Hi friends: You may have seen changes in this neighborhood lately. Starting this summer, there’s going to be more multi-media content that you can consume the way you choose: you will be able to read, or watch, or listen on the Why Now? podcast platform. You can also elect to have podcast episodes download directly to your device from Apple iTunes or Spotify.) In addition to my weekly date with historian Neil J. Young, where we dive deeply into one political story, I am tapping my list of friends to bring more expert opinion on current events to you.
This means altering the subscriber model. Most of the content will be free, except for live chats, which you can watch as they are happening (I will give you ample warning), or at your convenience. In other words, I am asking you to become a paying subscriber because you believe in this platform and its mission.
This week’s subscriber-only live chat will be with historian of gender, culture, and fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: it’s the first episode in a summer series where I am going to explore the American cultural obsession with Harvard University. On Thursday June 19, at 11:00 a.m., Natalia and I will kick off this special feature with a deep dive into Reese Witherspoon’s 2001 girl power flick, Legally Blonde: paying subscribers will get an email with a link so they can listen and ask questions in real time.
Today’s interview is with Ilyse Hogue, an American activist with a long history on the progressive left. Ilyse is perhaps best known as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, now Reproductive Freedom for All, a position she held from 2013-2021. There, she emphasized integrating the reproductive rights struggle into the larger progressive movement, linking feminism to other, related projects: the environment, our changing media, and the health of the Democratic Party itself.
During a stint at New America, Ilyse was part of a team (with former Congressman Colin Allred and pollster John Della Volpe) that incubated a new project to persuade young men that the Democratic Party cares about what they care about: prosperity, economic justice, and the resources everyone needs to build a future. Speaking with American Men is a $20 million initiative to re-engage men between the ages of 18 and 29 in the project of rebuilding our democracy.
Why? Because, across racial groups, Democrats narrowly lost this demographic to Donald Trump in 2024, after winning it by 12 points in 2020. Like many feminists, Ilyse isn’t the kind of person who walks away from a fight like that—and friends, she’s got plan. Let’s listen to what she had to say.
Photo credit: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
Claire Potter: Ilyse, welcome to the show.
Ilyse Hogue: Hi, Claire, it's so great to be here.
I'm excited about this because I was reading SAM—the Speaking with American Men document—and you're one of the co-authors. I wonder if we could just start by you telling our listeners: Where did the concept for Sam emerge, who backed the initial phases of the project, and who is moving it forward now?
Sure. Honestly, we certainly weren't calling it SAM at the time, but the challenge that we were trying to address came to my attention while I was leading NARAL Pro-Choice America, which is now called Reproductive Freedom for All, one of the country's preeminent abortion rights organizations.
As part of my tenure there (I was there for the better part of a decade), we decided we really had to understand the information ecosystem. We realized we were in an information war, one driving anti-abortion narratives and mobilizing adherence on the other side. So, we set up an opposition research operation. It was the most robust in the sector and, sort of by accident, honestly, Claire, we started to see all this activity of young men who were not presenting the way traditional anti-choice people were.
They were not even overtly anti-choice but animated by a lot of information ecosystems that were just kind of swimming in misogynistic content. They emerged as a huge force and came out of online spaces that organized around Gamergate. I don't know if your listeners know Gamergate, but it was online bullying of female game designers who were creating games with female protagonists.
And this loosely organized group emerged as a huge force for Trump in his first run. Arguably, it did a tremendous amount of work to help him emerge out of the initial primary in 2016 and then continued to back him through his first presidency. I kept monitoring these online spaces, trying to understand what young men were being fed as they were driven more and more online, but I couldn’t do anything about it while I was at NARAL.
So, after I left NARAL, I spent a couple years at New America, which is a fantastic D.C. organization that supports research about what we called our “gender extremism and engagement program.” In real time, we were looking at what was happening online with these young men who are going online to look for things like fitness or gaming strategy or things like that and see what was getting served up to them in their online algorithms.
