone and feeling of it be different for you?

Gilbert: There was something about that moment, I think—there has been so much about the second Trump term that has been the first but, like, unhinged. Like, off the chain. There are no adults in the room. There’s no one holding him back. Everything is just sort of unfettered Trump, and I think the misogyny comes hand in hand with that. So the quote that I was thinking of was—who’s the internet personality? Sorry, I’m forgetting.

Lewis: Are you gonna say Nick Fuentes?

Gilbert: Exactly, Nick Fuentes. When he had that tweet that was, “Your body, my choice,” and I think that was the state of shock that you are referring to, where it just felt like, Okay, this is different. This is—

Rosin: Different. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: This is honest, real. Total degradation of women is the goal. And this is what will—like, it felt so endorsed, I think, by—and it felt so powerful. And then two years later, I do think, as you said, Helen, we possibly have reached a peak, and I think to a lot of people, the really grotesque masculinism, the performances of just unfettered cruelty and hatred of women, it seems to be turning more people off at this point, which I think is slightly cheering if we’re looking for signs of hope on the horizon.

And you can see sort of the new popularity of candidates like [the U.S. Senate candidate] James Talarico, who are not like that at all, who are men who are able to appear in public and present a more gracious persona and a less obvious hatred of women and all that we smother.

Rosin: So let’s talk about James Talarico, who’s a really great test case of where we are as a nation on these issues. I know that you wrote about this race. The Republicans have tried every way to call him gay.

Lewis: Gay.

Rosin: Yeah. Right. It’s like low T.

Lewis: They’re like, He doesn’t even like barbecue.

Gilbert: Yeah.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Exactly. Yeah.

Lewis: Okay.

Rosin: Like vegan.

Lewis: Yeah, He’s vegan.

Rosin: He’s vegan. But last I checked, the polls show that he’s ahead. So—why are you making that face?

Lewis: No, ’cause I’m thinking the schadenfreude of it will be incredible. Because essentially, they had John Cornyn, who was a conservative Republican, and Donald Trump imposed instead Ken Paxton, who once stole a pen out of a security tray because he liked the look of it. This is the level of just, Oh, I’ll have that.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: And so because they haven’t got a single positive thing to say about Paxton, his record, lots of people in the state Republican Party hate him, it has all just been hard negative on Talarico. And it’s like they’re just turning a dial that just says homophobia and sexism up and up and up, and waiting for it to bite. And I think Sophie’s right. If you look at the poll, and Talarico has been consistently ahead in a state that the Democrats have targeted for a long time, that ought to be a Republican slam-dunk race. Even in a wave year, they should be able to hold that, and it’s genuinely in contention, because Talarico is normal—

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: —it’s, like, the low bar. He has apologized for some of the wilder things that he said in the 2020 time, when everybody got a bit overexcited. And because he hasn’t—I mean, he’s done some pretty punchy ads about Ken Paxton, for example. Like, he’s not soft in that sense. He’s willing to punch quite hard, but he hasn’t, to your point, Sophie, gone in for the kind of cruelty.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And I think that’s the point. I think whenever it moves into just being mean to individual people, I think lots of Americans still recoil at that. There’s obviously a small chunk of people who love the idea that they can crush their enemies and like, Yeah, show it to the libs in the HR department. But most people, I think, still are genuinely decent, and they don’t—they might be interested in this thesis about the great feminization, but being rude to individual people is still a line that they feel quite queasy about.

Rosin: I can’t tell if what you’re saying is this turning up of the dial of sexism only works in individual cases and in individual races; if you’re making a broader point that maybe it’s just not working anymore; or a whole third point, which is that it’s been absorbed. Like, James Talarico did try and eat a big turkey leg, so that he has kind of—I know. It’s sad to think about.

Lewis: What’s sad about eating a big turkey leg? That’s awesome.

Gilbert: I know, lucky him.

Rosin: It’s just sad about, like, responding to these accusations that you’re gay by eating—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: —a turkey leg. It’s just the sequence of events is a little depressing. (Laughs.)

Lewis: Yeah, okay.

Rosin: So is the idea that we’ve absorbed—like, that is the language that we speak now, so you just kind of have to submit? Can you imagine, Sophie—who are the feminist, the women leaders? It’s sort of weirdly hard to imagine now, even though things have gotten better.

Gilbert: I know. I mean, this is the thing in terms of thinking about the state of feminism. We don’t have the figureheads that feminism has always had. And I was thinking about this with the loss of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, women who were really at the forefront of this movement that was actually very successful and got a lot done. And they were berated, and they were hated in their lifetime, and they certainly have been trashed by all different kinds of people. But they managed to win substantial gains for women over the course of their activist lives.

And I don’t know who the figureheads are now. I mean, there are sort of individual people who have enormous cultural sway, like Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain festival, obviously, was significant for its kind of cultural power, I think. Just to see a celebrity of that ilk stand up for reproductive rights felt very powerful to me and surprisingly unusual, I think. But in terms of people who are helping define feminism as a protest as a sort of intellectual movement, I don’t know who we have right now, and that feels strange.

Rosin: Yeah. When you were reading about Gloria Steinem, ’cause you recently wrote about her, it was kind of an interesting experience because some of the things she said felt sort of old-fashioned from the ’70s and ’80s, and some of the experience of reading about her was like, Wow, nothing has moved. I’m curious what stood out to you of what she said or what that period was like compared to now.

Gilbert: There was an article that Ms. magazine, which Gloria Steinem founded, ran in the ’70s, and it was titled, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, and it was about—I think it was kind of inspired by Steinem and how much she enraged other feminists. Specifically radical feminists, I think, felt that she was so mainstream in lots of ways.

To sort of see that tradition of tearing feminism apart by other feminists and to see sort of how little we’ve been able to move away from that and to work productively together. But also to remember that for all of the divisiveness, there were also moments in her career where she really was able to bring women together, and those were the moments when we had our most tangible gains, I would say. So as you said, a lot felt familiar, and it makes you think that nothing has really changed that much.

Lewis: I think it still feels very radical that she begins her memoir, the dedication is to the doctor who gave her an abortion when she was in her 20s.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And you said, Promise me, you will never say what my name was, but also promise me you’ll live your life. And I think that even now, that still feels like a very edged thing. Lots of people would—that would still put their backs up, which, you know, 50 years later is, that still has that power—

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: —I think is quite extraordinary. I mean, my analysis of the problem of feminism in America is that regardless of traditional ideas of left and right, this is a culture which is both very individualist in a very libertarian way—it’s very much about individual freedom to do things—and it is intensely capitalist. And those things are both really difficult for feminism. So I’ve just written—

Rosin: Wait, explain that in two more sentences.

Lewis: Well, I’ll give you the example, which is for the latest issue, I’ve written about surrogacy. I mean, in Britain, where Sophie and I live, there is a pretty well-developed feminist critique of that and from a labor-rights perspective, which is that surrogacy is paid for by rich women and mostly pursued by women who are much poorer than them. Some of those might be in other countries, in the developing world. Some of those might be in America. But there is a fundamental mismatch when one side can afford really good lawyers and the other can’t.

And I think that’s not the way that Americans tend to see it. They tend to see it as a matter of individual choice and consent. If the surrogate says yes, that’s, like, Who are we to question a woman’s bodily autonomy and choices? So I think that has been traditionally a really big problem for the feminist movement. It’s why I think the abortion-rights campaign succeeded on that, “My body, my choice,” because that’s a very American way of putting it.

And then the capitalist part of it, again, is about, you know, freedom to buy things, freedom to own things, but it’s very difficult. Women’s lives, because of childbearing, necessarily follow a different path in aggregate to men’s, and that is something that is, Is it your individual choice to have a child, or are you doing something for civilization and society that then the state should have a role in supporting? Because it is still seen as like, But you chose to have a child, so why are you not responsible for that?

Lewis: Whereas the European social-democratic model is much more open to the idea that children are a social good, and it’s all of our responsibility to pay for them.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: why it feels like one of the worst things you can be in politics today is a woman.

[Break]

Rosin: The other thing that I wanna talk about—we’ve talked a lot about the Republicans. It’s easy to talk about Trump, the manosphere, and testosterone. The Democrats are a new phenomenon, a little kind of different and interesting what’s happening there. And I will bring us back to a gym in Dearborn, Michigan.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Where Hasan Piker—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Who’s a sort of lefty streamer, and [Abdul] El-Sayed, who’s running for office in Michigan, were—what were they doing, Helen?

Lewis: Well, they were doing some—oh God, I’m gonna get the names of the exercises wrong.

Rosin: Deadlifts?

Lewis: Yeah, I definitely watched them do, I think some, like, Turkish pull-up, which is a thing you do with a kettlebell. They were also bench-pressing. Abdul El-Sayed, who is the Senate candidate in Michigan, he can bench-press 315 pounds.

Rosin: Which you know. We all know, and it’s actually kind of important that we all know this, ’cause they have Muslim-sounding names, which right now is, like, the Republican Party can sort of put your picture up and just say “Muslim.” And El-Sayed doesn’t say he’s part of the [Democratic Socialists of America], but he’s sort of DSA affiliated. And so it almost feels like the working out makes you extremely socially acceptable or something, and that’s a very weird logic. But I’m wondering how you interpret them very ostentatiously working out.

Lewis: But it’s about redressing this idea that to be a liberal is to be a kind of effete, pencil-necked, you know, like, not a real man’s man.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: There’s a bit—

Gilbert: Soy boy.

Lewis: Yeah, a soy boy, exactly. You know, like a cheesy Millennial. So, you know, they are both—

Gilbert: It all comes back to tofu.

Lewis: They are both out working out. And there’s a line just after they did the bench press, which is an upper-body exercise, where Hasan Piker says, Haley Stevens couldn’t do that—who was the woman, primary opponent of Abdul El-Sayed. And me, getting on my little feminist high horse, was like, Actually, women’s upper body strength is one of the most sexually dimorphic things that there is. So of course she can’t bench-press 350 pounds. She doesn’t have, like, circulating testosterone at your level. But it was a really interesting moment of, like, Ha, women. Ha, they’re weak.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: And I think that’s the word that I think Democratic men are most frightened of at the moment. When I interviewed [California Governor] Gavin Newsom for the magazine, he said he’d got this line from Clinton, which was like, Voters would rather you were strong and wrong than weak and right.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s something that Donald Trump has internalized.

Gilbert: Mm.

Lewis: Part of the idea of being a man and a leader is just like, I’m the decider, and maybe I decide things wrong, but I get to do that ’cause I’m the decider. And being too consensual is seen as feminine. You know, you’re like, You wanna have a hippie drum circle, and everybody’s just gonna talk about their feelings until you all come to a mushy consensus. No, what men do is men tell you things, and then other people do them.

So I can see that they—you know, and I think El-Sayed is an incredibly talented political candidate, but he has definitely got and embraced a kind of masculine aggression. Like, he’s very much a debate bro, right? He will argue with you in the ways that I don’t see other candidates doing. But you’re seeing it with, you know, [former Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, who, I think if he runs for president, will lean very heavily on having served in the military, for example. These very traditional ideas of masculinity are still things that voters like and that Democrats feel that they need to embrace.

Gilbert: What you were just saying about being strong and wrong, it made me think it’s not actually just an American phenomenon, ’cause it was [former Prime Minister] Keir Starmer’s downfall in the U.K., the idea that he was seen as sort of mushy, couldn’t make decisions, couldn’t stand by his principles, would have, like, a 10-person meeting for every tiny thing he had to do.

Lewis: Yeah, there was a description of him that I think famously did, from one of the biographies of Keir Starmer where it described him being like a driverless train, like the DLR, which is the automated trains in London. Like, It’s going somewhere, but one’s doing the pedals.

And I think that is something that we associate with masculinity. And you’re right; it makes it hard for female candidates, because if you’re a female candidate, how do you access that level of, like, I just tell people what to do without becoming the Karen, the school mom, the nag? You know, all of these negative stereotypes we have about female authority.

Rosin: Okay, but just let’s surface what we just said here. It’s profound actually. So the Republicans or MAGA has reached this sort of peak cartoonish, practically camp masculinity, and then as it rolls down the hill on the train, obviously driven by a woman, it’s careening off. But what’s happened is: It, like, seeps back up and becomes so mainstream that the Democrats pick it up as a kind of necessity. Like, even take what Democrats define, like, their almost embarrassingly desperate search for a working-class candidate. What is it that they define as working class?

Lewis: Jobs that men do.

Gilbert: Yes.

Lewis: It’s being an oysterman; it’s being a logger. It’s not being a nail technician.

Rosin: Right.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Exactly. Which is a working-class job. Which is a working-class job.

Lewis: Exactly, done by many immigrants in America, yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. So Pete Buttigieg is an interesting example. It feels like, Democrats or the left—one choice would just be to sort of speak this idiom and go to the gym and bench-press and have everybody know how much you can bench-press. Another option would be to slightly expand the definition of masculinity such that it could possibly include a gay dad who served in the military. Does that just seem ridiculous? Like, if I say that out loud, you’re like, That will never happen, or, That won’t happen now. That’s going too far.

Gilbert: No, I think that makes sense. I’m thinking about Jon Ossoff, who was a documentary filmmaker before he was the senator in Georgia. Expanding masculinity feels fruitful at this point.

Lewis: Yeah. I feel less optimistic than you. I think there’ll be such tension in the Democrats about, This is the most important election of our lifetimes. We have to find the kind of candidate that we feel, like, least tense about. I mean, I hope it’s not true. The Democrats took a chance on Barack Hussein Obama, with his middle name and all this kind of stuff, and it worked out for them. And I hope that they can find it in themselves to look at candidates who don’t look central-casting masculinity next time. But I worry they’ll think, Oh, no, other voters are sexist. Other voters are homophobic.

Gilbert: Do you think there’s any chance that there’s a female candidate? I don’t either.

Rosin: Let’s take an audience poll. Any chance there’s a female candidate? No. No. No. No.

Lewis: Unless AOC goes for it, but I think, it doesn’t—

Rosin: Too soon.

Lewis: Yeah, and I think the announcement about her freezing her eggs, that’s not the kind of thing you do when you’re about to embark on a presidential cycle. So it’s a shame. And Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, essentially ruled herself out. So I think we could be looking at another, like, total sausage-fest debate stage, basically. Yeah, like it’s ’92 again.

Rosin: You heard it here, guys. Sausage-fest debate. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about politics and where we are. Sophie, I wanna ask you about realms other than politics. What about in culture? You and I have talked about this. In your book Girl on Girl, I mean, the message is that Millennials grew up with a sort of ’90s, early-aughts culture that put bad ideas about women in their heads. How have you seen that evolve? Like, if you wrote the book about, you know, 2020s pop culture and women. It does feel different. It does feel like women have a lot more agency. You mentioned Olivia Rodrigo, but what do you think?

Gilbert: I mean, this is the one thing that I keep coming back to, because it’s a sign of a positive. Like, there aren’t many; we cling to the ones we have. But in terms of mainstream culture, it’s so much better than it was in the 2000s. In the 2000s, there were no women in movies at all. If women were present in movies, they were bitchy girlfriends who were annoyed that their husbands are going to Vegas, or they were, you know, bombshells in bikinis, or they were sort of crones who were figures of sexual disgust. I mean, that was what women did in movies in the 2000s, and I should know, I’ve seen them all. No.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Gilbert: But basically, movies—I mean, there’s a great quote in a Tad Friend New Yorker piece, I think of a profile of the actor Anna Faris, and it comes straight from a studio executive, and he’s like, You know, men make movies, and if they don’t wanna put women in movies, they won’t. And it was that simple. So the culture that we had in the 2000s was incredibly misogynistic, degrading to women.

But now we are in this moment where we have, in film, in television, all these stories being told about women’s lives that are about things like the transition into motherhood, the tyranny of beauty culture, what it’s like to age as a woman. We have all these actors in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people who are doing the most interesting work of their lives, like Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman. I mean, there is a slight counterargument that to be present, to be visible in public life, those women have to do an enormous amount of cosmetic work to themselves, so that’s a side note. But at the same time, just the fact that more women are being given the opportunity to make film and television, to tell stories about women for women, or just even cultural products that are interested in women feels like huge progress.

At the same time, if you look at music, I think there is no argument right now against the fact that women are culturally dominant. Music is the one form of culture where women are all-powerful. I mean, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo. These are the ones who the fans are obsessed with, who the tickets go crazy for. I mean, women have a power in music that men do not have right now. I have no idea why, so if you guys know, please tell me later. But it’s interesting to see. At the same time—sorry, I keep telling—

Rosin: No, no, no. This is the only, like, unquestionably positive part of this conversation so far, so continue.

