Jack Neel Podcast: Rachel Wilson on Why Women Are So Unhappy (Transcript)

Because I want — what if I want to be a mom and have kids? I want to raise them myself. How am I going to do that if I’m gone 40 to 50 hours a week? Especially if I get a career that’s very demanding. If I want to be a doctor or something, where does that leave room for raising my kids? I’m going to have to outsource that to someone else, and I didn’t like that idea. And when I said I thought that that was kind of silly and inefficient, I thought, isn’t that silly? I’m having children and I’m going to pay some other stranger who isn’t their mother maybe $12 an hour or something to spend all day with them. And I might get to see them for a couple hours at night and on the weekend, and that’s it.

JACK NEEL: And meanwhile, they’re not even with their kids.

RACHEL WILSON: Exactly. So I thought, we’re all just — it’s like we’re playing musical chairs with the children. And it’s like, well, you raise mine so that I can go to work and then someone else will raise yours so that you can go to work watching my kids. And when I said, I think that seems silly. Who came up with this system? It sounds terrible to me. It was like I was challenging this deeply held dogma, this preciously held dogma that like, well, you don’t want to be enslaved, do you? And I was like, I don’t know that going to work for a corporation and having to pay half of what I make to have someone else raise my kids — I don’t know, that kind of sounds a little bit like slavery to me more than having a family.

But there was just this idea that if I didn’t have my own money and my own career, the only guy who was going to be interested was someone who wanted to take advantage of me and hurt me and wanted me to be vulnerable and not able to escape.

A Childhood Shaped by Divorce and Conflicting Worldviews

JACK NEEL: You kind of gave the most important part of your backstory to understand why you view feminism the way you do, but I want to know about your parents and your childhood. Like, what’s the most important part of your childhood that shaped maybe why you chose to write your book and some of your views today?

RACHEL WILSON: When I was 9 years old, my parents got divorced and my dad sat us down and explained that my mom had found somebody new. She was going to divorce him, and that he had to move out. And I remember asking him, “Wait, if Mom got a boyfriend — you know, you’re not supposed to do that. That’s against the rules. Why do you have to leave? That doesn’t make sense.” And my dad kind of got tears in his eyes. And then I told him — I remember saying, “I have a lump in my throat, it kind of hurts right here.” And then he just kind of lost it.

My mother really didn’t want to explain. It was just like, Dad’s got to go and this other guy is going to move in. And that was kind of the beginning of everything changing for me and my sister. And I remember thinking — I had people, adults in my life, when I would ask. One of my mom’s friends was babysitting and I was like, “Why? I know my mom wants a new boyfriend, but why does that mean that my dad has to move out? Now this guy is going to move in. Why can’t me and my sister have our dad?” I’m trying to figure this out as a 9-year-old. And the answer I kept getting was, “Well, your mom needs to be happy.” And I thought, “Well, yeah, I want my mom to be happy. Of course, I love my mom. But what about me being happy? And what about my dad being happy? And what about my sister being happy?”

So that was kind of the first seeds of me wondering, why is she the only person that matters in this equation? Shouldn’t we all matter? And nobody had a good answer.

So as I got older, my mother had been kind of radicalized in college as a Marxist and then started reading Marxist literature like The Mists of Avalon. It’s a feminist retelling of the Camelot legend, from a very Marxist feminist perspective. And she kind of adopted this view that men are bad and evil, especially white men. The evil white men that have all the power are bad. The intersectional stuff — the more oppressed you are, the more truth you have and the more righteous you must be. And if you have money or you own a business or you’re a white person or you’re a male, you must be bad. You must be oppressing someone to have those things. And that was kind of her worldview. So most of the week living with mom, that’s the stuff I would kind of hear filtered through. It kind of trickles out as you’re talking about things growing up.

Then I’d go to my dad’s, and he was a business owner. He was a Rush Limbaugh guy. In the car we’d be listening to Rush Limbaugh on the way to my orthodontist appointments or something. So I grew up listening to him with Dad, and my dad would explain things from a completely different worldview — like things are based on merit, it depends how hard you work for things because a lot of people aren’t willing to work hard, and those who are can potentially get ahead even if they maybe started out behind. My dad would say, “I didn’t grow up with money, but I’m doing a lot better now than my dad was because I put in 14-hour days. I have better ideas than the other guys in the same industry I work in.” So you earn your way in the world. Whereas my mom’s view was completely different. It was everybody deserves, and you only don’t have because someone else has.

So these two completely opposite, conflicting worldviews that you get as a kid — you kind of start having to learn to think things through and try to figure out, well, which one is correct? How do I know which one is correct? And how do I filter through these ideas to figure out which worldview is more accurate? What should I follow? Because I’m getting completely different directions from both parents.

And I remember the best piece of advice my dad ever gave me, especially being a woman. He said, “Self-esteem is not based on external validation. You will never get a sense of self-esteem, a true sense of it, from people telling you you’re pretty or telling you they like you or saying you did a good job. You get your real self-esteem from making good decisions and learning that you can trust yourself to do the right thing.”

And that was one of the first pieces that I felt really clicked for me. That maybe Dad’s on to something. Maybe his worldview is more correct. And as I went through school and saw that, if we had a group project or something, oftentimes people would want to be on my team. “Oh, I want to do the group project with Rachel,” because they know I care about it. I’m going to try hard and I’m going to make — I want to get an A on the project. So they could sit back and kind of relax and kind of let me do all the work. And I thought, this must be that merit-based stuff Dad’s talking about, right?

So just my experiences going through life, I felt like my dad’s worldview was a lot more matched up with reality than my mother’s idea that people just deserve — we’re all just born deserving what we want and someone needs to provide it, and if they don’t, it’s because of evil or oppression in the world.

Writing Occult Feminism

JACK NEEL: You have a book, Occult Feminism. Do you think a big reason you decided to write this book was trying to maybe understand what could have led to the society that shaped her views.

The Origins of Feminism

RACHEL WILSON: Oh, definitely. And I wrote it with the idea in mind that I have 4 daughters and I hope to have a lot of grandkids. If the Lord grants me that, I would be so happy. And I wanted to make sense of the world, like you said, what kind of society shapes a woman the way that it did my mother and so many other women like her.

Like, if you look at the popular culture, you look at things like Sex and the City, you look at every pop star— like Sabrina Carpenter right now is making a multi-million dollar a year industry off of cute little man-hating songs and things like this. And I was trying to make sense of how did we get here? Because my mom wasn’t around a lot growing up. Because of all her issues, I would get sent to my grandparents’ house all the time. And so I grew up mostly with my grandmas, and one of them just turned 100 on April 1st, and she was probably the most influential person on me. And again, got a totally different view of the world from her than I did from my mother.

And she was much more traditional and a very practical, hardworking lady, not political at all. Grandma didn’t care about politics. She wasn’t talking about politics. She was worried about getting the house cleaned, cooking dinner, taking care of the grandkids, those sort of things. And I feel like the world she grew up in was so different from the one that created my mother and from the one that shaped me.

Almost everybody today kind of looks around and we all know that something’s off, something’s not working. Men and women are kind of pitted against each other and we have these dating apps and nobody’s happy and nobody’s having kids and nobody knows what to do about it. Everybody knows that something is wrong or something is off, but nobody really knows what it is. And it’s right in our face. But because we’re swimming in feminist waters, just like a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, we don’t realize that that’s what it is. And that’s why I was like, I’ve really got to write a book because I feel like I could explain now that I have done so much research and read so much history.

I spent years reading early feminist writings. Going back to Mary Wollstonecraft or even before, which is something nobody does unless you’re going to college for gender studies. And then of course you’re going to read it through the lens of feminism was wonderful and it’s awesome and it’s great. But me reading it through more of a skeptical lens of like, I just want to know what happened. I hadn’t even decided that it was evil or satanic. I didn’t know any of that. I was just like, I want to know what happened. I’m curious.

JACK NEEL: Not what she wrote, but who is this person that wrote this and why did they write it and who funded it and who— yeah.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

JACK NEEL: Made it popular.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah. Why did somebody like Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 1700s at the height of the revolutionary period, why did she write Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which is like the first big feminist publication, the kind of the thing that started it all. Why did she write that? Like, what was going on in her life? What was the society like around her? What things prompted her to want to write such a thing? How did people respond to it? So I spent years reading that stuff.

And then once I felt like, okay, I’ve got a really clear picture on what I think happened, I want to write a book. And I really thought it would be for my kids and for my grandkids. I never thought it would blow up and become like a bestseller. I just wanted to help them, like, as my daughters are growing up and they’re deciding, do I want to start a family? Do I want to have a career? Like, which way do I want to go? I just wanted them to know the truth.

This is my big thing with feminism is that if this is a movement for women, if it’s for me, if it’s for my daughters and it’s for our benefit, we should know the truth about it. We should know the truth about how it came about, who pushed it to the forefront, who paid to push it to the forefront, why there needed to be a century and billions of dollars worth of propaganda, why the CIA had to get involved to create things like Ms. Magazine to push this stuff on the culture. We should know that as women. If we are the benefactors of feminism, you could at least tell us the truth. I think it’s very patronizing to say, ah, don’t look at that. Don’t look at that. Just look, you don’t want to be stuck in a bad marriage, do you? Don’t you want your own money? So that’s why I wrote the book. I just feel like women deserve the truth about it.

Where Feminism Really Began

JACK NEEL: Rachel, when most people think about how feminism actually started, they maybe think of early 1900s women marching, figures like Susan B. Anthony, the suffragettes. But your book says feminism started thousands of years earlier.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

RACHEL WILSON: At the beginning of humanity. Of course, I’m a Christian, so I’m going to look at things through my Christian lens. But even if you’re not— let’s say you’re a secularist, you don’t care about the religious part. Clearly nature has a hierarchy. Men are physically stronger, physically bigger than women are. And that’s why through all of history, until technology made it possible to have feminism— like, if you’re wondering why did we never have this feminism stuff, why didn’t it take over until the last 100, 150 years? It’s because we needed an industrial revolution and then a technological revolution to create a world where women could be equal.

Meaning, women can go out and earn a living just like a man. They can drive on roads that were built by men in a car that was built by men and is maintained by men to an office building that men built with an electrical power structure and telecommunications that are all built and maintained by men. And they can sit at a computer and have a job and say, “I’m equal with men and I’m the same as men.”

200, 300 years ago, there was no such thing. If you were on a farmstead working alongside your husband, sure, you worked. You got up and you took care of the children. You milked the cows. You churned the butter. You did all of the domestic agricultural stuff. But you knew that you couldn’t take giant steel beams and move them like your husband and his friends could. You knew that the barn raising was done by the men because that stuff’s heavy and you have to be big and strong in order to move big heavy things and do heavy dangerous work. So there wasn’t this idea that men and women are inherently equal. And when I say equal, I don’t mean in value in the eyes of God or in value in the eyes of people even. It’s more just that it’s very clear that there’s a biologically based difference between men and women and each have their own responsibilities, their own burdens, their own roles to play. Because we are not interchangeable widgets. Now that we have technology, everybody thinks we are.

So I went back. I thought it was going to start around Mary Wollstonecraft, and then as I went further back, I realized there were women like Christine de Pizan, who was a writer for the French court in the 1500s. She was actually Italian but became a prominent writer and worked for the French aristocracy and made her own money, became published, and she even wrote a lot about why she thought we should push women to a higher station in society and things like that. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting, that’s a little earlier. And I kept kind of working my way back, and you realize that from the beginning of humanity, whether you think that’s in the Garden of Eden or whether you think that’s in ancient Mesopotamia, there’s always been this hierarchical balance of men having a monopoly on physical force and women having a monopoly on reproduction and who gets to reproduce.

What do I mean by that? If you look at genetic studies, each of us alive today has twice as many female ancestors as we have male ancestors. And the reason for that is because as a woman, all you need to do to reproduce and make a genetic copy of yourself is be fertile, and some man is going to come along and he’s going to fertilize you, right? That’s really all you have to do. For men, it’s never been like that. You’ve always had to either be able to compete and dominate with other men by force or by having more resources or more wealth or status than them. You had to have either taken a war bride or get permission from a woman’s father in ancient times in order to reproduce. And a lot of men died before they got the chance to do that, whether in war or by doing dangerous work, things like that.

So there’s always been this kind of hierarchy. And what feminism did was it said, “We’re going to try to equalize that. We’re going to try to equalize the hierarchy. We’re going to try to boost women up to where we think men are.” But the problem there is that along with the power that men had came a lot of responsibility and difficult duties that women either don’t want to fulfill or physically cannot fulfill. Women have a duty that men cannot physically fulfill, which would be childbirth.

So from my view, looking at history, there was a balance in place, and what feminism did was threw the balance off completely and shifted a whole bunch of power to women without the corresponding duties and responsibilities and accountability that would go with that.

Ancient Goddesses and Pagan Gender Dynamics

So if you look at ancient times, you had women’s only agency was things like temple prostitution, being a priestess. We’re talking about pagan times, like ancient pagan Rome maybe would be a good example— women can either marry into wealth, power, and status, they can be born into it, or they can do something like become a temple priestess or a temple prostitute or something like that. And that’s a form of like sexual liberation in ancient times.

And when Christianity came along, it kind of did away with that and elevated women to more of a holding them in a virtuous position. Not treating them as sacrificial lambs. We’re not sacrificing virgins to angry gods or anything like that. We’re saying no, women should be protected and provided for. They should be venerated as mothers and good wives, and they should be chaste and pure to the extent that they can. And then men’s job is to protect and provide. And it changed the social order of men and women from what the pagan order was depending on where you were.

JACK NEEL: So the pagans, what were like some of the goddesses they were worshiping, and what were those societies that were kind of pushing that feminist flip in gender dynamics?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, so my book opens going over some of this and how a lot of the ancient goddesses were— they usually were goddesses of fertility, but they were also usually kind of vengeful and angry. A lot of them were, which is why they’ve become popular again in feminist circles, especially in the 1970s. There was a goddess worship revival, and that’s kind of going on now. Like, if you go on TikTok, there’s plenty of girls talking about like Lilith or Inanna or some of these revitalized ancient goddesses that they worship. And whether they worship them truly in a spiritual sense or whether they’re kind of worshiping them in a not so much a literal sense, but just saying, “I like this idea. This is like an avatar of the strong independent woman who gets her revenge on men for trying to subjugate her.” It depends, right?

JACK NEEL: It has a similar effect.

The CIA, Ms. Magazine, and the Feminist Goddess Archetypes

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, yes. At the end of the day, it’s basically the same thing. Interestingly, a great example of this is the first cover of Ms. Magazine. Now, Ms. Magazine was the first feminist publication that was really popular in America. There were feminist publications going back to the early 1800s, but this was like a mainstream magazine that was really pushed and became really popular in the ’70s. It was founded by Gloria Steinem and Clay Felker of the CIA. So it had CIA funding and CIA backing, which is— people probably think that’s super weird. Why would the CIA be interested in feminism?

And it was part of a Cold War project called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And this was an effort by the CIA to compare and contrast and distinguish us from Soviet Russia and say we have this liberal freedom, they are these old-timey oppressors, these communists. And it was kind of like an anti-communist propaganda to push the women’s liberation thing, like, hey, in the West you can be free as a woman and you can’t have that under the communists. My second book is actually coming out later this year and is about that, about how actually the communists were the first ones to really push the feminism in government and make it legal under the Bolshevik regime.

But that aside, the first copy of Ms. Magazine, on the cover— now remember, you’re trying to market this magazine to suburban housewives in America in 1973— and they picked the Hindu goddess Kali. And she is a blue-skinned, kind of terrifying-looking Hindu goddess who— now I’m not saying this from the Hindu perspective because I’ll get Hindus that get upset with me and they’ll message me, you’re wrong about— no, I’m saying the feminists, from the feminist perspective in the ’70s, they saw her as a vengeful goddess who only accepts the sacrifice of men. She eats the blood of men on the battlefield. She is the Dark Mother.

And so there’s this picture of her with 6 arms, and in her 6 arms she’s holding a baby and an iron and a frying pan, and there’s even a baby in her womb. And on the cover, one of the issues is talking about abortion as one of the article topics. So there’s this baby in the womb of the— and she’s dressed in an apron. A very bizarre choice, but what they were trying to get across is like, we’re at this tipping point where we’re going to choose whether we’re going to be these domestic slaves who are just baby factories. You know, all we are, our life is not up to us. We’re subjugated by men and we’re just forced to give birth and be chained to the stove until we die. Or we’re going to become vengeful goddesses who get our revenge against the evil oppressive patriarchy.

So I’m not saying Hindus believe this. I’m saying feminists use these angry, vengeful goddess archetypes as a cultural weapon to push the propaganda. But if you do go back to ancient times, that was often the role of a goddess figure — fertility, domination of men, or revenge against men through sex.

So if you look at a lot of the ancient Roman gods, a lot of the ancient Greek gods, and you read the mythology, there’s often this— the gods are always fighting, right? They’re always at war. Pagan gods are always fighting with each other, kind of like humans. And the way that the female goddesses usually get back at the men is by eating their offspring, seducing them, using their sexuality as a weapon to get revenge, things like that. And so the feminist movement loves that. They love reading that mythology and turning it into a feminist cry to battle.

