Former White House strategist Steve Bannon is afraid for men. Not just his estranged former boss, Donald Trump, who has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct, but for the patriarchy more generally. He first aired his concerns in January, when he watched the Golden Globes with journalist Joshua Green. “It’s a Cromwell moment. It’s even more powerful than populism. It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that—this is the Puritans! It’s anti-patriarchy,” he exclaimed, as black-clad celebrities used the televised event to promote the #TimesUp movement. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room.”

Weeks later, castration anxiety apparently remains top of mind for Bannon. On Wednesday, in a lurching interview with GQ that variously touched on China (“I’m a Sinophile”), digital-and-analog armies, and his new entity aimed at getting ideas out there (“weaponizing ideas maybe is too strong a term”), Bannon returned to Time’s Up: “or what I call the ‘anti-patriarchy movement.’” A self-professed arbiter of national feeling, who identified and harnessed the latent stirrings that ultimately projected Trump to the White House, Bannon is fascinated by the febrile, unprecedented, and potently destructive movement. “I’ve never seen such potential power in something,” he told his interviewer, Ben Schreckinger, gesturing towards a New York Times piece on the Women’s March. “The headline’s even more important: ‘A Movement’s Vast Cadre of Foot Soldiers.’” He repeats the headline again and again, like a mantra to ward off evil spirits. “A movement’s vast cadre of foot soldiers. A movement’s vast cadre of foot soldiers.”

In an abstract sense, there are obvious parallels to be drawn between Bannon’s brand of populism and the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Both are fueled by powerful emotion, both are ostensibly anti-Establishment, and both have sprung, suddenly and vigorously, from the repressive structures that have quashed them for years. But despite his reverence and voyeuristic academic interest in #TimesUp, Bannon simply, cagily, can’t get on board. “I’m opposed to it because it’s clearly coming from the left,” he says, when Schreckinger points out that Bannon “can’t articulate why” he opposes a movement he says he respects. “What I do know is that it’s against what I call the patriarchy—it’s against the way things have been run for the previous 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 years. It’s just opposed to that.”

Bannon, who made his name knocking down the status quo, is in a bind, so Schreckinger presses on. Is it fair to call Bannon pro-patriarchy? No, apparently it’s not. “I just know that this is a resistance to the existing order. Whether the existing order is correct or not is not a thing I want to debate. My issue is the existing order between the elites and the people of this country has to be changed.”

While Bannon is an expert at deftly tapping into the sensibilities of certain American voters, he’s not so willingly insightful when it comes to himself. Readers might recall that his past is steeped in allegations of misogyny, assault, and harassment. During a 2011 interview, he said that progressives vilify conservative women because they are not “a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools.” When he was at the helm of Breitbart, the Web site published a headline that read: ”Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” Another declared: “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” A dropped lawsuit accused him of attacking his ex-wife; another lawsuit, filed by an old colleague, claimed that he had once held her wrist at a company party and said, if she “did it” with him, she’d never want to do it with anyone else. (The company named in the suit countersued, and the parties eventually settled.)

GQ’s interview, then, tapped into the patriarchy-shaped paradox that is currently cleaving Bannon. He’s anti-Establishment! He even wears an excessive number of shirts! And yet the Establishment must be defended when women are thrown into the equation.

The power of the #TimesUp movement, driven by anger and by unity, tosses him in with the Trumps, the Weinsteins, and other members of the ruling class who have abused their positions of authority. What’s a man to do when he’s simultaneously transfixed but terrified by a female-led movement that won’t spare him? Why, frame it as led by a braying mob of censorious puritans, of course.