Gilbert: Well, I was gonna go negative now, which is to say that, as I do, I’m gonna smother you all. No, to come back, unfortunately, for a lot of people now, especially young people, mainstream culture is not film and television and music. It’s what they see on their phones whilst scrolling.

Rosin: Ah, that’s the problem.

Gilbert: And that is the realm, I think, where I would argue misogyny is worse, more cartoonish, more depraved, more hateful than it’s been in a very long time.

Rosin: More hateful?

Gilbert: It feels like it.

Lewis: I mean, my worry about the female dominance in pop music is it reflects the lack of importance of pop music in our culture. And I think you have to look at—if you look at AI, how many women are there in those tech companies? How many women are in crypto? Things that are hot and cool, men fence off for themselves. And I worry slightly about those cultural products, that actually, the female dominance of them might reflect their lack of importance. Like, You can let—the women can have those, right? You can’t have crypto. That’s ours, ’cause we all think we’re gonna get very rich off it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve brought it down again.

Rosin: That is a very depressing argument. But it’s very interesting, because it is what happens in the labor market. Men used to be secretaries, like in the Dickensian era, you think, like, All the men are secretaries.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: And then women became secretaries, so they got paid a lot less, and the same is true for teachers.

Rosin: But I don’t think that’s true in pop music.

Gilbert: I don’t.

Rosin: What do you think?

Gilbert: I don’t. I mean, Taylor Swift is a billionaire. I mean, obviously there can only be one Taylor Swift. But in terms of cultural power, but also earning power, I wouldn’t write it off as insignificant, I don’t think.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, I wanna spend our last few minutes talking about relationships, which is harder to talk about. Because it’s sort of less concrete, and there does seem to be—you know, our colleague Faith Hill has written about this—a kind of freeze of suspicion between men and women. As you’re talking about the internet, I know you’ve written about porn. What are you seeing in the kind of male-female relationship realm—you have children—that worries you?

Gilbert: I mean, I have recently been reading an advance copy of a book by a Financial Times journalist called Patricia Nilsson. And her book is called Guilty Pleasure. It’s about how the entire architecture of the internet is basically built on porn, because porn was the first major force on the internet. And so many of the elements that we take for granted—like algorithmic engagement, endless scrolling, the sort of endless shift towards extreme content—so much of that comes from porn. Even things like payment processing, like, that was initially, like—it was made for porn sites first before it was used anywhere else on the internet.

But her point was—this was also something that I’ve felt and not quite seen anyone state so clearly, which is: Basically the majority of modern porn on tube sites now is degrading and humiliating to women.

Rosin: In different ways than it ever has been? Or what’s notable about that right now?

Gilbert: There’s just sort of a lot of violence towards women, slapping, choking, but also just name-calling. And her point, and I think it’s true, is that a lot of this impulse has sort of, it’s filtered out into different aspects of the internet as well and certainly into male culture. So you have a generation of younger men now who have grown up watching this kind of content and are entirely habituated to the idea that you will call women these vile names. And there’s something about the idea that if you’re a young man and you have been taught that women are not your equal, that they’re not fully human, that they’re figures of degradation and sexual humiliation, how are you ever gonna have a meaningful relationship with a woman in your life?

And so, my colleague Faith Hill has written a lot about the loneliness crisis and the fact that Gen Z men and women aren’t having relationships in the same way. But I mean, as women, what are the options? If the option is being alone or being with someone who absolutely hates you, I think it’s quite a simple choice.

Lewis: There’s a sociologist I really like called Alice Evans, and she has this theory about essentially that young men and young women, if they hang out together in offline spaces, they essentially de-radicalize each other.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s really part of what we’re talking about here. When I look at the algorithmic internet, it feels very sex segregated. There are things you get shown on your Instagram algorithm, your YouTube algorithm, and one of the first things that those algorithms want to know is whether or not you’re male or female. So if you’re a guy, you get advertised—and it’s done for advertisers, basically, because there’s one set of products you’re gonna get advertised, like, meat.

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: No, seriously, like, okay, well, meat is not a product. A lot of these men, a lot of the manosphere things have, like, boxes of meat that you can buy. Yeah. Like, Order some meat from men.

Rosin: I’d like a box of meat, please.

Lewis: And then if you’re a woman, then they’ll, obviously, like—they’ll try and sell you stuff about the fact that, you know, you’re ugly and repulsive—

Gilbert: Beauty products, yeah.

Lewis: —and you need to pay money to offset that.

Rosin: It will be, like, extract of meat to put on your face every night. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Face meat. But I think that’s really worrying. So part of that is I think you’re having young boys and girls, and young men and women, spending time in very sex-segregated spaces because it’s them and their phone. And actually, if they were spending more time just with, you know—one of the things that predicts better equality is when men and women report having cross-sex friendships. In cultures where that isn’t the case, they tend to be much more unequal.

That’s one of the ways I worry about America is that going backwards, and actually, getting young people off their phones and just hanging out at a bar or wherever it might be, like a pool hall, bowling, or whatever all these things are. That I think would be powerfully de-radicalizing. But that’s one of the things that worries me about where tech has taken all this.

Rosin: I can end in two ways. One way I can end is to create a manifesto for all the people in this room to pervert the algorithm. So basically, I’m saying all the women in this room, just order meat.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: So that it flips the algorithm. We can all agree to do that together, ladies. Another way—

Lewis: I would say manly meats, as well.

Rosin: Yes.

