Women and Liberals Win With Language

To beat progressive mean girls you must learn how they talk

One of the big developments in my thought over the last few years has been the idea that women are much more talented at conflict than men.

Obviously they are bad at physical violence and direct confrontations like chess or asking for a raise. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

What I mean is that women are much better than men at defining a conflict’s “narrative” or “terms of debate”. They hold a kind of automatic and self-evident moral authority that men find it almost impossible to challenge in practice—particularly as women usurp material power structures that historically granted men some leverage against femininity.

While on a micro level it’s obviously masculine vigor and aggression that push society forward, on a macro level femininity is the true driver of civilization, because it shapes and directs male behavior without men even realizing it. Women exercise an enormous indirect control over the overall trajectory of society by defining our communicative norms and influencing what men value.

Men might be the head of our body politic, but women are the neck.

And for most of history this actually worked to the Right’s advantage. Women were much more religious than men, and correspondingly more conservative. A century ago they played a huge role in fighting to restrict immigration and instate prohibition against the wishes of their more progressive husbands and brothers.

But these days educational polarization and credentialism have shifted the dynamic sharply in the opposite direction, and women are much more liberal than men. This is becoming an enormous problem for the Right as progressives increasingly wed liberal rhetoric to feminine communicative norms that are a lot more powerful than anything conservatives have on hand.

In this essay I will explore this problem in greater detail and give some advice to conservatives as to how they might begin to push back

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Feminine power emerges from three sources.

The first source is simply the mechanics of heterosexual courtship.

In the vast majority of cases, men chase women and women are pursued. Men are generative while women are receptive. Meanwhile, sex is much riskier for women and their pleasure less assured, so they usually expect the man to do something cool first.

This basic need to “perform” for women allows even moderately pretty young girls to trade on their looks for power, money, or fame. If they are smart about this it enables them to climb very high very fast, as Theodora / Evita / Kamala Harris can attest.

But even normie women in more typical relationships will benefit from this dynamic. Most men enjoy spending money on their girlfriend or opening the pickle jar. Women can be a lot needier and more helpless with their boyfriend than vice versa. Nobody will judge a woman for being a NEET at 30 if she is cute; her social class is her father’s and then her husband’s.

Meanwhile, men instinctively have a “women first” mentality and will sacrifice their own life to protect their girlfriend if need be.

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The second source of feminine power is crying.

Crying is an incredibly potent rhetorical tactic because men usually have an immediate and intense urge to do whatever it takes to dry a woman’s tears. Once she starts crying you can’t really retain an aggressive posture—you will feel like a giant asshole and you will look abusive to any onlookers. For some segment of the population, a woman’s tears will ipso facto make her boyfriend / husband / father the Bad Guy, even when she is straightforwardly in the wrong.

Now in most cases crying is obviously an automatic response and can’t be controlled, but even then I think it has substantial rhetorical content.

In some sense crying is a submission ritual, like a dog showing its belly. It is your body’s way of communicating that you are the weaker party and can’t properly defend yourself, and imploring your interlocuter to go easy on you. This alone will be enough to “win the argument” against a lot of guys. It just triggers something protective in the male brain. Lots of BPD women turn their man into a husk this way.

There is also something of a tacit threat that comes with crying. When you start crying your body is expressing that it can’t take any more conflict. It is setting a boundary. If that boundary is broken, as the weaker party you will have no choice but to mobilize the community against your interlocuter.

And that’s a big reason guys often lose their nerve when a girl starts crying—it creates an image of helplessness that prejudices third parties against you and forces you to optimize your rhetoric for inoffensiveness and restraint. In some circumstances you might even worry about a false accusation to the police, just as many decades ago you might have feared getting beaten up by her brothers.

All of this obviously undermines your ability to advocate for your own interests in a straightforward way, so crying is clearly stronger than masculine argumentation.

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The third and most significant source of feminine power is the female understanding of social dynamics, which is vastly more sophisticated than the male understanding.

Compared to men, women are much better at picking up on subtext or implication. They can grasp things like implicit power imbalances and status inequalities very quickly. They’re also great at sniffing out trends and patterns in human behavior.

Of course men can also do these things, but when we do so too openly it usually elicits a very negative response. Most people don’t like it when men spend a lot of time thinking or talking about social dynamics. This is because a lot of social reality is extremely painful, and men can’t deal with it the same way women can.

A great deal of human happiness rests on copes, white lies, cognitive biases, leveling rituals, and subtextual social accommodations that distract everyone from the basic inequality and inescapable unfairness of life. This crucial social infrastructure comes almost entirely from women, who maintain it on a mostly subconscious level as a constant background goal of everyday life.