Lilith, Inanna, and the Roots of Modern Feminism

JACK NEEL: Yeah. Your book spends a lot of time on 3 ancient goddesses specifically. Lilith, Kali, and Inanna. Can you tell me a little bit about Lilith and Inanna and kind of how they shaped modern feminism?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, so Inanna was one of the most important goddesses in ancient Sumeria. She was one of the top tier ones. There were a lot of temples built to her, one of the oldest goddess stories that we have, one of the oldest archetypes that we have. And something you’ll find with her that’s pretty common across all of these goddess archetypes is that they’re a mother, so they give life, they give birth. They’re usually also fertility goddesses. They use sexuality, like I said, as a weapon or as a way to get power or control, because they don’t have the monopoly on force. The big male gods are stronger, physically or whatever it might be.

And in ancient times, when you were worshiping one of these goddesses like Inanna, you would usually go to a temple prostitute. And there was this sense that female sexuality was a way to connect with the divine. And so prostitutes were often venerated, at least temple prostitutes, maybe not street prostitutes, but temple prostitutes were venerated. They were held in high regard. So it’s like an early example of female sexuality being used as a way to elevate women, because it can be a weapon. Sexuality for women and seduction and fertility is a power that we have that men don’t have. We’re the people who basically get to decide who gets to reproduce. Like I said, unless we’re grabbing war brides or something, but that wasn’t most men through most of history. And Lilith was—

JACK NEEL: I just want to clarify really quick, so temple prostitutes— I kind of have a guess of what that is. Like, is that a priestly woman that would participate in a fertility ritual with men for some kind of— like, explain what that is.

Temple Prostitutes, the Occult, and Witchcraft

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, it kind of depended on the culture and the time because it changed and differed a little bit, but it was a religious sacrament of sorts in the pagan world. You’d go to the temple, you would meet with the temple prostitute, you would have some kind of relations with her, and that would be a way to commune with the divine or a way to give an offering. And that’s something that has continued, like the modern occult rituals are kind of based on that. They kind of take those ideas and use them in occult rituals, because that’s all the occult really is — a secretive type of esoteric religious practice that takes a lot of the ancient stuff like Hermeticism, paganism, and turns it into ritual magic.

JACK NEEL: You’ve written that one of the earliest modern movements to bring these ancient goddesses back was a religion called— is it called Wicca or witchcraft technically?

RACHEL WILSON: Wicca is a type of witchcraft, so it’s like a subset.

JACK NEEL: Got it. Yeah. So just maybe a theology known as witchcraft or religion known as witchcraft. How do you define witchcraft and how is it connected to feminism?

The History of Witchcraft and the Witch Archetype

RACHEL WILSON: Witchcraft — I took a whole chapter on it to explain the history of it and how it’s always been a way for women who felt like they were outside of the competitive female hierarchy to have power, to get revenge.

Think of the archetype of the witch, like the Wicked Witch with the big nose. She’s always ugly and haggard, she’s always dressed in black, wearing the pointy hat, she lives in a cabin off on the edge of the woods, away from the town. She scares the children, she kidnaps and eats the children. Think of Snow White, think of Sleeping Beauty — all of the fairy tales that we have. The witch is always trying to hurt the young beautiful maiden, trying to poison her with an apple, trying to steal her youth, steal her beauty.

These archetypes exist for a reason. There’s always been some women who don’t compete well within the hierarchy for mates. So if you’re a pretty girl that men like, you’re charming, and men want to marry you, the system works great for you. But there’s always this minority of women who, for whatever reason, whether they’re physically repulsive to men, or their personality type is very combative and unappealing for men, and they’re kind of shunned by the patriarchy. It’s like, go over there, we don’t really want anything to do with you. We want the beautiful young nice girls that are going to make good wives.

Throughout history — and this is not just according to me, there’s a witch who teaches about this at New York University that I reference in my book — this is from her perspective as a second-generation witch herself, that those women have always gone outside of society and practiced witchcraft as a way to have some power, have some influence, get some revenge, take back what they feel they deserve that they’re not getting, that the rest of society has been benefiting from.

So this whole thing where men choose women and women choose men and they get married and they have a nuclear family — if that doesn’t work for them, witchcraft is very appealing because it’s always very anti-patriarchy. It’s also very anti-Christian. It’s a way to kind of fight back as a woman who the system doesn’t work for. So that’s why we have the archetype of the witch.

The Rehabilitation of the Witch in Popular Culture

But in actual history, everybody’s heard of the witch trials, burning witches at the stake and things like this. In the middle of the 20th century, there was this big effort to make the witch into a sympathetic character, starting with L. Frank Baum in The Wizard of Oz.

Now, L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law was named Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was one of the prominent suffragettes, a good friend of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the two big figures of women’s suffrage. L. Frank Baum lived with her for a long time and was very heavily influenced by her, and he wrote the character of Glinda the Good Witch after her.

Now, Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote a book called Woman, Church, and State, and this was her explaining how she felt that Christianity and the state came together to oppress women, and that Christianity was the root from which women were oppressed, and that if we want to have real feminism and real women’s liberation, we’ve got to get rid of Christianity. So when L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz, this was a big influence on him. And that was the first time that we’ve seen somebody try to make a witch into the good guy, basically.

But then that kind of continued post-World War II when the culture wars began ramping up again. We saw stuff like the old TV show Bewitched, where it’s a witch named Samantha who’s cute and adorable, and she wiggles her nose and casts spells. She marries her husband, and her husband’s always telling her not to use her witchcraft. “You be a normal woman. You don’t use your witchcraft. You be a good wife.” And that was another kind of cultural attempt to say — if you read between the lines — “Hey, women and their powers and influence, whether it’s their sexuality or their spirituality, why should that be oppressed by bad men? Maybe the witch is really the good guy. Maybe she’s the rebellious woman that’s not going to let men push her around and tell her what to do.”

And then now in the last few years, we have Wicked, which is this other big cultural phenomenon with Ariana Grande. Again, we see a witch character who is really the good person but is being painted as bad when it’s unwarranted. She’s actually the sympathetic character who’s fighting for what’s right, and she’s just misunderstood.

The Real History Behind the Witch Trials

So throughout all of history, it was never that way. Witches were persecuted, and people think that’s because they were opinionated women. That’s not the reason at all. If you actually go back and read some of the things that were being written around the time of the prominent witchcraft trials, a lot of the people who were persecuted — not saying that there weren’t people who were wrongly accused or wrongly tortured, there certainly were — but a lot of the people who were persecuted by the church for doing witchcraft were abortion providers.

Witches had herbal remedies and knew how to do primitive surgical abortions and things like that. They had tinctures, they had herbal remedies to induce abortions, and they often did do ritual magic. That’s where the broomstick comes from. It’s a little graphic, but in my book I explain where the idea of the witch riding the broom comes from.

In medieval times, there was a practice in witchcraft of using — it wasn’t LSD because that hadn’t been synthesized yet, but there were natural things like ayahuasca or other types of psychedelic drugs, hallucinogenic drugs. Mushrooms would probably be the primary one. They would make a paste or a lubricant out of that and put it on a broomstick and use it in a sex ritual.

Sex is always the most powerful way to do ritual magic because the emotions are so heightened, and the belief is that you can kind of access the divine through climax, through this heightened emotional state. So that’s why almost every famous occultist you’ve heard of, like Aleister Crowley, they’re always doing ritual sex magic. It’s supposed to be the most powerful type of magic, and that goes back to the temple prostitution that goes back to ancient times.

So witches would indeed use hallucinogenic tinctures as a lubricant and then use something like a broomstick and do ritual magic. And that’s where the idea of flying on a broomstick came from.

The Origins of the Witch’s Hat

JACK NEEL: So where does that come from originally? Like the pointy hat — what does that symbolize?

RACHEL WILSON: When you see witches flying on broomsticks, that’s a subtle way of saying what they were doing. Same thing with the pointy hat. The pointy hat actually comes from Kabbalah. A lot of medieval witches practiced Kabbalah, and there was a black triangular, pointy hat that people would wear back then when they practiced Kabbalah, and that’s where the witch’s hat comes from.

JACK NEEL: But where does that come from originally? Like the pointy hat — what does that symbolize?

RACHEL WILSON: I’m not sure what it symbolizes. You always see threes a lot. Anything in threes — even in Christianity, we have the Trinity. Three is like a sacred geometry thing.

JACK NEEL: Got it. So it’s a triangle.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, it’s a triangle.

JACK NEEL: That makes sense.

RACHEL WILSON: So from ancient Kabbalah is where the witchcraft hat kind of originates from. And again, this is not Rachel telling you as a Christian — this is me listening to lectures and reading books written by witches, modern-day witches, who are telling you proudly what their heritage is. So if you think I’m wrong, you’ve got to go take it up with them. That’s what they told me.

A lot of witches were actually prosecuted for practicing witchcraft, doing spellcraft. Another really common reason a witch might have been persecuted or burned at the stake was they were the primary purveyors of poison. So if you wanted to poison someone, you went to a witch to get a poison so that you could poison someone, often men.

It’s a really interesting historical fact that women have always used poison as a primary means of unaliving someone, whereas men tend to use more brute force. And as we developed testing to identify if somebody was murdered with poison, poisonings went down. But that was a primary method. If you wanted an abortion, if you wanted to kill someone by poison, if you wanted to do ritual sex magic, you went to the witch who lived outside of town.

Were the Witch Trials Justified?

JACK NEEL: So if you had to break down the real reason the witch trials happened, the burnings — would you say that all the women accused were accused of those two specific things? Or was the Catholic Church and the aristocracy more upset at the actual magic they were doing? Like, what were they upset with?

RACHEL WILSON: I think it was both. It was just that those were the things that were easier to prove. And again, I’m not saying there were not periods where maybe the Roman Catholic Church or the Puritans in New England didn’t get hysterical and start persecuting people who were wrongly accused. I’m sure that that happened.

But another thing that happened during the witch trials that we never talk about is that 20% of the people who were burned or drowned as witches were men. So plenty of men got accused of witchcraft as well. And I think it was a time where you do have some political things complicating matters. The church is trying to keep power and maintain power — that’s true. But it was the belief at the time that if you had somebody who was doing these things, the wrath of God and his judgment was going to come upon you and your people. If there’s somebody in the town performing abortions on a regular basis, we need to get rid of that. So from the perspective of the church, these were things that were illegal, they were crimes, and they needed to be punished.

But yes, they had legitimate reasons for wanting to persecute witches, and then at times it probably did get out of control, and there were probably a lot of people who were falsely accused, and it did become a vehicle for people to make false accusations.

But the idea that there was no basis for it whatsoever, and this common trope that you hear now — “Oh, the witch trials were just awful patriarchal men who didn’t like women who had their own brains and their own thoughts, and so if you tried to speak up about an injustice, they would burn you as a witch” — that’s historically not accurate at all.

JACK NEEL: In reality, they were providing abortions and poisoning people.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: And people were concerned that that would spread.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, exactly.

JACK NEEL: You never hear that. So that would make more sense. I was always confused watching the Salem Witch Trial plays or movies about that. I was like, what was going on here? Like, were people just crazy? But it seems like part of the history was left out.

Feminism, Witchcraft, and the Spiritual Battle

RACHEL WILSON: Yes. A big part, a big important piece was left out. And that happens all the time. That’s— I’m a super huge history buff. I always have been. And it’s because almost any time that you have a super dominant historical narrative, if you go back and look, there are things that will challenge it. There are counter-narratives. And it’s really tough to find exactly what the truth is because it kind of does depend on who’s telling it. And they say that history is written by the victors. And it’s rewritten all the time. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that with feminism. And we can talk about college textbooks and what they’ve done there.

But yeah, if you go back, you can almost always find a counter-narrative. And it takes some sifting through and some thinking about what was going on at the time, looking at the people involved and who stood to gain from what to kind of form a picture of what’s maybe more accurate. But there’s a lot of history that we’ll never fully know exactly what happened.

As we get later into feminist history, I’d say from the 1700s on, because there was no telecommunications yet until the early 20th century, we have extensive written documentation. So I do feel really, really confident that everything from 1700 to the mid-20th century, we really know what was going on because the primary way that suffragists and feminists communicated their message, talked to each other, that’s all written. They wrote each other letters, they wrote pamphlets, they delivered speeches, they debated publicly.

Actually, a lot of people think women were never allowed to speak. They weren’t. Rachel, you’re on a podcast right now speaking, and you couldn’t do that if it wasn’t for feminism. That’s not true at all. Women were in the 1700s publicly speaking and giving speeches and making a living touring, talking about these things.

JACK NEEL: I do want to connect the Protestant Reformation and how it paved the way for the rise of feminism, but first I’m not sure if you’ve seen this stat. It was in 2002, only 30% of American women identified as feminist. And by 2020, that has doubled. And among Gen Z women, 68% of them identify as feminist. And at the same time, the fastest growing religion among Gen Z women in America isn’t Christianity and it isn’t atheism. It’s witchcraft. Do you think the rise of feminism and the rise of witchcraft is a coincidence, or do you think they’re the same movement?

The Rise of Witchcraft and Its Connection to Feminism

RACHEL WILSON: I definitely think they’re the same movement. So that’s why in the book I take a lot of time to show the historical thread from ancient times through medieval times all the way till now. And of course I’m not going to make it a 5,000-page book where I’m covering every single century of history. I just kind of weave some important moments together through the ages to kind of show there’s— it started as a spiritual battle. It’s still a spiritual battle. And then the politics gets weaved in, of course.

So Susanna Budapest, who is a Czechoslovakian witch, she was an immigrant here in the ’60s. I think she actually came during World War II because she was escaping some of the stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe at the time. She was the first to get witchcraft laws overturned in the United States, in California where she lived, under religious freedom clauses. And she herself, who is still around— she, I believe she’s still around— she was around during Trump’s last term, leading spellcasting rituals against Trump with all the witches that are on Facebook and TikTok who follow her. She’s a much older lady now, but she’s still practicing witchcraft and cursing Donald Trump with her. It’s like a 13,000-member Facebook group.

JACK NEEL: I believe, yes, it was like a lot of people.

RACHEL WILSON: It’s a lot of people.

JACK NEEL: And they did it against Brett Kavanaugh too, I believe.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

JACK NEEL: What were they trying to accomplish? Just give him bad luck?

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: Okay.

RACHEL WILSON: To prevent them from coming to power, prevent them from getting their agenda passed. Because of course, from their perspective, Donald Trump’s going to enslave all the women and Brett Kavanaugh is going to enslave all the— it’s going to be The Handmaid’s Tale, right? That’s what they think.

So this woman said that feminism is just the political arm of a spiritual battle. That’s according to a witch herself. She says this is a spiritual battle and feminism is just that political arm to help us with the political power aspect that we need to have the freedom to do things like practice witchcraft.

Abortion, that’s a big one. When Roe v. Wade was overturned a few years ago and it went back to the states, there were multiple organizations including Native American organizations, the Satanic Temple and multiple Wicca and witchcraft covens who contested the changing of the laws because they said abortion is a ritual sacrament for them and should be protected under religious freedom laws.

So I— this is not Rachel. People, off the bat when they see me and they hear me start talking, they go, “Oh, she’s one of those crazy Christians that thinks everything’s the devil,” like I’m Bobby Boucher’s mother in The Waterboy and I think everything’s the devil. No, I’m telling you, they’re the ones who tell me witchcraft is a spiritual battle for feminism, for women’s freedom, for revenge against the patriarchy.

JACK NEEL: You’re saying that the Church of Satan— yeah, is suing the state of Texas?

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, they did. They contested the change in the abortion laws, like the Heartbeat Bill.

JACK NEEL: Yes, because they see abortion as a ritual sacrifice, so it’s necessary to their church.

Abortion, Power, and the Witchcraft Ritual

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, exactly. And if you go on TikTok and you search the hashtag #WitchTok, you can find dozens of female creators on TikTok who will show you how to make a ritual out of your abortion. They’ll show you how to make an altar, how to use the tissues that are removed from you in a ritual magic spell, and ritualize your abortion to give you power, to give you things that you want in life.

Like, this is— people think this is Rachel being crazy. It’s really not. Like you said, witchcraft is the fastest growing religion, especially among Gen Z women in America. And they do mostly identify as feminists, and they do think that from a spiritual perspective these things are empowering.

So that— the reason I have an argument that is original to me when I debate people on abortion, and this will show you that what I’m saying is true and that this is how they actually feel, because in the ’90s, you probably don’t remember because you’re very young, but Bill Clinton would say, “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,” right? That was the progressive stance in the ’90s. Now we have switched to “my body, my choice, abortion on demand.” You are not allowed to put any restrictions on it. “No uterus, no opinion.”

And what this kind of proves— when I put forth this argument, it goes like this. I’ll ask a woman if she thinks abortion should be legal. She’ll say yes. And I say, “All the way up until birth?” And sometimes they’ll say yes, sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I would cut it off here, I would cut it off there.” And I say, “What about this? A woman goes in to get an abortion at 8 weeks, and the abortion doctor says, ‘Good news, we have new technology, we have artificial wombs, we’ve just created artificial wombs that are successful, and you don’t have to kill this fetus. You can have it implanted into an artificial womb, and you won’t have any legal obligation to it, you won’t have any moral obligation to it. It’s just going to be a simple laparoscopic procedure, no more risk than an abortion. And the only difference is rather than killing it and removing it, we’re just going to remove it alive and let it gestate and fully grow and be born.'”