Lewis: Preferably, like, venison. No chicken. Chicken’s for ladies.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Yeah, not chicken. The gamier, the better. That’s what the T-shirt will say, The gamier, the better. No. Here’s, in all seriousness, I was thinking about your first book, and the women that you wrote about, it’s 11 Fights.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: They were operating in very bad conditions, and I was wondering if in researching that book, there’s anything you learned about the modern era, or you see, even if it’s AOC, sort of somebody kind of operating in these unfavorable conditions but in a successful way.

Lewis: I mean, all I felt when I was writing this, and I don’t know if you felt this when you were writing Girl on Girl, was, like, these fights never go away.

Gilbert: Oh, yeah.

Lewis: Like, there’s just echoes constantly.

Gilbert: There’s just new iterations of them—

Lewis: Yeah, and it comes back.

Gilbert: —new technology. Yeah.

Lewis: But the other thing I felt was, you know, I saw some young journalist had got kind of bullied off Twitter because she’d written a piece about Sydney Sweeney, and everyone had called her fat, essentially. And I thought about posting, Do you know what really has previously worked against feminism, is just being rude about the physical appearance of feminism. That stopped women getting the vote. Well done. Yes, you did that one. That stopped women, like, you know, getting equal pay in the ’70s. No, it doesn’t.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Actually, it’s what people do when they’re losing.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Love it.

Gilbert: But it’s also what happens when you write about anything related to men, as a woman. If it enrages a man, he will sic all his followers on you, and they will all make fun of your appearance, and it’s because they can’t counter the ideas. They don’t have an intellectual standpoint with which to argue with what you’re saying, so they say, You look old, and I’m like, Thank you. I’m 43.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: All right, we’ll end on that. Thank you all for being such a great audience. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Miguel Carrascal engineered. Rob Smierciak provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The word that the Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick hears often from her FBI sources is desperate, meaning that they believe FBI Director Kash Patel is desperate to please President Trump. What Trump wants, sources from the agency and the Justice Department concluded, is proof that he actually won the 2020 presidential election and punishment for those he believes conspired to deny him victory. Sources told Fitzpatrick that nervous agents have sought counsel in recent weeks about how to respond to FBI directives related to the midterms.

Fitzpatrick has published a series of revelations about the FBI under Patel’s leadership. In April, she reported that Patel had “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Patel called the story a “lie” and filed a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic. On Radio Atlantic, she discusses what agents and other sources are telling her about how the mission of the FBI has changed, how resources have been diverted to exploration of long-debunked election-conspiracy theories, and what most worries them about this moment. The FBI has responded to Fitzpatrick’s reporting by calling it “false” and stating that the FBI is “united.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin:  “Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?” That’s the title of a recent story by staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick, who covers the FBI. She spoke to FBI agents and other sources who told her that Patel is, quote, “desperate” to help the president get what he wants, which one source told her was indictments, people in handcuffs.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the last few months, The Atlantic, and Sarah Fitzpatrick in particular, has published a series of revelations about Kash Patel’s leadership at the FBI.

Back in April, Sarah reported that Patel had alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences, a story that got a lot of attention. Patel called the story a lie, and he filed a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic. Sarah is joining us today to discuss her reporting on the FBI and the midterms.

Sarah, welcome back to the show.

Sarah Fitzpatrick: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: From your reporting, you learned that under Kash Patel’s leadership, the agency is approaching elections differently. What did you discover?

Fitzpatrick: In interviews with over 40 sources across the FBI and across Washington, they described an FBI that has fundamentally changed its core mission into essentially acting in many cases on behalf of the president and pursuing things that are in the White House’s interest, not in their traditional role around elections.

Rosin: And what did the agents you spoke to find alarming about this new focus?

Fitzpatrick: They found it incredibly alarming to the point that I think there was a real level of apprehension and terror that I had not sensed, even in my prior reporting. This was something new, and this was a real concern that there was a lack of information about what would happen on Election Day.

And a real concern that they were gonna be asked to do things that may be counter to what they had long been instructed to do as agents of the FBI, specifically around elections.

Within the FBI, it is such a sacred thing. There are so many rules and laws and ways to make sure that there is no appearance of the federal government ever putting a finger on the scale around elections.

And I think the concern among the workforce, and those familiar with what the FBI’s plans are, is a real lack of clarity, and in that vacuum is a sense of concern.

Rosin: And did people you spoke to bring up specific scenarios, like before the polls, long before the elections, after the polls?

Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Rosin: Did they spin things out?

Fitzpatrick: Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s a concern right now, given the FBI’s incredible amount of resources that they have devoted to election-related investigations. These range from things like going back over election conspiracies that have long been disproven, and making agents go over and over and over the same things with no new information, as far as we can tell, to investigations into people that the president or others around him find to have been—that they believe were part of a grand conspiracy—and to go after those individuals and to find reasons to indict them, essentially.

So there’s a kind of concern about how the FBI is—what they are prioritizing, what they’re using resources for, and whether or not that is an appropriate application of the law. I think there’s also a great concern among—because normally the FBI does a lot of preparation for Election Day. There are briefings; there are trainings.

The major one is around this idea that, how do we protect election locations and people involved in elections?

Rosin: That’s in the past. That would be the normal course of operation.

Fitzpatrick: That would be the norm.

Rosin: Right, right.

Fitzpatrick: That would be the norm. There’s a tremendous amount of that, and it’s a real focus on civil liberties and protection.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Fitzpatrick: That has not happened thus far, and we’re a couple weeks out from the election. There has been one large-scale training, which was titled “Election Integrity,” and the vast majority of that training, as far as I’ve been able to discern from my reporting, is that it was focused on illegal-immigrant voting, which, as we know, is a tiny, tiny, minuscule issue. And there wasn’t the same focus on making sure that the appropriate role of the FBI is followed on Election Day.

