“The trad stuff is performative BS,” roared a post on X this week with 80,000 views. “All the people claiming to be religious, judging other people constantly are actually the shittiest people.” But the tweet hadn’t come from the usual source — the platform’s embattled progressive enclave. Instead, the woman skewering the trad establishment was Emily Saves America, a notorious MAGA influencer known for scalding takes, for hosting provocateurs like Hannah Pearl Davis, and for railing about “black fatigue”. Is the trad movement eating itself?

The subject of Emily’s wrath was Elijah Schaffer, a prominent hard-Right podcaster who in recent years has flown the flag for the traditional family — alongside more bespoke takes (e.g. that women are a “bunch of holes”, “whores that can’t even cook a Hot Pocket”). Schaffer, a shock jock on the Rumble politics show The Rift Report, is married with two sons — but his ability to trade on the family-man image was scuppered when scabrous “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos publicly accused him of having an affair with an employee, the married hypertrad Catholic e-girl Sarah Stock.

Rising predictably to the rage-bait, Schaffer embarked on a generational run of embarrassing posts — gems such as “publicly stone me”; “they [the FBI] have kidnapped my family” and threatening that he would not lose custody of his children “without a few shots fired”. Like the first child to cry in a playground scrap, Schaffer had truly lost the argument.

What has become known as the “trad hoe scandal” may seem like the squabbling in the coop of internet nobodies. And yet it portends the demise of the bizarre traditionalist larpers whose domestic dream-lives have been leeching into the mainstream for the past decade. As birth rates tumble, playing the noble patriarch becomes a way to signal excellence — temperance, responsibility and authority. That big families embody this makes sense: politicians have long used their own swelling broods to signify that they have an immediate stake in a nation’s future.

If the mode of fatherhood promoted by the modern tradlad was accompanied by the values, not just aesthetics, of traditional patriarchy, it would be taken more seriously. As things stand, the fathers of the young hard-Right seem just as flimsy and flawed as the rest of that conviction-free generation (Schaffer is just 32). Far from modelling virtue and restraint, these bigoted begetters are about as loyal as Don Draper, minus the charm.

Nor do things look better for their dadmaxxed forefathers. Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War who presides over a blended family of seven children, has spent years banging the drum for god-fearing traditionalism. One wonders how three marriages — the first wrecked by at least five affairs — and a child fathered as part of a tryst with a Fox producer are factored in. Judging politicians on their personal lives is an imperfect approach, but when dynasties are touted as evidence of purity they should practise what they preach. And what, precisely, do they preach? “I’ve got a bunch of kids and realise the only thing that matters is introducing them to Jesus Christ,” he purred to a local Christian paper in 2024. That and, presumably, how to pay off rape accusers.

The “exceptional” men setting the agenda for modern masculinity require props — compliant wives, many kids — to stabilise their inherently untested and chaotic personal brands. Problems arise when aspirational beliefs collide with shameful impulses, and nowhere does this happen more frequently than in the mind of a weak-willed, wannabe man.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist.

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