Dec 4, 2025

Objectively Speaking with Helen Smith Transcript

Remember the Tea Party Movement—the protest against the Obama administration’s confiscatory and collectivist policies? Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist and wife of Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds unleashed a firestorm of controversy with a pointed 2008 column popularizing the slogan “Going Galt,” a reference to Atlas Shrugged and a provocative proposal: “Should productive people cut back on what they need, make less money, and take it easy so that the government is starved for funds, or is there some other way of making a statement?” Smith continued the theme of withdrawing the “sanction of the victim” with her pivotal book Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why It Matters, which argues that men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers.