We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilija Chinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of
our website. Today we're joined by one of the newest Federalist contributors. That
would be the one and only Peachie Keenan. She is the author of the
new book it is out on June sixth, Domestic Extremist, A Practical Guide
to Winning the Culture War. You can also follow Peachie's work over at Peachie
Keenan dot substock dot com. Peachi, Welcome to Federalist Radio Hour. Hey,
Emily, it's my pleasure to be here. It's very funny referring to
you as Peachi in conversation, because for those listeners who aren't on conservative Twitter,
Peachie Keenan is obviously a pseudonym that you use for a variety of reasons.
You write about those reasons in the book. I wanted to ask you
to talk a little bit here, so I think it's probably a very interesting
story. I know you can't get into too many details or specifics about why
you are anonymous and why you sort of left your career, as you say,
quote writing for corporate behemoths to do what you're doing now. Yeah,
I mean that is basically why I had to sort of adopt a pseudonym.
I first started like getting on Twitter, probably around Trump and the Trump era
twenty fifteen twenty sixteen. I just wanted a way to comment on politics and
express my opinions as a conservative woman, which you know you can't really do
where I live in Los Angeles and plied company, and then I finally started
the Peachie keenan account in twenty nineteen. I wanted to have like a real
name just to it was just like a fun you know, kind of ironic,
like everything's peachy keen when it wasn't. And at the time I was
working for a very yeah, like you said, a very large, very
well known entertainment media company in southern California. So for obvious reasons, you
know, expressing your opinions online, writing my articles for the American Mind,
which I started doing in twenty nineteen as peachem those would not have been very
well received at my day job because I had a full time day job and
I was writing for them and working with you know, people who they would
have stoned me on site. Okay, if they had like seen my Twitter
or knew knew how I felt about things, I would have been beheaded.
They would have brought in a guillotine, like it would have been over for
me. And so, you know, the anonymity is really protective. It's
very cozy, and you feel like, you know, maybe you are not
going to get docs or canceled immediately then uh, you know, right around
the time the pandemic started, my work with that company basically ended. Because
of the pandemic, a large number of people's or the contracts were not renewed,
people were giant departments were laid off directly as a result of COVID,
and so that was sort of freeing. You know, it's a little scary
to lose like the security of a day job, but it was also like
a great opportunity for me to just sort of double down, you know,
like all right, well now I'm now I'm peachy, and how far can
I take this thing? And very soon after that, you know, I
got a book deal, and things just sort of took off from there.
So now, you know, sometimes so when I wake up in the morning,
I have to kind of like blink my eyes a few times and remember,
like, oh, yeah, I'm Peachie keenid, Like what am I
going to say today? I get to wake up and be a domestic extremist
again, that's right, that's right. Well, yeah, that's that is
really interesting because to the extent that your story is representative of many others.
I mean, I think that's important to the book because that's sort of the
central thesis here, is that domestic extremism is not extremism, and it's it's
in fact the norm. But I want to also ask before we get into
that about your conversion to Catholicism, because I have to imagine that was a
really important part of your story. Of four kids, you're married, this
is all what makes you an extremist. But um, it's that's I think
that's particularly interesting in your timeline. You know, you start writing the stuff
around twenty nineteen, pandemic comes, you have this moment of liberation. Um,
Ideologically, what has how has your how have your personal beliefs evolved?
How did your conversion to Catholicism and your faith sort of play into all of
that. Yeah, I actually have more than four kids. Just want to
fact check that for the record. Book. I know, I'm sure I'm
extremely domestic. Okay, I'm I'm in the big leagues. Um well,
yeah, I mean, like I saying the book, it's sort of it
is like there's a there's some memoir in the book about how you know,
my my quote unquote journey from like basic liberal, you know, uh democrat,
socially liberal, feminist. I was a pro choice, militant, um
secular atheist. I thought people who believed in religion were stupid where that was
those are those that's the flyover people. I'm not. I'm this you know,
smart coastal elitist. You know. I was a snob about it totally.
Um, Like like all liberals in California and New York are today,
like they don't like people who believe in anything are just proves that there's they're
idiots. Um. But I slowly became a conservative basically right around nine to
eleven, I kind of, you know, the liberalism sort of fell from
my eyes. Um. And then later on I became more socially conservative.
Um. I started dating my husband, he sort of kind of red pilled
me a little bit on things like abortion and gun control. I mean,
it's like the power of like the power of a masculine man, okay,
to woo a liberal woman and like convert her like that. It works,
like you man out there, like you can fix her. Okay, you
really get And then in terms of Catholicism, that was sort of my last,
my final kind of iteration of you know, my extreme domesticity. And
the process began when my husband and I were newly married. I got pregnant.
We were thrilled, and at three months I had had a miscarriage,
and you know, it's very dramatic, unexpected. We were both like completely
unprepared, you know, we had not Now we're sort of battle hardened as
you are. You know, once you've had a miscarriage, you're you're braced,
you know, every time you get pregnant. But at the time,
we were just like lambs to the slaughter, and we had no idea,
you know, oh my gosh, what this can happen at this stage?
And like we were devastated. And he told me, he's like, listen,
I I'm just I'm so upset I have to convert to sanity. I'm
becoming a Catholic. And I was like, what I mean, I didn't,
you know, this is not what I signed up for, you know,
But I loved him and I was not going to like stop anyone from
doing that obviously. So he started the process of going to our CIA,
and I was sort of reluctantly accepting of it. My family was sort of
semi horrified, like, oh no, like you married this religious fundamentalist,
Like what were you thinking? But just the process of him going through it
and me kind of going through it with him going to mass reading things,
just understanding and I had come from zero knowledge of any of this. Right
that process led to my own conversion, and I I mean, I mean,
I was pregnant again and I very quickly had three children under the age
of three, So I didn't I wasn't even able to find like shoes that
matched, you know, for a few years. But once I did,
I started my own conversion. And it's been about ten years now. And
you know, what can I tell you, Like, if you want to
shortcut to all this stuff, you can want a great way to immunize your
kids and inoculate yourself to the you know, to the woke mind virus.
Roman Catholicism is a great way to do that. With this one knee trick,
you could just like cut right to the end. So that's very that's
very helpful because I didn't realize that the kind of ten year scale thing.
But it makes a lot of sense. And I guess it also makes sense
to the extent that you're right. Um, I really liked this line.
I think this is actually just from the introduction you say, instead, you
will simply begin to make choices large and small, that come not from without
but from deep within. And to me, that's a really optimistic note,
and it goes along with the optimism I think of what you just said,
even if it was more implicit. You're saying that the human instinct that women
have also that men have. You right, you have the whole section on
men in the book that can kind of rescue us from. Um, you
know, this extremism that we consider normal now, or we're supposed to consider
normal and back to just being normal. Do you think that's true? Do
you think that do you have hope that there are a lot of other you
know, PG Keenan's out there who maybe won't take the step of becoming you
know, anonymous right wing. I was gonna say shit posters, but maybe
that's inappropriate. No, that's fine. I like that. I like that,
I like that that handle. But do you have hope that there are
other people out there? Again, maybe they don't, you know, do
a career pivot, or maybe their career pivot looks like staying at home something
like that, or or homeschooling. Are there more people like you out there,
who coastal elites left of center, who will just sort of naturally come
around because they start having kids and get married. Yes, I think there
are. I mean I've met some of them, and I think that the
pandemic really will radicalize a lot of people to the reality of like public school
education and the teachers unions and what they actually want with your kids. People
tell me all the time that they're they reach out to me on Twitter and
they say, you know, I used to be this way, and I
had a change of heart. I used to be on the dating market and
you know, tinger apps, and I finally woke up to the reality of
that wasn't helpful. For me, So I think that a lot of women
are. It really just takes them hearing the right message or like seeing the
right kind of persuasive argument, or seeing them their own lives, how they've
been affected by, you know, single minded focus on a career to the
sacrificing like their natural inborn fertility, or they've enforced in these positions of finding
themselves later in life, you know, child free, maybe by accident,
and now it's sort of too late. So I think the culture, the
liberals are actually helping me radicalize. They're doing a great job of radicalizing women
against feminism, and young men especially seemed to be kind of leading the vanguard
there, you know. I mean there was a study that just came out
that showed like gen Z men are hugely against feminism more than women and like
at least half or something. So not like you know, overwhelming majority of
gen Z men, but this is like guys like eighteen to twenty five or
whatever. And the reason that not many of them are anti feminist or whatever
or see that it's it's all bull is because they're in the trenches, like
they're in college with these chicks. You know, they're seeing what these women
are like and so that the reality on the ground is doing a great job
of kind of red pilling people against this stuff. But like you said,
when I say in the book like turning inward, um, you know,
there's no I'm not really revealing anything like completely new under the sun. You
know, I'm not discovering any novel ideas like these. All these things are
so so kind of ancient and timeless, and they're all in us from the
beginning, Like we're all born with these natural you know, normal instincts,
ways to feel, like how a mother should feel about her baby, a
man and woman falling in love, like these are just like normal ways of
being human that if you can kind of like brush away the like scales of
feminism or progressivism and uncover them, you can kind of, you know,
reveal what the person's true desires are, which they're not allowed to say anymore,
you know. Like I don't know if you had this experience, but
I had friends when I when I had my corporate job in the office,
I would have friends who would you know, young women marry for a few
years, have get pregnant, and they would tell me how reluctant they were
to come back to work when the baby, when they returnity, when they're
paid. Leave was over, like it was like four to six weeks,
you know, and they were like, I don't know if I can do
it. I just I don't know if I can come back. And some
of them, I would say, listen, you don't you don't have to,
Like when you have your baby, you know it's going to be hard
to say goodbye to the kid for twelve hours a day, six week old.
