Bulwark Takes - Sarah & JVL Roast MAGA’s Weird “Trad” Fixation

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Taylor and Travis were a bright spot until Charlie Kirk made it weird. JVL and Sarah Longwell show how his shift into "submit to your husband" politics reveals the insecurity behind the MAGA movement's obsession with "trad."

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my best friend, Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark. We're going to talk about Taylor and Travis and Charlie Kirk, which is weird. But we're going to get to that in a minute. Before we go, do me a favor. Do me a solid. Hit like. Hit subscribe. This stuff helps us more than you could possibly imagine with all of the algorithms. All right, Sarah, you've been away. You came home from a legit vacation to the news that Travis Kelman. had popped the question to Taylor Swift, and it was all cool until Charlie Kirk decided to talk about it. And let's get people to listen. This is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism.

Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge. So, uh, what? Why? Why? Why? How do you got to go and make it weird, man? Well, this is one of those things where everyone's got to have a take, right? Like, everyone's looking for an angle in on the Kelsey Swift romance. You know, I was just thinking, though, of the three characters in this video, I know the most about Charlie Kirk. So I don't know. I know that he plays football. I know that she sings.

and unfortunately, I'm more familiar with Charlie Kirk's. In your world, he's the most famous person. That's great. Very healthy. Well, he's the one I have the strongest feelings about, which are entirely negative. And I guess you're more of a Swifty than I am. I have endeavored during some of the Taylor Swift discourse to go and listen to our whole catalog, which I find perfectly good.

and enjoyable. She's the Bob Dylan of her time. But sure. Is that, are you being facetious or is that what you think of her? No, I think she's the most gifted lyricist of her generation, honestly. But that's, look, we can get to that at a minute. Charlie Kirk, here, I guess my question for you is, is Charlie Kirk on the level or is this just trolling? because he's got to make hashtag content and a great way to make hashtag content that gets surfaced

by the algorithm is for him to go out and say the craziest possible thing about Taylor Swift to then get as many articles and videos made about his insanity as possible because that's what I don't fully understand because I don't know if you noticed but even your favorite president Many people were saying the greatest president in the history of the world, better than Lincoln. Even Donald Trump was able to act like a normal human being and say like, well, you know, I wish those two. He's a great player. She's a terrific person. I wish those two kids the best of luck.

Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift are engaged and the world wants your reactions are. Well, I wish him a lot a lot. I think he's a great player. I think he's a great guy. And I think that she's a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of love. I can't believe Charlie Kirk really means all of this. You know, she's got to submit to her husband.

Because that's just fucking weird. All right. So here's the thing. I think a few things can be true at once. Okay. I think number one, this is bait. And I think we should acknowledge to some degree we're taking the bait here. Part of the reason, though, that I'm willing to take it is because I have now watched Charlie

Kirk really evolve into one of these. women submit to your husband, guys. So he, when he gives his speeches now, Turning Point USA, it used to be, some of this is like, we all have to like grow up in Charlie Kirk's trajectory. Like his, what he is done as a college student with Turning Point USA led to actually a big shift in what it meant to be a campus conservative, which is essentially the unholy alliance between Charlie Kirk turning his young generation of followers into MAGA followers, that cannot be overstated as a political phenomenon. And as he has grown up and gotten married and, you know, had kids,

he's turned into a trad husband, trad wife, evangelist. And so when he speaks now to groups of college kids, I heard him recently talking to a group and he said, how many of you young women, you know, who are in college, you're there to get your MRS degree and people aren't clapping? And I don't want to miss what I think is a real, I don't know whether it's a backlash or what it is, but it goes to our ongoing conversation of whether or not what we lived through was actually an interregnum, like our sense of we run. up in a period where women were starting to dominate in college, where they were achieving

more parity along with sports and in the home. And that that was actually the abnormal piece. What we think of as normal is an was an abnormal interregnum. And we are now living through like a new generation, which is much more conservative, not in the sense that you and I would say conservative. but is sort of marrying together the MAGA vibes with the Tadwife ethos. It's an interesting corner of the MAGA coalition. But Charlie Kirk, this is his schick now, is the, I am a biblical man.

It's weird. It's like he was sort of a, don't go to college, drop out, populace, turning point U.S. say young conservatives has morphed into like a James Dobson want to be like 700 club type talker. Yeah. I mean, I do have to say, and I don't know anything really about Charlie Kirk. I'm sure he's a great, upright, God-fearing man. It is notable, though, that some large number of people who get into this as part of their public persona turn out to privately be a little weird, a little weird, like,

I don't know if you remember Jack Murphy, who was a big manosphere guy who turns out was into literal cuckolding. Like, really, really liked watching other dudes. When you say weird, do you mean gay? No, no. I meant that, like, he was like, you know,

manly man, man. And then it turned out he was like, I like watching other dudes where all my wife, you know. Oh. Same thing with the Falwell kid. We have Pete Hegseth who is like, oh, praise glory to God. And he's like been through three marriages already.

It was like, you know, not real great keeping his vows to God. Mike Cernovich. Or the women. Or the women. But, you know, the vows are really to both. Oh, okay. Mike Cernovich, who was like the guerrilla mindset, like alpha male got to, you know, play the player game stuff. And then we saw a big New Yorker profile of him.