I say, “If there was such an option as this available, would you then still be in favor of abortion?” And I have not once had a woman say no. Every single time they say, “I still think she should be able to choose to kill the fetus.” And then I ask why, and they don’t really know, and they’re hesitant. It’s like they know I’ve kind of caught them in a trap. They know it doesn’t sound good to people that they just said that, but really what they’re saying is women need power, and one of our greatest powers that we have is to decide who gets to live and who gets to die.

That this is like a deeply held ancient inherent power struggle, and that women need the power to decide which men get to have babies and which men don’t for any reason at any time. So it kind of just gives the game away a little bit psychologically, that even if they don’t mean to phrase it that way, or even if they don’t mean to put it that way, something deep in their brain is telling them, “I need the power to decide who gets to be born.” And that’s like a very, very ancient concept, and it is a holy sacrifice type of a thing within witchcraft.

JACK NEEL: The people who push for abortion saw it as ritual sacrifice.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: And what does that mean exactly? Like, what was that sacrifice that they’re doing? Like, what is that based off of?

The Ancient Roots of the Power Struggle

RACHEL WILSON: Well, it is based off of these ancient esoteric belief systems, and it is based off of this inherent need for women to have power. Not having the power on force, having half of the planet be physically weaker and smaller than the other half of the planet— if you take this view that that means you’re in danger, that you’re going to be oppressed, that men can’t be trusted, they have too much power, which is something that’s always stated as if it’s a fact. And it’s probably the thing I have to battle against the most, this inherent idea that men are just waiting to do bad things to women.

I’ve been on the Whatever podcast numerous times, and every time I’m on with a panel of young women, I always ask if they could get away with it, how many men do you think would sexually assault you? Like, if men could get away with it, what percentage of men in America do you think would be out there sexually assaulting women whenever they felt like it if they knew they could get away with it? And I’ve gotten answers like 50%, 80%, 100%.

There’s this thing programmed into us. And it comes from an understandable place. When you are the smaller, weaker sex physically, it makes sense to be nervous about that, to be worried about that. But in order to believe that all men are inherently violent and wanting to do something bad to you, you have to believe that throughout all of history, men didn’t want to protect their wives or their mothers or their daughters or their sisters, that men haven’t fought entire wars in order to protect the women of their nation or their people group. And that kind of goes against logic as well, right?

But we don’t think about that because we’re in modern times, and we don’t think about the barbarians at the gates trying to come in and steal all the women and take them off to be war brides. And that was historically a big problem and a major concern. So there is something baked into men that, “Hey, this woman is producing my offspring. I need to protect her. I love her. I want to take care of her. I want to protect and provide for her.” So we forget that that’s the primary thing that’s baked into men, not this inherent desire to be destructive and violent and hurtful towards women.

But what feminism has done, because it was deeply unpopular when it began and women didn’t like it— Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both write extensively in their memoirs about terrible women like me who didn’t think feminism was going to be good for them, and they wrote that these women already have pretty much everything they want and they do feel they’re privileged in society. They can work a job if they want to. And this is the myth that people believe. They think women couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t own anything, they were just slaves, and that’s because of pop culture stuff. But if you read the writings of suffragists, some of the first universities in this country were women’s seminaries and women’s higher education colleges.

JACK NEEL: Right.

The Origins of Women’s Suffrage

RACHEL WILSON: Women have enjoyed higher literacy rates in most places for a lot of American history. They have a lot of laws in place to protect them, to protect their assets when they enter into marriage. Like New York, for instance, had a law that if a woman came into a marriage with money or land or an inheritance, that her husband could not sell it or do anything with it unless he could prove to a judge that she authorized him to do that and that she was not compelled.

So the judge had to not only hear the man say, “Yes, she said I can sell this land.” He would have to talk to the woman and say, “You’re not being compelled, you’re not being forced, you don’t feel like you’re being made to do this. This is your own volition that you want to sell this asset.” And she would have to say yes.

And women were afraid they would lose these privileges. They were afraid that they would be— by being made equal with men, we would have all these responsibilities on us that really aren’t for us. And so in order to sell it to women who didn’t want it— the Massachusetts referendum, only 4% of women who could even vote on whether they wanted the vote came out and said they wanted it. So it was really, really unpopular for like the first 75 years of the movement. It was deeply unpopular with women and had more support from men.

JACK NEEL: They had to ban women from voting as well on whether or not they could vote, right?

RACHEL WILSON: Yes. So there were multiple suffrage groups, and the two biggest ones stopped women from being able to vote on whether they wanted to vote because they were just getting clobbered in every state that they had a referendum. It was just voted down unanimously by women. And they said, “Look, we just can’t let women vote on whether they want to vote anymore because it’s not going well for us,” which I think is really funny. And people learn that and they’re like, “Whoa, that’s crazy, I can’t believe that.” But it’s true.

It did gain popularity, and by about 1920, it was a small majority of women who did support it. But you have to remember, this is a campaign that started in the 1840s, so it took them about 80, 85 years of propaganda and massive amounts of money pushing feminism and World War I and the effects of World War I to get women on board with this. They really didn’t want it.

The Forces Behind the Feminist Movement

So this is where a lot of the myths about men being evil and violent and bad and, and you have to watch out because they’re just waiting to hurt you and abuse you— that’s where a lot of this comes from, is needing a way to get women on board. And you might wonder, why would they want to push this so much? Who would want to push it?

A lot of the early support for feminism came from socialists and communists, aside from the occultists as well, who didn’t like Christianity and saw it as this patriarchal, oppressive, archaic religion. Socialists and Progressive Era industrialists— so we’re talking about like these big families, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts— they wanted a Progressive Era batch of reforms, this whole big agenda that they succeeded in and that we’re living under now, where you would have an income tax, you would have a central banking system, the Federal Reserve Act, you would have a compulsory education system. So now the state is in charge of educating the children.

And they needed numbers for that to get that passed. They also wanted things like welfare, massive welfare programs. They wanted open borders because these are the people who need low-wage workers for their factories and to expand factories and to build railroads. So a great way to accomplish this is you get women voting, and they know that women are going to vote for safety and security over freedom and liberty. They know that you can weaponize maternal instinct to pass welfare reforms, to get all these things passed. You could never get the Progressive Era agenda passed without women’s votes. So those were the people who primarily financed pushing through the 19th. Women didn’t want it. It came from socialist men, basically.

Victoria Woodhull: The First Woman to Run for President

JACK NEEL: Who was the first woman to run for president in the U.S.?

RACHEL WILSON: That was Victoria Woodhull. She was nicknamed by the press “Mrs. Satan” at the time, and she was a pretty dubious figure. She’s one of the feminist characters that I don’t think you’re going to hear a lot about if you go to a gender studies program because she makes the movement look pretty bad.

She was raised by her father, who was a criminal, and she and her sister were raised learning how to kind of scam people. They were snake oil salesmen, so they sold fake cancer cures to sick people. They did tarot card readings, fortune telling, things like that. And they actually had criminal warrants out for their arrest in multiple states, so they were always moving around a lot.

And she was an early proponent— now we’re talking 1860s, 1870s— Victoria Woodhull was very outspoken about wanting to legalize sex work, prostitution. She called— she was the first to call marriage prostitution by another name, which later feminists like Andrea Dworkin and other radicals of like the ’60s and ’70s picked that up and ran with it, saying that being married is just like being a prostitute. It’s just that you’re getting room and board instead of cash, basically.

And she wanted no-fault divorce or some form of like legal civil marriage rather than this religious sacrament stuff. She had some really wildly progressive views for her day, and she was the first to publish the Communist Manifesto in English in the United States and widely distribute it.

Victoria Woodhull and Cornelius Vanderbilt

Now, the way she got the money to do that, the way she got the money to open her own printing press and publish the Communist Manifesto, is she said she was told in a vision, in a dream, by an ancient Roman ghost that she needed to go to New York and find Cornelius Vanderbilt and make friends with him. So she did that. She went to New York— and this had nothing to do with her running from the cops in 4 different states that all had warrants for her arrest, I’m sure.

She went to New York and found Cornelius Vanderbilt, and she got into a network of prostitutes in New York whose johns were mostly like famous Wall Street guys, rich traders on Wall Street. She knew the prostitutes that they frequented, and she would make friends with them, give them money, help them with things in exchange for intelligence, in exchange for spying on these rich Wall Street guys.

And she went to Vanderbilt and said, “Look, I can kind of help you with some of your investments because I’m getting insider information from this prostitution ring that I’m a part of.” Now she also said that she was doing mediumship and fortune telling for him. Now whether he believed in that or not, I couldn’t tell you, but they gamed the stock market in the first big crash in the 1880s, and Vanderbilt made a fortune. I think $26 million in today’s money. It was a huge amount. Everybody else lost their butt, and he came out like a bandit.

And so the New York Times interviewed him, and they were like, “How did you manage this?” Very interesting. I’m sure there was a lot of eyeballs on him and a lot of suspicion. So the New York Times wanted to interview him. How’d you do this? And he said, “Do as I do and consult the spirits.” So he said that this fortune-telling woman told him what moves to make so that he made this massive fortune in the crash. But really, it was that she was getting insider trading information from a prostitution ring.

So either way you look at it, whether you believe that he or Victoria believed these spiritual things— maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know for sure. I think they did, at least to some extent, because spiritualism was really popular at this time in America. But I think they also knew it was a really good way to cover this kind of activity.

And so Cornelius Vanderbilt gave her a big chunk of money from that deal, and that’s what she used to open Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, her publishing company, and the first female-owned stock market trading company.

JACK NEEL: I know you had a big focus of your research was kind of opening up the feminist movement, but did you look into Vanderbilt and see anything interesting about him?

The Elite Funding Behind Feminism and Social Movements

RACHEL WILSON: There’s a bunch of interesting things about a lot of the Vanderbilts. So Alva Vanderbilt Belmont was another big funder of suffrage. And at this time with these Gilded Era progressives, this is like new money. This is a time where industrialists are becoming some of the richest people in the world for the first time, rather than people like monarchs or people who had come from old money, like Rothschild banking dynasties or the British royal family owning most of the real estate in the world.

This is the first time in history that regular people could become captains of industry and get into this circle. And the Vanderbilts did have connections with Rothschild banking. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s first husband was one of those. She got a divorce from him. So this idea that you could never get a divorce before no-fault divorce is wrong. Plenty of divorces were granted. In fact, I was just doing some research on that, and I think at the turn of the century, there were tens of thousands of divorces being granted already every year.

So you just had to have a reason. You couldn’t just go and say, I’m not feeling it anymore and the neighbor makes me feel sexy, so I’m leaving. You had to say that there was either abuse, abandonment, addiction, some kind of serious enough issue to grant a divorce. But she was one of the first women in America to become extremely wealthy from divorce by divorcing her first husband. And then her second husband was a Belmont who was also another wealthy person connected with the Vanderbilts and the Rothschilds. These are people that all kind of run together in the same circles. And then he died, so she inherited his wealth too.

So she became one of the wealthiest women in the world and was one of the primary funders of suffragists. So if you ever hear about the suffragists who did the activism — like they would bomb post offices, they would smash windows on storefronts, they would go on hunger strikes and things like that — she was one of the people who would finance that terrorism. And when those people got arrested, bail them out so that they could continue doing that activity.

So when you see organizations like Antifa doing that now, and they have these wealthy benefactors that bail them out and fund these things — that’s been going on forever. And that was a big factor in getting suffrage passed: these acts of terrorism that would make it to the newspapers. You create sympathetic characters out of the women and say they were going on hunger strikes in prison and being force-fed and things like that. And she was a very smart woman who knew how to publicize that. She bought a lot of headquarters for suffragists and things like that too.

NGOs and the Real Power Behind Social Engineering

A lot of these elite families, if you look into them, they’re into all kinds of suspicious activity, and they do tend to be the primary drivers of social engineering. The Rockefeller family — and what happened is in the 20th century, those wealthy families funded NGOs, non-governmental organizations, like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Vanderbilt Endowment. And there’s tons of them now. And arguably, those are the institutions that really run things.

If you want to look at who’s really in power in America, the NGOs have a tremendous amount of influence. They decide who gets professorships at universities, who gets funding for research, what departments at what universities get funding for research. They fund all the major political PACs for political campaigns. So even back then, at the turn of the century, these were the people who had the power and the money to get these agendas passed.

Feminism Was Not a Grassroots Movement

It was not a grassroots movement. And if people don’t take anything else from this podcast, I want them to know that feminism was not this grassroots groundswell where women looked around and said, “Oh my gosh, we are oppressed. Our living situation is intolerable. We have drunk abusive husbands. We are not allowed to do anything or have anything or be anywhere. We are subhuman and we are oppressed and we’ve got to do something about it. We need voting rights. We need political equality.”

That is not what happened at all. Women didn’t like it. They didn’t want it. And it was forced from the top down by wealthy Progressive Era industrialists who wanted sweeping social reforms. They wanted to completely change the way society worked.

Simone de Beauvoir, who was the primary feminist intellectual of second wave, actually said this herself in an interview with Betty Friedan in the ’70s. She said, “I don’t think any woman should be authorized to stay at home. I don’t think society should be run that way at all, because if there is such a choice, too many women will choose that one.”

So she kind of gave the game away and said, we want to create a society in which women have to work. And so now people say, “But Rachel, most women have to work. We can’t stay home with our kids.” And I say, do you ever think about why that is? Do you ever wonder how we got into that situation? Because it wasn’t like that at any other point through all of human history. And we had wars, we had economic collapse, we had famine, we had much worse times than now.

Granted, things were structured differently prior to the Industrial Revolution, but even post-Industrial Revolution, after World War I, after World War II, yes, sometimes the women went into a factory to help make bullets and bombs, and then they went back home. We never had this fundamental transformation of the economy where now you need both parents working — and that was by design, and that was on purpose. And Simone de Beauvoir gave it away. She said, we want to re-engineer society in such a way that you don’t have the choice to stay home.

So when feminists tell you feminism is about choice — that’s a lie. Maybe some of them wanted it to be about choice. Maybe the ones who have good intentions want it to be that way. But what feminism has done is it has taken away women’s choices. Now, if you want to stay home with your kids, good luck. It’s rough. You either have to have a wealthy husband or you have to figure out how can I have a side gig or a side job and make some money on the side just so that we can get by, so I can spend more time with the kids. And that’s what happened to me. There were lots of points where I was forced to figure out a way to try to make some money on the side, but also wanted to be at home homeschooling my kids. So ask the average woman if she feels like she has more choices now, or if it’s just, you’ve got to work.

JACK NEEL: You said the feminist movement is not a grassroots movement and implied that it was really a movement to get women working.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

JACK NEEL: Because that doubles the labor force. Would you theorize that maybe the civil rights movement wasn’t a grassroots movement as well?

RACHEL WILSON: Oh, definitely.

JACK NEEL: Was that in an effort to get people of color to work? Maybe.

The Civil Rights Movement and Astroturfed Social Revolutions

RACHEL WILSON: There were a bunch of reasons for that. Chad O’Jackson is a guy who — I hope he’s still doing stuff on YouTube, he was a couple years ago — and he’s kind of the same counterpart to the civil rights movement as what I am to the feminist movement. He’s a Black man who went back and researched the whole civil rights movement and found the same thing I found: that this was not a grassroots thing that came from Black people as a whole, that it was very astroturfed, very top-down funded, with a lot of intelligence agencies involved in that sort of thing.

So it is very similar. Almost all of the big social revolutions are not grassroots. Even the American Revolution, even the French Revolution — if you go back and really examine how those things started, why they became popular, how those things took place. And it’s the same thing with — I don’t know if you remember back in the 2000s, Occupy Wall Street. That was not grassroots. It was portrayed on television like it was, but it was not grassroots. It was a corporate-funded, NGO-funded initiative.

So powerful people understand that they can use political power, money, and influence to engineer society how they want it. And what was done through both feminism and the Civil Rights Act is institutional capture. So what will happen is, like I explained, you get wealthy people that start a foundation. The foundation gets all this tax-free money. You get other big wealthy people and families that donate to yours, and you donate to theirs. A ton of money gets thrown into this pile, and what you do is you vet people who you think can push your agenda, and you place them in powerful positions in different institutions, and that’s how you capture the institution.

Gloria Steinem and the Ford Foundation

For example, Gloria Steinem was sought out. She was scouted and chosen from Smith College in the ’60s, and she was already into feminist ideology. She was already writing about it. And what’ll happen is these wealthy people from the foundations are watching to see who’s writing their PhD thesis on this, who’s writing a master’s on this, and who’s pushing the messaging they want. They’re going to offer that person a scholarship.

So Steinem was offered a Chester Bowles Fellowship, which never existed, and no one else has ever been given one since. They created it, and it was basically a legal way to give her a bunch of cash and say, “We will support you. We’re going to fund you if you work for us, and we’re going to send you places, and we’re going to have you push this message where we want it pushed.” And I’m sure to someone with that belief, it sounds great. So they say sure.

So the Ford Foundation, immediately after Steinem graduated, sent her to India. She received a bunch of training there.

JACK NEEL: What kind of training?

RACHEL WILSON: Like a social engineering type of training where you’re learning how to push these cultural revolutions in different societies and different atmospheres, how to be a good propagandist. So they sent her to Eastern Europe and they’d have her go to youth festivals and push feminist messaging. She’d get up on a stage and give a speech. She would talk to media in the area and give interviews, things like that. They even had her go undercover at the Playboy Mansion as a Playboy Bunny and then infamously write articles about how this was misogyny and why we need feminism to combat these sort of things. And then they start Ms. Magazine with her.