What we learned was startling: that the right had put an enormous number of resources and energy into establishing a presence in these online spaces and cracking the algorithms. So, if you are on TikTok or in Twitch, it's not that far a journey for you to go on to saying: I want to learn how to bench press better. Pretty soon you're getting an Andrew Tate video that's telling you that you can't have nice things because women are advancing too far in the world.
But the other thing that happened through this research was an understanding that temperamentally, a lot of these young men are not what we would call progressive but that they had progressive priorities. They want affordable housing. They want universal healthcare. And we were ceding to the right a space that formulates, first their identity, and then their politics.
A handful of us were writing papers and articles and screaming into the void in the lead up to 2024 saying: “Houston, we have a problem. There's an entire online ecosystem you all aren't even aware of that is pursuing grievance politics on behalf of Trump. And we can't win if we don't play. We don't have anyone in these spaces. We're not resourcing leaders.”
And that like I said, fell into a vacuum. But after the election, the results were too stark to ignore. We lost men of every race, class, and ethnicity. And by lost, I don't mean absolute numbers, but I mean there was rightward slide in those demographics: 28 points for Latino men. It depends on how you slice and dice the data, but it's double digits, no matter how you look at it.
Eleven points, wasn't it? I mean, that's a lot.
I came together with a couple of other folks who were saying: Unless we're willing to invest in engagement, be in the spaces where these young men are getting their information, equipping folks to fight the fights, then we're losing this generation, not just for the next election, but for the next 50 years of their voting lives.
And not only does that mean Democrats can't win, but it means democracy honestly cannot survive.
So, I'm thinking about a couple of things. One is that for about 20 years, feminist sociologists have been talking about how lonely boys are, how difficult it is for them to make and keep friends. A friend of mine named C.J. Pascoe wrote a book called Dude, You're a Fag (University of California, 2011), in which she talked about homophobia as the way men express their frustration with each other and fend off the idea that to be a friend means to be gay in some way.
We've also got a fair amount of literature that shows how much the right has invested in campus activism. Liberals give students unpaid internships to do diversity work in the dorms and conservatives pay people to go around campus turning in their professors and write blogs.
We know a lot about what the right has invested in youth. What makes boys and young men so vulnerable to that siren call?
Sam has a mantra: we can't win if we don't play. So, part of what makes them vulnerable is, as you say, a lack of dedicated resources to listening to them, vying for their attention and offering an alternative vision of how they can be included in a pluralistic coalition that fights for progress for everyone.
There's a lot more technical elements to it than that, to your point. Turning Point USA, for example: Charlie Kirk got runs an $80 million a year campus organization. He made a big bet (that he openly says his benefactors laughed at), which was that he could move young men, a typically Democratic constituency, 10 points in 10 years.
Well, he beat that. He beat it by four years, and he moved them by more than 10 points. To some degree, that is because of the total absence of alternative voices in the spaces where young men are.
Loneliness is something that came up in our 60 hours of listening. I think everyone is lonely; I don't totally think that that's restricted to young men. But there's no question that young men who encountered the triple-whammy of online culture, breakdown of civic institutions, and then the pandemic, which pushed them even more online—they tell us they don't really know how to form community relationships and we’re not helping them do that.
But another thing that I think is possibly even more potent when we look at the collective impact of what's happening with young men is a broad expression of shame; shame that is coupled with economic and social anxiety. They don't know how to get ahead. They don't know how to provide, which is what their culture and all their role models told them is a core masculine trait. They don't know how to protect, and that has created a sense of internal shame.
You may be familiar with an academic literature that shows shame is one of the most salient emotions, and most easily translated into radicalism. So, thinking about shame as a driver, one of the things that we are working on are messages like: The shame is not theirs to own. Shame is produced by a manipulation of social and market forces that are designed to exclude them. If they can, and are willing, to participate in work to diminish the power of those forces—and that's concentration of wealth and power and all the things you know about, and I know about—t here is a different pathway forward.
Yes. I want to be clear with our audience that SAM is not associated with the Democratic Party. But are there policy proposals that you hope will come out of this project? Because one of the things I think about, is that I don’t want the draft to come back, but military service was one thing that many young men had in common. And then there was a certain point at which it was either the anti-war movement or the draft.