Like you if you if you listen to your heart, it will tell
you what you need to do. And yes it's a sacrifice. Yes you
might like lose whatever some few years of your income. But some of them
did take my advice, and I was very pleased to see that some of
these women were much happier they they had to stay them with their newborn they
had a second newborn. But then on the other hand, there were some
who came right back and I would just look at them like, wow,
that's I don't know if I could have done that. So I hope that
there is a way to sort of reach the hearts, the hearts and minds
of these young women. Yeah, at the Federalist, you're actually not allowed
to advance unless you have children, like nice, Nice, I love it.
Every kid lay the Handmaid's Tale over here. Every kid gets you into
a higher tax bracket, right, that's how shit. Basing On that note,
though, you have a section in the book where you talk about birth
control as mind control, and I love that phrasing. It raises this issue
of, like I think the birth control pill, we're on the precipice of
a real reckoning with it. It is the one thing if you could point
to something that just was a technological innovation that changed the world really quickly without
much thought because the conveniences were so obvious, especially to the people who were
peddling it. But it's just sort of dramatically changed human nature overnight. And
I think you know, with more than a half century in the river mirror,
this is at least slowly starting to change. So if you could you
know with that kind of context that we are starting to see more people question
pharma's claims about birth control versus their experiences with it, especially since it started
getting prescribed to women in my generation millennial generation for acne and everything when they
were like thirteen years old and been on the pill for ten years. Are
going to have fertility issues because of it, and in some likelihood. What
does it mean that it also in addition to be you know, the control
sexually physically. How's it also mind control? Um? Yeah, I mean
I think that the name of it is so dystopian. Um, you know,
birth control. It sounds like some way to like cull the herd or
something. It's crazy, right. Um. I think it's mind control in
a way. I think in the book, I say it's like it's a
form of like Chekhov's gun, you know, like Anton Chekhov, the playwright
hit a famous quote attributed to him that if you if you're writing a play
and in act one you show a loaded gun, you know that that gun
will be fired by act three. So if you if you show a girl,
a young woman, teenager or whatever, the pill, and like,
here's what it will do for you. Here all the benefits, Like you
can do whatever you want with a boy and no consequences. Like pretty sure
that that will be getting the pill, will be being will get She'll test
it out, like she's going to see if it works, and she's going
to know that she's her innards have been, her uterus has been up armored
and she's been sterilized and she is ready to party, you know what I
mean. And so you have a much I think higher likelihood of women being
open to you know, promiscuity dating apps like long strings of you know,
high body counts as they say, in terms of numbers of sexual partners.
And you know, the whole idea of like chastity. I mean, could
there be a dirtier word in the English language than chastity or even suggesting to
a young woman that might be healthier choice than medicalizing herself on lifetime synthetic hormones.
And now we're seeing more and more, like you said, the after
effects of birth control. Not only do they make you kind of gain weight,
and like you know, do they work by literally making a woman like
not want to have sex, like they make you a sexual They lower libido.
And there was some other study that said that women long term birth control
actually become lesbians, like they're just so almost allergic to masculine nity because of
the pill that they're on, that it kind of induces this um, you
know, anti natalism um. And so yeah, I mean, I think
Mary Harrington has been writing about the pill a lot Louise Perry, A lot
of these sort of like radical traditional feminists. UM, this sort of like
new group of women writers that's coming up because the after effects are no good
And yeah, my, you know, I remember my sister got put on
the pill for acne and she had problems later in her life, she had
PTOs, she had she really struggled to to have children, and so I
mean, I'm not a hundred percent sure it's related, but I yeah,
I mean, you cannot lightly just put a thirteen year old on the pill.
