Tangent: Daddy Politics

I was struck when you said that you got some pushback from feminists who believe that any repression of sexuality is wrong because sexuality is pure. Basically I think they're reifying sexuality as some kind of pure... force, or whatever, when in reality it is comprised of parts. There's a power part. There's an urge-satisfying/ relief part. And there's the pro-social and even loving part. (And more, sure -- I'm just pulling apart some threads... To speak METAPHORICALLY.) You can't distill sexuality into just one part, the wholesome part, but I think they make that mistake when they say that repressing sexuality is wrong/ unwholesome/ whatever. ... Maybe a moment of sexuality can be pure :) Sure, why not lol. But repression is necessary in other moments to prevent the dominating & instrumentalizing parts from causing harm! PS, It's nice that I've been out of the habit of watching video essays. Gives me some nourishment in this troubled time of rare Contrapoints content 🥲

Alex Moody

I was hoping you’d expound on this idea in a future video after seeing Conspiracy. It was great to see this post!

Whitters

I wonder how someone like Tolkien's work factors into this moral system. Bc the political environment of Middle Earth is explicitly patriarchal, but Tolkien's entire vision of legitimate masculinity and legitimate male leadership is based around nurturance and care. He makes an explicit point that the male heroes and legitimate male rulers of his world (Aragorn and Faramir) prefer healing and gardening to warfare.

Rose Dombegh

The far-right is about to win the presidential elections in my country, heeeeeelp

Alvaro Altamirano

not text painting! how have i been so late to the party?! new egg and classical music major = shooketh at Natalie talking about Handel's Messiah 😍

bakersdozn

the end of i saw the tv glow but it's tucker carlson realizing he wants to be vigorously spanked for being a bad little girl

Chris Oakley

Association of gender to G-d has always been weird. Considering that G-d rarely manifests in human form in the Tanakh, it’s odd to think that G-d would have the anatomy associated with sex or a role associated with gender. G-d is literally non-binary, as the Shema reminds us

Casey Maharg

Interesting. I would note that there are lots of instances where G-d is female in Judaism. Being a bride, having a 'feminine name', lady wisdom. I think care should be taken to not say "Abrahamic" when you mean Christianity and potentially Islam.

Tali

Fye video

Thotwire

It doesn't matter to the argument being made, but as a behaviorist I feel obligated to point out that what you described with regard to reward/punishment is operant conditioning, not classical conditioning. Common mistake, but I gotta do right by Daddy Skinner.

Three Keys

I think Natalie is of the opinion that class consciousness is to Marxism what piety is to Christendom. It is a secular rebranding of basically the same sociological phenomenon: seeing the world through the lens of one's preferred ideology is True, and there are the apostates who don't want to hear the truth. There is a grain of truth in class consciousness, as Marxist ideas often do. A typical person has more in common with a homeless individual in terms of material scarcity and gatekept opportunities than they do with a billionaire. Ironically, this concept has been reified where many Leftists see the possession of a large amount of money, in and of itself, without immediate and conspicuous efforts to rid themselves of that excess money, is indicative of a class traitor. Conversely, anyone who is poor or homeless is an innocent, noble person who needs protecting*. *(See Contra's "Envy" video)

Shane

Surely solidarity and class consciousness is still possible despite all of this, right?

Meghan Elizabeth

This destroyed me

Meghan Elizabeth

Would you say that the Netherlands has a rather homogeneous population?

Kristina Foster

I really like this approach to understanding the basic differences in values in the political spectrum, but the language/gender model seems a bit too perfect to be true (and very centered on an English speaking world). For decades, in the Netherlands, we had a very liberal system based on nurture (a marriage between left, center & right government) with very cheap healthcare, public transport, education and benefits and this was called "little father's state" ("Vadertje Staat"). It's the same flavor of masculinity I associate culturally with ending children's labour and the fight for equal education (and I think we're not the only country who recognises this form of care taking leftist fatherhood)

Poldergeit

I would love your analysis of word painting in the Messiah oratorio overall, let’s go!!!!

Emily E Crawford

I think I have an answer to why "de-radicalised fascists are re-radicalised". The problem is not the radicalisation itself. I for example always held "radical" ideas about the world, but I thought that people have "come into sense" by their own experience, not by nagging them to oblivion. I had this kind of szittya stuff, which is an interesting mixture of granola fascism, pseudoarcheology, pop ezotericism and general cluelessness on societal issues (kinda Zynternet, but I am older than the Zynternet). After that I grow some clue, I became an anarchist. I still have some vestage of the inner turboturul* in a sense of attachment to folklore and communal liberation from systems of opressions**. So I felled for the anarchism of the fools (as communal work sharing/helping networks was a core folk tradition here until it was not taxed into oblivion). So I was radical (a fool one), and I am still a radical (maybe a little bit less fooler one who made peace with himself). But I am not a puritanical fundamentalist*** and I was never fond of neither puritanism (I like shiny things) or fundamentalism (ambiguity is normal). I think fundamentalism should be revised as it calls for scriptural strictness - but we see that they can say that "that version of the scripture is infected with woke and we have the true version". And it is influenced by this strict father morality, which makes their core narrative into a dualistic hellscape for the world and they make a whole set of purity culture to this, which culminates into "us versus them" narratives, and techinally erodes mundane/prophane by making everything into a sacred-blasphemous thing (see conservative zionist pundits like Ben Shapiro and meme-y salafist imams for non-christian form of this). This applies to politics, too. If you don't perform the perfect revolutionary, you will be shamed and vilified, you became satanic/haram/trefah/libtard/fascist/lizardmen with the aura of darkness who does not vibe with the dolphin frequency of the Pleiadians and who wil be incinerated by Ashtar Sheran's purification love lasers. And I think this have to do with our own self image, not with the world et all. Because we want to see ourselves as some pure beings (a good child). And we project this into the world as some form of supposed force of goodness, of healing pain or whatever. And Jung named the reservoire of this anxiety - the Shadow. So yeah, in conclusion, we are pretty much screwed. *Turul is one of our taboo-totem stuff from our pagan era. Technically a bird of prey, which was the messenger of the Sky. Turboturul was the nickname given by the sceptic community for Hungarian granola fascists who were into the new religious movement part of the stuff. Nowadays they call themselves as "Schytians" as they believe that Hungarians are actually Schytians, who came from Atlantis, etc. I was more invested in the chrystal waving/raving aspect of this, because the "seer" aspect of my identity was the core of gravitating towards this, which we call "táltos". **As time went on, I accepted myself, because I found people who accepted me as strange as I am, and this made me able to not reject everything on sight but embrace my own ambiguity, which sould be one point of the whole mystical stuff but you can't sell that... ***I call the phenomenon like this, but maybe others can come up with a better name to this brainrot. I am a queer biothechnologist rural sorcerer from the Petri-dish of Heritage foundation with a half Phd from Covid-19 related coagulopathy, not a philosopher or some religious studies scholar.

Murguly Mátyás

Thanks, Natalie for verbalizing many thoughts and feelings that have been gnawing at me for the past several months.

retrotom30

This is my favorite tangent yet. I would never ever read an academic paper on how the metaphorical nature of contrasting cultural values influences US electoral politics...but if you present it in a video with jokes about getting so hard for you, I'm all over that fucker. Bravo! More like this!

Jon Stewart

1,000,000 bonus points for mentioning totem and taboo.

Nicole Champeau

nobody replied. I am really hoping someone does

william kirkpatrick

william kirkpatrick

Oh right, back to metaphors. Nobody asked, but Otto Santa Ana took Lakoff’s metaphor ideas into 90s immigration discourse (that’s an awful summary). It’s called Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Good shit.

