The last week of every month, High Noon: After Dark features Emily Jashinsky and Inez Stepman on the news of the past weeks. Stepman and Jashinsky delve into the Right’s Chomskyite temptations with regard to what increasingly looks like the merging of wokeness and the American-led global order, as well as the limitations of that pessimistic domestic frame when assessing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Additionally, they turn homeward to discuss a disturbing development slipped into the Violence Against Women Act, and what it would take to make the GOP get serious about the event horizon of tyranny at home. Finally, Inez gets Emily’s Culture Editor take on the Slap Heard Round the World at the Oscars.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we discuss controversial subjects with interesting people. I should really come up with a tagline that doesn’t trip up my tongue. As always, at the end of each month, we do a bit of a news docket overview with Emily Jashinsky, culture editor over at The Federalist, shaper of intrepid young minds over at Young America’s Foundation. She is, of course, a fellow with us, Independent Women’s Forum, and she’s a general cultural commentator, she is a group chat participant, she is all of the above. And once a month, for these After Dark episodes, she’s on High Noon.
So, welcome Emily, and it seems like a lot has happened since the last time we did one of these After Dark episodes. I mean, for starters, there’s been a month of a war. And I did want to start today with talking about Biden’s speech in Poland and his either gaffe or maybe not a gaffe, where he essentially called for regime change. He said that basically Putin cannot be allowed to maintain power in Russia, he can’t be allowed to do what he’s doing. Then the administration walked that back and said, he’s only referencing what Putin did in invading Ukraine and prosecuting this war, not regime change in Russia. But initially, everybody read it in the plain straightforward manner, which I think, in a plain reading, his comments did appear to call for regime change in Russia.
What do you think about how the Biden administration has handled this? Quite aside from, I mean, we know that the Biden administration is incompetent and feckless, but it seems to me there hasn’t been — it’s even worse than usual — there hasn’t really been a strong, actual consistency in the messaging. We seem to be, on the one hand, very clear about not being “escalatory,” and some of our actions have been that way. Right? We’ve stopped, for example, a MiGs transfer to Ukraine, from Poland to Ukraine.
On the other hand, there are these, like, throwaway comments in this entire framing of the war, as liberty versus tyranny. It seems like this administration doesn’t really have, whatever their foreign policy is, it’s not coming through consistently in a way that is predictable from the administration, and that seems to me, regardless of where you fall in terms of how we should deal with this situation, that seems to me to be a dangerous combination. What do you think?
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s funny you say that because actually when Hill TV got booted from YouTube for a week, it was over a video conversation in which Ryan Grim was asking me if Trump had this madman theory in his favor when dealing with foreign relations, right? So if Trump was so unpredictable that it actually benefited the United States because it made world leaders afraid of him, in a way that Biden or any other blob denizen doesn’t have. It doesn’t give anyone an advantage over somebody who is, like, Brookings Institute certified.
And I think the answer to that question, as I said then, is yes, but Biden is unpredictable in a very different way. He’s unpredictable in the sense that you can’t expect him to project an accurate depiction of what the policy is. The policy is not going to change. Whatever Biden wants to do is going to be what the blob and the foreign policy establishment wants to do; whether he expresses that accurately is a different question. And what it does, actually, is just project the opposite of strength, it projects confusion, and it projects this image of a leader who is not in control of himself or of his policy, which is a very dicey and I think frightening and disadvantageous thing in these nuclear races, these nuclear cold wars and these nuclear politics.
That’s not good because the opportunity to make any decision rests with one person in many cases, and that means that many people are involved in the process, but it ultimately comes down to one person. And if that one person’s faculties are in question, it doesn’t look good for their country or the country that they’re representing.
So, I think it’s been good that, to an extent, the Biden administration is too incompetent to escalate. If they wanted to execute an escalation, I don’t know that they have the competence to do that. But then that’s also a little frightening, like if they actually started to try and escalate, where might that take us? I just think Biden, the same instincts that led him to push back a bit on the blob when it came to Afghanistan, the blob and the generals when it came to Afghanistan…. So far, listen, from 30,000-foot view, I’m glad that Lindsey Graham is not president right now, honestly.
Inez Stepman:
I think it’s actually a really good comparison you drew, I don’t think necessarily with Lindsey Graham but with Trump in terms of unpredictability because, you’re right, Trump was famously unpredictable in the sense that people, and especially probably foreign actors, legitimately sometimes feared that he was crazy and that he could do anything.
That’s actually not the first time in our history that that’s been our advantage. I mean, Andrew Jackson famously, he won a lot of his foreign policy goals simply by being so belligerent and crazy, and nobody was sure that he wouldn’t start a war, for example, over a question of honor like France paying back the United States the money that it owed, even though France and the United States were allies. Right? Nobody was sure that he wouldn’t go to war over those kinds of issues, even though a war between the United States and France, at that point, would’ve been very, very lopsided, right, against the United States’ favor.
There is a certain power that comes from … it’s cliche to say power like that strength actually delays or prevents warfare. But I do think, and I think apparently there’s a poll that shows something like 60 plus percent of Americans agree with this, that this would not have happened under Trump, because Putin was actually afraid of what Trump might do, because he was unpredictable.