Universities as Radicalization Tools

So it’s actually very simple, and it kind of circumvents the whole political process. So we think that in America we vote on who we want to run this country, and that those people go to Washington and they pass the laws that the people want. And in reality, ever since we’ve had universal suffrage, that is not how it works, and that’s by design.

Again, if you want to know why Progressive Era industrialists were pushing feminism — it’s because they know: we get all the women into universities, and then they can be radicalized. We can teach them the history that we want. We can teach them the agenda that we want, and they become very good soldiers.

Women are very protective. It’s our maternal nature. We want to make sure everyone gets something to eat. We want to make sure everyone has a roof over their head and that people are safe and that things are fair. The Marxists knew this — August Babel and Vladimir Lenin, a lot of the Eastern socialists who were the pioneers of the Marxist revolution. They would openly write about how we need to get young women into university because if you get young women into university, you can very effectively radicalize them and they will do almost anything for the cause. The cause becomes their child and they will die for the cause like they would die for the child.

So this is why in Bolshevik Russia you had female assassins, you had female agitators, invaders in public, attacking police, attacking the White Russians — anybody who worked for the tsar. They’re trying to shoot people, they’re bombing places, much like right now you see people like Renee Goode. You see women out in the streets of Minneapolis fighting ICE agents, calling them horrible names, accusing them of terrible things, because they think they’re protecting this victimized class of people. Because they’ve been radicalized in universities to believe that there’s this white oppressive class of men and that everybody else is to varying degrees oppressed by those people. And so the white man in power with the badge is bad, and the immigrant, the brown immigrant guy — even if we’re arresting him for child sex crimes — he’s the victim that needs to be protected.

JACK NEEL: Why do you think women are easier to radicalize than men? Or I guess with propaganda specifically — what kinds of propaganda are used toward women versus men?

The Weaponization of Maternal Instinct

RACHEL WILSON: Marxist propaganda — they openly said, like, if you go back and read early Marxist writings, from the people who pioneered and pushed the propaganda, they knew this about women. And they said the reason for this is, women are much more easy to capture emotionally. Men have to go out into the world and provide value. They have to work and produce something to be valued by society. They have a more logical nature to them. They’re a little bit less receptive to emotional pushes. Not that men aren’t. You can definitely propagandize men as well.

But they actually did a lot of research and study on this in the 19th century of how to propagandize people. People like Edward Bernays, if you’ve ever heard of him, like the father of marketing. They actually studied how people respond to marketing and to propaganda and to different ads and things like that, and found that because women have this maternal nature — imagine like a litter of puppies. Men will see a litter of puppies and go, “Oh, it’s cute.” But if one of them is paralyzed or something and it can’t move, they’d say you should probably mercifully kill it or something like that. Whereas the woman will cry and she’ll try to save it.

Women are just much more maternal, and we feel this innate drive to protect anything weak, anything helpless. And that’s good when you’re a mother. You want that. You want women who are willing to sacrifice anything to produce the next generation. If we didn’t have that, human beings wouldn’t exist. I mean, imagine what it takes to go through a 9-month pregnancy, a painful childbirth, several months of recovering after childbirth, and then you’re nursing an infant for 2 years and you can practically do nothing else because they’re just stuck to you all day. You have to have that innate maternal nature that makes you feel like, “I will sacrifice almost anything to protect this precious innocent thing that can’t protect itself.”

So if you take that instinct a woman has and you weaponize it and you say, “These people are oppressors, they are violent, they are bad, they’re trying to hurt the outgroup. They’re trying to hurt the weaker groups. They’re trying to do evil things to those who can’t protect themselves.” Women feel very, very compelled to do something about that, and to the point that they’re willing to sacrifice their lives. And so it’s a weaponization of maternal instinct, and the Marxists figured this out 150 years ago.

Women in Education and the Workforce

And that was one of the big reasons they wanted to push women into education. They start giving all these scholarships, free college for women, all these scholarships for women, which now women hold 60% of college debt in this nation, by the way. So women are starting off 22 years old with a college degree and an average of $45,000 in debt, which is already going to put you in a position where you don’t feel like you should start a family.

So by sending all the women to college, you can radicalize them. You can get them into the workforce. They’ll protect their jobs. They’ll protect the corporation. They will protect the order that sustains all these things. You tell them that staying home is oppressive, that it makes them vulnerable and at risk for abuse, and that the only way is to go to college, have your own money, and make money for the corporation and pay taxes like a good citizen.

Socialism and the Female Vote

And this is something that worked really well. Socialists knew that they needed numbers. You don’t have socialism or communism without numbers. That’s literally the whole basis of it, right? “Workers of the world unite.” Well, half the world wasn’t working outside the home, so you only have men. And men understand hierarchy. Men work within hierarchies. If you get a group of guys in a room, there’s a pecking order right away. And if a group of men feels like a weak man is a threat, they will usually bully him, ostracize him, take care of him in some way so that he’s not a threat to the group. Because men inherently want to protect their people, they want to protect their tribe, their group, their nation.

So socialism was tough. It was tough to get men to buy into it. Some of the men who were more disaffected really liked the idea of socialism, but anybody who was successful at competing in the hierarchy wasn’t going to go for socialism. Anybody who had more masculine instincts and wanted a merit-based system wasn’t going to go for socialism or communism.

But we look at women — that’s half the population — and we tell them, “This is the only way to make sure everybody has enough. This is a way to make sure everything is fair. This is a way to help those who are weaker and more oppressed and protect them.” And sending them to college and indoctrinating them with this makes them great revolutionaries and makes them diehards for the cause.

Women’s Political Shift Since Suffrage

And that’s what we see now. We see a shift from the 19th century, when women in America were more conservative than men, especially on social issues. You had things like the Women’s Temperance Union. Women’s political causes prior to suffrage were things like clean water and food, environmental protectionism — not the crazy stuff we have now, not like the climate change stuff, but it was like, “Hey, don’t dump all of your toxic chemicals into our drinking water because our children are dying and that’s bad.”

They had a voice and they were well listened to. They got Prohibition passed without being able to vote. So women definitely had a voice and they were listened to because they had a moral authority. They had a moral high ground because they weren’t just another political voting block.

But what you do by enfranchising them with a vote is, now in every single campaign that we’ve had since 1920, it radically changed how presidential and political campaigns were carried out as well. This is why every time we have a political cycle, you see Democrats running ads like, “Republicans want to take away your grandma’s Medicare. They want her to die.” And they show them pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. “They want to take away children’s school lunches. They want the children to not be fed. They want to put kids in cages.” It’s always this fearmongering about what the right wing is going to do to the vulnerable. And women go for that. They overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

And they kind of — you alluded to this earlier with the civil rights movement — they do the same thing with Black people, right? They convince Black people that Republicans are these evil white racists who want to oppress you and that Democrats are going to help you.

The Government as a Replacement for the Family

I remember after Obama got elected, in the stadium where he’s doing his acceptance speech, everyone’s partying, it’s this great atmosphere, everybody’s cheering, “Oh my gosh, it’s the first Black president, this is amazing, it’s going to change everything.” And they interviewed a lady and they were like, “What are you feeling right now?” And she was like, “I ain’t going to have to pay rent no more, I’m not going to have to pay car payments no more. I’m going to get free food.” She thought, “I’m going to get free stuff. Someone’s going to take care of me. I won’t have to worry anymore. Someone’s going to provide for me.”

And it’s like, lady, you could have had a husband this whole time who would have done all of that. But what feminism did was convince women that your husband is a threat. He is dangerous. The government loves you and the government wants to take care of you, and it will replace your dad and it will replace your husband and it will provide for you and it will protect you and it will make things fair. And that’s exactly what we’ve gotten.

Feminism and Domestic Violence

There’s an article on my Substack that goes over the last 45 years of data from all of the reporting agencies on things like spousal abuse and child abuse, and it shows that actually feminism has made women far more vulnerable to domestic violence, and especially children, than ever before. And it does so by removing the men in women’s lives who have the most vested interest in their care and protection — your dad and your husband.

Statistically, the safest place for a woman is with her husband, and the safest place for children is with their both married parents, their biological father. And anytime you break that up, children are at more risk for abuse and women are at greater risk for abuse. The highest domestic violence rates are among cohabitating women, like you live with your boyfriend, or in lesbian relationships.

And the article breaks down how, if husbands were the threat, if having a husband was the problem and that’s the thing that makes you vulnerable to abuse, we should have seen some change in the rates going the other direction since no-fault divorce. Women don’t have to stay in marriages anymore. They don’t have to get married anymore. They don’t have to rely on a man anymore. We should have seen domestic violence rates drop off for those groups, and we should see more abuse in the trapped-in-marriage groups, and we don’t. It’s actually the opposite.

So women who are Christian and they’re married and they’re married young have the highest satisfaction rates and the lowest domestic violence rates. You live with your boyfriend, you’re at 40% higher risk overall for some type of abuse or violence.

JACK NEEL: So the less people get married, the more domestic violence, essentially. There’s like a high correlation there.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: Something I want to ask about that’s very interesting that you noted was, is it your belief that women were more conservative than men at a certain point in history?

Women Were Once More Conservative Than Men

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, definitely. And you can actually go back and see this. In the 19th century, women were overwhelmingly more conservative than men were. They were less likely to support some of the really progressive social reforms. They were very pro-marriage, they were very pro-family. They felt like that was their sphere. They felt like they had the most influence and the most purpose there. And they were very, very much against crime. They were in favor of stricter punishments for criminals, things like that. They were against things like welfare. They were against things like normalizing out-of-wedlock births and stuff like that.

And I always say that we have something I call the sisterhood, and this is the collective hive mind of women, and this is kind of how our brains work. Back in the day before feminism, when marriage was the order of the day and patriarchy was the order of the day throughout all of history, women knew that men — this is before we had paternity testing — men want to marry a woman that they know the child’s going to be theirs. To the extent that a man can assure paternity, that’s a good thing for him, and he’s going to look for that. And that’s why chastity and virginity were always a very highly prized thing, because it was the best way to make sure that the kids you’re raising are your kids.

The Sisterhood and Chastity

And so women would say to each other, “Look, ladies, if a bunch of you are going off and giving away the milk for free, nobody’s going to buy the cows, okay? If a bunch of you are going off and having all this sex and fornicating outside of marriage, all the guys go do that, and it ruins it kind of for all of us. Whereas if we all kind of hold out and say, ‘You don’t get any of that until you’re married. If you want that, you got to marry me, you got to provide for me, you got to protect me,’ that’s how we get the best deal collectively.”

So that’s why slut shaming was like the historical norm, right? Women were the worst slut shamers. Women were the ones who looked down on prostitution and thought — they wouldn’t even look at prostitutes if they crossed them in the street. They’d be like, “Ugh, can’t even look at her.” It was like this big shameful thing. And women were the ones that policed that. The sisterhood used to enforce chastity because it protected all women and got us the best deal in marriage, just to put it bluntly.

JACK NEEL: It seems like women would really just complain or shame other women or men on any kind of moral degradation behavior.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: And that men would be responsible for enforcing it, I guess.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, enforcing it.

JACK NEEL: A woman’s like, “Hey, you guys really shouldn’t be drinking all the time. Can we make this prohibition thing illegal?” But why do you think men — I mean, it would have to make sense to me that men are better at solving it and women are better at identifying what the problems are. Is that your view?

The Sisterhood Reversed: Feminism’s Pressure on Women

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. And so what has happened since feminism is now the sisterhood does the opposite. Now the sisterhood is like, “Hey, you’re trying to take away women’s rights. We should be able to party like men. And what does it matter if we have high body counts? And why can’t I ride the carousel all through college and then wait until I’m 30 until I’m ready to settle down? Don’t you shame me for that.” And, “You go, girl, you let her do what she wants to do. Who are you to tell her how she lives her life?”

So now the sisterhood, if you’re like a young lady and you’re a virgin and you want to start a family instead of go to college, your female friend circle will pressure you not to do that. They’ll pressure you and say, “You’re going to just not go to college? You need to go to college. You’ve got to have an education. You’ve got to get a good job. And you’ve got to live a little. You’ve got to experience different men before you know what you like. You have to have fun and be young and have your hot girl summer, because if you just get married to one guy and that’s the person you ever sleep with, you’re going to regret that. You’re going to look around at all the other options and you’re going to have FOMO. You’re going to be afraid that you’re missing out.”

So now the sisterhood does the opposite. Like, every single pop star, every single female singer — Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Katy Perry, all of the popular pop stars of the last 20, 30 years — Madonna would be like the first big one — have encouraged women to be empowered by promiscuity. It’s cool to be promiscuous. You get notches on your belt just like the guys. That’s cool. You do what you want and you get out there and experience life. It’s the opposite now.

So now girls who are virgins are shamed. Now girls who are like, “I really just want to become a mother” — it’s like, the amount of times I’ve been called a baby factory, or, “You never did anything but pop out babies.” Like this denigration of motherhood, this “ew, gross crotch goblins” — the condescending, disgusting names they have for children and the way that we talk about motherhood now. “Oh, you’re just mad because you were never able to do anything with your life but pop out kids.” It’s flipped so much.

JACK NEEL: Right.

Revering Motherhood: Then and Now

RACHEL WILSON: 100, 150 years ago, the woman in town who got married at 20 and had 7 children and ran her household well and was well-behaved and not drunk, and was modest and sensible and wise — the wise matrons of society, those were the women that we used to hold up and revere.

Like, that’s how I thought of my grandma, who’s 100, right? She really has it together. She’s got good control of herself. She’s very measured in what she does. She’s very responsible. You can always count on Grandma. She’s going to have it handled. She’s going to take care of her responsibilities. If you need good advice, she’s there. My aunt passed away at a young age at 34 and left two little kids behind. My grandma helped raise them. She was completely dependable. It was like having a solid rock of a person in your life.

And those were the women that we used to really revere and look up to. And now it’s like, “Oh, she’s boring and she’s just following the rules. She’s not a rebellious, wild, strong, independent woman who does what she wants.” That’s the thing we’re supposed to do now. It’s empowering to start an OnlyFans at 18 and get your bag, even if you’ve got to show everybody the insides of your body. You get your bag and you get fame and you get attention, and that’s winning now. That’s what we hold up as winning for a woman.

Taylor Swift, Witchcraft, and the Power of Mass Influence

JACK NEEL: As far as modern feminism goes, in the examples of celebrities, do you think Taylor Swift is practicing witchcraft on stage? And do you think Taylor Swift is doing spells in her songs?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s a lot of stuff like either her concerts or some of the Super Bowl performances — like Beyoncé had one several years back that was — there was all this online stuff about the satanic imagery and spellcrafting and things like that.

Maybe. I don’t know. I tend to think it’s less that she is sitting there planning a witchcraft ritual than it is that the people who do marketing and concert organizations at these really high levels, they really know how to harness crowd energy and how to manipulate emotions and make people like diehard rabid fans. Whenever you’ve got a huge stadium filled with people, everybody’s sharing energy. It’s like this big energy exchange where emotions are heightened and things like that. So even if it’s not intentional, it could in effect be accomplishing something similar to that.

If you’ve ever seen concert footage of the Beatles or Michael Jackson and girls just sobbing and crying and fainting — people get really emotional at these big concerts, especially if it’s somebody that they kind of idolize and they’ve listened to all their music for hundreds of hours. And I think that concert promoters know how to kind of take all of that and harness it and make an experience that leaves an imprint on people and makes the messaging and the marketing stronger.

But would I say it’s out of the realm of possibility for her or somebody like her to be doing that? No, definitely not. I mean, there was a lot of manufactured music coming out in the ’60s and ’70s, like the Beatles and the Monkees and stuff like that, where things were very artificial and astroturfed and not organic at all. And there’s a lot of insider stuff that goes on in the music industry. We kind of know some things that went on with Diddy and Diddy parties and stuff like that. So anytime there’s a lot of power and money at stake, there’s going to be people in those circles doing those kinds of things.

Even in politics, you have people like Marina Abramović, who’s kind of like an artsy performer, but she also is actually doing witchcraft. So to me, I always say it doesn’t matter if you believe it, it matters if they believe it, and it matters if the people watching and participating are buying into it and believing it. So whether —

JACK NEEL: Do you believe it?

RACHEL WILSON: I believe that it has the effect, yes. So even if you go to a Taylor Swift concert, you don’t have to believe in witchcraft. You don’t have to be consciously participating in an occult ritual or something. If you’re there and you’re totally bought in and you’re soaked up in the experience and you’re fully buying into whatever it is that’s going on, you could be unwittingly participating in something like that. So I don’t —

JACK NEEL: Do you believe it actually has an effect spiritually?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, definitely. I think one thing that some of the occult religions do kind of have an inherent understanding of is that human beings are really powerful and our emotions are really powerful. And to some extent, we create the reality around us. We have an effect, right? There’s like a butterfly effect. You and I doing this podcast right now is probably going to change the minds of people and maybe how they perceive the world, which changes the way that they act or the decisions that they make.

So mass media is an extremely powerful tool for this. And that’s where you get government projects like MKUltra studying the effect of, if we repeatedly send this messaging to someone’s brain, or if we enhance it with psychedelics or binaural beats or different things — even like sexual activity — can we change and manipulate the human mind? Can we get people to completely change what they’re thinking or how they feel about something? Maybe even change someone’s sexual orientation or their political persuasion through these different means.

And mass media communications is huge. I mean, just look at the change in people since social media. I had the benefit of growing up for 24 years of my life without any internet. I did not have at-home internet or a phone that had internet until I was 24. I grew up in a rural area, so it existed, I just didn’t have it till I was 24. And then now I’ve spent the last 22 years of my life with internet. Now I’m on it all the time, more than I’d like to be. And the effect it has on you is undeniable. And it can be used for good and it can be used for bad.

I mean, there’s some ways that I think the internet is a fantastic, amazing tool. You see things like the rise of Orthodoxy in America right now, which we didn’t have access to or barely even know about because it was kind of sectioned off into the East, and the Christian West was dominated by Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Now because of the internet, we have access to everything, so a lot of people are converting.

But then on the other hand, you’ve got OnlyFans and you’ve got dating apps and the damage that are done by those things. Everybody’s kind of looking at it going, “What do we do about this?” What do we do about the fact that now a girl in rural Ohio can get flown out to Dubai by a rich guy and Lord knows what they’re doing? And what effect does that have on her choosing a normal guy to marry? So we’re in uncharted waters as far as the internet, social media, and mass communication and the effect that it has on people.

MKUltra, Mass Radicalization, and the Power of Propaganda

JACK NEEL: But people assume that MKUltra was only effective because it was like a one-on-one thing, maybe done in a lab. But would you guess, based on what you know about propaganda, that something like that is actually more effective if it’s distributed among lots and lots of people — everyone you’re interacting with has certain beliefs?

RACHEL WILSON: Absolutely. That was actually the point of it. So the point of the MKUltra experiments was not, “What can we do to one person in a padded cell when we have total control?” It was to isolate the variables to figure out what’s most effective, how these things affect people, and then apply it en masse to the public.

So you no longer need to have subliminal messaging. You don’t have to find one person and radicalize that one person until they assassinate a president for you or something like that. It could be very easy for a person who is already mentally and emotionally vulnerable to get radicalized into something like transgenderism through gaming culture, through Discord, through online discourse with people — that, “No, those conservatives are evil and bad and they’re just trying to do bad things.” And you can radicalize a person to get them to do crazy things like try to assassinate Donald Trump, try to assassinate Charlie Kirk.

There is no longer a need to isolate an individual and target them. You can kind of mass target people. The majority of mass shooters for the last year have been transgender people who were convinced that they need to take out this evil conservative or these evil Christians or somebody like that because they’re oppressing transgenders. “Donald Trump is going to put all the transgender people in prison or something.” And they believe these really radical things.

My husband and I go on TikTok and kind of argue with some of these really radicalized people about it. And the things they believe would blow your mind. They believe the most insane things that there’s no evidence for, there’s no basis for. And to them, it’s religious dogma. They think that MAGA is there to create a Handmaid’s Tale or something like that.

I just had a lady last night on TikTok absolutely lose her mind on me and call me every horrible name in the book while also accusing me of being a victim and being brainwashed. So I don’t know how I can be the victim and the oppressor at the same time, but I guess I’m special. But she just truly believed that my purpose being here is to take things away from women, to enslave them, and that I’m a traitor to my sex, and that I want all women subjugated, and I want them under Christian Sharia law or something like that.

So mass communication is extremely effective. Everybody believed the Russiagate stuff, everybody believed the COVID stuff, and then we find out none of that was true, and then we just move on like it never happened. Things get memory-holed almost instantly now because of the speed of the internet and the way that information gets disseminated so fast. It’s really interesting and it’s kind of terrifying. And now we’re going to add AI to that, and it’s like all bets are off at this point.

The Gnostic and Luciferian Roots of Feminism

JACK NEEL: For people listening to this interview who maybe have an idea that feminism is literally satanic in origins, you’ve claimed that the religion these people who— like, it’s not worshiping Lucifer, it’s not witchcraft. Like, it all stems from this idea of Gnosticism. Can you explain what that is and why Gnosticism is the true religion of feminists?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, I think that there are Gnostic roots to all of this. I think there are definitely Luciferian, actual Luciferian roots too, and they kind of— they have a lot of overlap. So Gnosticism is kind of this idea that this physical world is bad, life is suffering, that you’re trapped in this fleshy mortal prison. And from that, a lot of weird ideas come out of that, like antinatalism, feminism, socialism, the idea that the way things are is inherently bad and wrong, and that we must overcome all of that.

And you see that thread in a lot of feminist writing, like Alexandra Kollontai in Russia wrote extensively about how once we conquer capitalism and we have full true communism, the final frontier will be biology, overcoming our biology. Margaret Fuller in America in the 1840s was writing about gender as a spectrum and that nobody’s fully male or female, man or woman, and that if we ever want to achieve unity in the one, which is like this transcendental kind of proto-New Age idea, which is actually very ancient. These always go back to ancient beliefs, right? They always have ancient roots.

JACK NEEL: Is that when people hear universal consciousness?

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, something— yeah, like universal consciousness, Christ consciousness, all of the New Age stuff that we’re supposed to— it’s like a monist belief that we have to return to the one.

JACK NEEL: To the monad.

RACHEL WILSON: To the monad, that we’re all like, we’re God and we forgot that we’re God and we have to remember and go back and like, that the divide between the sexes is one of the things preventing peace. And this is another reason why you see overlap with feminism and ecoterrorism, especially in the ’70s, and goddess worship being a big thing, and the witchcraft stuff being the next logical spiritual place to go from feminism.

In the ’70s, we had lots of radical feminists— these were the ones that built gender studies in the universities— talking at length about how maleness is inherently destructive and violent, and femaleness is inherently productive and peaceful and kind. That women are like Mother Earth, we give birth, we nurture, we’re peaceful. I don’t believe any of that, by the way. And that men are only here to like eat other animals, destroy things, cause war, rape, destroy. And that the only way to overcome that is you get rid of sex and gender altogether and everybody becomes like a non-binary blob. You reduce men’s testosterone, you put women in masculine activities and create more of a male-mindedness, but retaining all of those Mother Earth peaceful qualities, supposedly.

Lucifer as Liberator: The Feminist Connection

So the Gnostic stuff is kind of— it’s that underlying idea. And it’s the same thing with the Luciferianism. So people don’t know this, but a lot of the feminists in the 19th century actually openly declared Lucifer as their liberator, their god. And you don’t have to ask me, you can read a wonderful huge PhD thesis by a guy named Per Faxneld, who is a European scholar who himself is a Satanist. I’ve actually talked to him a little bit on Instagram because it’s kind of funny that we came to the same conclusions about how things went, but of course, me from a Christian perspective and him from an actual Luciferian perspective. He would see it as good, I would see it as bad, but it’s interesting that we agree on how it went down and what really happened.

So Lucifer was the one who wanted to liberate Eve in the garden. He was the one that wanted her to be like a god and, you know, don’t obey God the Father, obey Adam, you know, go your own way and do your own thing. And that’s why they saw Lucifer as a liberator. In fact, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, best friend of Susan B. Anthony, one of the giants of the suffrage movement, wrote a book called The Woman’s Bible in 1895 with 14 other feminists, some of whom were female pastors.

So if you think that’s new, I hate to break it to you, but that’s also not new. There were openly lesbian female pastors during the Second Great Awakening in the 1800s. This is how liberal the ethos was, and people don’t know that. They think that everybody must have been like really conservative, but no, like the feminist stuff was extremely progressive. It was very socialist. It was very progressive for its time. So these were women who started their own churches as open lesbians and called themselves pastors, and they rewrote the Bible from a feminist perspective.

In the preface, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who most people would assume was like a conservative Christian lady from the 1800s, said that she doesn’t believe God ever spoke to anyone. She doesn’t believe the Bible was divinely inspired. And if she could get rid of the Bible and Christianity altogether, wipe it from the face of the earth, that would be the best thing. But she said it’s too influential. It’s the most widely published and most influential book on the planet. It’s probably not going away. So the second best thing we can do is subvert it, is subvert Christianity and get people to understand that Christianity was designed to oppress women. It was written by bad men who wanted to keep their boot on the neck of women. And she also says in some of her memoirs that we’re never going to get women to go along with this unless we can convince them that men are actually dangerous. You got to be worried about your husband.

JACK NEEL: How did they rewrite it?

RACHEL WILSON: They literally went book by book through the Bible and gave their commentary. That’s why there was like 14 of them on the editorial board.

JACK NEEL: I guess the most important would be Genesis.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: Do you remember what— yes, like what was different about Genesis?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, they kind of took everything away from like the curse of Eve and stuff like that, and it’s just their commentary on it. So they’ll give you the passage and then they’ll say, clearly this was written by a man to convince women to be ashamed of their cultural station in life, and that there’s something defective in women that causes them to be weak, which that’s not the orthodox interpretation of Genesis at all. Some of this stems from Protestant misunderstanding of Genesis, at least from my view, and my book talks a bit about that.

Gnosticism as the World’s Most Popular Hidden Religion

JACK NEEL: Do you think Gnosticism is really the most popular religion on Earth and people are worshiping it without realizing it?

RACHEL WILSON: I think parts of Gnosticism would be, yes.

JACK NEEL: Like this idea that, yeah, does Satan believe God is the real God? And in that, like, be your own— like, there’s like the girl boss part of it. There’s like, just do whatever feels right. There’s like trust your intuition, all these things. And it seems like people really believe in that.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes. Well, I think that was part of the liberal enlightenment ethos. I think that Gnosticism goes really well with that. I think it’s, you know, no kings, right? Liberty, equality, fraternity. The kind of the ethos of the revolutionary period where we’re overthrowing monarchies, we want democracy and equality— why should we have all this authority? Why do you get to have authority? Why do you get to tell me what to do?

And it’s a very American thing. Like, it was actually a struggle for me in a lot of ways to write the book because it made me confront a lot of those kind of foundational Americanist beliefs that I was raised with. Now, the founding wasn’t exactly like that, but it was a revolutionary founding that we had, this idea that rugged individualism, you know, liberty above everything else, that it should be the highest value that we have. And what I’ve come to realize is that there has to be a balance with things, right? Authority isn’t inherently bad if it comes with the proper amount of accountability. You need a balance between responsibility and liberty. You need a balance between duties and rights.

And feminism tends to go to the extremes because once you start believing in some of it, your whole worldview and the way you think about everything changes. And I think that’s where you can get into Gnosticism. And I think that’s where you get not just Gnosticism, but if you take the liberty stuff to its end conclusion, you end up with like LaVeyan Satanism, which says, I am my own God, there is no authority but me, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, you know, do what you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

I just debated a woman who claimed to be a conservative who formerly worked for TPUSA, and she said that to me in the debate. And I kept telling her, you’re not a conservative, you’re definitely a classical liberal or a libertarian. And she’s like, yeah, I think people should be able to do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. The only conservative position she had was she was against abortion, but she was pro-gay marriage. She was pro— we got to keep prostitution legal because it’s free speech, these sort of things.

The Collapse of the Natural Order

So it’s like, if you take some of these ideas to their extreme, you end up with Luciferianism, you end up with Gnosticism, this idea that I’m God, God’s in me, why should I have a boss, who gets to tell me what to do, why should I follow order, and that the ultimate self-expression is to buck all authority except yourself. But what you end up with there, almost always, every time, ends up destroying you.

If you think about a lot of these revolutionary periods where you had these really revolutionary groups or revolutionary cults that wanted to break away and completely change society— I write about a bunch of them in my book— this was part and parcel of feminism too in the 19th century. There were all these breakaway utopian cults that were socialist, and almost all of them experimented with like gender swapping and extreme forms of feminism, like having the men raise the children while the women tried to go grow crops and things like this, having the women cut their hair short and wear pants. And none of them lasted more than a handful of years.

It just doesn’t work when you try to take the natural order that I would say God created and invert it, which is what Satanism is, which is what Luciferianism is, which is why feminists love Luciferianism. When you try to invert the natural order, you end up with no one’s having babies, society doesn’t work anymore, men and women hate each other, the economy is collapsing.

The Birth Rate Crisis

We’re on the precipice of this massive birth rate collapse. South Korea is at 0.7 children per woman. The average South Korean person is not replacing themselves. There’s not going to be a South Korea in 100 years if something doesn’t drastically change. And almost every country is following suit. And this is what no one wants to talk about.

It’s deeply unpopular, and I get in trouble for saying it every time, but the number one correlate worldwide, regardless of culture, religion, financial status, to falling birth rates is women’s access to higher education and career. If you tell women, focus your whole life on education and career and put family on the back burner, if you even do it at all, you don’t replace yourself as a population.

And what happens then is first you have to resort to mass immigration. You got to take people from other countries because you don’t have enough labor. You got labor shortages and your supply chain starts breaking down. We have problems with that still with supply chains ever since COVID. They’ve never totally recovered because nobody has enough people, nobody has enough infrastructure building. So you first end up with mass immigration. When you run out of other people to borrow from other countries, things just start collapsing. Things just start decaying. Things just stop working. Roads aren’t getting fixed. Bridges aren’t being repaired. Houses aren’t being built. We have a housing crisis. They keep saying we need to build homes. There’s not enough builders.

And it’s going to get worse. That’s why you’re seeing places like Japan and Canada with euthanization programs, where they’re offering incentives for people to delete themselves because you’re old and we don’t have enough young people to take care of the old or the sick or people with mental problems. So we’re going to offer you an incentive to just die. And you’re going to end up with more and more of that.

So we end up in this very antinatalist, anti-human death cult that we’re in now where it’s like having children is gross and bad. Grandma’s no longer of use to anyone, so let’s just get rid of her. Oh, you have cancer or depression? You should probably just kill yourself. When I say I think it’s great for women to be mothers and have children, I get bashed and trashed and shamed as trying to control women or trying to force things on them. It becomes very anti-human, which is Luciferian, right?

The Hegelian Dialectic: Feminism and Its Synthesis

JACK NEEL: I want to ask. There’s some theory called like, what is it? Hegelian dialectic, something like that. And it’s like thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis. So if you imagine, well, there’s two of these. So there’s feminism, there’s your antithetical to it. I’m curious what your view is that could be the synthesis of like your message. Like if everyone heard it, like what could be the synthesis? Like, I haven’t really thought about that. And then there’s also like Gnosticism versus Orthodoxy, or Gnosticism versus Christianity maybe. And like, where does that end up? Like, yeah, everyone heard about Gnosticism, let’s say, because that’s, like, I’m just curious, like, the effects of all these things from your view. Like, where’s the middle ground?

RACHEL WILSON: Well, that’s what this is, right? The reason we’re here and the reason I’m talking about this or writing books at all is because everything is Battle of Worldviews. Essentially, all that matters is what you believe. Your worldview is you. That’s what shapes you. That’s how you get up every day and make decisions. That’s how you decide what you’re going to do, where you’re going to go in life, where you’re going to direct your energy and your talents to. Worldviews are the most important thing.

So we’ve established what this feminist worldview is and what it looks like, and that it’s the dominant thinking for people, especially in the West, certainly in America. If you even question it, you get attacked. And I’m out here with this alternative messaging, and what I want people to hear, what the alternative messaging is, is that I didn’t have a me when I was 20 years old.

When I was 20 years old and I really felt pulled towards, I want to be a wife, I want to be like a good wife to someone and have the family that got, like, ripped away from me as a kid. I want to fix that and rebuild it in my own life and not do that same mistake in my life. And I want to have kids. I love having kids. I didn’t know I was going to love being a mom until I was one. And then once I was, I was like, this is the best thing ever. Like, I can’t imagine anything that would ever be more important or cooler than this.

I love having this whole new person, helping them shape their life and their world, and having a bigger purpose than me. I’m not getting up every day just to, like, do stuff for myself. I’m getting up every day because everything I do matters. I’m someone’s mom. I’m someone’s wife. I’m really important. What I do each day affects all these people around me. Everybody in my community, everyone at my church parish is affected by what I get up and do every day and the decisions that I make. And it gave me purpose, and it gave me meaning, and it helped me get through some of the most unimaginable tragedies that you’d ever have to go through in life.

Feminism, Happiness, and the Destruction of Community

So I think that feminism tells you the opposite of that. It tells you all that matters is if you’re happy, and that happiness is the metric that tells you if you’re on the right track or not. And the problem with that is that life essentially has suffering. It’s an entailment of being alive. You’re going to suffer. You’re going to go through hard times. Bad things are going to happen. And those are the things that shape you and your purpose in your life.

And if you think that the only thing that matters is you and your feelings and your happiness, you’re going to destroy yourself. You’re going to destroy everyone around you. You’re going to end up breaking up your family for petty reasons. You’re going to end up choosing a path that at the end of it you have no one and nothing around you. And you’re going to be one of these women that’s on TikTok crying and going, “I’m 45 and I’m alone and all I have is my cat and my crappy job that I don’t even like anymore, and I don’t know how I got here.”

And then on a societal scale, right? No one’s mothering, no one’s parenting. What we have lost by pushing women into the workforce, we don’t have community. The loneliness epidemic is because women are all in cubicles, women are all at work, women are all at a job making money for corporations and paying taxes. So if Uncle Joe gets sick, no one’s there to check on him and bring him some hot soup. If the child is sick, he has to get taken care of by someone else because mom’s at work.