I’ve spoken to lots of agents and others within the bureau who have asked for guidance, who have asked for: What is going to be the plan? What do I need to be doing? And they are concerned that they are not getting the answers that they would expect.

And I think there’s a real concern among employees at the bureau about what it will look like after Election Day. And what will they be asked to do? What may the government—this White House—ask them to do? And I think there’s a real concern about that.

Rosin: And was there a specific scenario that anyone spun out to you? My greatest fear is X?

Fitzpatrick: One agent described, and we mention it in the piece, he says: “I’m either gonna be sick that day or they are going to have to fire me.” They are already preparing for what their red lines might be.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Fitzpatrick: Now, I think it’s important to be clear: There has been no specific guidance that has gone out, but the absence of that, given a bureau that is known for preparing so carefully, that’s making people nervous, and that ultimately goes to leadership.

Rosin: Right. Well, last month, Patel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Democratic senators tried to extract a commitment from him that he would say no if the president tried to deploy federal agents to polling locations.

And as you—you’re nodding your head—they didn’t succeed.

Senator Richard Blumenthal: Can you commit to this committee that you will not send FBI agents to the polls on Election Day?

FBI Director Kash Patel: The FBI will follow the law. If there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation of the law, we will. Otherwise, we won’t.

Blumenthal: Would you agree with me that the FBI has no general authority to monitor elections?

Patel: That priority rests with DHS.

Blumenthal: So you would agree with me that deploying FBI agents to the polls on Election Day would be contrary to law?

Patel: I don’t know that we can’t legally do it. I’m telling you we’re going to house our agents and intel analysts in our field offices for election-security efforts.

Blumenthal: Well, I’m dissatisfied that you are unable to give us an unequivocal, clear, unambiguous commitment that the FBI will be kept out of election interference.

Fitzpatrick: I think it was a really alarming moment for members of Congress, and it was a really alarming moment for members of the bureau. I talked to a couple people who described what it was like to watch that in action, and they were a combination of just bewildered and distraught.

Like, this is such an easy question to answer. The law is clear. Why can’t he say it, and what does that mean?

Rosin: Speaking of the law, what are they legally allowed to do? What is the law around sending federal agents to polling locations?

Fitzpatrick: So officially, federal armed agents are not allowed to enter polling locations. The law is very, very clear. There’s a lot of case history around this. There are specific examples potentially in which there would be a threat to life, but the conditions that need to be met in order for that to happen are quite extreme.

Rosin: Now, you’ve implied in our conversation that the pressure’s coming from the White House. Why did you conclude that, and what did people tell you they’ve been hearing?

Fitzpatrick: Everyone I spoke to around this story, and I spoke with more than 40 people, described instances in which the orders that were given were described as: This is coming from the White House. This is a presidential priority. This is important for 47.

It was explicit that this was the case, and that also is an incredible departure from the FBI under any administration prior. They spend a tremendous amount of time and energy making sure that it doesn’t even appear that they have any contact with the White House.

And this is one of the questions that we asked. You know, Has the bureau followed the rules about who’s supposed to be talking to the White House and not? They claim that they have. Our reporting suggests otherwise.

Rosin: All right, let’s get specific about that. Under previous administrations, at least in my memory, agencies actually take pains to—

Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Rosin: —to portray themselves as independent—

Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Rosin: —and apolitical. What has this agency done under Kash Patel—things that you found out but also things that have been publicly reported—that depart from that tradition?

Fitzpatrick: I mean, first of all, you have a director that is appearing with the president at events in which it appears—there’s this particular event that we talk about in the piece, a rally, essentially a Trump rally at a police-training academy.

Patel: President Trump’s mission to make America safe again, as he campaigned; he is delivering on that promise, and it is such an honor to be here in Nassau County, back in my home, when he’s about to walk onstage and give you the latest update on the statistics.

Fitzpatrick: And the fact that you had the attorney general and the director of the FBI up there—and not just, not just there, but personally thanking the president.

Patel: President Trump, thank you for backing law enforcement. Thank you for funding law enforcement. Thank you for loving law enforcement. Thank you for relentlessly pursuing the mission of justice with the warriors of justice across this country.

Fitzpatrick: You know, saying, The president reads about every single case that we work on. That’s not supposed to be happening. If that’s happening, that’s a real problem on every level.

Rosin: And play that out for me. I saw that—is the departure, like, in tone, or the way that he appears, or the way that he praises the president, or just the very fact that he appears?

Fitzpatrick: The very fact.

Rosin: The very fact that he appears at a public event that feels like a political rally.

Fitzpatrick: The very fact that you would be with the president, that you would be photographed with the president really at all. I think previous FBI directors have described to me how they would take all these pains to avoid that and would not even come visit the White House, in many cases. That’s not what’s happening here.

Rosin: How did Patel and the agency in general respond to this reporting when you asked them about it? It’s strange, a little bit funny.

Fitzpatrick: It was really strange.

Rosin: Yeah.

Fitzpatrick: I still don’t fully understand it, to be honest. It’s one of the most odd responses I’ve ever received.

Essentially, we sent—I sent—three pages of very, very detailed questions about what we planned to report, and Director Patel’s response was about a golden Jet Ski, and asking if I had found his golden Jet Ski.

Rosin: Which you hadn’t.

Fitzpatrick: I hadn’t.

Rosin: No. It’s not one of the things you’ve —

Fitzpatrick: I’ve actually never reported on Jet Skis.

Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Fitzpatrick: I wasn’t aware that he had lost one, but I’m happy to help if he needs help.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Fitzpatrick: But I think it was, you know—it was a reference to what we think was another news organization’s reporting that had nothing to do with the story, which was very odd for someone whose job it is to be precise about facts.

Other executives at the FBI did respond. They said that the reporting was false. They emphasized that this was a united FBI. But it was very curious: All of the people who submitted these responses had almost identical language, right down to the words.

Rosin: Which was “false.”

Fitzpatrick: “False,” “united.” It was unlike any response I’ve ever received in my many years of reporting.

Rosin: In its flipness?

Fitzpatrick: Its flipness and its—it’s a lack of engagement in detail.

Rosin: Right.

Fitzpatrick: And I think, you know, my job as a journalist is to gather as much information, to engage. Normally, you know, it’s a constant back-and-forth.

And, you know, on something so important as elections and Americans’ perceptions of elections, anxieties about this election, and federal law enforcement, it is odd. It’s very odd. It’s very concerning.

Rosin: And we should note that a spokesperson for the FBI denied that there were any internal concerns raised about the bureau’s approach to election investigations, and they said in a statement, “Election security is and will continue to be one of this FBI’s highest national security priorities, and we will make no apologies for any work to ensure every American citizen’s sacred right to vote is protected from criminal interference.”

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, why sources have described Kash Patel as, quote, “desperate” to help the Justice Department before the midterms.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanna go back to election-interference claims, which have a long history in this administration. Earlier this year, Patel announced that the Justice Department was gonna be making arrests in connection to 2020-election interference, and as we know, they haven’t made arrests. But your reporting found that it’s not for lack of trying. What did you discover they’d been doing in regards to the 2020 claims?

Fitzpatrick: They’ve been doing a lot in regards to the 2020 claims all over the country. There are a series of election-integrity investigations in which they have gone back and pursued conspiracies or theories from people who normally would not be providing information to the FBI, or that the FBI has already found it not to be credible.

But agents and other analysts, other FBI staff, were taken off of their responsibilities to go and do this work. In Fulton County, we have the example this summer of over 200 agents, I believe, were taken off of their responsibilities, worked nights and weekend, at tremendous cost to the taxpayer, to review ballots that had been seized by the FBI in January related to 2020. Our understanding is that nothing new or material came out of that investigation, and it took away people from doing really important work that helps keep people safe.

Rosin: And just to be clear, we’ve done some reporting on the Fulton County case on this show, and it’s not just been investigated by federal. It’s been investigated by state agencies. It’s been investigated many times over, and there wasn’t any evidence turned up—

Fitzpatrick: Exactly.

Rosin: —over these years that there was anything fraudulent.

Fitzpatrick: And I think one of the things that I report in the piece that I think really sent shock waves through the bureau, as well as other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, is the fact that two people were walked out of the Atlanta field office for even raising questions about the process of what they were being asked to do.

And when we asked the FBI about that, they said they couldn’t comment on personnel but made a very curious comment that anyone who engages in weaponization no longer has a job here. And I think that speaks to a place that is demanding a certain level of what they believe, what has agents and others inside the bureau describe as loyalty. You have to show your loyalty.

And one person I spoke to recently, a private defense attorney, he described to me that he receives constant calls from people he used to work with in the bureau, because they are concerned about this election and what the FBI’s role in it may be. And he described people that are essentially—there is so much pressure to bend to this narrative, a narrative that has been debunked. But that’s what our FBI is spending their time on, much of their time on.

Rosin: And you also reported that people in the FBI and at the Justice Department are looking for guidance. Like, in what ways, and what kind of guidance?

Fitzpatrick: There’s a real absence of clear direction and clear information right now. And I spoke to multiple people who described sometimes having to be on, like, a goose chase trying to figure out, Okay, so who’s in charge of elections, and what should we be doing, and how should we be preparing?

And I was told of this message that was relayed from one Justice Department official to another. Someone was asking about the Justice Department manual, which is the list of very, very clear rules and guidance and procedures, and there’s an entire aspect of this specific to elections because it is so sacred and high-stakes. And this person was told, we quote—we say it in the piece—“I was told the Justice Manual isn’t a thing … There are no rules. Just make sure Republicans win.”

Rosin: Wow.

Fitzpatrick: Now, I asked the DOJ about that. They said that this is not and has never been department guidance. And I think, you know, that’s what people are getting alarmed by, that these are the messages that they’re getting, and they are really concerned.

Rosin: In your piece, you used the word desperate, as in people described Patel as “desperate” to help. Why desperate? That’s an extreme word.

Fitzpatrick: It is an extreme word. It’s a word that people used over and over in my conversations with them, and increasingly as time went on in this reporting. And I think it reflects this very precarious position that Patel finds himself in. We at The Atlantic have reported that he has been on the list of people that were believed to be close to being asked to leave.

We’ve reported that Patel himself has expressed that to other people and is very nervous about his place. But in a way, that is a feature, not a bug.

Often, sources will talk to me about: There’s an audience of one here. And that the president has asked him to do very specific things, and in order to keep this job, you know, what our sources tell us is that he is willing to do things that he feels that he must do. And that, you know, one source says to me, This is the guy—Patel’s the guy who never says no. And the president likes that.

Rosin: What are the tone of the sources you’re talking about? Is it mocking, worried, concern, a whole range of things?

