It is rare for the hit American podcast, Red Scare, to pay attention to what’s happening across the Atlantic. But when hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan do tune in, they’re usually bemused by what they hear. One of their recent episodes looked at the Question Time debacle, in which the actor Laurence Fox denied that it was racist to criticise the Duchess of Sussex, and exuded contempt for the whole “woke” shtick.
Fox’s contempt is one shared by the Red Scare “ladies”, as the podcasters archly call themselves. Nekrasova and Khachiyan are suspicious of wokeism in all its guises. Their podcast, a runaway transatlantic success, was originally inspired by their feeling that feminism had been commodified and homogenised to such an extent that the term had been hollowed out. “Pussy-hat” feminism – the kind that propelled young women to take to the streets but instigated little structural change – was due for scrutiny.
Red Scare is not an easy podcast to characterise. Nor is it easy listening if you’re vulnerable to a fit of the vapours. Each episode is recorded in Khachiyan’s flat in Manhattan and lasts about an hour, though it has the languor of a summer afternoon. The podcast bills itself as a cultural critique offered by two “bohemian layabouts”. The women parse indolently through news items that interest them, chain-smoking and namedropping philosophers. They may be millennials – Khachiyan is 34 years old, Nekrasova 28 – but they defy many of the cliches pinned to their generation. Never were two people less like snowflakes.
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Crossfire - A Telegraph Podcast A podcast revealing the untold story of Britain's role in the Trump-Russia scandal. Spies, lies and an election like no other. Listen Both women relish delivering bold and brutal verdicts on the talking points of the day. “The only people that understand masculinity anymore are gay men,” Khachiyan has declared. Nekrasova has suggested that Greta Thunberg should branch into “eco-terrorism”. Rape jokes can be funny. Words like “retard” are not beyond the pale. Being “an extremely hot and relevant model” for five seconds, the hosts think, would be “the best feeling a human being could have”.
As for Fox, while the Red Scare hosts sympathised with the thrust of his comments, they were withering about the actor himself. He was hardly worth listening to, Khachiyan said, not least because he was covered in “ill-advised tattoos” and willingly wore leather jackets. “I think he sees himself as a rogue emancipator,” Nekrasova added, with evident pity. Khachiyan took that further: Fox was a “sad and pathetic loser trying to worm his way into the attention economy”. With the character assassination complete, the ladies moved on to other matters.
Red Scare turns two in March. A pair of episodes are released each week – one for free on iTunes et al; the other for paying listeners only, who get their hit via the subscription app, Patreon. When Khachiyan and Nekrasova launched Red Scare, they tell me, they were dirt-poor and slaving away in “sh---- service jobs”. Now, each month, the podcast rakes in over $19,600 (£15,100).
I ask them how it feels to be rich at last. “I wouldn’t call it rich,” Khachiyan purrs. “But it feels nice.” “I feel rich,” Nekrasova says in her slow-mo drawl. “But we’re both really bad at managing our finances, because we’re new money.” (Nekrasova is particularly prone to blowing her podcast loot on nights in Manhattan hotels.)
We are speaking via FaceTime: me in London, Khachiyan and Nekrasova in New York. It’s surreal to see them talk, given I’ve only ever heard their voices. Some listeners (they say) find it hard to tell them apart, but their personalities are distinct: Khachiyan seems flintier, edgier and more academic than Nekrasova, who is more languid and cruises more readily for jokes.
Red Scare has become something of a bête noire among liberal millennials unamused by the hosts’ ironic sensibility. An article on the feminist website Jezebel last year shrieked that Khachiyan and Nekrasova were “lazy provocateurs”, prone to bigotry and “breathtaking cruelty”. They have been accused of being transphobic, sexist, antisemitic, racist, ableist and even fatphobic. (This last may be because they talk enthusiastically about how nice it is to be skinny and attractive, and suggest that fat people might be cheerier if they shed some pounds.)
I’m no snowflake, but I have been stopped in my tracks by things they have said. In an episode on the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, for instance, Nekrasova called him an “inbred, guilty, dumb-ass person”, while Khachiyan lamented that he was “too stupid to lie convincingly”. She also took issue with Emily Maitlis, saying she had affected an irritating “fake sobriety” during the interview and had “the look of, like, an actor in amateur German porn.”