He's basically a kept man. Like, you know, he lives with, you know, like next door to his in-laws, and he, his first wife's alimony to him because she's the one who was the breadwinner was like what was keeping him afloat financially. Like so many of these guys, not to mention, God help me, a bunch of the super trad Catholic guys who are just clearly gay. Yeah. I just, again, there's so much weirdo overcompensation here. And I'm not saying that that's what Charlie Kirk is doing. But part of me wonders, is that what Charlie Kirk is doing? Because it's weird.

This is like my broken man theory of politics right now is that we are dominated in our culture by a bunch of like men children who are working out their daddy issues and or their issues with their kids. I mean, Elon Trump. I mean, yeah. But what's his burger? Facebook guy, like every single one of them is just like, like he needs robots to be his friends. Like he needs to build AI friends because he didn't have friends when he was a kid. And so as a result, he's going to, you know, destroy humanity with the metaverse. And they have, he has no sense of genuine connection.

And I do think that men who talk about women in this way, I've always thought this, that if you're the kind of guy who has to say women's sports is so stupid. You know, like, oh, it's so boring and dumb. Or if you're the kind of guy who has to say, like, women should submit to their husbands, and I'm going to devote my time to making that argument, I'm always like, oh, no one danced with you at the seventh grade dance. And now we all have to suffer through your nonsense because of it. Like Charlie Kirk, I wonder if they realize that when they talk about this stuff, they are a blaring

siren of deep insecurity, because that's all. I see with it. Can I offer a little, it's a little, a little thing to the viewers, to viewers, if I could just be, you know, offer you some service journalism here. I, I am older than most of my bulwark colleagues. I live a fairly trad life, I think, you know, like Catholic guy, been married for a long time, got a mess of kids. I, look, again, every marriage is different. Every, every every person's life is different, but having gone through family life, it just seems to me that having a partner who is submitting to you is going to be, like, weirdly unsatisfying and also make it all so much harder.

Like, you, if you're throwing yourself into family life and you are, like, going to get married and, like, raise children and stuff, you want somebody who's partner, not part of a help. That's just what you're going to make yourself unhappy and you're going to miss out on like all of the good stuff. Don't do that. It's weird. Well, also it sort of misses the point of look, I'm not in all the marriages. I'm only in one. So, but like so much of it is just it's not about submitting. It's about like you take turns in your roles of what you're doing, right? Because it is, it is like all it is is is give and take. And so this idea that you are, you need to like say, no, it's about submitting.

It's about submitting. To me, it's sort of like the way when I always hear Ben Shapiro is one of the big people, women's sports are stupid women's, until they all started to need to protect women's sorts. And women's sports are really important because you had to protect them trans people. Right, right. But before that, but they were all people, you were always like, oh, these are people who've never played sports in their lives. Like these are, these are dorks who like are just looking for a reason to. put other people down. And so, like, if you have to, if you have to talk about submitting, a woman submitting

all the time, like, that's a weird problem for you. Because a normal person, I think, wants, a normal person who's secure is trying to figure out, okay, how do I help you? And how do you help me? Because we're in this thing together and we're doing this thing. And it doesn't have to be Libby. It doesn't have to be, you know, like feminism. 101 or women's and gender says it just has to be like normal human like I treat somebody else

with dignity they treat me with dignity and we're in it together yeah and you know like real relationships aren't about dominance and submission I'm sorry like that's a kink that's not a normal kind of relationship and and also again spoiler for young people listening to this family life can be very very hard for like all the reasons because the world is not set up for family life because we live in a very red-in-tooth-and-claw economic system, because there's a lot of bad luck floating around out there, and sometimes it falls on you, and even worse, sometimes it falls on your children. You wind up with a sick kid or a kid with special needs.

Like, this shit, it can be really, really hard, and you should have a partner to navigate all that together, not someone who works for you. That's all. all right i don't know if that got a little too much touchy feeling emotional um but uh i don't know like taylor swift i think she's great i like travis kelsey i think he's great not as great as his brother jason kelsey all-time great eagle soon to be in the hall of fame player um but uh you know if those two crazy kids can't make it what hope do any of us have i wish them all the all the best and all the luck in the world uh yeah i want i look i think the fact so i was i was with

I was on vacation, and so the second half of the vacation I was with a bunch of people that I've known my whole life, but they are other families. It's like a family reunion of sorts, but people who are not, I'm not actually related to. And when they got engaged, a bunch of the moms saw it and they were, they were just so happy. And, you know, the thing about you, and this, to me, this is actually a microcosm of something that is broken in our politics. It's like, you can either use your celebrity to make people feel good.

and to sort of promote a kind of, you know, just like you can either make things better or you can make things worse. And Charlie Kirk and the Taylor Swift thing is a perfect example of two people they're in love and they are getting married. And it is an objectively nice thing. And because of our culture, everybody knows who they are and they're a little beacon of something nice in the world. And Charlie Kirk has to turn it into his own weird pathology around his sense of insecurity with women. And I'm just saying, in a tough world, be a Taylor Swift and Jason Kelsey. Don't be a Charlie Kirk.