There were also organizing projects, either state-sponsored or grassroots, that pulled young men into alliances with each other. One was ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project), a Students for Democratic Society initiative during the Great Society, in which mostly White kids went into Black and Brown neighborhoods to organize and so on.
Are there policy proposals that go beyond living in these virtual communities, initiatives that seek to pull young men into physical and social community with each other?
There are, but SAM is not a policy shop, and I really want to be clear about that. We work with great people who do that hard work. Richard Reeves is among the best known, Gary Barker at Equimundo, Ross Morales Rocketto: The role that I think we play is saying we've mapped these information ecosystems. We see leaders within them who, to your point, are not resourced, are not actually networked together to make a bigger impact on how young men are interpreting what is happening in the world around them—far upstream from politics, then politics as well.
Our listening inevitably allows us to communicate to our partners in the field and to any candidate willing to listen. Our audience tends to be more Democratic leaning about how these guys are seeing their interests. I intentionally differentiate interests from policies, because the idea that most Americans are sitting there reading and looking at policies and understanding the nuances are, is sort of fundamentally flawed.
But, like I said, interests are something that we can effectively reflect for people who are writing policy and running campaigns. Then, the question of when policies are moving and when they are in the news, how we can make sure that men are getting the progressive perspective in the Discord servers that they're in, in the subreddits and in the Twitch streams, is crucially important.
Right now, you could have the best policy in the world but their interpretation of what that policy is, what it means, and who benefits from it is entirely mediated by right-wing forces. I think there would be a tremendous amount of openness to an idea of national service. Really, we're talking about what's popping being much more sort of survival based. How do I get a better paying job? How do I afford stable housing? Those kinds of things.
What we've learned from being in these spaces is that men want more information about how to make their lives better. They're getting it from one side and not from the other.
One of the things I've noticed, is that my generation saw the Peace Corps as that kind of opportunity. I knew a lot of people in my senior class at college who did the Peace Corps, and they came back with very strong ideas, not only about what they wanted to do, but how they were going to get there.
But now, getting into and paying for college itself is really sort of under question. It's very difficult for people to do. It appears that young men look at the whole thing and go, “No, I can't deal with this.” Whereas young women will sort of pull themselves together and figure it out.
Why is there such a difference between young women feeling a sense of purpose and young men feeling a sense of purpose?
That is a very big question that I can take a stab at, but I'm not sure I can answer. I think we have rightly and reasonably—and both you and I have participated in this—resourced and moved social and political agenda that young women see their interests reflected in. Right? There's a lot of rhetoric, but also actual policies, and ambassadors for those policies, saying, “Hey, look what's in this for you. If you work with us, if you put the time in, you're going to reap the benefits of it.”
So, young women have bought into a component of a social contract that is coded Democratic that young men have not. Why? Because we haven't put in the commensurate interest. We sort of sweep them in, and we tend to lead with race or ethnicity.
Democrats have a program for Black men, and they assume that means that young men see themselves as Black before male. We're trying to challenge those assumptions. One of the things we learned in our research is that Generation Z has bought into that they are the most multiracial generation. They're mostly totally fine with that. So, misogyny has become the gateway drug for the right to pull them in much more than white supremacy, which we saw is more effective for the older generations. The Proud Boys say they're one of the most diverse groups in America and they're not wrong.
There's a piece of this that we need to think about in terms of how people are self-identifying, the multiple identities that, we, the left would call it intersectionality. That is not language that these young men are using, but it happens to be true. There are people who do this well--Governor Wes Moore, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senator Cory Booker— they have started to say, “We want you to see yourself as part of this coalition. We're going to call you out explicitly, and sometimes we're going to have policy that is for you.”
The pushback on SAM has been informative, But one of the things that I feel viscerally coming from critics on the Democratic and left sides is that we have cemented ourselves in this zero-sum game way of doing politics. To me, that is very anti-progressive and anti-democratic, right? We should and can have a vision that is not about moving pieces on a board where one person gets ahead and then the other person must take a step back. In fact, the winning vision is going to be the one that can really inhabit pluralism as people have more and more intersecting identities.