But you’re right, this is a completely different kind of unpredictability under Biden. It’s this bizarre, like, the need to be very rhetorically strong, almost in a domestic context about this war, but there’s a tension between his words and his actions, on the one hand framing this as something like the moral arc of history, right, and tying it to all of the domestic pronouncements of the left. And then at the same time, he’s being provocatively weak in executing on this arc of history.
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s a good way to say it, provocatively weak. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I actually think this is worse, right? Maybe I’m probably more open to, let’s say, more aggressive foreign policy in this instance than you are, which is not to say that I think we should be needlessly escalatory, but I tend to think that, actually, when you convince people that you’re willing to escalate, that’s when you don’t need to, but regardless of where you fall, it seems to me like this is the opposite of TR’s maxim, right? It’s speak softly and carry a big stick. This is yelling very loudly about the arc of history and how Putin is a murderer and how Russia needs regime change at home, but then carrying a very tiny stick to back up your actions.
And that strikes me, in many ways, the worst of all worlds, if you have more isolationist foreign policy or less interventionist foreign policy, and you speak softly and you have this attitude, that leaves open the possibility that there are lines that you might really enforce and care about, but just that you don’t care about certain things going on in the world versus drawing these, to use the Obama analogy, drawing these red lines everywhere and talking about the morality of the situation. Of course, Putin is a thug and a murderer. But when you, as a president, as opposed to a commentator, say things like that and then don’t back it up, you are creating the expectation that your words cannot be taken seriously, and I think that is really, really dangerous.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, no, that’s completely true. Especially, again, in nuclear politics. To clarify something that I said earlier on this point, there are shades of blobbiness when it comes to this particular conflict. You have everyone, from Lindsey Graham up to Joe Biden and the various people advising them, that could be considered within the blob, but do have these major differences when it comes to like a no-fly zone. That is a huge, huge question that even people in the so-called foreign policy blob disagree with.
So when Joe Biden bucked the generals on Afghanistan, that was, like, shocking for Joe Biden because I think it demonstrated this weird vitality or this obstinance that I don’t see Joe Biden having, because he doesn’t seem capable of it. But that was just something that was very deeply rooted, I think, in him for years, but on this conflict, he’s all over the place. And the regime change slip-up is a really interesting one because I think it shows, when you’re the President of the United States, especially the kind that was hysterical over Donald Trump’s casual use of language, you are very careful with your words in these types of situations, and Joe Biden was a senator for years and years and years. He knows damn well, and he believes damn well in those boundaries and linguistic strictures and all of that.
And so, if anything, I think the message that he just telegraphed to foreign leaders that are well aware of his knowledge of these norms, is that he is no longer in a position to uphold those norms even if he wants to, because his mind just isn’t there. Again, what that telegraphs is that his mind just isn’t there, and by the way, he’s in charge of the greatest nuclear power in the world during a conflict with another great nuclear power. It’s profoundly embarrassing. I like the language that you used, Inez, that it is provocative because, to your point, Putin under Trump, you don’t know if he’s going to take the advice of Jim Mattis one day and John Bolton another day, or if he’s going to take the advice of Steve Bannon. Right?
Like you actually don’t know what’s going to come out of that administration, not even just because Donald Trump is unpredictable, but because he listened to both the blob and people outside the blob, and he had them all clanging when it came to his foreign policy in his years and, you know, let the debate kind of…. He wasn’t this entrenched foreign policy ideologue. I think that probably was very helpful. It was frightening at some moments like when he started tweeting about the size of his button versus the size of Kim Jong-Un’s button, but there is really something to that, and I think the contrast with provocative weakness is a really instructive one.
And Joe Biden saying what he said and failing to uphold these linguistic norms that he has upheld for years, even as a self-proclaimed gaffe machine is a sign that in a situation as serious as this, he can’t even control his gaffe. He can’t control his language because his mind is not there, and the mind of the president of the principle in nuclear politics is essential, and everything comes down to that, and so that puts us in a difficult position.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. One of the things I really wanted to ask you in particular, Emily, about is, and I’ve struggled with this myself. I think in a previous episode, I said it’s like this…. I have on the little angel-and-devil-on-your-shoulders analogy. This particular devil I’ve never actually had any, until now, had any inclination towards, and that would be a Chomskyite anti-Americanism. Right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
I’ve always believed very strongly that America has been a force for good in the world. That’s not to say that we don’t make mistakes, that those mistakes as a global superpower don’t have very, very real consequences around the world for people’s lives. But that seemed to me always to be true about any global superpower, and it was always very clear to me that I would rather…. In William F. Buckley’s famous phrase about, when he was talking about the moral equivalence of the left used to make between the Soviet Union and the United States, that the person who pushes an old lady in front of the bus and the person who pushes her out of the way of the bus are functionally both people who push old ladies.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I’ve always very strongly believed in all of this, and the moral that America was as good a global leader as anyone with an understanding of history and human nature could hope to expect in terms of using its power justly. That assumption is much more difficult for me — and I think a lot of conservatives today — because we see domestically how corrupted our institutions have become both ideologically and just in terms of competence, right?
Arguments like this that to me, once…. If Russia had invaded Ukraine, let’s say in 1995, or let’s say in the late nineties, or even in the 2000s, I think this would’ve been much, much clearer to me, the contours, and it’s still clear, and sometimes I think we use too much of our domestic frame in looking at what’s going on, because the one thing that seems to be lost in a lot of commentaries is Ukrainian agency in all of this, and of course, Ukrainian nationalism. But from the domestic perspective in the United States, I find myself having much less confidence that, for example, alignment with the United States is a good thing.
Because that alignment has been used to advance, not what I would call traditional American values, but has been used to advance now the values of the people who control our institutions, which I so strenuously oppose at home. So that’s been a complicated…. It’s difficult for me to reconcile these two things, the longstanding commitment I have to the American order and the decline of American values at home. I don’t know how you square those two things, but it is now like a difficult question for me in a way that it never would have been before really imbibing, and I think especially after the pandemic, how unserious and how this stuff doesn’t dissolve when we’re confronted with serious problems, right? I think there’s a certain school of thought out there that says, “Yeah, wokeness is bad at home, this stuff is bad. But as soon as we really have to confront something serious, it’ll fade away. It’s really just ephemera of decadence, right, that will be knocked off as soon as we have to actually confront a rising China or we have real problems.” The pandemic seemed to me to be a rebuttal to that idea, that in fact, even when we do confront real serious problems, we can’t be competent in apolitical and set aside the fact that wokeness has taken over these institutions.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think it is still a black-and-white simple question, and I think America is clearly on the side of right still, but I completely agree with you that the lines have been blurred on some important matters. If you’re making a pro/con list, that some of those questions because…. The reason also, by the way, to remember that this is still, I think, black and white, is that you and I are sitting here having this conversation. We are still using a Google-based browser, and we are still….
It doesn’t mean that those threats are not very real and that these major companies are governed by this terrible ideology that Macron and others have actually explicitly said is a poisonous American export, which is, when Macron said that was like one of the worst moments I’ve ever had as an American, sitting back and thinking, “We are, this is our export. This is what we export now.” We don’t have Detroit, we have Providence and the ideology of students in Birkenstocks in the brown women’s studies department is a little bit different than cars, but anyway, that’s a digression.
So, I think that is true, although I would say, because America still has fight in it, because the institutions formed on the bedrock of our Constitution are still fighting for the principles on which they were founded. And we can still have these conversations without threat of Google literally turning us off while we’re doing it, or reporting us to the police or whatever. We are still in contrast with Putin’s Russia, or let’s say China or Middle Eastern countries, some Middle Eastern countries, for all of our faults.
The balance here is still very much clearly on the side of the United States because we are still on the side of freedom, even though we are rapidly descending into a place where we, at some point, have to admit we aren’t. But I don’t think we’re there yet, and we’re not there yet, especially when compared to some of our adversaries — Russia, China, et cetera — for all of our nation-building, for all of our regime change, that was far beyond what we should have been doing. All of these questions. We still have created a haven for people from other countries who are fleeing tyranny and want to enjoy our freedoms, but it is very true that we’re in the process of making ourselves into less of a haven. Zaid Jilani, who used to work at Center for American Progress and is very much on the left, wrote a wonderful article about how we are still the good guys on his Substack, I believe, that everyone should check out. So for me, it’s still a black-and-white question. I’m not burning my Dixie Chicks CDs, but mentally I’m still on our side.
Inez Stepman:
I guess I have two responses to that: one, I agree the country is still good and that the country largely is still fighting, with the phrase that you used. But what I’m less certain about is the institutions that would be governing foreign policy are. Right? So, I very much so believe that this is a fight here. I don’t believe that we have descended into a tyranny that’s comparable, for example, to Russia’s at home, but that’s because of essentially Americans outside of our institutions.
It’s a very difficult question, actually, at all to compare because — and I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve been kicking around this dissident piece for a long time that I still haven’t published, because I haven’t decided quite what I think about it. I think sometimes, even in the comparison, we are in some ways better and in some ways worse. Right? So it is obviously true that we can still speak without being jailed. It is obviously true that the opposition in this country is still not treated like Navalny, right, in Russia. These are obviously true things.
On the other hand, people understood that Pravda was false, right? People understood that the nature of the government and the nature and line of power that was being applied, at least in the late Soviet Union. And there is a diffuseness to the power structure in the United States of how that line is deployed, that I think in some ways makes it much easier to live under and, at the same time, much more difficult to actually nail down and try to stop. But again, all of this stuff, though — this is where I’ve broken, I think, from a lot of the people that I generally agree with, with regard to analysis of the United States, people so-called the new right or populous right, whatever you want to call it.
This is an understanding that’s fairly new, even in the United States. When Ukrainians talk about, let’s say, aligning themselves more strongly with the West and with liberal democracy, these are things that still have meaning to them. I don’t think that, and I guess because I don’t have the position, say, that some folks on the new right have about this decline being inherent to the American system in some way that like there’s an inevitable chain of reaction starting from 1776 and even before that from the enlightenment all the way to wokeness and how we live today; I don’t think that is like an inevitable chain of reactions, and therefore I don’t have this same….