Fitzpatrick: You know, I think it’s changed over time. Originally, when I first really started digging into the FBI, it would be a kind of mocking, a kind of, This is silly, but the work’s getting done. And over time, especially this summer, there was a real change. People started getting much more alarmed, concerned, bordering on sometimes a kind of Is there any use?—almost a kind of nihilism—and really describing a kind of paralysis in how they were feeling and how they were approaching that work. And that really made me take notice and feel that there was something that had shifted this summer in the preparation for the midterms.

Rosin: So that’s the evolution in the agents. I’m curious about the evolution in the precarity of Kash Patel’s position and what you know about that. When we spoke in April, it did seem as if his job were at risk.

Do you get a sense that that’s changed? Has he won the favors of the president? Do you know about that?

Fitzpatrick: Yes. I think that’s true.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Fitzpatrick: I think that’s absolutely true. I think he has gone from being one of the most vulnerable members of the Cabinet to being perhaps one of the safest, because it’s very clear what the president wants, and he has demonstrated over and over again that he will use the resources of the FBI towards those purposes.

Rosin: Now, there has been some resistance. You mentioned some, but can you tell us who else resigned and what they said?

Fitzpatrick: So there’s been a kind of an ongoing, either people that are fired or people that are resigned almost on a weekly basis, and they sometimes come in waves. Interestingly, but we had a couple really interesting people resign recently.

Out of the blue, we had Andrew Bailey, who was one of the co–deputy directors of the FBI. He was brought in and was viewed by many in the bureau, but as well as within the White House, as the person who would be the successor to Patel eventually. And Bailey suddenly resigned. That was a surprise to even his closest staff.

And I think for a lot of people within the bureau, this was a really telling indicator of the direction that the bureau is going in. In part, I’m told from sources familiar, that Bailey was viewed as someone who was willing to discuss the Constitution; bring up Perhaps these are the limitations. Perhaps this is, you know—we should be aware of these things; and that he was, in many cases, a lone voice in that. And now I think that resignation has made those inside the FBI, especially in leadership, very concerned about who is going to say no to Patel.

Rosin: Since you mentioned Bailey, I should say that he’s pushed back against some of your reporting and your narrative.

Fitzpatrick: Yes. In a statement provided by the FBI press office, Bailey said that the reporting was false and said that—and it was specifically around questions about pushing back on proposed law-enforcement actions and the fact that he brings up the Constitution in meetings.

Rosin: There were also some other resignations you mentioned, which surprised me.

These were people who I thought would be maybe more sympathetic to claims of election interference, and they also left. What is that about?

Fitzpatrick: I think it’s a reflection of the fact that these investigations—so this is within the bureau but also primarily within the Justice Department. There is this giant investigation that’s been going on in South Florida that just keeps taking people from all over the government, so much money, so much time.

It is just, like, agents describe it as something that they try desperately to avoid getting picked up to. One person was telling me that they were, like, kind of having to come up with ever more creative excuses to not be in the office. Anyway, this investigation in South Florida is really kind of the nexus of the effort to use the federal government, the FBI and the Justice Department, to go after the president’s perceived enemies and those that he believes somehow contributed to his loss in [the] previous election.

We saw some of a mass—essentially a mass resignation, although the Justice Department has said that some of those were reassignments that were already planned, and that this is a real signal. It was designed to be a signal. And it was a signal that, according to sources that I spoke to, that the leadership of the Justice Department was asking them to move too quickly and asking them to do things by a certain timeline, which was prior to the midterm elections.

And for even these individuals, who are true believers, who truly do believe and have devoted their lives to correcting what they believe when it was improperly handled, they said, This is a step too far. You are asking me to do something that is not supported at this point by the evidence or the law.

Rosin: Interesting. Interesting.

Fitzpatrick: It’s a real—and one person described it to me as an effort to get the president’s attention.

Rosin: I wanna put this in some kind of broader context, because you and other people in The Atlantic have been warning and reporting for months about potential election interference.

First, a little historical context: J. Edgar Hoover. This is not the first time that the FBI has been accused of political interference, you know? He obviously helped build the modern FBI, and also, you know, went after activists. And so how is this moment in history a deviation from what’s been in the past?

Fitzpatrick: I think it is a deviation from a mission that was very clear, an oath to the Constitution and to protect American citizens, and that is what the FBI does. That is what it is trained to do. There’s a lot of time and energy for the leadership of the bureau. They spend, I would say, the vast majority of their time thinking about, How do we put guardrails around what we do?

And so I think a lot of the FBI’s history has been around creating reforms, having checks and balances, making sure that these things are carefully and cautiously applied in a way that keeps Americans safe, but also upholds their rights under the law. I think we are seeing a shift in what that mission is, and that mission is towards the president’s agenda in many cases, assisting with immigration enforcement, going after perceived political enemies, going after election-conspiracy theories. That is a radical departure.

Rosin: We’re only a few weeks from the midterms now. It seems like you’re gonna be vigilant. What will you be watching for? ’Cause we’ve described ways where it could really go off the rails, and we’ve also described ways that there are boundaries and checks. So what signs are you watching over the next few weeks about which direction it’s gonna go in?

Fitzpatrick: I’m watching for—I’m gonna be watching for resignations or firings. I’m gonna be watching for actual planning. What is the level of who’s being asked to be on call? What are they being asked to prepare for? Where are they being stationed, and why? I’m going to be watching for what threats the bureau is anticipating. There’s a real conflict within the bureau right now about how resources are devoted to what is considered antifa or extremism, and who gets—which cases are pursued and why. That’s gonna be a really telling indicator, I think. And ultimately, this is an administration that is very clear and transparent in many cases about what they plan to do and what they’re hoping to do, and we need to take them at their word.

Rosin: Well, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today.

Fitzpatrick: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West with help from Mike Pesoli. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.