Let's talk about masculinity, because there's a lot of stuff out there about what's wrong with men, and what's wrong with young men. The right picks up on that and says, yes, all these things are wrong with you, but it's not your fault. It's the fault of women. It's the fault of Black people and immigrants taking your jobs and so on.
How might one turn that around in an online space and say, “Hey guys, here's what's right about you, and this is how to activate it?”
The way that I see doing that is lifting up the young men who are doing that all the time. And I have been in these spaces long enough to say, “My God, that guy, Luke—" I sometimes only know them by their handles because they're online—"is really trying to fight for a different vision of masculinity, but he's being drowned by the surround sound of the right.”
So, how do we find a hundred Lukes and network them together so they're not doing a hand-to-hand combat one by one, but they become much more of an organized force? Quite honestly, it's basic organizing. Then, how do we resource them with what they need to fight for this vision better.
There are positive visions of masculinity out there. There are also people who are pointing out that the negative vision doesn't work, right? And every time that we see a clip of Trump bullying someone, there needs to be a service that is clipping that, putting it into all these spaces, giving it to these young men who are organizing and saying, “Hey, I don't know that we know what a new version of masculinity totally looks like, but it doesn't look like that. I was raised by my father, my grandfather, my coaches to say that bullying is not what a man does.”
And I think we're not doing any of the above right now.
I think that's important. I am sort of a sideways fan of Taylor Lorenz. I read her newsletter, and one of the things she's been talking about a lot lately, is that the left has abandoned online spaces to the right, and the right has a powerful online infrastructure.
If we point to what's going on in Los Angeles now, the right had influencers on the ground immediately. There were these networks of professionals who were just pumping out content. How do we go about doing that but doing it in an ethical way where we're being upfront about who we are, being authentic and connecting with people without bending the facts or trying to manipulate them?
The good news is that we don't have to bend the facts to win our arguments, which they do have to do. We saw that over and over in our town halls with young men. What we need to do is break the monopolistic grip that the right has on these channels, right? I keep saying that it's not rocket science, it's doing what we've done in other sectors. The innovation is recognizing that we need to do it in this sector. There are great leaders and great organizers and people who are producing content. They need resources to get out in the streets of LA and show a different version of what's going on.
Then, what I would call a back office which is a little bit what SAM is, to make sure it's getting distributed as widely as possible. That's much more than half the battle, right?
Because if you look at the media asymmetry, just a map of how much real estate the right owns in online space, Taylor is totally right about this. We should have lost that election by a lot more than we did, which says to me that some modest investments will go a long way in regaining ground. SAM put out a funding proposal for $20 million—the media imagined that that we had all the money, and we don't; that it was all for research; it's not. It's a two-year engagement program.
Here’s an apples-to-apples comparison: Trump's campaign spent $20 million on engagement of young men between Labor Day and Election Day in 2024. Sam is suggesting we spend the same amount over two years. I’ve got to say the pushback that these young men were not worth that level of investment was dispiriting, but it’s also kind of terrifying, because the alternative is not great.
Part of what you're making me think about, and tell me whether this is right or not, is that SAM has a goal, and then there need to be ancillary efforts to say to young women: “This is not about boxing you out. What can a feminist do to support young men? What can a feminist do to think about policies that allow young men to achieve their dreams.”
Is that right?
I think that's right. And I also think, again, that we don't see much divergence on the policies. We had young men say to us in our listening tour: “I love that my wife makes more money than me. I just want to be able to contribute as well.”
I think some of this is in our own flawed frames. I come from the feminist world; I am a proud feminist. I would never promote any kind of policy that is at the expense of those hard-fought gains. What we do need to quell are people in our own ranks who seem to authentically believe that any young man who is not already with us is a hair away from becoming a knife-wielding incel. That is the furthest thing from the truth of what we have experienced.
So, you know, just extending a hand, recognizing that these, grievances that are being weaponized politically are grounded in real problems, human problems. That's where you start, just saying: “My God, I see you, it's hard for me to afford rent too. What do we do together to make that a reality?”