I mean, and what message are you sending as the mother that what
are you hoping her to do when she's thirteen or fourteen years old? You
know, Yeah, it's um the way that. But that's to me,
this question of one of the biggest questions I had when I was reading the
book is um this sort of relativity between normality and extremism. And increasingly I
think that what is normal and what is normal and sort of an idealistic sense,
what are healthy norms are becoming not just framed as domestic extremism by the
media, but when you look at how sort of accepting everyone is of these
premises, like the Orwellian term birth control. I mean, look at how
pervasive the question of quote, forced birth has been after jobs, which is
insane. There's this like really I think tough, dynamic, and I don't
have the answer, but I do wonder if that if we're already so far
gone that it is genuinely extreme to be what used to be considered normal.
Do thoughts on that, especially in a world where I mean, I think
birth control is a really indicative pendulum that seems to start swinging back. But
then I also think it it's such a tool of hedonism that I have a
hard time seeing humans ever giving up so as a sort of stand in for
other conveniences and comforts that you know, we have in this hedonistic world.
Can we go back or are the normies now destined to be extreme long term?
Yeah? I mean that that really is the question, isn't it.
It's like can we are we going to win the culture where or not?
You know, are we going to save save Western civilization or not? I
mean, you can see the effects of birth control are having these profound population
effect impacts everywhere, and not just the First world, not just you know,
Japan and Europe, but now all over even even Mexico and Central America.
Their birth rates used to be high, but I think now the only
really major, you know, extreme extremely high birthrates are pretty much in sub
Saharan Africa. They're the last last ones to go. So we're kind of
all committing genetic self suicide. As I say, we're choosing extinction. And
um, you know a lot of people, not just me, are talking
about this. I mean Elon Musk talks about this a lot. He's sort
of like the highest profile you know, pro natalists that we have UM.
And he talks about population collapse as like the existential problem. You know,
sorry, you know, climate change, people like your thing is not as
important as this, um And so, you know, are we destined to
just be a tiny minority on the fringes, you know, homesteaders and homeschoolers
and domestic extremists like toiling away as everyone else jumps off the cliff? Um?
You know, I I don't. I don't think so. I think
that most people, at the end of the day, do not want to
die alone. They do not want to die with no children, no grandchildren,
no legacy, no one to remember them, no one to visit their
grave, just their cats. You know, to eat their body when they
die in their studio apartment. UM. I think that most people don't want
that. It's a It's the trick is how do you get them to admit
that, you know, and like fight these very entrenched, as you say,
cultural taboos against even talking about this, against even suggesting to a woman
that she should not be dating a new guy every weekend. You know,
you should not be, you know, trying to get a very high body
count to show off to your friends how how hot you are or whatever it
is. You know. But I think we're just kind of have to peel
them off one by one. And it's one hundred year of March we have
to take basically m And that's a helpful just framing because we think about things
and you know, one year marches, maybe ten year marches, but so
much has changed. You know, we live in such a hyper novel rule
this. Brett Weinstein and Heather Hang we would say that you're you're the frog
in the boiling pot in your head spinning, and you can't kind of keep
track of how much is changing and how much it is changing. I think
about that a lot when um, I think about sort of the the experiment
in norm shifting what across the West when it comes to homosexuality, gay marriage,
and that it's strange to me that there's been so little discussion about what
the life might look like forty years, fifty years, sixty years down the
road when the natural sort of relationship between a man and a woman has a
lot of comfort and nurturing from the woman. And it's not to say a
man can't provide. It is just to say that men and women are biologically
different. Therefore the sort of complementary aspect of care is different. Having a
biological child with your partner, with both genes, that obviously changes the way
that you're sort of evolutionarily, you know, condition to live as you age
and to be cared for as you age. So all that is to say,
there's just so little conversation about it, and we just sort of blaze
ahead because certain things are I guess right now the conditioning is so deep.
And on that note, um, maybe you have thoughts on that. But
also I wanted to ask you about quote industrial scale grooming, which is another
fantastic term because this this all has been industrialized. It is big business and
it is on a mass scale. Uh yeah. I mean one thing I
talk about in the book in some detail is like the whole industry of egg
donation, and you know where we're going with that kind of blindly, and
what the consequences are to not just to the couples, like the childless couples,
the infertile couples. You know, today's mostly is mostly gay couples buying
egg you know, well they're donated, but they're actually you're buying eggs.
But the consequences to the women who are donating, quote donating their eggs um.
You know, sort of like an issue that's linked with surrogacy. You
know, the women who are who are volunteering or whatever being paid to be
surrogate. M s gets for couples who don't want to, don't want to
or can't carry their own babies to term. Again largely gay couples, UM.