Women are worse than men at debate and transactional dealmaking despite a greater verbal intelligence because they’re constantly dedicating mental energy to keeping the peace, managing egos, aligning goals, enforcing unspoken norms, and so on.

A woman can’t afford to care whether a proposition is true or false in the same way a man would, because its social implications are almost always more salient to her. There are a lot of situations where a woman saying something true instead of something polite would literally cause men to fight to the death.

Women *feel* painful social truths on a very deep level. But they don’t *think* them. Most of the time they will *think* the opposite of what is true, because that makes it easier to *act* in a way that practically gives people emotional relief from a deeply immiserating truth. For instance, a pretty girl will consciously believe “there’s someone for everyone if u just bee yourself :)”, and that will make it easier for her to turn very ugly men down gracefully.

Most men aren’t able to “feel” complex social dynamics this way , and only reach a fully accurate understanding of how people behave by systematizing and theorycrafting an explicit mental model that’s usually centered around painful “redpills” (basically unpleasant heuristics that deliberately pry the comfy feminine scaffolding off the harsh inequalities and power dynamics of life). Women inevitably find this horrifying, hence the hatred for PUAs / incels / rationalists.

I used to really resent women for this, because developing such a model was the only way I as a moderately autistic guy have ever succeeded socially. I don’t think this way because I’m Patrick Bateman, but because I’m kind of bad at reading social cues organically. At least a mechanistic worldview lets me sort of mask as neurotypical..

But as an older man I can now see why women have this reaction. Autistically shooting down leveling platitudes like “just bee urself :)” only makes it harder for them to emotionally maintain the “sweet little lies” that keep society running. Maintaining this social harmony is extremely important and I think we need to give women more credit for it!

Also, most guys aren’t nearly as autistic as me, and will not benefit in any way from “redpills” like I did. They will probably make the most money and get the prettiest wife by being maximally confident, and for 97 IQ normie guys from a happy family that often comes from hot girls telling you to bee urself after rejecting you.

It is probably best for society to keep praising the emperor’s clothes, both for this guy’s sake and for the sake of women, even if it annoys spergs like me. And it’s also just healthier for the political order—men need to have some illusion of equality or they will become unproductive or violent.

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So let’s bring this back from the personal to the political.

Over the past decade American liberalism has become a movement intellectually and emotionally dominated by affluent suburban white women with graduate degrees.

This group has the most feminine communicative style of any major demographic. Not because they’re dainty tradwives, but because their husbands are enormous wieners who can’t inspire them to adopt a more straightforward and masculine style, as usually happens with married women. Instead the men begin to talk like their women, even adopting uptalk and a disdain for declarative sentences.

As a consequence, female communicative norms and liberal rhetoric are by this point pretty much one and the same. Everything is about reaching consensus, all decisions are made by committee, and nonconformists are chastised for not “reading the room.”

In this epistemic kindergarten claims are backed up first and foremost by credentials and appeals to authority. At this point more plebeian liberals on Twitter don’t even pretend to care about arguments; they just want Bill Nye to run everything. Meanwhile the ones who still try to think for themselves, like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver, have to put up with hundreds of hectoring credentialists who’ll demand they simply defer to specialists instead of ever trying to form their own opinions.

One of the things I’ve always loved about the extremely online right is that someone can roast me on Twitter or on their blog and we can usually punch it out in the comments like gentlemen and emerge as friends. There is a culture of “iron honing iron” among right wing keyboard warriors, in which prestige comes from the ability to acquit yourself well in a sustained and direct confrontation.

This impulse has almost completely disappeared from American liberalism. Liberals these days are never keyboard warriors—they’re keyboard mean girls. These people have no interest in an honest and straightforward debate, and when challenged will adopt a bitchy passive-aggressive tone while trying to undermine your respectability and social clout by pointing to “cringe” things you said or did.

Below is a great example from Matt Yglesias. This is a very common type of tweet from him. Some conservative pol will express opinion X that is socially unacceptable and chud-coded, and Yglesias will simply quote tweet it saying “I don’t think (X)”.

This is very similar to how teenage girls and gay guys bully people in nonpolitical settings—their opprobrium is always centered on your failure to adequately conform to group norms. It is simply taken for granted that this is a bad thing, because these people have an adolescent fixation on fitting in.

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For a liberal, to be “cool” is understanding what other people like. It’s having a sophisticated knowledge of the latest trends and fashions, as well as a good intuition as to what will be fashionable in the immediate future.