I think that applying 2022 pessimism about the American system to a decision in Eastern Europe to try to escape the orbit of Russia, and very real, like the Russian system, right, as something different from the liberal system. Because that I do agree with, and I think the most egregious error that people are making is that, because they’re critiquing our own system, they can’t recognize that this is a system that…. First of all, the Russian system is not some kind of like conservative trad utopia. This is idiotic. I don’t understand why people believe this at all. Otherwise smart people, they suffer from many of the same maladies of modernity as we do. They are also pessimistic, also irony-poisoned. Also, they don’t go to church.
Emily Jashinsky:
[crosstalk 00:24:06]
Inez Stepman:
Their abortion rates are high, right? Family breakdown and atomization has struck Russia. I mean, don’t forget they lived under communism for decades and decades. That line of thinking to me is completely crazy, especially when I look at some of the very smart people who seem to be going down that route, like Christopher Caldwell, who has been on this train for years, since at least 2017, has been on this train of, “Oh, Putin’s Russia is the great alternative to corrupted liberal democracy or woke liberal democracy.”
But at the same time, you look at the border between Poland and Ukraine, in a very real sense, represents these two systems, right? Liberal democracy, with all of its flaws and all of the encroaching wokeness, which now Poland and Hungary are both in a similar position in terms of trying to fend off from the EU, right, not wanting for various reasons. And the governments are very different and there are lots of differences between these two countries, but both of them were united in trying to push back, for example, against some of the gender ideology stuff that the EU wants them to adopt. Right?
Even with all of that, that border with Ukraine represents not only four times the GDP per capita, and they started out roughly similar, but it represents two totally different trajectories for post-Soviet or post-Warsaw Pact countries coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it’s clear to me that liberal democracy has done something that Ukrainians very much look across the border and say, “No, that’s better. That’s better than when we have, it’s better than being an orbit state in a kleptocracy.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
You can see even how I talk about this, I’m a little bit mixed up, but I don’t think that we can apply how we are now disappointed, because I don’t think it’s inevitable here. I don’t think we can apply how we are now so disappointed with our institutions and with wokeness and all the very real problems and very real worries I have about tyranny in the United States in a different way. I don’t think we can apply this to Ukrainians and the way that they think about an alternative to the system that they’ve lived under for the last several decades.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, and if anything, it’s actually a reminder to jealously guard our principles and the norms that they have created when you see, suddenly, the establishment media flocking to the defense of nationalism and traditional masculinity and the principles behind the second amendment, where you have Ukrainians arming themselves to defend their property and their families and their country.
So when you have an establishment media for its own ideological purposes and corporate purposes rushing to defend literally the nationalism that in this country they have equated with racism and bigotry and intentionally conflated with white nationalism, when you see the establishment media rushing to defend that — when it is virtuous and it does deserve defense, as it does in the case of so many of these Ukrainians, obviously not the Neo-Nazis, but decent Ukrainians who have virtuously taken up arms, men who have defended their children and their wives. And you see these stories being heralded by the establishment media. This is a sign that we still believe in our hearts in the virtues of these principles, and we see how desperate people are to enjoy their fruits.
And it should be a reminder for us to jealously guard them, not to covet what they are fleeing from. And that’s the clash in nuclear powers, China, Russia, the United States, who have very different concepts of the relationship between government and its subjects, government and its people. If you look at the three of those, at least the promise in their principles, their organizing principles and ideas, we do not execute ours perfectly, but I would say that a human being is better off with the aspirations of our principles here in the United States and broadly in the West than anywhere else.
And what that means is we need to fight to restore them and to save them, but we are lucky that we do have a Constitution that, for the time being — and I don’t disagree with you at all, Inez, and we had this conversation on Federalist Radio Hour last week — about how precarious this is, about how close we are to descending into a place where the Constitution might as well just be shredded because nobody has any respect for it anymore, and it doesn’t undergird our culture and our economy. I don’t disagree that we are rapidly descending with every new graduating class from the academy into that hellscape, but I don’t think we’re there yet, and I think so long as we have those principles in contrast with the organizing principles of Russia and China, this is a reminder to fight for what we have here, and that doesn’t mean we have to build nations, we don’t have to take on Ukraine as a nation-building project nor should we, but it does mean that we…. If other nuclear powers see our concept of freedom as a threat to their empire, then we should be proud, if that’s what the threat is, if the threat is human freedom, then we should be proud to uphold it, and reminded to guard it.
Inez Stepman:
I only have one more thing to add, and I think this is a good opportunity to transition exactly to what our leadership has been doing about us as we hover on the event horizon of tyranny in the United States. But just one thing that I would maybe rephrase something that you said, it’s not even that the Constitution will be shredded or that people don’t take it seriously, because I think that has been the case for a long time, at least on the left.
It’s also that the particular type of tyranny that seems to be rising in the United States doesn’t really…. It evades in many ways the constraints of the Constitution, right, which is why I think increasingly you’ll see conservatives retreat into the public. And by that, I mean the public sphere generally, like things interacting with government because, actually, our system does work very well in a certain sense that it’s designed to do, to restrain these impulses of government. Even in our very degraded state vis-à-vis what the founders imagine the Constitution would restrain, those checks and balances — actually, I think Trump’s presidency is a really good example, actually, of how impulses from one branch can be checked by the other, and actually, we do have still plenty of this systemic genius in the way our government works, even as we’ve ditched a lot of the important constraints the founders put.
So that I am less pessimistic about, but it’s difficult, and maybe there are reforms we can make to tie these two things together, but the problem it seems to me, now, is that that tyrannical impulse can circumvent, in many ways, the obstacles the founders put in place for exactly that kind of tyranny because what we’re facing is a private tyranny, which is, as far as I know, as far as I can understand the history of the world, and maybe somebody can email me and tell me that there’s some other example, but as far as I understand it, this is new and uniquely American. This is a new development in the history of how men tyrannize men.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes, it is.
Inez Stepman:
Maybe somebody can write in and tell me why that’s not true and there’s some precedent somewhere, but it’s a very different problem. But let’s —
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, I was going to say quickly, that’s why those romantic overtures to human freedom that I just said fall flat on a lot of people these days, because they’ll say, “Well, it’s the human freedom to pretend gender isn’t real and to live in a postmodern dystopia.” And again, yes, but it’s better, it is far superior to the concept of freedom that is enforced in China and Russia, certainly.
Inez Stepman:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about…. Leave aside the complicated question of how much our internal pessimism should guide America’s foreign policy. But how about…. I think it’s a pessimism that is not apparently shared by Republican leadership. I say that because they seem to be operating very much on assumptions that were outdated probably even in 2012, but are certainly outdated now. So the newest outrage for me and the thing that sent me into a rage spiral and the group chat that Emily and I share with Rachel Bovard, which we sometimes do a podcast version of that group chat over at The Federalist Radio Hour — so if you’re interested in that, you can check that out — but the most recent ragey thing for me was that we have edited the Violence Against Women Act quite substantially, in ways that I find very, very worrying. And it was just slipped into the omnibus, signed into law, it was passed out of committee by, including Republicans, right, and it received Republican votes overall for this bill, which apparently also included, of course, aid to Ukraine. So it was very, very difficult for people to vote against, when that clearly should have been a separate vote as opposed to all the other goodies that the left wanted.
But in any case, this became law with very little Republican objection, and those changes are psychological abuse, which does not have a good definition among other elite ill-defined words, has been retooled with a lot of consequences for college campuses. So, the worst-case scenario for this piece of legislation is something that is basically like Title IX inquisition courts that we are familiar with now since the Obama administration, but the Trump administration attempted to deal with through Title IX, which is to say mere accusation is taken as proof of guilt.
There are massive consequences assigned to, often, young men, almost always young men in these situations, without anything that would be recognizable as due process, which is why a lot of these courts, “kangaroo courts” or whatever on campuses, keep getting smacked down by actual courts. But for me, there’s the potential here for this piece of legislation which became law with basically no objections from the GOP, some very brave and small voices aside. It has the potential to create that inquisition environment, not for drunken hookups, but for relationships and perhaps like breakups and stuff like that. And that seems to me to be a really bad idea, to say the least.
But the question that I wanted to ask you about this is, how is it that the leadership of the Republican party, and generally, I think, the right in this country still doesn’t understand…. Here we are spending the last half an hour waxing depressingly philosophical about whether or not the U.S. really can hope to stand for freedom abroad, as we teeter on the event horizon of tyranny at home, and yet not only are leaders not as pessimistic as us, they don’t even seem to think that this is any political moment out of the ordinary?
Emily Jashinsky:
I don’t know. And this is something…. I guess I remember this would’ve been 2014, I think IWF at the time had a briefing on the problems with VAWA. So this is pre-Trump and —
Inez Stepman:
We’ve been working on this issue for a very long time.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes, yes, yes. And sort of dissident feminists. The reason that I was at this briefing — I think it was on the House side, it was on the Hill — I think the reason I was at this briefing is because they invited Christina Hoff Sommers, who I was working for at the time, and there have been sort of dissident feminists and feminist writers who have been concerned about the problems in this legislation that keep happening and without Republican backlash at all, because Republicans….
And I remember this very much from this particular briefing, whenever you talk to actual elected members of Congress or people at the establishment apparatus, they are terrified to touch these issues and even post-Youngkin, even post-Trump, when it comes to women, they still are, and that’s kind of fascinating because it’s a little bit different than where you see the left go wildly over the top, when you’re racist if you disagree with CRT and you are a bigot if you disagree with Lia Thomas, all of those things Republicans are leaning into and have gotten better, not great, but better at fighting.
And the RNC has learned that this is, to Inez’s point, as she always says, that the culture war is the big tent. But I think because for so long there was just fear. I mean, the way you had to talk about this had to be perfectly focus-grouped. If you thought it was worth delving into this issue — if you did, if you were one of those brave people who did — you had to be perfectly focus-grouped, and you had to talk like a liberal about women and women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It’s just dumb, instead of saying, “Listen, this is anti-woman, this is misogynistic. This puts women at risk. This is doing the bidding of the radical left at the expense of average middle-class working women.” There’s just still no will to talk about that, and I think this issue has gone under the radar for so long because of that, that even now it still exists. I think it’s amazing, and actually a really fascinating case study.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. My question is what will it take, then, for the leadership? Because like you, well, I think I was somewhat a little bit more optimistic at saying that, yeah, that maybe they actually do get this, especially since they were running on…. We had a crop of candidates who are now running on cultural issues in the way that they had not before. And yes, sending out fundraising emails doesn’t necessarily lead to legislation, but at least they were thinking in the right way, and so that was kind of encouraging.
But it really has not seen to translate into an agenda. And that was always the big question for me, right? Talking about these issues more, is it going to translate into actual policymaking and prioritizing of cultural issues that have gone by the wayside for so long and so many recent stints in power for the Republican party? I kind of thought, “Oh, maybe this dam finally is going to break.” Right? And then we have this whole kerfuffle on Capitol Hill over Senator Rick Scott being bold enough to actually release an agenda, which I have some quibble and some stuff with gender, not least of which is that he uses the word gender instead of sex.
But it’s an agenda of things that people care about, and apparently, this is not welcome in the Republican leadership because they would like to simply run on the overreach of the left without actually putting forward anything they’re going to do about it in a serious way.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. You stand a [inaudible 00:40:38] yelling stop, but not redirecting traffic. Yeah, that’s actually a really big problem.
Inez Stepman:
Nicely said.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, do you remember actually, again, under the Obama administration in the years of the kangaroo courts? Republicans did not want to touch that issue at all. Actually, most of the pushback was coming from conservative media, not from elected Republicans, and it’s rare that you have such a clear-cut issue as that one, but Republicans had been hit with the war on women charge from the media and were really terrified. They did not want to talk about life, despite what the left thinks, that Republicans are just champing at the bit to talk about abortion and sex and marriage. They’re not.
But it did not want to touch that issue, and I’m sure, Inez, you remember that very clearly, and Betsy DeVos came in and even had the support of groups that normally lean left, legal groups that normally lean left and did all of this. Then you have Biden nominating the person who enforced this in the Obama administration and Republicans don’t give a damn. So it’s not just like Catherine Lhamon, I’m talking about…. Do you know how to pronounce that correctly?
Inez Stepman:
I know how to write it, but I don’t know how to say it. Many such cases in my lexicon.
Emily Jashinsky:
Many such cases. The enforcer of the kangaroo court regime on campuses has been installed at the education department, and Republicans did not lean into the fight. Did they oppose it, and did they ask questions? Sure. Did they lean into it? Absolutely not. This should be a huge part of Republican messaging in an election year, but men’s lives had been ruined by this, women’s lives had been ruined by this, and Biden just got back to business as usual.
Inez, as you say, we can expect these rules to be reversed and shifted back to the Obama era shortly; that is coming up, and it is going to have a very real effect on our college campuses, on our young people, on our young men and young women. And it’s imminent, and nobody’s talking about it. So it’s not just that they aren’t leaning into the fight, it’s that they don’t know where the fight is at all. It’s like they don’t even care to find out.
Inez Stepman:
I would really like to see a legislative version of the question that Senator Blackburn asked the Supreme Court nominee in the last week. I would like to see a piece of legislation to see who would like to vote for the biological definition of a woman in federal law. And it would not be just performative because, actually, as you just pointed out —
Emily Jashinsky:
[crosstalk 00:43:20]
Inez Stepman:
One of the regs that we expect to drop through Title IX, not only is the Obama administration almost certainly going to restore the complete destruction of due process that we saw with regard to sexual assault accusations, not only are they going to restore the incredibly broad definition of sexual harassment that eats into free speech. And what I mean by that is that we were seeing on college campuses cases where somebody, for example, was making a statement about gender or sex roles, or the kind of conversations that you and I have all the time, Emily, and the school was interpreting that as sexual harassment.
So that standard is probably being restored. So not only all the bad stuff that we had under Obama that did lead to so some confusion and, frankly, so many ruined lives on college campuses — that’s all coming back — but in addition, we are probably going to get regulations that define sex in Title IX as gender identity.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
Including gender identity, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
And remember, John King did that in the last months of the Obama administration via a letter in the same way the Title IX regime had been enforced, that changed the interpretation of Title IX to not just sex, but that sex also includes gender identity. They did that with a fricking letter, and you had some sort of cultural conservatives pushing back on it at the time, but that should have been a five-alarm fire, and it should be a five-alarm fire now.
Inez Stepman:
As an aside, this is one of the reasons that I oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to put in place a federal tax credit, federal school choice program, even though I’m very pro-school choice; in fact, that is my day job, is promoting school choice. But because the department can put forward regs like this with the stroke of a pen — that is not really the case on the state level; there would be a lot more pushback from private school groups and so on — I think on the federal level makes it very, very dangerous for private schools to take federal money because, initially, that Dear Colleague Letter of Obama’s, they did clarify that they meant public schools, but initially it went out to all schools.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yep. Well [crosstalk 00:45:32] all schools.
Inez Stepman:
[crosstalk 00:45:32] trying to force private schools by the stroke of a pen, private schools to abolish men’s and women’s locker rooms. Right?
Emily Jashinsky:
If you take public money, if you take subsidies, as every college except for pretty much Hillsdale does, even though that they changed who the letter was directed at, that is precedent setting and can be cited in…. You’re a lawyer, Inez; I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But that can be cited in court, if the federal government says, to receive federal funding, this is what you have to do.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Look, you take federal money, there are strings attached. I think, look, all public money has that danger inherent in it, but on the federal level, I think it’s much more dangerous because of the way that federal agencies operate. You just said this can be done with a stroke of a pen. They literally just send out a Dear Colleague Letter.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
And what a Dear Colleague Letter is, is for the purposes of enforcement. The Department of Education understands the law to be this, and it’s not supposed to be used to actually change the law, right? It’s just supposed to clarify certain minor aspects, but that is how Democratic administrations have used that power in the past, has been basically to nod, nod, wink, wink, that we’re going to investigate you and possibly adjudicate cases involving you, in through the federal bureaucracy. Right?
Emily Jashinsky:
It would be a knock-down, drag-out legislative battle, and they know it, and it would not have ever passed Congress at the time, though it would have been in the same way the Equality Act still hasn’t passed Congress. It would’ve been a bitter, bitter fight. And instead, they circumvented it with the stroke of a pen, knowing damn well what they were doing.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, I mean this is, again, one of my favorite things to talk about, and something that I talked with Eric Kaufmann about earlier this month on the pod is the power of bureaucracy; like, this is one of my buckets of things that, to my mind, any serious, let’s say Republican backlash that comes into power, any serious bunch of policymakers have to consider the power of unelected bureaucracy because they all have been a powerhouse in just circumventing public debate. Having a majority doesn’t matter if the people making decisions have no accountability to the majority at all.
And increasingly that’s what happened in the last two years. That’s what’s happening with a lot of these folk issues. It is not going through the legislature on the K-12 level, it’s often not going through the school board, it’s going through the district bureaucracy. Right? A lot of these policies, for example, the gender policies, a lot of the gender policies go through the district bureaucracy. They do not ever land on, say, the docket for a city council meeting or for a school board meeting. Right?
So, a lot of this really does circumvent democracy for exactly the reason that you say, Emily, which is they want to avoid the public debate and they want to just quietly implement more and more radical policies through essentially bureaucratic standards. Right? Best practices standards, or through the promulgation — I don’t even want to call it regulation because regulation requires notice and comment. It’s just these Dear Colleague Letters that go out, and all of a sudden, it seems like every school is following this policy. Well, it’s because there was a letter that was sent out that said, “If you don’t follow this policy, we might prosecute you.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, yeah. The Education Department has also enforced different standards when it comes to race, and they’ve done it with strokes of pen and unelected bureaucracy. We have transferred so much Article I power to the executive branch. We are not functioning in the way that we’re supposed to, that’s for sure, let alone at a country that has grown to this size. I mean that in terms of population and geography. It’s completely anathema to how the system’s supposed to work.
Inez Stepman:
Finally, I would be amiss if I did not ask Emily, culture editor, about the biggest pop culture event of the month, which was, I guess, I’m now going to be calling it SlapGate at the Oscars. Which I actually saw live, which I almost never do. I haven’t watched [crosstalk 00:49:43]
Emily Jashinsky:
I’m shocked, Inez told me this, I was like, “You were watching the Oscars?”
Inez Stepman:
A friend of mine had a little watching party, and so we, my husband and I, we went and we watched this live, and it was the most exciting thing that has happened at the Oscars in a long time. There’s been so many takes around this. Obviously, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife and her haircut, which is apparently due to alopecia, the fact that she’s baldish. She has some hair but very, very short. It has to do with a condition she has, and Chris Rock made a joke about it, and Will Smith slapped him. So Emily, culture editor, what should we think about this?
Emily Jashinsky:
Okay. This is a perfectly debatable situation, right? Because it’s a Rorschach test, and we have this question of masculinity at the center of it. So, is it masculine or is it petulant? Is it virtuous or is it petulant to defend your wife’s honor, when the joke is basically that she looks like she might be starring in G.I. Jane 2? Well, first of all, celebrities need to be bullied more often by other celebrities, by journalists, that just needs to [crosstalk 00:50:58]
Inez Stepman:
[crosstalk 00:50:58] Emily is pro-bullying.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, I absolutely am pro…. This is Joan Rivers, and this is what comedians used to do, and this is what the entertainment media used to be a little bit better at. You have to hold celebrities in check because they’re extremely powerful people, and they have the power to set norms, they have the power to spend vast amounts of money in our politics and in our culture, and they do. And they deserve to be treated basically like politicians are in terms of being held to account by the press. That doesn’t mean that artists need to behave like politicians, but they should be scrutinized in the same way. They’re public figures, and they are in control of our culture and our politics in many ways. So they deserve that.
So, is it virtuous or is it petulant? I think given the scale of the joke, it’s petulant; the joke was innocuous. If he had said something truly bad about his wife’s appearance or character and not just a minor little quip about her hair, then get on stage. Yeah, sure. I would much more willing to defend Will Smith in that situation. Chris Rock took it like a man, Will Smith should have taken the joke like Chris Rock took the punch.
Will Smith, I think, redeemed himself by then winning best actor, which is an award he totally deserved, and saying Denzel Washington pulled him aside and said, “You got to watch out for the devil when you’re at your highest moment because that’s when he comes for you.” Apologizing to the academy, he didn’t apologize to Chris Rock, but it was apologetic, it was sincere, it was tearful in a way that I think is maybe helpful to see this healthy masculinity. I was just trying to defend my wife’s honor and protect my family, tied it into the character that he played, that he won the award for. It was almost poetic.
I liked it. I don’t think it was, like, perfect — celebrities never are — but I think he redeemed himself. Although, the last point I’ll add is that Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are deeply weird individuals, as artists arguably should be, who are not role models for anybody who have been involved with Scientology, who have an open marriage, and who challenge, I think, healthy norms about men, women in marriage, from their platforms. And if Will Smith wanted to protect his wife, as I tweeted — because, like Donald Trump, I feel the need to express myself in pithy form on crucial topics — if Will Smith wanted to protect his wife, he should start by insisting on monogamy. What a hot take!
Inez Stepman:
I’ve really been trying to avoid the…. That take, I think, is a little ridiculous, considering men have been punching each other and worse over insults to women in their lives for millennia and far predates wokeness or this notion that words are violence. There have always been certain things that are provocative enough to sometimes spur violence, especially between men. But it’s so hard to avoid these takes. All Twitter — we’re recording this on Monday — all of Twitter, all today has been…takes a varying levels of humor and ridiculousness.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
About what this says about our society, and my very, very critical take on this is that I’m really upset that the person who got slapped at the Oscars wasn’t Timothée Chamalelele.
Emily Jashinsky:
Chalamet.
Inez Stepman:
What he was wearing and just his general visage and the way that he is, I feel like —
Emily Jashinsky:
He looks like [crosstalk 00:54:39] a Tim Burton character.
Inez Stepman:
You’re pro-bullying, I’m pro-bullying that guy.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Bully Chalamet.
Inez Stepman:
In particular.
Emily Jashinsky:
No for sure, bully Chalamet, 100%.
Inez Stepman:
Despite being on this.
Emily Jashinsky:
[crosstalk 00:54:48] terrible Laurie and Little Women. He was good in French Dispatch, but no, I’m all for bullying Chalamet, I think that’s great. The more of it, the better, but it is interesting that these were two like major A-listers and that’s part of the reasons that the Oscars have foundered is because we have these films that are more niche, and meaning we have these celebrities that are more niche, and Hollywood doesn’t know how to create new Will Smiths and new Chris Rocks.
And so, we’re watching these middle-aged men trade barbs and get slapped — he slapped him on stage at the Oscars, and I don’t think we’ll have middle-aged A-list celebrities in 20 years to slap each other. And then the Oscars will have 500,000 people watching instead of the very low 9 million or whatever they had the year before, which pales in comparison. That’s how many people — I looked this up last night — watched the VMAs in 2009, when Kanye stormed the stage and tried to take Taylor Swift’s award away from her. That’s the VMAs. The 2009 VMAs are now at the same level of the Oscars at 2022.
Inez Stepman:
I’ve been trying not to opine, but it’s, like, almost irresistible at this point, and the only larger thing aside from who needs to be slapped that I can think of, is that I do think, especially after the pandemic but even before, I do think that we have a lot more people and not just — and perhaps Hollywood actors always were a little crazy, but I do think we have more people on edge than before. And I think — I’ve talked about this with friends — I think people are visibly more, there are way more altercations that I see in normal environments, right, so like in the airports — and some of this has to do with COVID restrictions and fighting about those, but some of it doesn’t.
I just think people are, I think, modern living and especially the isolation that most people endured for the last couple of years has had some…. I hate the words mental health because I always just get…. I have the urge to roll my eyes every time somebody says something on mental health, but I do think people are more on edge than they used to be, and they’re more apt to get into altercations. They have less control over their emotions and less control over acting out on those emotions than they did even five years ago.
And I’m not sure what combination of, perhaps Emily’s theory of hyper novelty, social media, pandemic lockdowns, isolation, family breakdown. I mean, you just keep going the list and there’s all kinds of factors that could be feeding into that. But I have noticed that people are, in public settings, way more on edge and way more apt to act out than they were even five years ago.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think people need more antidepressants. Like if there’s something we don’t have enough of, it’s —
Inez Stepman:
That’s true. What we should all do is just swallow as many pills as possible to dull any sensation of life, and then we will be perfect candidates for the metaverse.
Emily Jashinsky:
You take your benzos, you put your Oculus headset on, kickback, do your work in the little metaverse room and then go mini golfing afterwards with somebody in Japan, and you’re honestly all set until you have to take another pill.
Inez Stepman:
On that note, Emily Jashinsky, thank you so much for joining us on High Noon: After Dark, as we do every month. And at the end of every month, Emily and I will have our very upbeat and optimistic conversations about the universe, life, everything in the future of the country. But, Emily, thanks for joining us once again.
Emily Jashinsky:
Thanks, Inez.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected] Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button, leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.