There is no sense of community. There is no elder care. When people get old, they go to a nursing home and you’re getting taken care of by Nigerian immigrants who just got here yesterday and are being paid $12 an hour to change your diaper instead of, your daughter or your granddaughter or your children all taking turns and helping and taking care of their parents the way that we always have.

We don’t have support for moms at all. So if you’re like me and you want to have children, you don’t have anyone to help you. You don’t have a community to raise your child with anymore because all the other women are at work, which is why it’s so hard. And that’s another reason women don’t want to have children. You used to be raising your kids with your sisters, with your cousins, with your aunt and your mom and your grandma and your neighbors. All the women were at home. All the women were raising kids, and they helped each other, and they did it together. And you had this sense of community and the sense of unity, and you had these bonds, and it’s all gone. It’s just all dissolved, and it’s all gone, and we’re all suffering for it.

So feminism telling women what matters is you and your happiness right now, your emotional state right now should direct your life— terrible advice. And it makes women miserable. It makes them destroy themselves in their lives and the people around them, and they don’t even know how they got there because they’re just doing what they’ve heard they should do.

Going Back to Values, Not Back in Time

So I would say if anybody’s going to— the synthesis of like these two worldviews and like what I think we should do, I think it’s not about going back in time. Everybody goes, “Oh, we’re not going back to the 1800s, Rachel.” I know, I know. It’s a different world. We have technology, things are different. It’s not going to look the same, but we can go back to the values and the worldviews and the type of thinking that helped us hold families together, that gave us meaning, that helped us create things that lasted into the future.

We don’t build cathedrals that take 400 years to build anymore. We don’t do things now with the intention that this is going to not be finished until my grandchild is around. Everything’s in short cycles, even our government, 4-year cycles. So you can’t plan ahead, you can’t do long-term thinking, and that’s why nothing works.

So I think that what we need to do is go back to valuing family, motherhood, unity within the family, men and women working together in their proper natural roles with each other. Yes, it requires some trust. Men and women have to be able to trust each other. We’re going to have to be able to behave in a way that we can trust each other, and that’s hard. And it can’t be all about you.

We don’t want communism where there is no individual, and we don’t want this like radical libertarianism where it’s only the individual. We need families and communities again. We need long-term thinking in order for things to be cohesive, in order for things to work. And you can’t have that with feminism. It’s got to go.

And I think that ultimately it will. I think that in the future, feminism will be looked back on— and it might take centuries, I don’t know how long it’ll take— but someday they’ll look back and go, “Wow, that feminism stuff was crazy, that was a terrible experiment.” And it’ll get thrown into the dustbin of history because it’s not sustainable. The birth rates and everything going the way it’s going, there’s going to be hard times ahead.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there’s no such thing as a feminist in a disaster area, right? If there’s a hurricane or there’s floodwaters or there’s a war zone, nobody’s a feminist. Suddenly everybody reverts right back to traditional gender roles. The men are the ones that come in and rescue you from the floodwaters or the building burning, and the women are the ones bandaging up people and trying to cook food and feed people and things like that.

Women, the Draft, and True Equality

JACK NEEL: So do you think Gen Z women will be drafted for Iran? It would be the first draft where I think they qualify.

RACHEL WILSON: I think one of the best things we could do to fix this problem is draft women, and here’s why. Women in the military, as soon as they get called up for active duty, there’s this phenomenon. The first thing they do is get pregnant, and then they can’t be called into battle, right? So I think if we did draft women, if we said, okay, feminists, fair, you guys want equality, because one of the big arguments out there right now, popularized by people like my husband or Brian Atlas, is, hey, women don’t have to sign up for the draft and men do. We could be called into battle at any time and you guys can’t, so why should you have equal political say? And I think we should say, okay, hey, if you want to vote, sign up for the draft. And I think if we just had that requirement, a whole lot of women would go, I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m that passionate about voting. Maybe I’m not.

JACK NEEL: And it’s really interesting, like, if you made all women have to sign up for the draft but you don’t have to get drafted if you have a kid, I wonder how many would have kids, genuinely.

RACHEL WILSON: So I always say that I don’t believe women when they say they want true equality. And the reason I don’t believe that is because 90% of all infrastructure jobs, which are usually difficult, dirty, and dangerous jobs, are still held by men. Women have had 100 years to decide that they want to be trash collectors, wastewater treatment managers, lumberjacks working on oil rigs, power linemen, things like this, roofing— stuff that you can die in your job. Men still overwhelmingly die on the job at far higher rates than women.

We still do most of the same jobs that we did 100 years ago. We basically just swapped farm labor for HR work, but we’re still mostly just secretaries, nurses, early childhood educators, retail workers, line cooks, waitresses, things like that. So when women want to take on jobs that they could die in, that are going to break their bodies down at a fast rate, they’re going to find out right away. Like, I’ll have people insist to me women can be roofers. And I’m like, where’s all the female-owned, female-only roofing companies? They tried to do that in England, and I think it survived a couple of years and then it went out of business, right?

What Would True Equality Actually Look Like?

JACK NEEL: Yeah. What would society look like if we reached true equality? Like, can you paint a picture of like what a woman’s life would look like?

RACHEL WILSON: Oh, it would be horrible. If women had to equally really do what men have to do, if they had the same exact standards where you couldn’t get by at all, where the fact that you’re pretty or that men might want to sleep with you or marry you or have children with you, if that just was out of the equation. There’s actually a woman who tried to do this. She dressed as a man and lived like a man for like a year, and it was so awful she quit and then ended up very tragically committing suicide. But she said, “Life is horrible for men, it’s so bad for men, I had no idea.”

If women had to— let’s say 50% of garbage men had to be women now, then I would take feminism a lot more seriously. If you had to get up at 4 in the morning, get on the back of a garbage truck— you’ve seen the guys where they hold on to the thing and they gotta stop and pick up the trash, throw it in the back— they’re dealing with dirty things, sharp things, dangerous things, they’re using their physical strength to hold onto the back of the truck all day and hoist things that are 30 to 50 pounds up over their heads into a truck. If they had to do farm labor, if they had to do things like underwater welding that only men do—

JACK NEEL: Work on oil rigs, perhaps.

Raising Daughters in a Fallen World

RACHEL WILSON: Yes, and everybody’s probably seen the videos of men doing these things. My husband used to have a job in food factories as a robotics mechanic where he’d have to go down into really tight, dangerous spaces where he had to wear a gas mask, and if there was a leak or anything, he could die from inhaling ammonia. He saw a guy get all of his flesh burned off his entire lower arm, saw a guy cut his hand off on a lathe once, having to drive people to the ER bleeding and hoping that they don’t die as part of your job.

Versus women who still— I’m not saying there aren’t some important things women do. Of course, we want nurses, and we like when we have women teachers and things like that. And women have always done those jobs. That’s fine. But they’re not doing the really difficult, dirty, dangerous work that men do. And if they had true equality and had to do that, I think they would all pretty much immediately go back in the kitchen. It’s like that meme where World War III starts and suddenly the feminists are all washing dishes in the kitchen.

Because yeah, that’s what we see. When female soldiers get called to action, they end up pregnant immediately. We just don’t see women clamoring for equality in those jobs. And really what they want is power, opportunity, and self-enrichment. Fine, that’s fair. But again, we men don’t have power without all this responsibility, and that’s what women always miss. They don’t realize that, yes, maybe men have some advantage, maybe they have some power, maybe they’re bigger and stronger, so they’re always going to have the monopoly on force. But the responsibility and the difficulty that goes along with those things, you probably don’t actually want that. And a lot of women will say they do until they have to experience it, and then they’re like, okay, never mind.

So I think it’d be great if we said, okay, if you want to be equal, then you got to sign up for the draft, and we’re going to start recruiting women straight out of high school for frontline combat in the military. We’re going to recruit them for the dirty, dangerous, and difficult jobs. We want 50% representation for women in all of the top 20 jobs where men are dying on the job. We want that to be 50% women. Hope you make it. Good luck to you.

If there was something like that, like a lottery where, say you’re a senior in high school and there’s all these college things you can do and there’s all these jobs you can do, and we just do it as a lottery — you just draw a random number and that’s the job that you get — and women had equal representation in men’s jobs, feminism would end tomorrow. It would be over tomorrow. They would demand that we end feminism because they would say, “This is not safe, this is horrible, look what you’re doing, women can’t do this.”

And that’s all of the anti-suffragist women made these arguments in the 1800s. They said, “Look, the purpose of government is to protect property and people. We’re women. We can’t do that. We can’t protect national borders. We can’t defend people. If someone’s being violently assaulted, you don’t call a woman to come save you. You call a policeman. If your house is on fire, you call the firemen.”

And we used to have things like compulsory fire brigade service to vote. There used to be all these restrictions on voting, even for men, where if men weren’t paying a poll tax or if they couldn’t pass a civics test or a religious test in some places, or if they weren’t a certain age or didn’t own property or didn’t do some kind of civil service, they couldn’t vote either. And I think it’d be good if we went back to something more merit-based rather than this idea that everyone deserves — and that word “deserve” drives me nuts. Everybody deserves just because they exist.

And women will tell you all day — you ask a woman, “What do you think women deserve?” And they’ll tell you, “I think they deserve freedom and equality, and they should have this, and they should have that, and they should be able to do whatever they want.” You say, “Okay.” And I’ve asked this question: “What duties do women have?” And they go, “What do you mean?” They’ve never thought of that. They don’t even understand the question. Does a woman have a duty to anyone or anything outside herself? And they’ll just sit there and look at you gobsmacked like, “Well, I don’t know.” And I haven’t gotten a good answer yet.

So I think that, sure, you have rights, but you have duties. And if you have rights with no duties, then that’s just entitlement.

The Hardest Part of Raising Girls Today

JACK NEEL: Rachel, your daughters are growing up in a world where the most popular career choices for young women are things like social media, OnlyFans creator, and teenage girls are being recruited into witchcraft on WitchTok, TikTok. As a mother of 4 daughters, what is the hardest part of raising girls in 2026?

RACHEL WILSON: The internet. Just keeping them off of it for as long as possible. And I think my husband has said this publicly too — when they were younger, we didn’t know how bad it was because we are from a different generation. We didn’t know some of the things that go on online and stuff like that. And if we had to go back and do it over, we would have kept them off of phones and social media even more than we did. We thought we were doing enough, but looking back, we would have cracked down on that even more.

And my older daughters actually agree. My older ones will say, “Mom, you cannot let the younger ones on this stuff. You got to take away all these things. Don’t let them have this app. Don’t let them have that app.” And the older ones will even kind of help police the younger one because they’re like, “This is not good for you. You shouldn’t be watching any of this, and you shouldn’t be in Discord. Discord is crazy. Get off of Roblox. There’s bad stuff in there.”

So I think the hardest part is the internet. Because the orthodox interpretation of Genesis is not that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was some kind of perverted test by God or some kind of trap that God laid. It’s that as Adam and Eve grew spiritually and became more like God and learned and became wise, they would be ready to eat from the knowledge of the tree of good and evil, but that they did so at a time when they were not ready for it yet, and that’s why it corrupted them.

And it’s kind of like that with kids. The internet can be good and it can be bad. And until you’re old enough and you’ve got enough wisdom to discern those things, putting the whole world in a child’s hand and expecting them to handle that is nuts. It’s crazy.

So I think, yeah, I would definitely put way more restrictions on that. I think that if we could have as much blocking of children from internet websites as possible — if we could make it 18 and up for so many things — I would be in favor of that. I just think you can’t throw that much at a child and their brain and their limited experience and expect things not to go horribly wrong.

The Loss of a Child

JACK NEEL: You lost one of your children. What was his name?

RACHEL WILSON: Jeffrey.

JACK NEEL: He was 10.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

JACK NEEL: There’s a question I think only you can answer. What do you think God was trying to teach Mary when He took her son away?

Faith, Loss, and Marriage

RACHEL WILSON: Well, the Orthodox interpretation of why Christ died is a little bit different than the Western conception. In Western thinking, they tend to believe in something called penal substitutionary atonement, this idea that Christ took on the sin of the world and died for our sins to pay a debt to God that we couldn’t pay.

Now, if you believe Christ was God, if you’re a Trinitarian and you believe that Christ is the second person of the Godhead, this becomes a problem. Because either you’re splitting the Trinity against itself, where one person of the Trinity has to appease the other, or you end up in an Arian or in a Nestorian position where Christ must have not been fully divine, or he must have just been human or something like that.

What the Orthodox believe is that Christ died to enter Hades, and this is something called the Harrowing of Hades. It’s a doctrine that’s kind of lost in the West. So after the crucifixion and Christ’s death, he descended into Hades, and we kind of skip over that, right? I was raised Protestant. We kind of skipped over that. We just talk about the resurrection and the ascension.

But when he went into Hades, he defeated the power of death and took the keys of hell back and actually resurrected the Old Testament patriarchs. And it says right in the New Testament that when Christ resurrected and people saw him walking around, they also saw the Old Testament patriarchs resurrected with him and walking around. And I was like, how did I, in all my 40 years as a Protestant, never, never noticed that? Never heard a thing about it in church.

So that’s something that as Orthodox, we really focus on. And we have a whole chant that we do every Easter: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” And we say it over and over and over. We say it about 100 times by the time we’re done with our Pascha service. And it’s to really impress upon us the fact that we were rescued from death. Death has no power anymore over us.

Losing a Child and Finding Strength in Faith

And I think losing a child, the thing that it impressed upon me — I immediately had this bizarre sense of relief that I’m not God. Thank God, I’m not God. Thank God, I’m not in charge of who’s born, who dies, when they die, how they die. You get this sense of helplessness that kind of makes you realize you are not God and you are not equipped to make those decisions and that you have no idea.

Like, I have no idea what would have happened had that never happened and he lived, or had something turned out differently, or he had survived but been very badly injured. He was in a car accident. That’s how he passed away. So you get this sense of gratitude that God, who knows all things and can see all ends, is in charge of that and not me, because I can’t see all ends and I don’t know all things and I don’t know what everything is for. I have a limited understanding as a human being.

And when I would express that to people, they thought it was really weird. They thought it was like a really strange thing to say. But I don’t know how people get through that kind of suffering without a belief in God. I know that atheists have a lot of reasons and things that they’ll say, but I don’t believe that just because he was only alive for 10 years that his life did not matter. That’s why I still always say I’m a mother of 5, because I am.

And I don’t know what else to take from it other than that God is in charge and he is merciful and he’s loving and he’s just. And the suffering that we go through in this life, at least from an Orthodox perspective, is for the benefit of our salvation. We’re each born at a time and a place that is best suited to our salvation, and the things that happen to us, God can take the worst things and make them for good. So who knows what would have happened had that not happened?

And at the time, you’re just trying to breathe moment to moment and keep your head above water. It was like that for me for like 2 and a half years. I gained a ton of weight. I just couldn’t care about myself. The only reason I got up every day was because I had 4 other kids that really needed me.

And Andrew and I really focused on our relationship and keeping our marriage together because the statistics on that are terrifying. Like, 88% of people who lose a child divorce. It’s crazy. And I thought the only thing that could make this worse is if we divorced, or if I ended up at the bottom of a whiskey bottle like my mom and never came out. And then my other 4 kids have to raise themselves, and it’s like they lost their mother and their brother.

So I think without that sense of purpose and without my Christian worldview, I don’t know that I would have gotten up every day and kept going. I don’t know that I would have had this sense that because I’m here and I’m still alive, God has something for me and there’s work to be done, and I need to get up and do that regardless of how bad it is and how bad I feel. If you don’t have that, I might’ve just quit. I might’ve just given up because it was that bad.

I mean, anybody who’s lost a child will tell you, you can’t even explain it to somebody, what it does to you and how it changes you and changes your view. But it gave me something to fight for. It was like, I’m still here for something and he’s not. And so I have to do right by myself. My son, by doing the absolute best I can with whatever time I have left here. Like, I owe it to him, and he wouldn’t want me to quit. He wouldn’t want me to give up.

Andrew’s Role in Getting Through the Grief

JACK NEEL: Do you remember at that time, like, if there’s something Andrew would tell you to kind of give you comfort, or if there was something — like, did you feel like he was comforting you? Did you feel like you were comforting him? Like, was it kind of like a mutual thing? Like, when you looked to him and asked him, like, I can’t deal with this, this is so hard — do you remember what he was saying to you at the time?

RACHEL WILSON: A lot of it was more unspoken things. And that’s the only time I’ve ever seen that man actually just cry. I mean, cry like a baby cry, was when that happened. He’s a very stoic guy and he’s very in control of his emotions.

But he’s Jeffrey’s stepdad, but he had been there since he was 2 years old and they had a great bond and they were really close. And I think it was more just like the two of us — we started this when we decided, okay, we’re going to get married and we’re going to have a family, and we’re either all in or we’re not. Like, we knew it wasn’t going to work if we weren’t all in, and this was just us reaffirming to each other — this is the kind of thing where we need to be all in. There is no room for giving up, or retreating from each other, or avoiding each other. So I think we just doubled down.

Like, I always say, I think of him first. I put him first in everything, and I take care of him first, and he does the same thing for me. There are wild people on the internet that think that Andrew’s abusive to me. It couldn’t be any further from the truth. For one thing, I was in an abusive marriage before him, and when he met me, I still had a restraining order. It had gotten very violent. It was very dangerous. The guy was still coming around, and the first thing he did was take me to a shooting range and teach me how to shoot so that I could defend myself. He said, just the fact that you have this and know how to use it will get rid of these types of guys. And he was right about that.