And you know these women are doing it for mostly this. You know,
many of them are Christian Mormon. UM. There's a lot of a
lot of egg donors in Utah. UM. I did a lot of research
on this, and they are kind of entranced by the idea of you know,
um empathy helping people. You know, people who can't have their own
children, sharing their wonderful youth and fecundity with those who are less fortunate,
you know. And it comes to this place of love, and so trying
to tell love is love a lot. Yeah, yeah, And they're literally
not being they're not even because they've absorbed so many of the planned parenthood messages
and narrative that your eggs are not children, they're not even related to you.
They're nothing. It's nothing. It's just a sell, you know.
They you imbibe that I did as a teenage girl. You just believe that
wholeheartedly, that it's not a baby until it comes out. Okay, before
that, it's up for grabs. Anyone can claim it. It is whatever
you say it is. And so their eggs to them are nothing, and
it's just like giving them a piece of dry skin, like it's not a
finger, fingernail clippings. And so they donate their eggs. They go through
a very kind of rigorous, medically invasive, destructive process of egg harvesting.
There's I mean, it's really gruesome what they do to you. Once you
get sucked in, you're not paid paid very much money, and they harvest
your eggs like you're like you're a belooga sturgeon. They just like open you
up and take out this and you're jacked up with crazy hormones, and you're
very young. And most of these women have never had a baby. They
don't know if they'll ever have fertility problems. And I and their eggs are
sold on these crazy websites that look like dating websites. They look like Tinder
profiles with the women young twenty twenty one year old girls dress provocatively, you
know, tenie shots like it's really it's really crazy. Um. And like
the blonde, blue eyed ones are you know, obviously the most popular,
like even to liberals, you know, there's not a lot of diversity among
the egg donation women. Just what does that mean? I don't know.
Is it are the egg egg buyers you know, a bastion of white supremacy.
I mean, like, yes they are. That's who's buying, you
know, the gay men and the women buying eggs are like they're looking for
a specific body type, thin, young, white, blonde, blue eyed.
Um. And what I found in the book is that there's some terrible
stories of women having egg donor regret. And a woman who was rendered,
for example, totally infertile by the process of her harvesting her eggs. And
she found out that she had two biological children who were being raised by strangers
in another state, and they would never know her, she would never be
able to see them touch them, and she was now infertile, and those
are the only two children she would ever have. And now she herself was
resorting to egg buying to have her own children. And just like, what
a depressing, what a debacle. You know, It's like it's almost it's
not you know, it's it's like it reminds me of like the de transitioners,
these victims of the left, these victims of you know, medical technology
gone gone wrong. It's almost like one of the Aliens sequels, you know,
just like this. You know, it's like this. These laboratories are
doing these things with no consequence, like you said, they're just full steam
ahead, and there are consequences. And I hope that people can read about
them and learn more about them and decide, you know what, I think,
I'm not going to sell my eggs at least I hope. Well,
no, it's again, it's a great example, like Katie Faust really of
them before us rightly. Oh yeah, eyes up to this. I think
she's open a lot of people's eyes up to this because she's great artifacts of
our culture that have that just kind of like baked into because the industrial scale
grooming is so power powerful. They're they're really not questioned birth control and surrogacy.
They're cast by corporations that run media outlets with that kind of love is
love framing with the um you know, technology is amazing and blah blah blah.
It's all the same, and they've shoved this down people's throats in a
matter of decades. And it's something striking about your book is how much of
it goes back down to sex and biology. I mean, so much of
what you're writing about, I mean maybe most of it is se and biology.
So I guess I wanted to ask why you think that's become the central
sort of fight in the culture. Where Why does it at the end of
the day, why does so much of this come down to sex and biology?
I think it's it's been become clear to me why all of these things
seem to be focused and targeting on young women who are at their most fertile,
the time when they should be thinking about, you know, finding a
mate and having children. Instead, they're being delivered this menu of options,
reproductive technology, lifestyle options that include things like, you know, exploring your
sexuality for the next ten years, avoiding pregnancy, freezing your eggs, donating
your eggs, getting abortions, get out of birth control. And it's very
clear to me that the reason is because once you are a mother, you
suddenly have something to protect, and you suddenly have something to conserve, and
you suddenly have something a vocation, a lifestyle that has nothing to do with
your job, your boss, Joe Biden, the government, like society as
a whole. Now it's like you, your mate and your child against the
world. You know, like the old schoolhouse rock song, three is a
magic number, you know, a man and a woman have a little baby
and like that. Now they're this like micro unit of you know, the
ultimate, the ultimate nuclear family, and breaking that apart is required. You
know, the powers that be kind of have to break that apart in order
to kind of reassert you know, control over them so they can continue selling
them their products, their technology, their their political ideologies. It's very very
important to them to break that apart and get access to the to the the
woman and the child in that family unit unit. And that's what that's what
the whole book is about, you know, become extremely domestic if you want
to live, you know, um, prioritizing yourself, your relationship with your
spouse and protecting your your children and hopefully having more than a couple like is
the only path out that I see for all of us to take, you
know, Um, it's the only way to prevent them from kind of like
stealing your your you know, stealing your brain and like asserting their control over
you. And so that's why they have to target the mothers. That's why
they have They have to you know, convince moms that it's okay to trans
transition your six year old boy, that's fine, to keep him, make
him a medicalized patient for life. And they seem to be really going after
the mothers, and a lot of mothers are going after it. I mean
there I think they have like some mental problems, um, you know,
among a lot of women who are doing it as a virtue signal or whatever.
