Stop Taking Them Seriously: These Guys and the Tradwives Whose Labor They Rode In On

Mock them all

There were 4500 men and boys at Freedom Con this Father’s Day Weekend, and that’s “a lot,” I guess.

But let’s put it in context:

• It’s roughly half the attendee count of the annual MLA convention (that’s “Modern Language Association”—you know the organization that makes citation rules for academic writing in the humanities? No? That’s because MLA is incredibly niche and also inconsequential to society, but their annual event is still twice as big as Freedom Con; so that’s an important comparative point).

• There was a 10K race in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the same week as Freedom Con, and it drew over 10,000 runners. It’s called “The Bellin Run.” You’ve probably not heard of that either unless you live in Green Bay. It’s only locally famous, but still more than twice as famous as Freedom Con.

• If you’re part of the Burned Haystack community, and I assume you are if you’re reading this, well: the total attendee count of Freedom Con amounted to about 1.3% of our membership. We’re not even famous, but we’re 77 times more famous than Freedom Con, if you crunch actual numbers.

What all of this means is that this is very much a fringe movement. The fact that these men are emotionally unstable and obsessed with guns does make them individually dangerous (mostly to their wives and children, for anyone paying attention to statistics), but they shouldn’t be taken seriously in a sociopolitical context.

They get a lot of attention because they are a spectacle and because their weirdness renders them more clickable material than, say, hundreds of thousands of rational women calmly and humorously discussing irrational men.

Why is mainstream media paying so much attention to these insecure maniacs and their gingham-clad tradwives? (The cover image on this article is from the piece New York Times ran, but they’re getting a lot of media attention in general right now). It’s shock value and entertainment, morbid curiosity, the inescapable voyeurism of human nature.

We’ve always loved a freakshow.

It’s easy to get sucked into spirals of despair, to become fear-struck by the suggestion that pretty soon all of America will be living inside the Manosphere, obsessed with looksmaxxing and raw milk and wailing about hypergamy and Low T. These are men who are terrified of social irrelevance and seed oils, and they can’t even figure out which one of those things is the bigger threat. These are not men with adult-level critical reasoning skills.

Also, consider this: For every man who spent Father’s Day weekend at Freedom Con engaging in “raw competitions that punish weakness,” there were millions of men at home engaging with their actual families just being—you know—fathers.

For every man who attended the session on how to “reject woke secular gay paganism” (not making this up), there were millions of men at home watching TV and mowing their lawns.

For every Freedom Con-er navigating obstacle courses that someone set up for them as though they’re children, there were millions of men navigating the demands of parenting in healthy, two income-households.

For every red-pilled moron who went to this thing to practice tire-changing, there were millions of men at home who changed a tire simply because it needed to be changed.

For every attendee at this Trump-loving, chest-beating stupidfest practicing his lassoing for cattle-wrangling (also a real activity at this thing), there were millions of men at home wrangling toddlers into bed and making sure their dogs were fed.

(What percentage of the male population needs to know how to LASSO things in 2026? [Note: this is not an indictment of lassoing or the profession of cattle ranching. I’m just saying these guys are not cattle ranchers. I imagine actual cattle ranchers would find their “lasso practice” hilarious.])

For every wingnut man-child losing his mind listening to “original verse from a pastor and tactical gear salesman known as the Warrior Poet” (also an actual feature of this event), there were millions of men at home listening to Spotify while washing the dishes.

People are fascinated by these Freedom Con men for the same reasons social-media is fascinated by their financially-submissive and home-birth-obsessed tradwives, and those women’s realities are as outlier as their wackadoodle husbands’:

For every woman churning artisanal butter in a vintage dress she bought with her allowance, there are millions of women grabbing the butter at the grocery or the bodega on their way home from the normal jobs that grant them financial autonomy and the ability to make healthy decisions for themselves and their families.

For every young woman suddenly donning a chapel veil in the name of humbling herself before man and God, there are millions of young progressive Catholics working together to feed the hungry and liberate the oppressed and increase inclusivity in their church.

For every woman who paid to be a volunteer at Freedom Con (you read that correctly), there are millions of women mocking it online in platforms like mine.

But again, these are just normal things: women going to work and stopping to pick up dinner and volunteering for actual causes and talking to one another. None of it is as fascinating as watching he-men practice their planks in a fitness-based circle jerk in rural Washington, I guess.

We have to stop taking any of this seriously. The media will keep covering it, I’m sure, but part of that coverage needs to be more explicit about how extremely niche, extremely stupid, and extremely hilarious it all is.

We need MORE MOCKING, and I say that with all the seriousness in the world