This is generally how women establish an implicit pecking order among themselves, and it’s also how liberals accrue prestige in academic or corporate environments. Trendy language like “cisgender” or “unhoused” or pronouncing Kiev like “Keev” is a way to convey you’re “with it” and fashionable, which to liberals is self-evidently prestigious.

And just as women despise the incel, liberals usually don’t like it when you talk about these dynamics in an explicit way, because they are extremely fond of implicit power dynamics and unwritten rules.

Liberals derive much of their power and status in society from creating complex subtextual status games in which they can outmaneuver more direct thinkers and conservative types.

When a verbally sophisticated rightist starts breaking down what they do in a reductive way that can be algorithmically internalized by the conservative chud shape rotator mind, that is extremely threatening to their power base.

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Conservatives obviously have a more masculine way of communicating. It is very direct and codes as oafish in liberal spaces, and I don’t disagree with that assessment.

Conservatives are more fond of simple declarative sentences. They don’t like grey areas and blurred lines and nuance, and tend to view these things as loopholes that predators or parasites will just exploit.

They like clear and easily understood hierarchies, and will get stressed out or annoyed by ambiguity and a lack of boundaries or direction. For them conflict is best kept direct and unambiguous, and in conservative spaces communicating through subtext is usually seen as a waste of time. If you aren’t straightforward you are probably shifty and untrustworthy.

This means conservatives are terrible at making art.

They don’t know how to be subtle with their messaging. When they try to make a “conservative movie” it’s almost always something like God’s Not Dead or Hallmark Channel shit that hits you over the head with a simple didactic message and has a bunch of based black guys singing Christian Rock at the end.

Meanwhile liberals understand that good propaganda comes from a lower time preference approach. Liberal movies never just bash you with the lesson you’re supposed to take away. They push you subliminally through tropes and symbolism that move you on a primordial level—what Mark Brahmin has called “esoteric moralization”. In the laziest cases this will just involve making the white guy the villain, but with more complex pieces it’s not uncommon for liberals to create work that rightists enjoy even on our own terms.

In fact, the best conservative art is always made by disagreeable / contrarian liberals who are annoyed at other liberals and want to tell an intellectually honest story that will sometimes challenge liberal premises. A lot of HBO prestige television is like this—The Sopranos, The Wire, Girls, etc. This is also what made Red Scare so successful.

Meanwhile conservatives *never* make art that appeals to liberals. Most of the time they can’t even appeal to conservatives!

Conservatives are also really bad at keeping up with the Left’s infantile status games over fashionable language. This is partially due to educational polarization, and was much less the case 30 years ago. Back then GOP was very successful at branding the inheritance tax the “Death Tax,” and benefited from this electorally.

But as MAGA has rendered the Right more chud-dominated and purely masculine in its rhetoric, the Left has leaned into femininity to marmishly oversee our political lexicon and distort public sentiment. They were thus able to rebrand “global warming” as “climate change”, and “gay marriage” as “marriage equality,” with nary a word of resistance from mainstream conservatives. At most you see midwit YouTubers snarking at them for this linguistic warfare.

Why don’t conservatives ever attempt the same thing? Why not call gun control “civilian disarmament”? There are a million things you could do to fight fire with fire, but MAGA is a lot less interested than the Frank Luntz types of yesteryear.

This is mostly because conservatives are verbally dim people who don’t place much importance on metapolitics or how opinions get shaped in practice. They don’t think of the world in terms of “narratives” so much as shopping lists of facts and events.

They usually aren’t very introspective and their extreme disdain for relativism makes it hard for them to have any tactical flexibility (or hell, any tactics to speak of). Especially since MAGA took over the GOP, conservatives mostly will “debate” by earnestly asserting their own beliefs and that’s it. They don’t seem to have a theory of mind that enables them to meet anyone else where they are, or even approach politics in a transactional way with potential coalition partners.

Compare that to the liberal mind, which naturally looks to form coalitions between odd bedfellows to assail the mainstream white cis male center of power. Getting “the groups”—blacks and feminists and Chicanos and union guys—to agree on shit is hard, so they optimize for reducing internal friction with ideas like intersectionality and lots of tone policing.

Meanwhile conservatives optimize around the solidaristic defense of this hot dog mainstream. They are willing to ostracize people and factions who don’t play ball, because to them hierarchical obedience is vital for social health, and subversives are morally dangerous. They also think of themselves as “real America” or the “silent majority,” and are more prone to seeing dissidents as nonessential than the liberals relying on turnout across a highly diverse “rainbow coalition”.

Consequently, depending on which faction is in charge of the conservative coalition at any given time, there are always enemy factions “in the jungle” without any influence in the mainstream GOP. It used to be libertarians and WNs, these days it’s the traditional eastern establishment and anyone opposed to MAGA.