I don't want to connect too many different things because I don't know whether the research leads you there, but we're also seeing a lot of research that says that young women are frustrated in the ability to find a man who will really be a partner to them. I think it's upwards of 40 % of young women are saying: “I probably won't get married and if I have a baby, it'll be by myself.
That's a huge shift in the culture. And without saying whether it's a good shift or a bad shift, I don't think young women are finding that there are men who feel that they can support a family or support a partner or whatever. So, doing this for men is doing this for women too. I say that as a lesbian, but you know what I mean.
You're getting to one of my favorite points. There's both this sort of capital P “political” point, which is that there is a portion of young women who are sort of in the feminist tank with us, and are, stridently, rightfully wary of anything that would ask them to subsume their own goals and dreams to create more space for men. I don't want to do that. Nobody should want to do that. T
here are also, just to be real, increasing numbers of young women who are like, “I want a boyfriend, and I want to get married, and I want to have a baby.” And if they don't see that perspective, reflected in Democratic policies, then we start to lose them too. The other thing I've been warning about is I'm starting to see among a lot of liberal and independent Moms a concern that Democrats don't care about their sons. So, we're going to start to see that impact voting patterns.
But on the larger scale, I live for the world where everybody gets married because they want to, and nobody gets married because they must. It's much more about an emphasis on mutually supportive partnerships. I think that that is the vision that we want to put out there.
And I also think that what young men are perceiving right now is that unless they are parroting progressive lines, then they are treated as predators, dangerous, and that is not a pathway forward for anyone.
Before we go, I'm wondering if you could tell our listeners where they can read more of your writing?
I write for The Bulwark and Democracy Journal of Ideas, but we also have a SAM Substack, and you should check it out. It is, we just launched it a couple weeks ago and we look for subscribers.
Fantastic. Ilyse, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, Claire. Nice to see you.
What I’m doing when you’re not looking:
When I am down in New York City during Pride week, I will head over to the center for Architecture to see “Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture.” Curated by historians Stephan Vider and M.C. Overholt, the exhibit explores the life and work of a pathbreaking designer who asked the question: what would spaces look like if they weren’t designed and built by men?
Short takes:
At The Liberal Patriot, Michael Baharaeen argues that if the Democrats are going to push Trumpism aside, they need to address Americans’ ongoing anxiety about the state of the nation. Many respondents in a recent survey “fondly recall” the Reagan era “as a time when the country succeeded under the leadership of a strong and confident president—especially coming out of the Vietnam War and economic stagnation of the 1970s,” a finding that does not suggest voters will automatically respond to the chaos of the Trump era by rushing back to the Democratic Party.” Democrats “would be wise to reckon with the disquieting feelings many people possess right now, including speaking directly to the issues that informing those feelings” with policy proposals that project decisiveness and strength. (June 17, 2025)
Donald Trump’s Bunker-Busting Budget Bill has drawn a lot of attention for what it takes away, and less for where that money is going. As Felipe De La Hoz points out at The New Republic, “the Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps the bill’s most ominous characteristic: an orgy of resources for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller’s shock troops to carry out President Trump’s indiscriminate crackdown on immigration and protest.” The bill “is effectively a blank check,” De La Hoz continues, and “ would take everything we’ve seen so far—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.” (June 17, 2025)
Calls for Barack Obama to take charge of the Democratic Party are revealing—but not about Obama. This plea "speaks to an accepted truth: The Democratic Party lacks leadership,” media sociologist Tressie MacMillan Cottom writes at The New York Times. But it also speaks to an inability to grasp that political communication has changed drastically since 2016: the Obama that generates such nostalgia governed in a different country and a different media environment. “Yes, he was a historic president and a gifted speechmaker. But he was also speechifying in a media environment that could easily deliver 50 million viewers for political theater,” Cottom explains. “It is also symptomatic of a deeper problem among both the political center and the political left: They don’t want the discipline of a political faith, but they still clamor for a charismatic preacher.” (June 13, 2025)
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