But yeah, it seems like very obvious why they're targeting women and girls.
They're the soft underbelly of the culture. That's another good transition because that's
the book includes a quiz, and as I was going through the quiz,
I had the same again the Reactually, so much of this is in some
way just ties to sex and ties to biology into you know, all of
those sorts of things. Can you tell us just about making the quiz,
because it's it's basically a quiz to find out whether you're a domestic extremist.
And we're not going to spoil all of it because you should go get that
book, which again is that undude, But tell us about coming up with
the sort of litmus test for whether one is an extremist or not. Yeah,
I mean I was called a domestic extremist by people when I was pregnant
with my third kid. You know, a neighbor saw me, literally saw
me coming home like pregnant with my two little kids, and she was like,
wait, are you pregnant again? And I was like yes, She's
like, what are you some kind of Mormon? You know? So I
was done ankle lengths girt. Yeah, like I was already some kind of
like religious fundamentalist with three kids. Obviously she had two kids, because that's
all you can fit you know, in the back of the Mercedes or whatever,
and I had like the mini van, I was ready to go.
I'm ready to fill it up, which we did. But yeah, I
mean, you're just you're just going to be marked as a domestic extremist by
being living a normal life or what used to be considered normal, you know,
within recent memory. So a quiz, it's what is it called how
to know if you're a domestic extremist, Like you might be like you know,
the old quiz, you might be a redneck if like you might be
a domestic extremist. If you want to get married one day, want to
stay married and want to be monogamous, If you don't want your spouse watching
pornography, if you aspire to have let's say, at least three children,
If you think it's great for a mom to stay home and nurse her baby.
You know that makes you like all these things that were kind of taken
for granted, that was just that was just how you lived. These were
not not conservative ideas, These are not radical ideas, These are not all
right ideas or whatever. This is just timeless. This is millennia. People
have been doing these things, but now they mark you as a very dangerous
domestic extremist. That's the irony of the title. You know, it's just
like wild, how these very basic things have become you know, taboo.
Yeah, wild is a great word for it. You've written for us about
the kind of boycott trends right now. Obviously on the front of a lot
of people's minds are Target and bud Light, and it's it's obviously difficult to
put a number on what percentage of moms, or what percentage of parents,
or what percentage of consumers period um. You know, bud Light probably wouldn't
be a bunch of moms protesting it in mass That would be more like the
the I don't know, Barefoot's Pino Griggio. But um, with with bud
Light is just a lot of you know, sort of middle American people,
and with Target, probably a lot of moms, parents, um. And
the media sort of chewing on this question of like what's going on. There's
been some explanations for targets market downturn. You know, it's it's that time
of year. There's there's just all these things going on with Target, these
business structural things. It's not about the boycott. Um, what do you
what do you make of like the last two months now of consumers starting to
really seem to make their voices heard at the cash register. Yeah, it's
been amazing because you know, people have tried to do boycotts before, you
know, boycott Disney, that's been a perennial for the last three or four
years. This one seems to be really hitting. And I think it really
is because people I think they jump the shark with a Dylan mulvaney bud Light
can and now people that I know, at least anecdotally are really having fun
with it, like they're sharing and getting excited about like the latest bud Light
stock price low. You know, like the normans are like like loving it,
like having fun with it, and it is becoming fun. It's like,
now what else can we boycott? Like what can we do? Now?
Who else can we take down? Because Wow, we do have a
little bit of power just as a regular person, as a regular consumer.