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There are also lots of respects where conservatives have advantages over liberals.

They have more money. They are harder working. They are more likely to incorrectly attribute individual success to hard work, which is a huge advantage because it gives them a greater level of practical “free will” and personal agency”.

They are less likely to be addicts or suffer from a debilitating mental condition, and are much more likely to be physically strong. They also likely have a higher level of visual-spatial and mathematical intelligence.

They often have more robust and reliable social networks through their churches. They are less scattered and more prone to forming consistent habits. They can deal with boredom and unglamorous periods of “downtime” more easily.

These advantages and others allow conservatives to win elections a lot of the time despite being vastly outnumbered in the institutions and having a much lower level of cultural competence / social intelligence.

However, conservatives are not properly weaponizing their advantages and are making a lot of unforced errors because they are too rigidly committed to masculine norms of discourse.

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If you want to win over or triumph over progressive Mean Girls you need to learn how to handle yourself in the world of feminine rhetoric.

Below are some clever tips and tricks to help you do this:

Integrate your anima

The psychological framework of Carl Jung asserts that every man has an anima, or “inner woman”, that exists in his mind at an unconscious level. Your anima is effectively the feminine part of your personality.

A lot of times when you fall in love with a woman, especially as a young man, you are in fact projecting your anima onto her. You are falling in love with the feminine side of your own personality, and hoping the IRL girl will actualize that part of you.

However a man treats his girl is what he thinks of his anima. Oftentimes the men who are most sadistic in raping or beating up women do so because they are extremely contemptuous towards the most vulnerable parts of themselves.

Meanwhile it is enjoyable to spend money on women or open pickle jars because you vicariously feel a lot of the good vibes through your anima, and in that sense get to psychologically benefit from your own chivalry.

A major goal in Jungian analysis is working to “integrate” your anima into conscious thought, both so you are more aware of her wants and needs and so you can separate her from the women you date and hook up with. If you fail to do this, she can start to influence your behavior in ways you don’t understand or control. If this gets really bad you might become “anima possessed” and start to act like a BPD girl on her period all the time, which I think happens to a lot of incels.

Meanwhile I suspect the average conservative chud is mostly cut off from his anima and would instinctively associate the whole venture with trans ideology or gay stuff. That is extremely dumb, as anima integration is most practically useful for enjoying women more as a heterosexual man. If you don’t integrate your anima you’re basically just masturbating with her pussy.

Anyway back to the point at hand: anima integration is enormously useful for debating with bitchy progressive mean girls who will make fun of you using adolescent shaming tactics, because your anima is the part of you that they target.

They will try to make you feel like a loser, on the outside of the group, like a oafish or unsophisticated person—all the things that teenage girls are terrified of being. But once you have intellectually explored any insecurities you have in this direction, their hollow shaming tactics will roll off you like water.

Mentally explore and then exploit your own victim narrative

Generally liberals want to live in a softer and gentler world that gives people lots of grace when they fuck up.

Many of these people are so hateful towards you because they came from dysfunctional conservative families that didn’t appreciate them and adopted a grug “bootstraps” attitude towards their mental health issues that wasn’t useful or productive. Or alternatively, they were genuinely bullied in a hateful way by white trash kids when they were 13 and called a queer or something.

The angriest and more censorious liberals aren’t the elite ones, they’re the traumatized hicklibs who fled the sticks because people were assholes to them. But I find you can often establish common ground even with these people and get them to stop being bitchy if you are open about your own pain and past traumas.

This isn’t an easy task for conservatives, especially conservative men, because we don’t like feeling like “victims”. We like to downplay our moments of vulnerability and play up our successes.

A big reason for this though is that other conservatives will be bragging/exaggerating themselves. and if you try to express any kind of pain to them they will act awkward or even reproach you. Conservative women will often get turned off when they see their man struggle in some way, much more so than liberal women will.

But you don’t have to do that with liberals. They all want to be your therapist. They will overshare their own trauma and bond with you when you reciprocate. You can exploit this as a valuable inroad into their psyche. I have been very successful at gaining empathy from people like this by talking about my own feelings of ostracism from normie society, and then parlaying this into explaining how I felt assailed at college for being a white man etc.

It helps if you have some diagnosed mental illness you can lean on. You can really make ADHD your personality with liberals and use that to act like Frederick Douglass, and if you have a high enough verbal IQ they won’t be able to push back on you too hard.