So I ended up becoming a firearms instructor and teaching other women how to shoot and use pistols for self-defense and get concealed carry licenses and things like that. So he started off, definitely, as the kind of guy who’s going to shield me from abuse and help me protect myself rather than ever abuse or take advantage of me. He’s always been very protective of me, and he’s always put me first.

And when Jeff passed away, he just doubled down on that. He took care of things. Like, I’ll never be able to repay him for what he did for me. Even the night that we found out, him calling people to tell them the news, him setting up funeral arrangements, him taking care of things like that because he knew I was just in no shape to do it. I was just in total shell shock. So he just stepped in and did those things regardless of even what he was going through. He was just like, I have to do this because she can’t do it.

And we just doubled down on making sure that we were taking care of each other because I think both of us had no sense of giving a s* about ourselves for those first couple years. You just, you’re so depressed, you don’t care about yourself. You’re like, I just, I don’t care. Like, I can get up and brush my teeth and put on clothes, and that’s about all I can manage.

But I do care about him, and I do love him, so I took care of him. And same thing for him. He was like, well, I don’t really feel like I want to keep going right now, but she needs me, so I’m going to be there for her, and I’m going to do what I can to make today a little bit better for her, or make it a little less terrible. So it really just helped us relearn taking care of each other and putting each other first.

The Orthodox Conception of Marriage

And I think that that’s what those trials are for. The Orthodox conception of marriage is that you are dying to your own will. It’s a sacrament for us. It’s not just a living arrangement. It’s not just a sharing of household duties. It’s not just for procreation. The Orthodox conception of marriage is that it’s teaching you how to die to your own will for the sake of someone else, like Christ did for us — to get back to your question. Like God does for us.

And that if we can die to our own will for the sake of our spouse and their salvation, we are doing the same thing with God. We are aligning our will with God. We are forsaking ourselves for the love of someone else, and that’s so much greater. And what you get in return for that is you get another person who’s doing that for you. And then it’s like marriage becomes easy. I’m not saying you don’t ever fight. I’m not saying you don’t ever go through hard times, but it’s automatic for us now.

And people always go, I wonder what their fights are like because they’re both debaters, it must be such a — and we really don’t fight.

JACK NEEL: Yeah, I would guess you wouldn’t.

RACHEL WILSON: We just really don’t fight. And Andrew always says, you just choose not to fight. He’s like, I know that sounds way too simple, but you just choose not to. And I do submit to him. Like, if he tells me, I don’t think you should do that debate, I don’t think it’s a good idea, I go, all right. He goes, hey, that tweet was out of line, you need to delete the tweet. I go, fine, all right, I’ll delete the tweet, or something like that.

JACK NEEL: But what’s the last tweet your husband made you delete?

Submission, Leadership, and the Proverbs 31 Woman

RACHEL WILSON: I don’t even remember it. I think it was probably— I think it was something where he was going to do a debate that he hadn’t announced yet, and I said something about it and he didn’t want the details getting out just yet. But usually it’ll be me being a little bit too sassy, me going a little bit too hard. Sometimes he’s like, “Oh, that’s pretty good.” But sometimes he’s like, “No, delete that.” And I’ll delete it.

And that’s hard. I’m a very opinionated person. I’m in some ways the weirdest person to be out here talking about this because I’m very headstrong and I’m very opinionated and I am very self-directed and very independent. I had to be from a really young age. But it’s been the best thing for me to learn to trust my husband and submit to him in all things, just like I would unto the Lord.

It’s like this weird thing happens when you do that and you have a good man for a husband. He becomes the absolute best husband that you could ever want because he knows— he’s like, “She’s going to do whatever I say, so I better get it right. She depends on me to be the leader, and she’s going to follow me. So I’d better make sure I’m pointed in the right direction because I don’t want her to follow me into something bad. I don’t want her to follow me into destruction.” And so suddenly the man feels like everything he does is pretty important, and he needs to be the best version of himself because he has this responsibility.

Now, of course, if you marry some jerk douchebag, that’s not going to work. But I’m assuming that if you marry a man, you have vetted him and you think he’s a good guy and that at his base core he’s a virtuous human being. And if that’s the case and you submit to him, yes, it does impress upon him— whoa— the same thing that happens when a man becomes a father. If he’s a good man, he goes, “I need to be a good example, I need to try my best, I need to improve myself, I need to be aiming towards virtue because my children are paying attention and following me.” It’s the same thing with a wife.

So if you want good men in society, you can’t tell them to lead and then say, “But I’ll follow you if I feel like I want to, and if I agree, and if I don’t, I’m going to fight you on it.” And it’s that balance that we were talking about.

JACK NEEL: I think also too, it’s useful to marry a strong man but realize what actual strength looks like. For a young woman listening to this right now whose mother, professors, and algorithm are telling her that career comes before family, what message do you want her to know?

Advice for Young Women: Family First

RACHEL WILSON: I would love for her to know that— read Proverbs 31 in the Bible. The Proverbs 31 woman is a great description of a biblical woman, and she does a lot of things. You’ll notice when you read that passage, she does things like buy and sell land. She makes decisions for the household. She runs a household that has servants. Now, we don’t have servants now, but if you’re running a modern household with kids and a family, you’re making all the healthcare decisions. You have a lot of responsibility. We all know everything that it takes to run a family. It’s a big job, and it requires you to be competent.

This idea that housewives are dumb bimbos that lay on the couch all day watching soap operas— not if you’re doing it right, and certainly not if you have multiple kids. It’s a lot of work, being in charge of people’s whole lives and running a whole household. And you don’t need to define yourself by a career and a job. That’s a very modern idea, first of all. That’s a post-industrial idea that we are our job. That’s crazy. You’re not your job. You’re not your degree. You are a person.

And if you really want purpose and you want to define yourself by who you are, become a mom, because you’ll find out what you’re made of and you’ll find out who you are really quickly. This idea that you’re at risk or you’re going to regret it— no. The Proverbs 31 woman goes about her day and handles her responsibilities. The only difference is she’s doing it for her family. She’s doing it on behalf of her husband, on behalf of her family, and not for a corporate boss, not for the government, not for some system that doesn’t care about her.

She’s doing all of the things. She’s an authority over her children, over her servants, over the decisions she’s making. She’s central. She’s important. But she’s important to the people around her. She’s important to her own family and her own community and to her church. And that’s better.

If you want freedom— if feminism was really about freedom— I feel like as a stay-at-home mom, I had way more freedom. I got up every day and decided what we’re going to do, when we’re going to do it, the order it needs to be done. I can prioritize according to what I think matters most. I don’t have to get up and stick to a schedule that’s appointed to me by someone else where I feel like, “Oh, there’s really more important things I want to get to, but I have to do this crap for 8 hours, and then maybe if there’s time after, I can take care of the stuff I actually care about.”

Freedom and independence is having your own family, making your own family. You get to discover what you’re good at and what you want to learn and what you want to do with your life. And by putting your family first— I think we give women backwards advice. We say career first, maybe family later if there’s time. No, no, no. I’d say do your family first.

Find a great guy while you’re young, before both of you have been through 30 different boyfriends and girlfriends and had your heart broken a million times and all you’re good at is breaking up. That’s what we do now. We teach people to date and date and date and date and have so many different boyfriends and girlfriends that all you get good at is breaking up with somebody and moving on to the next one. You don’t ever get good at staying with someone and learning the skills of being a wife and being a husband, because that’s a skill set and you have to learn it. We’re not born good wives and husbands.

So find someone young who shares your worldview, your spiritual views, the life that you want. You kind of have a shared mission together. And build a life and a family with that person first. Do it when you’re young, because number one, having babies is a young woman’s game. I can tell you it was easier at 20 than it was at 32. Trying to get up with and chase after toddlers in your 40s is tough. Your body bounces back faster, you’re at lower risk for health complications, you’re going to have an easier time getting pregnant— all of that.

So have your kids and your family young, and then you’ll be like me and you’ll be 45 and they’re pretty much all grown up and moved out. I have two at home. One of them is about to be an adult and the other one’s only a couple years away from that. So now I do have time to do other things like be here with you, write a book in my spare time, stuff like that. There’s a lot of life after kids if you do that first.

So it’s not that you can’t do all the things or be more than a mom or do other things besides just raise kids. It’s just that you’re setting yourself up for failure by putting that on the back burner and doing everything else first, if that makes sense.

The Comment Section of A Happily Married Woman

JACK NEEL: What does the comment section of A Happily Married Woman look like?

RACHEL WILSON: Oh, it looks like people trying to convince me that I’m not happy, people trying to convince me that I’m brainwashed into being happily married. I love my husband a lot, and I kind of get made fun of for simping for him. I’ll get called Rachel Will Simp, which I think is cute. I’m always kind of gushing over him. I just think he’s the coolest, most awesome guy ever. I just love him more the longer I’m with him. And that bugs people.

It’s very surprising to me how much people hate that. I don’t know if it comes from jealousy or if it comes from just that it’s been so cool for so long for women and men to hate each other and dunk on each other. Every sitcom has wives that can’t stand their husbands and think he’s a moron who can’t do anything without her. I don’t know what it is, but I’m constantly being told, “Oh, you’re actually brainwashed. You’re just too scared to leave him and you’re stuck in a cycle of abuse.”

And I’m just like— I was in a cycle of abuse. I’ve been with Andrew for almost 2 decades now and he’s been nothing but fantastic to me. I depend on him for everything because he’s awesome and he really comes through and he’s totally dependable and he’s always there whenever I need him for anything.

So the comment section usually looks like some people going, “Wow, this is really white pilling, and it gives me a lot of hope, and I hope I can find a marriage like this someday, that would be great.” And then the other half of the comments is, “Actually, he’s ugly and fat and he smokes and he swears, and you should be ashamed, and he’s disgusting, and you’re awful, and you’re brainwashed.”

JACK NEEL: And it’s like— are these men leaving these comments?

RACHEL WILSON: It’s more women, it’s more women. Most of the men are like, “Wow, that’s really cool that you guys have such a great relationship and genuinely really love each other.” Because Andrew will do streams where he’s watching me debate or something, and they’re always like, “I’ve never seen a man so proud in all my life.” You can just see him beaming with pride when his wife’s doing a good job, and that’s so cute. So some people love it and they think it’s adorable, and they’re like, “I want that. I want a super best friend wife-husband dynamic where we have this shared mission and shared worldview and we’re really close and we’re just in it to the end no matter what.” And they think that’s great.

And then there’s just this— it’s usually women, but there are a few more feminist men that— I don’t know what it is about me, but I trigger the feminist men. They hate me with a burning passion. And I think it’s because I ruin their sneaky f*er mating strategy. That’s guys who can’t compete, guys who tend to get friend-zoned a lot. They’ll take on a feminist persona. They’ll act like they’re girls’ friends. “Oh, I’m just one of the girls, I’m just hanging out with you.” And they’ll kind of wait until one of those women is post-breakup, she’s had a little too much to drink, she’s a little sad, and then they make their move.

JACK NEEL: That’s actually what I meant earlier when I said look for a strong man.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: Because I think that every man that a woman realizes to not be strong is really that kind of person.

RACHEL WILSON: Yes.

JACK NEEL: It’s appearing weak so they appear not to be a threat, but those people are typically the biggest threats, you know what I mean?

The Trap of Choosing the Wrong Men

RACHEL WILSON: That’s the exact trap that I fell into when I was young. And it was— yeah, I’m— I mean, it’s my responsibility ultimately. I chose the first two men that I tried to make a family with, so that’s on me. But it did not help that all the messaging from everybody, from my mother to the culture, was like, no, those strong men are toxic and bad, and they’re the ones who are going to hurt you.

So the ones that were telling me everything I wanted to hear and presenting themselves as Prince Charming, and then you marry him and he’s a totally different person and you’re like, oh crap, I’m screwed. That was bad. Don’t recommend it.

So a strong guy who has boundaries is the guy you want. A guy who knows how to maintain boundaries is the one who’s going to protect you and also not let you walk all over him. Because women make this mistake all the time. They think they want a man who’s going to take orders from them and do what they want. And then they get that guy and their ovaries shrivel up. They’re no longer attracted to him. They have no respect for him. And then they resent him.

And that’s— you see a lot of women in that situation where they’re married to a guy that they ultimately don’t really respect because he kind of lets her push him around. He kind of just goes, “Oh, happy wife, happy life.” And then they resent each other, and it’s just this slow boil of resentment, and they just kind of stay together and it festers until they get divorced.

JACK NEEL: It’s like something is thrown off, women’s gauge of being able to identify what makes them feel safe.

The Effect of Birth Control on Attraction

RACHEL WILSON: Birth control. Birth control will do that too. It actually changed— like, they’ve done a bunch of studies showing that birth control, because it tricks your body into thinking you’re pregnant, and when you’re pregnant, the type of mate that you’re looking for is more docile, because you’ve already been fertilized, I guess. So it’s your brain’s way of saying like, we need the nice guy now.

Whereas— and women will tell me this, like, I get emails and messages from women, they’re like, “I’ve been off birth control for 6 months and I’m finding whole different men attractive than I ever did before. Like, suddenly I’m into a whole different type of guy than I ever was. Like, no more of these artsy skinny boys who are liberal arts majors. I’m liking the tall guy with the cowboy boots and the beard all of a sudden. Like, what’s happening?”

Yeah, birth control will do that. And then I think the cultural propaganda does that a lot too.

JACK NEEL: It’s like this really basic idea of like, I would guess, when a girl meets a guy that’s actually a good partner for her long-term, she should be scared of him when she meets him. Do you know what I mean?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.

JACK NEEL: It’s like if you’re not a little frightened by him, like it’s like how—

RACHEL WILSON: No one else will be there.

JACK NEEL: Yeah, exactly.

RACHEL WILSON: You know?

JACK NEEL: And sure, a guy should make you feel safe, but if he overly does it, and it’s authentic, and he acts that way to other men, he’s not going to get what he wants either, you know?

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah.

JACK NEEL: Because if you act docile to other men, I don’t know, any guys listening to this that have done that, it doesn’t work out very well.

A Dangerous Man in Control of Himself

RACHEL WILSON: You’re right. Jordan Peterson, that was one thing he got right. He used to say, “A good man is a dangerous man,” because if you’re not dangerous, you can’t really do much good in the world. So a dangerous man who’s completely in control of himself is like the best guy you can get. And that’s what I think I have.

Andrew has— we had a home invasion some years back, and there were people in our basement. They had broken into our basement and were rummaging through things. And he went to the top of the stairs with a shotgun, pumped it, and yelled something super scary at them, and they ran off. I mean, he didn’t have to think about it. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t hide behind me or anything like that, and scared them off. And those people got arrested and went to prison and everything.

So, and then there was another time at a party where somebody said something really rude to me, and he open palm slapped the guy and knocked him out standing on his feet. But at the same time, if I’m getting a really bitchy attitude with him that’s totally undeserved, he’ll be like, “You need to go take a nap and you don’t talk to me like that.”

I always tell this story about when we first started dating and I was being kind of a brat and I threw a remote control at him for some reason. Don’t even remember what it was, but I was just being a sassy brat. And he just looked at me and he went, “I don’t date girls who throw things at me. So I’m going to leave now. And if you ever want to see me again, you should call me and apologize.” And he just walked out.

Now he didn’t yell. He didn’t get into a fight with me. He just calmly asserted like, this is a boundary that you don’t cross, that I won’t put up with. And at first I was like, what a jerk. And then I was like, oh crap, am I the girl that throws things? Am I the girl that throws stuff at guys? Like, I don’t want to be her. I don’t want to be like that. And then I was like, dang it, he’s right.

So just my ability to say to myself, “Yeah, objectively he’s right, that was out of pocket obnoxious behavior and no man who respects himself is going to want that,” helped me. It helped me to correct behavior, habits that I had probably picked up growing up that I didn’t even know that I had. And he was just calmly assertive. He never yells at me. He doesn’t raise his voice to me, really ever. He’ll just calmly be like, “No, that’s not happening. This is what we’re going to do.”

And sometimes— most of the time he takes a lot of care to explain what he’s thinking. But sometimes he’s like, “Look, I don’t have time or patience to explain this right now. This is just what I need you to do. And you’ve got to trust me.” And I go, “Okay.”

The Biggest Psyop Happening to Women Right Now

JACK NEEL: What do you see is happening right now? Like, what is the biggest psyop happening right now to women?

RACHEL WILSON: I don’t know that there’s anything super new. It’s usually just any attempt to remove illegal immigrants or shut the border down or anything like that is going to end up in The Handmaid’s Tale, right? Like, people are just going to be put in cages and raped. If we give the government the power to actually defend the border and remove people who are here illegally, that this necessarily means—

You know what it is? The other one is the abortion stuff. So I think the biggest psyop is— and I’ve seen female political candidates on X saying this garbage, and I will correct them with facts and post everywhere. I have Democrat women running for office in Texas telling people stuff like, “Women are dying right now because they can’t get healthcare because of abortion laws.” And I’m like, no, they’re not. Why are you saying that?

They’re like, “Well, women are hesitating to get treatment for miscarriages because they’re afraid they’ll get prosecuted for an abortion.” I’m like, I know a friend of mine who just had an ectopic pregnancy. It was an emergency and it was taken care of right away. Nobody stopped us to make sure she wasn’t having an abortion. Like, this is just lies.

And if you look up the actual facts of it, you can easily find this out. But there are pro-abortion groups that are putting out talking points that are very misleading. So they won’t outright say women are dying directly due to the law change, they’ll say it creates confusion that may lead some women to hesitate to get treatment in time. And then they’ll give you a case and they’ll say, “Well, this woman died of a hemorrhage because she waited too long to get treatment after having a miscarriage or something like that.”

So nobody’s actually dying because abortion is illegal, okay? But they’ll frame it in a way— and this is always the case with feminism, it always comes down to framing. They will say something that sounds like it must be true, but really when you look into it, it’s not.

Misleading Statistics and Feminist Framing

For example, they’ll say things like, “One in three women on every college campus will be sexually assaulted.” And you go, “One in three? Wow, that’s a terrible problem.” And when you look into that, it’s actually not true. The actual crime statistics of women even reporting that a sexual assault happened is something like less than 2%, but they get the 1 in 3 number from surveys, self-reported surveys, where they ask women things like, “Have you ever felt regret the next day after sleeping with someone, or felt like maybe the fact that you had something to drink made you less able to consent? Have you ever been catcalled and felt uncomfortable? Has someone ever touched you and it wasn’t— like, somebody rubbed your shoulders and you didn’t want them to?” And they’ll count all those things as sexual assault.

So it usually comes down to framing and misframing and misrepresenting facts to make things sound a certain way. Anytime you hear a statistic like that from feminists, always think to yourself, does that sound like it lines up with reality? And then go check, because it’s almost always wrong.

So this gaslighting that women are dying everywhere because they can’t just get abortions whenever they want for any reason is ridiculous. And if anything, abortion has a lot of risks, and women can die from abortions, and they do die from abortions. And the abortion pills have a lot of risks. Birth control pills have a tremendous amount of risk for women, and I don’t feel like most women are properly informed.

I don’t think they emphasize to women the risks and the long-term health consequences of birth control. They give it to you like it’s a vitamin. “Oh, you got acne? Have some birth control. Irregular periods? Birth control. You have migraines? Try some birth control.” They just push it so much on young women and don’t fearmonger you about any of the things that can go wrong using abortifacient drugs or surgical abortion or birth control or any of that stuff.

But they will fearmonger you to death and make you think that just because you can’t get abortion with no limits, women are dying everywhere. And it’s not true.

Does It Come from the Devil?

JACK NEEL: Do you think that someone actually just wanted less kids to be born so they could gain power, and they told these witches like, “Hey, believe in this thing so you’ll do abortions.” Do you know what I’m saying? Do you think it comes from the devil first and then gives people power? Do you think it gives people power so people push that religion?

RACHEL WILSON: It’s kind of a chicken or the egg thing, and I don’t really care how people think of it as long as it gets them to the right conclusion. But I do believe that yes, it comes from a demonic, satanic place. And the reason I think that is because when I wrote the chapter in my book on Margaret Sanger, I literally had nightmares. I was so angry. When I read—

JACK NEEL: Is there anything you left out of your book because it was too disturbing?

Margaret Sanger and the Origins of Planned Parenthood

RACHEL WILSON: There’s things that I softened. So this is a good example of that. So Margaret Sanger — if you know anything, she was the person who kind of was pushed to the forefront, founder of Planned Parenthood. Technically, it was the Bureau of Social Hygiene first, and it went by other names, and people will try to obfuscate around that point. But no, the Rockefeller family found her, already kind of saying some of these things, and paid her and pushed her to the forefront to be like the face of this. And she was their primary propagandist and the one who helped establish Planned Parenthood around the world. England had a similar woman, Marie Stopes was her name. And both of them started by going to like poor people of any color, but also especially non-whites, and trying to really force sterilization on them.

And Margaret Sanger had a book that she used to fearmonger women about birth and convince people that abortion was this necessary thing and that we needed to be pushing towards birth control. She was also really involved in the development of the birth control pill as well. So she had 3 children herself and she was married and she was doing things that were illegal. You weren’t supposed to distribute birth control, which at the time was things like diaphragms or spermicides. You weren’t supposed to send them in the mail. This was a violation of a set of laws called the Comstock Laws, and she got in trouble for doing that and for passing out pamphlets on birth control and family planning.

And she let her husband go to jail on her behalf for that so that she could escape to Europe and have orgies with prominent men of the time who were socialists and things like that. And she abandoned 3 children, and one of them died while she was in like a boarding school.

And she wrote a book that was supposedly a collection of letters from women around the world saying they couldn’t figure out how they kept getting pregnant, and they were just so tired of being pregnant, and they were dying from being pregnant too much. And I found out that that whole thing was basically baloney. There was no letters. I contacted the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, which has everything the woman’s ever written. If she wiped your face on a napkin, they have it. And I contacted them and said — she said she got tens of thousands of letters. Where are they all? And can I access them? And they said, oh, we don’t have most of them. And I said, well, how many do you have? And they said 3. I said, 3? What happened to the other thousands? And they said, oh, they were lost to time, or she might have sent them to abortion doctors to like encourage them when people were like — it was so stigmatized. We really don’t know.

And so I run back over the book, and it’s clearly plagiarism. She clearly just made all this stuff up. And I thought, here again, we’re being lied to, to push an agenda. They’re willing to just lie to women. And we do that now. We do it with fat acceptance. We do it with all kinds of things. People are just so willing to lie to women to get them to believe anything.

Margaret Sanger’s Radical Anti-Life Ideology

RACHEL WILSON: And I think that she genuinely — Margaret Sanger said that “the kindest thing a large family can do to one of its members is kill it.” She said that she didn’t believe anyone should be having babies. This woman was like a nut job radical. You can go back and watch her early TV interviews from the ’40s and ’50s. You can listen to her radio interviews from the ’30s. She just came right out and said we shouldn’t be having any more kids, the planet’s too full, no more babies, nobody should be having any babies, and big families are terrible and you need to kill them.

And it’s just like, she was a crazy radical person, and that’s Luciferian. I mean, in Genesis we’re told that the seed of the woman will crush the serpent, and that’s Jesus, the seed of the one — because usually you hear the seed of a man, you don’t usually hear it referred to in that way, but because Christ was incarnated of the Holy Spirit, there was no male seed involved. So they said the seed of the woman will crush the serpent and he will bruise his heel. That’s referring to Christ being crucified.

So yeah, Satan hates women and he hates motherhood and he doesn’t want you to have babies because if Satan could have stopped women from having babies, he could have prevented the incarnation. Simple as that. And he doesn’t want us producing new icons of God. In the Orthodox faith, we think that human beings are icons of Christ. We’re like an image of God. Roman Catholics use the Imago Dei, the image of God within a human being. We think that we are unique and blessed creations of God.

So to me, when I hear a woman saying, kill babies, don’t have any, these large families need to just start killing off some of their children as a mercy, I know exactly where that comes from. That doesn’t come from God. That only comes from one place. So in my opinion, yes, I think that’s deeply satanic. I think that’s the essence of Satanism, of Luciferianism, is to be so anti-human that you don’t want new life coming into this world. You don’t value human lives. You see human beings as like a pest or scourge on the planet.

The Logic of Abortion

JACK NEEL: If you logically deduce that being God is choosing who lives and who dies, then like abortion, if it’s not murder, at the very least you’re choosing who lives and who dies, you know?

RACHEL WILSON: Absolutely.

JACK NEEL: Like you’re choosing to not bring in a life.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah. I just had this debate with a couple of girls that were on the Whatever podcast with me. And they said, “You think abortion is murder?” And I said, “Yeah, it is murder.” And they said, “No, it’s not.” And I said, “Okay, is it human?” And at first they said no. I said, “So the thing inside of you isn’t human? It’s not a Homo sapiens? It’s not a human being?” And then they were forced to say, “Well, yeah, it’s human, but it’s not alive.” And I said, “It’s not alive?” And they were like, “No, it’s not alive yet.” And I was like, “Then why do you have to kill it? If it’s not alive, why does it have to be killed?”

So then they finally admitted, “Well, yeah, it’s alive, but it’s not a person.” So then you end up with this personhood argument where, well, it’s a human and it’s alive and I am killing it, but it doesn’t have personhood. It doesn’t have a life yet. It doesn’t have experiences. It doesn’t have conscious experiences.

So when you walk those people through the logic, you always end up with a lot of goofy arbitrary coping and arbitrary starting points of, well, yeah, it is human life, but it’s not valuable yet because they haven’t had experiences. And so then you can say stuff like, okay, well, if someone’s in a coma and they’re not having conscious experiences, can I just kill them? Well, no, you can’t do that. Why not? Well, because they did have experiences. I’m like, yeah, but if they’re brain dead, like, say the doctors say we don’t think he’s going to wake up, probably no more conscious experiences for him. So if I go over and just unplug him, whether I’m authorized to do that legally or not, there’s no moral implication. I didn’t do anything wrong because it’s the same thing as an abortion. So if an abortion isn’t wrong, then this isn’t wrong. So it’s like you can constantly get them on the logic.

JACK NEEL: Do you know how many abortions there are a year, roughly?

RACHEL WILSON: I think it’s still hovering just under a million. It’s under a million in America, and worldwide it’s much more. I mean, we’ve had more abortions in the last century than people who have died in every single war around the world. It’s the biggest mass genocide in human history by far.

Abortion as Ritual Sacrifice

JACK NEEL: It’s interesting because I’ve read that some people see war as a type of sacrifice. There are two people. One person believes that it’s actual ritual sacrifice to something, and then there’s one person who believes that this just gives me power. Like, what does this person get, and what does this person get from all these abortions?

RACHEL WILSON: The only reason you do a ritual sacrifice is for power. So like, the reason that Aztecs would cut the hearts out of people and throw them off the top of pyramids was they were hoping to be granted something, whether it’s rain for crops, whether it’s power over their enemies. You’re asking for something you want and you’re giving a sacrifice in return. That’s what all human sacrifice is, like Baal worship, right? We know that ancient Canaanites and other Mesopotamian groups did sacrifice babies to pagan gods, and they did so either to conquer their enemies, to gain power, status, wealth, to get food or have a bountiful harvest — but it’s always something for me.

JACK NEEL: Do you think —

RACHEL WILSON: And that’s why it’s a sacrifice.

JACK NEEL: Do you think it works?

RACHEL WILSON: I do. I think that the enemy will grant you certain temporal powers. Christ himself was tempted by the devil before he was crucified. Satan took him up to a cliff and showed him like this huge kingdom and said, “I’ll give you all of this if you bow down to me.” And he said — he basically said, “Who are you to offer me anything?” Which is another indication that Christ was saying he was God.

But that’s what the devil does. He offers you — that’s like the proverbial taking the deal, right? Signing your soul off to the devil. You’re giving away your soul for some kind of temporal gain that you want. It’s always a bad deal. Like, everybody knows this. Nobody ever reads Faust or anything and thinks, oh, that’s a good plan that works out well for people. But if you don’t have control over your passions, if you let your passions rule you, it will override your logical faculties and you’ll make a bad deal to get something you really, really want right now. And it’s usually very emotionally driven.

And there’s a lot of women who, when you talk to them about abortion, it’s like, “You’re not going to tell me that I can’t!” And they get very angry and they see it as like ultimate rebellion against authority, and “you don’t tell me what to do with my body.” It doesn’t come off to me as a thing I really didn’t want to do, and “safe, legal, and rare,” and nobody wants to get an abortion. Like, the way that women are about it now, they’ll just scream in your face. Like, you see at these abortion rights things where there’s like abortion protesters and they’re screaming, “Kill all the babies,” or something really inflammatory. And it’s like this defiant, angry — “you’re not going to take this power away from me” — because it’s a power that they have.

JACK NEEL: And then for those who don’t believe it’s anything spiritual, what do you — why allow that?

Abortion, Demographics, and the Power of Belief

RACHEL WILSON: A lot of times it’s just for convenience purposes. It’s like, well, and people have a lot of silly ideas, like they’ll say, oh, you don’t want a bunch of babies being born to people who don’t want them. And it’s like, well, my mother didn’t want me, but yeah, I’m really glad I’m here. And I had 5 children that I did want, you know, that had no basis in determining what my life was going to look like. Did I have a rough childhood? Yeah, but a lot of people have a rough childhood and go on to be incredible human beings and do wonderful things.

And even if your mother doesn’t want you when she’s pregnant, there’s a ton of women that really contemplate abortion and almost do it, decide not to, and then they’re like, thank God. I love being a mom. I love my child. I would never take it back. So usually people have arbitrary, materialistic kind of reasons for wanting abortion.

A lot of people still believe in overpopulation, even though that’s been disproven. It’s a myth. We are not overpopulated. They’ll say, well, there’s 8 billion people on the planet. That’s too many. It’s like, it’s clearly not. We’ve pretty much eradicated hunger by having enough people that we can create these sophisticated logistical supply chains that get food to pretty much everywhere it needs to go now. That’s why Africa is one of the only places that still has a birth rate above replacement, because we’re feeding all of them now. They’re not dying off from starvation or anything anymore.

So it’s usually misguided. One thing I’ve learned doing this is that most people do not know why they believe what they believe. They really don’t. They’re forming their worldview and their beliefs off of things they’ve heard repeated over and over that sound good on their face. And most of us are too busy trying to pay bills and just get through the day to sit there all day and really think philosophically and deeply about worldviews and why we believe these things and where our ideas really came from. And did I think of this myself, or were these thoughts kind of put in my head and I just accepted them? Most of us don’t think about that.

That’s why shows like this are important, because it gets people to think, hmm, why do I think that? Or why did I hold this belief? Does it make sense? Is it logical? Is there something better? Should I continue to believe this, or have I been presented new evidence that makes me feel like maybe I should change my mind?

Men vs. Women: Logic vs. Feelings

And this is another thing where I see a big difference between men and women. Most of the men I sit down and talk to, even if they really don’t agree with me at the beginning, if I present a lot of facts and arguments that make sense to them, they’ll go, hmm, okay, I’m going to have to go think about this. Whereas women — I just sat across the table from a woman 2 weeks ago who said, “I don’t care how many facts you tell me, and I don’t care how many arguments you have, I’m not going to change my mind because I feel.” Every statement she came at me with started with, “But I feel like,” and “I believe,” and “I feel.” And I was like, okay, but — and I asked her, so it doesn’t matter what I tell you? It doesn’t matter what facts? And she was like, well, no, because your facts are biased facts. My facts were biased Republican facts or something.

JACK NEEL: So her feelings were objective.

RACHEL WILSON: Exactly, exactly. So I think that that is more common. I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of logical women. I get emails from women all the time and messages of support from women all the time, and so many comments from women who are like, “Thank you for speaking up for us, because I’m a wife and I’m a mom and I feel like I’m fighting the same uphill battle. I feel like I have no support. I’m scared to say that I don’t want a career and I’m scared to tell my parents that I don’t want to open a dental practice,” or whatever it is they’re doing.

And a lot of them will write me to say, “You gave me a way to kind of defend my choices. I feel like I can competently explain, yes, I’m going to skip college and start my family. Here’s why.” I kind of give them words that they didn’t know how to articulate before in order to defend that choice and to feel confident in it, to not feel like, oh, am I screwing up? Am I going to regret this? I don’t know.

And that’s all I really set out to do with writing this book and doing all of this — I just wanted to help all of the women who were like me in their 20s. They’re just going, in their head, “I know everyone expects me to go to college and have a career, but I don’t really want to do that. I want to get married and I want to have a family. And that’s my priority.” And I don’t think that they should feel ashamed or nervous to voice that, and they shouldn’t have to be met with so much pushback.

The boomer generation is really bad with this. Boomer parents were, “You gotta go to college, you gotta have an education or you’re not going to be anything in this world. You gotta have an education and a degree or no one’s going to hire you.” That was my generation.

The Staggering Cost of Abortion on a Generation

But one more about the abortion stuff — you’re Gen Z, right?

JACK NEEL: Yes.

RACHEL WILSON: Do you know that almost a third of your generation was aborted? Almost one-third of Gen Z worldwide was never born because they were killed before they could be born. And I can’t —

JACK NEEL: There’s about 60 million Gen Z, 17 years of the generation.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, that makes sense.

JACK NEEL: About 17 million abortions or something like that. Yeah, that’s ridiculous, actually.

RACHEL WILSON: Imagine what that amount of people might have done to change the world. Imagine what those people could have accomplished. We’ll never know what the world would be like if a third of your generation hadn’t been wiped out before they could ever be born. It could have been people who figured out how to cure cancer or make free energy, or who knows. We could have ended up with a world where we didn’t need endless third world immigration in order just to sustain our economy. We just won’t know. And it’s crazy that we would eliminate a third of a generation before it could be born, and people just are like, eh, it’s fine.

Closing Remarks

JACK NEEL: Well, your book and your thoughts have really made me think. Everyone, this has been your guest, Rachel Wilson. This is the Jack Neel Podcast. Where can people find you?

RACHEL WILSON: You can find more of my writing at my Substack, rwilson.substack.com. You can find my book, Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation, on Amazon. And I do have a little YouTube channel — Rachel Wilson — and you can find me on X at Rach4Patriarchy.

JACK NEEL: Beautiful. Thank you for coming on.

RACHEL WILSON: Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it. It was a great, great chat.

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