I mean, will Dodgers games be less crowded? Like they look like they're
pretty crowded? Still? Our targets going to see actually fewer sales, like
when it comes to like back to school time. I mean that's an open
question. The problem is, like there aren't a lot of alternatives for a
mom who makes for regular Target run where you can get diapers and school supplies,
you know, and like make up at the same store. Like there's
no Walmart near me, And I don't know if I want to go to
Walmart, Like I've seen too many Walmart fight videos, Like I don't know
if I you know, like I don't know if I'm that's one of the
fun You're gonna bring my mace to Walmart. There's not a lot of alternatives
yet. You know, bud Light is easy because there's a million beer brands.
There's not a million Targets, there's not a million Dodgers. So it
remains to be seen if that will last. But the good news is I
am hearing people and my own family, like we're done with Disney, like
we usually go. We were going like once a year. You know.
We live in LA I grew up going to the park. I love the
park. We're probably not going to go for the foreseeable future. It's just
the finally the cons outweigh the pros, and I think that will be the
case with Target. People will find alternatives, and I think that just people
are having fun with it. It's like a tactic, you know. Sallyinsky
said, like, you know, always use tactics that your side enjoys,
and so right now everyone's really enjoying this, and I hope they keep having
fun with it. So that's also one of the big questions I think a
lot of people are asking themselves, like when you look at your trajectory,
which, if I'm very interesting and I've seen in other people's lives, maybe
it's fair to say you might disagree with this, but it might be fair
to say that you went full trad like you did the full You never Emily,
you never go full tread. You never go full tread. That's sub
get that tattooed um, never go full trad. But that's you know,
are things like guns and abortion as much as like your average person looks at
the tucking stuff at Target or kids themed pride clothing and just says, get
it out of my face. But you know, they also don't have a
lot of alternatives because Walmart, I'm sure has plenty of di stuff, as
do as does Coals. I saw that over the course last week. It's
lovely. So it's like, what are you supposed to do. Um,
you know, does my my vote with my dollar even matter? The answer
to that, I think is pretty clearly um, mostly no. I don't
know. We're still in the stage of the experiment where it's not entirely obvious,
but I would say it's, you know, probably no. And that's
sort of the point of SG. But all that aside, Um, are
those sort of baked in type cultural things that come with the things that maybe
icked you out when you talk about how you're sort of a California snob towards
the middle American CAMA wearing you in church going Bible thumping folks. Is that
going to be the thing that prevents a Glenn Younken or Ronda Santis from doing
well in different places, whether it's the presidential election or another in you know,
gubernatorial racist senate races. How powerful is that at sort of stopping you
know, potential peaches at the maybe half mark. Yeah, I mean,
you know, a joking about never go full trad I mean, I live
in I'm a you know, I'm still living in Los Angeles. I'm still
from all you know, from from out from the outside. You know,
I don't dress like a I'm an Amish. I don't have a farm.
I don't. I don't. I'm not a homesteader. You know. I
don't milk. This is the litmus stuff. I'm fine with raw milk.
I don't know where to get it. Here's like, once they sell it
at a Trader Joe's, I'll try it, but until then I wouldn't.
I don't know where a cow is. I don't have lived I don't want
to touch a live chicken. Okay, I'm still very much like suburban,
you know, like spoiled, like American. I'm not a farmer. Um.
You don't have to be to be extuly domestic. That's the magic of
this. You can do this anywhere. You can live this way in an
apartment in New York City. It might be harder, but this is not
about growing your own food. That's all great. People should definitely do those
things and be less less dependent. But part of the way that you make
going trad quote unquote more popular, especially among you know, coastal elitists u
is, you make it cool and so like. You know, the reason
I always looked down my nose, I was a total awful snob was because
to me being a conservative, being trad looked it just looked kind of like,
I don't know, it wasn't cool, it wasn't trendy, it wasn't
hip. It was you know, it was I mean, I'm all for
patriotism, but I was not going to be like in a pickup truck with
a shotgun and with like antlers, like no hunting culture. Like I just
couldn't relate to that. I wanted to be hip and trendy and cool.
And the thing I'm seeing now is that like being trad is sort of becoming
a fringe, cool, trendy aesthetic. You know, there's a whole thing
going on in New York with like Dimes Square, where traditional Catholicism has become
like a scene among among twenty year olds and you know, wearing crosses and
going to mass and it's like this kind of groovy hipster scene. Now will
that translate like are they LARPing? You know? Will that translate into actual
marriages with three or four kids in a minivan in the suburbs? I mean,
I hope. So. I mean it's like fake it till you make
it. I'm totally fine with that. I went to a reading a few
weeks ago, which was was remarkable. It was it was myself, Curtis
Yarvin, another Twitter and on and we read from our writing and this is
in Los Angeles and there was like two hundred people there, all young,
all all cool like it was. It was a very hip scene. I
know, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was like, I asked the
crowd. I was like, where did you all come from? Wait?
