Your Freakshow guide is just back from a weekend in San Antonio, soaking up the sights and sounds at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit – and yes, coincidentally watching the Knicks kick the Spurs.

The word “leadership” was perhaps an oxymoron among the thousands of young women who sat through speech after speech about submitting to God, husband and female biology. The lineup featured high profile conservative women including Erica Kirk, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, and even Texas State Sen. Angela Paxton (Ken Paxton’s estranged and cheated-on wife), alongside a bouquet of hip and pretty right-wing Gen Z influencers all advocating early marriage and pregnancy and putting husband and hearth ahead of worldly pursuits.

The TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit is an annual, expensively produced and carefully packaged political propaganda product. This year, the organization occupied three floors of the San Antonio Marriott, plastering the hotel’s walls, doors, escalators and elevators with slick signage. The main co-sponsor was the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), whose founder said she flew in from Israel to encourage the gathered to repeat a Hebrew word offering themselves to God.

To the naked eye, the event was more tent revival than political conference. The most reliable applause lines invoked the dangers of Muslims and “transgenders.” No one needed a Trump button here. The politics of the participants was presumed. “It’s Not Political It’s Biblical” read one button on a table devoted to recruiting GOTV door-knockers, where a digital electoral map ranked the states according to how “tyrannical” – aka progressive – their policies are.

TPUSA’s project of selling Gen Z women on a submissive posture aligns with the Heritage Foundation’s latest manifesto. The overt push for submission – a concept that occupied white-nationalist fringe swamps merely a few years ago – has now become one of the ideological pillars enabling the predators’ ball assembled at the White House, headed by a convicted sex abuser and oft-accused serial sex pest.

The supposed personal misery and baby-hating of feminists is bedrock to the ideology (See: JD Vance and childless cat ladies). Twenty-something influencer Isabel Brown declared that the Handmaid’s Tale-dressed protesters outside the building “will say the baby growing inside you is a lethal parasite.”

“Charlie would often say that feminism was about wanting women to become men and eventually not needing men,” Erica Kirk said. “He watched feminism rear its head on college campuses in a way that was openly hostile to conservative women who were told to reject the very things that make womanhood unique. Things like motherhood is a burden, marriage is a trap, or motherhood is something that should be stalled or not even experienced at all…”

“Feminism is the biggest lie we have ever been sold as women,” said podcaster Savanna Stone, whose merch includes a Good Wife hat and a sweatshirt that reads Normalize Liking Husbands Again. “While the textbook definition of feminism is about equality between the sexes and women having agency over their own lives, what feminism actually is, is a movement funded by the wealthiest evil people with the goal to destroy marriage and family.”

Several of the speakers cited polls from the early 2000s showing women reporting lower levels of happiness relative to men than women did in the 1970s. No one mentioned the other polls that consistently find single women happier than married women.

If the unhappy women poll is in fact accurate, though, is it fair to blame feminists?

The best guesses for why women might be unhappy involve some version of the Second Shift problem that Arlie Hochschild identified: women don’t enjoy going to jobs and returning home to still do all the work traditionally assigned to women.

All such polls prove is that women changed while many male partners did not.

Every one of the esteemed speakers at the San Antonio Marriott holds bank accounts and credit cards in her name, and every one of them has taken advantage of the right to pursue good-paying jobs – all rights earned by our feminist grandmothers. They’re cynically – and cleverly – leveraging the American birthright assumption that all people, women included, have a right to happiness, conveniently forgetting, as usual, the “pursuit of” part of that phrase.

They prey on the fact that no one bothered to drill into the next generation that the fight for women’s equality as human beings was never going to be easy, nor was it going to end anytime soon.

My 48-hour bath in submissive-wife propaganda ended at the San Antonio airport just as Heidi Blake’s devastating report on the choke-rapist Tate brothers landed in my news feed. The article details years of violent abuse inflicted on dozens of digitally trafficked women, both in the United States and abroad, with a sickening degree of legal impunity. The porn entrepreneurs made millions from pay-per-view sex and a pyramid scheme of social media rape propaganda advising young men how to violently and psychologically force women to submit.

The Tates and their minions are, of course, the post-millennial inheritors of the Epstein class. They share their ideological forefathers’ profound contempt for women, their refusal – or incapacity – to view women as human, the same assumption of impunity, same obsession with manipulation and total control over women that we see in every one of Epstein’s interactions with his “girls.”

All you have to do is behold the worldwide influence and social and legal impunity of the rape-Tates to understand that women are in a war. A real war with real violence.

What TPUSA’s well-financed and slick influencers are selling to young women is the idea that they would be a lot happier if they had never had to fight at all. And the price of that attrition is abandoning efforts to earn one’s own living, choose when and with whom to have children, maintain financial independence, vote, or fully participate in the world outside the kitchen and bedroom.

They preach – literally, in speeches threaded with Biblical passages – that submission is the path to both happiness and spiritual salvation. They present feminism as rebellion against “God’s purpose” and the fountainhead of virtually every challenge women face today.

They do see a war, but their strategy involves a Christian soldier, fighting a very different kind of battle: an internal one devoted to molding herself to husband, childbirth and motherhood, and to crushing her own secret dreams because – although they never say this explicitly – it is simply too hard under current conditions to chase them.

It is certainly unfortunate, but hardly a coincidence, that the misogynistic and corrupt Trump administration propped up by TPUSA helped spring the Tate monsters and bring them back to America. The submissive wife movement is the performative, cross-wearing, milkmaid-dressed light side of the Epstein-class coin.

The young women in prairie mufti, chiffon baby doll dresses and cowboy boots do not hear a peep of objection from TPUSA. What they will hear are Bronze Age admonitions to endure, like this from Book of Genesis: “To the woman [God] said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

.Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.