Exploit liberal relativism to build empathy

Liberals are a lot more relativistic than you in their assessment of right and wrong in mundane, people-level situations. On a macro level they often have an unnuanced and Manichean hatred of conservatives, but on a micro level it’s easy to leverage this relativism into getting them to see you as “one of the good ones.”

Compared to conservatives they have less of a dogmatic belief in “Free Will” and don’t assume someone has absolute control over their actions at all times. Compared to you they place a lot of value on where someone’s “headspace” was, their number of “spoons”, etc.

When rightists hear liberals say “speak your truth” they often interpret this as epistemic nihilism, but really it’s just the trivial grandma insight that there are two sides to every story and you shouldn’t be afraid of voicing yours.

With that in mind, you can usually have some success opening the liberal mind if you can explain what led you down your path using a lot of emotionally vivid language.

Don’t do the normal conservative storytelling thing where you recite a laundry list of events in monotone—make it a narrative with arcs and plot twists and a three act structure. Obviously exaggerate some stuff or move small things around if it makes the story better.

Have sex with liberal women

Generally speaking it’s easiest to be conservative in liberal spaces specifically when you are flirting with and dating a liberal woman.

It codes as very masculine/roguish so long as you are higher IQ than her and make more money. Also if you are good at bantz it produces a fantastic sexual tension.

You can make fun of her fat / gay friends who hate you and she will go “staaaahp” and giggle, and that will start to build a permission structure where she’s laughing at Morrakiu songs after a few months.

If you are less of a normie conservative and more of an eccentric and high openness feller like me, you will also find that these women are a much better fit for you than conservative church girls. You’ll also observe that in practice high bodycount liberal women are much more submissive and feminine than low bodycount conservative girls, who are often quite frigid and masculine Dagny Taggart types.

You shouldn’t go for a lady in the 50s or something, but if she’s been with, say, 18 guys at 26, that probably just means she’s very obedient and high openness by disposition. That is also why she is a liberal, and why she’d make a good wife to someone batshit insane and weird enough to get into esoteric far right politics.

Make them look unreasonable with Motte and Bailey tactics.

This one works in situations where you have an extremely liberal person being bitchy and a more centrist person in close proximity.

You need to say something that will really get the extreme liberal’s jimmies in a pickle, but would also go over the head of any 60th percentile liberal American.

It’s almost like “reverse dogwhistling”—you’re figuring out the Brown Note that will make them shit their pants and lose credibility with the neutral party. If you look at internecine debates among Twitter leftists you will probably find something good.

I loved doing this to my girlfriend’s roommate a few years ago. One time I kept saying “transgendered” instead of “transgender” and that got her to slam a door on us.

The great thing about these people being so volatile and mentally ill is it makes it very easy to provoke them into uncharismatic and tactically unsound behavior.

When in doubt, don’t be afraid to coon

If you ever have to hang out with a ton of liberals at once and start to feel uncomfortable, you are probably best served by doing the Shane Gillis bit and “cooning” as a Dumb White Guy.

Just act like a Big Dumb Chud, but be very deliberate about it and be absolutely certain as to which rules you can break. Basically this requires you to lean into the stereotype in a way that simultaneously shows you can laugh at yourself and asserts the dignity of your own perspective.

This is easily done by playing up things that are low prestige in their world and high prestige in yours. This kind of rhetoric allows you to be self-deprecating in one sense and braggadocious in another, which is a great look for a conservative white guy.

Note this isn’t the same thing as simply letting them laugh at you. Shane is an incredibly clever guy and makes liberals crack up on HIS terms, in the same way Chapelle or Katt Williams does with white audiences. Being able to do this is definitely a tricky skill to develop, but it gets easier with time.

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While feminine power structures will always remain hegemonic and liberal communicative norms will be hard to supplant, it’s important to remember that individual women aren’t really complicit in any of this. Like you and me and anyone else, they were thrown naked and screaming into a chaotic and painful world and are only looking for happiness and love.

Virtually any young girl you meet will stop talking like that after a few months of dating you. These women don’t really like the specific academic / corporate status games. Most would rather be a wife than a Director of Brand Solutions. But they were never taught how to operate in any other way.

Besides, women are temperamentally very conservative and risk averse and become scared if there isn’t a reliable way to enforce group norms or coordinate behavior. You should find that cute more than anything.

Also girls are pretty non-ideological. The Cyndi Lauper song is mostly true. If they had a choice they’d be coordinating spicy margs with the gals every afternoon, not advancing cancel culture or making PowerPoints for HR.

So never resent women when you’re annoyed by how effeminate Matt Yglesias is. Instead focus more narrowly on talking the way you want to talk and inspiring the change you want to see in the world.

You’ll be surprised by how far you can get.