So you and Curtis Yevin were in person. You're in person on stage together.
Yep. And somehow the universe did not split off into gen X.
For the win, gen X writers are finally taking charge of mainstream American culture.
And my takeaway from that was everyone there was literate, smart, educated,
cool and hip. And I think that becoming trad has to be something
that's not like a cringe like good old boy Thingum that there's anything wrong with
that, but to appeal to like twenty year olds in La New York and
Florida and wherever in big cities. You know, it is becoming cool.
It is like the counterculture. And that's why I mean I called the book
Domestic Extremists. We are a fringe aesthetic and I'm hoping that is a little
appealing because the mainstream, the conformist stuff to do is to be your basic
feminists, child free, you know, loser, and you know, we're
the cool people. And I hope that people decide just just because of that,
to join to join our movement. Emily, is there like a support
group for right wing like Twitter or not? Like? Do you guys like
all congregate? There are a few group jets, that's all. That's all.
I'm gonna say, fed proof group jets. That's what you think?
Yeah, right, spoken like a fed Well, on that, I have
one. I have one final question because your writing is unusual, clever and
sharp. And I say that because you know, I think we're as a
as a culture, as a society, really losing our ability to write artfully.
And that's what's so refreshing about your work. I think that's what's magnetic
about it and why so many people love it. So on that note,
who are some of your favorite writers? Are there other people who's writing you
really love that you feel like informs your style? Maybe I should even ask
like comedians, because again, your work is really clever. Yeah, well,
thank you so much. That's so nice to say. I mean you
know, as a young person, I was obsessed with comedy. I was
a comedy writer for a short time. I was a writer's assistant for a
very well known female television writer. But growing up I loved I loved comedy.
I loved funny writers. And in those days, the main thing people
read, you know, pre internet, pre blog, we're magazines. So
like I loved, you know, Anthony Lane's movie reviews in the New Yorker,
you know, I loved I read Harper's Magazine. I read Spy Magazine.
I thought Spy Magazine just sort of like a parody satire magazine which doesn't
even really exists very much in line of like the you know, the Harvard
Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, John Hughes, PG O'Rourke. All these writers
from like the mid eighties were sort of my idols because they were funny and
they and I, you know, I idolized Dorothy Parker. I wanted to
be her, you know, without the like dissolute alcoholism, but I thought
she was great. Um, I just aspired to be like them one day,
because being funny that's how you became cool, and that's how you would
become popular, and so my writing style has just I mean I've sort of
always had this sort of whatever voice. Um, but I you know,
I have no interest in reading something that is like dry and academic. I
mean I read a lot, but I I'm always drawn to people who are
who are who are witty, who can make a joke make me laugh,
because I mean, there's a real art to that, and it's it's hard
to do, you know. I mean, I'm not a stand up comedian,
but I mean there's some of the most brilliant writers. If you can
write, and like Twitter, having to tweet, you know, make something
sharp and short and sweet in a tweet is great practice. And of course
I also benefit from working as a as a like an advertising copywriter, which
was my main you know, that's how I supported myself for many years.
And so birth control. I never sell a birth control. I never sold
out, although I did once almost have a Margaret Sanger charity as one of
my clients, and I just had to I had to turn that one down.
I was like, I can't, I can't promote Margaret Sanger, you
know, the founder of planned parenthood. So I did. Yeah, I
did walk from that. But if you're required to write a pithy tagline or
summarize this cool product in you know, a hundred characters. You have to
learn economy, you have to learn puns, puns or your friend. I
mean, there's a whole host of kind of tricks that you have to learn.
But yeah, I mean I can't really name one and writer. I
mean, I just there's so many writers that and there's so many great writers
writing now on the right. Um, it's sort of a it is.
It's like a it feels like a rich time for content and writing and literature
on our side, and I hope to see a lot more of it,
more of it. Yeah, well, if you want some of that rich
culture, you should pick up a copy of Domestic Extream as the Practical Guide
to Think the Culture Wars out June sixth. Click on the link for the
cover alone. It's really cool. Peachie Keenan. You can find more peaches
work at Peachie Keenan dot substack dot com, also, of course, on
Twitter and at the Federalist. For Peachie Keenan is now a senior contributor.
YEA, thank you so much for stopping by and for being brave enough to
do all you do. Oh, thank you so much, Emily. This
is so fun. I'd love to do this again. Oh my gosh,
anytime. I'm em Eldrasnski, culture editor here at The Federalist. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. We'll be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom. Just the frame you