The part in the Prince Andrew interview where he says his judgement was clouded by his tendency to be too honorable - honestly, same
— dasha (@nobody_stop_me) November 18, 2019Listening to the podcast makes you question how good a person you are. But, equally, it’s bracing to hear young women being so flagrantly opinionated. “I think it’s probably something to do with us being immigrants,” Khachiyan says. “Our parents passed their hand-me-down trauma and sceptical outlook onto us.” Khachiyan moved to the US from Moscow when she was four, while Nekrasova came over with her family from Belarus when she was three. When they began doing the podcast, Nekrasova says, they had “nothing to lose”. “We weren’t established in any sector of polite society, so we had the freedom to say things without repercussions”.
In her early twenties, Nekrasova remembers feeling that there were “no models for femininity” that appealed to her. “I didn’t know what kind of woman I wanted to be, because I didn’t see anyone exemplary.” Both hosts seem proud to have become unlikely feminist pin-ups. “What we are modelling for young women,” Khachiyan says, “is a kind of womanhood where you can be politically involved and intellectually invested, but also have a certain joie de vivre and sexuality.”
They suffer social media pile-ons regularly, though they shrug them off with sublime insouciance. Often, it’s other women who try to police their speech. “I think women tolerate outspoken women less than men,” Khachiyan says. “Men are quite thrilled by it.” Nekrasova nods, and adds: “There’s a hostility towards free thought on the Left in general.”
Whether the podcast is on the Right or the Left is much-debated. To me, it is superficially reactionary but radical in its politics. While the hosts deny the relevance (and indeed the existence) of the patriarchy, their ideas are rooted in a rejection of what they regard as the neoliberal capitalist order. Both are diehard Bernie Sanders supporters and believe that none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance against Trump in November’s election. They routinely slate “coastal elites” (to which they probably belong themselves) and liberal feminists, who, they say, are desperate to feel victimised.
“They think they’re being oppressed from the top down – by the patriarchy, or toxic masculinity, or whatever,” Khachiyan says. Actually, feminists are being trammelled by a system that “leaves everyone, men and women alike, in the same s----- sinking boat”.
Nekrasova agrees. “Things like Little Women and The Handmaid’s Tale feed this twisted liberal feminist fantasy of being oppressed and forced to reproduce against your will,” she says. “When actually the reality is that no one can afford to reproduce.”
The Red Scare hosts have been accused of showing callousness to victims of sexual assault. They like to bash the #MeToo movement, arguing that it made things worse because “hiring an attractive woman became a liability”. (They also point out that the movement focused on privileged women – actresses, for instance – rather than on an underclass of labourers regularly targeted by abusers, such as maids and waitresses.)
Red Scare puts the emphasis on women’s freedom and accountability. Khachiyan stresses that “when sexual assault happens to women, it is never the woman’s fault” but suggests that women often “miscalculate their own bargaining power” in their interactions with the opposite sex. “We often see power dynamics as one-sided – Harvey Weinstein types, molesting young and vulnerable women – but women have a great deal of agency.” Khachiyan was sexually assaulted herself at 15, and mentioned it in passing on the podcast last year.
I ask why she brought up the assault. “A lot of people assume that we are criticising them from an elitist, exclusive, morally superior position,” she says. “But my position has always been one of identification: we’re not against you, we are with you.”
For many women on the Left, hearing this sort of approach espoused – and tacitly endorsed by so many paying podcast subscribers – is hard to swallow. (Or to use another word, it’s “triggering”.) But hearing a young, smart woman set out her views on the subject without fear of reproach is refreshing, and (I’d wager) good for the health of public discourse.
Red Scare has been described as “the most pure distillation of Brooklyn Leftism around”. For some, Nekrasova and Khachinyan are petty ideological terrorists, making a pretty penny from provocation and a refusal to recognise the validity of others’ trauma. I don’t agree with a lot of what the women say – factual errors, conspiracy theories and bozo hot-takes are routine on this most controversial of podcasts. But I would defend their right to say it all to the hilt.
Red Scare can be heard online or via various apps
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