“Think about it,” I said to Bannon. “The message at a Tea Party rally is the same as at a Gay Pride parade: Don’t tread on me! Let me be who I am!” Embittered conservatives felt like they couldn’t be “real men” anymore, because women wouldn’t date men who behaved the way men had behaved for millennia. They had to hide their true selves to please society—and they were pissed about it. In their minds, feminism had locked “real men” in the closet. It was humiliating, and Bannon knew that there was no force more powerful than a humiliated man. It was a state of mind he was eager to explore (and
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