Andrew May

Whenever MAGAs cheer for "daddy to take his belt off", I just see a bunch of whiny, angry children who grew up WITHOUT fathers and never got over the big mean "no"'s and the discipline that mothers and teachers told them! They wish for onmipresent, omnipotent imaginary friend that hates the same people they to, hates the same things they do and can dish out all the cruelty they wish they could but somehow never "take his belt off" to beat them up. That's a father....in the mind of someone who was always left wishing for one because there was no human to fill the role and tie it firmly into reality! Learning that your dad is not that omnipotent figure is part of growing up and we do it from the first time we see dad lose his temper at us as kids, to the day we see him in a coffin.

Cynthia Sonier

Omg I read "Don't think of an Elephant" a few years ago, and I've been waiting for more people to discuss Geroge Lakoffs work ever since

John Savage

“Daddy sometimes has to use strong language” - now even Rutte’s at it. What’s got into them? https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/jun/25/trump-daddy-nato-summit-mark-rutte-israel-iran-video

Jon Patel

given that we have this fear driven instinct to reach for Daddy Politics, I guess the obvious step is to ask where do we from here? which I’m curious about Natalie’s take— do we try and convince people their fear is unwarranted, and that they don’t need daddy to protect them? or does it come to a pure battle of physical force where leftists and liberals need to somehow out-daddy the party of daddies?

Jun Sekiya

I also think Natalie is spot on with the draw of so many to Daddy Politics. I do think the reason it’s so compelling and authoritarian populism is so appealing is for pragmatic reasons, that people intuit from their environment that physical violence is a powerful undergirding force of political legitimacy. and so they’re drawn to candidates they feel can pragmatically deploy that violence to the goals they support

Jun Sekiya

Whose the "salt of the earth white man" at the beginning of the video?

Rose Dombegh

i feel like a lot of these comments are missing Natalie’s point about leftist infighting. the hyper vigilance and cynical relationship a lot of leftist have developed to liberalism is both frustrating and understandable. like liberalism has let a lot of leftists down but leftists often seem more interested in scolding liberals then actually finding common ground. and at the end of the day, that relationship of resentment and scolding feels very counterproductive to longstanding change.

slightlyem

I love listening to these tangents over and over to get the most out of them but I HATE that i have to go get my phone and skip past that full 10 minutes of the don telling the snake story

Matthew Bowden

FD Signifier has a great video about how he doesn't want to go too far left on YouTube, because it costs him viewers (he talks about how his video on P Diddy got 3M views, while a video about abolishing the police that he worked on for a long time got just a tiny fraction of that). I notice this with more Youtubers lately, how they seem to *insist* on distancing themselves from 'those lefty left left people', and I wonder how much this is inspired by the fear of losing income and viewers? It's a trend I really don't like, especially not in these times, because it's just - again - punching down on the people who really really need support & a voice right now.

Poldergeit

I'm also #concerned by the end of this video. While I've known I'm probably a bit farther left than Natalie, nothing about her videos has ever suggested she's a liberal, or wanted to create more liberals (in the American sense). Liberals are for Israel, genocide in Gaza, for profit healthcare, foreign wars, billionaires, stagnant wages, p. much stagnant everything. The status quo. I'm not a huge revolutionist either, but even if you're more buddy buddy with or hold your nose to vote for these people for strategic/incremental reasons, the democratic party is weak and ineffectual at slow, boring progress, and outright refuse to wield any tools of change like court packing or abolishing the filibuster. If leftists are more hostile towards than libs than the conservatives, it's because the latter is a lost cause and there's at least some lingering faraway hope that maybe democrats would ever see reason.

Andy Summer

Revolutions don't happen because of weak leaders, they SUCCEED because of weak leaders. There have been so many more revolts and revolutions in Europe throughout the centuries (many to rebel against serfdom, inequality, unjust laws or to protect communities) and so, so many peasants lives were lost. It's really time America learned about those events and how the struggle against unjust power, kings and oppression has been a war going on for CENTURIES and still we continue and fight.

Poldergeit