In this monthly After Dark episode, Emily Jashinsky and Inez discuss whether we’ve reached “peak woke,” and whether pragmatic alliances with centrists and TERFs on the consensus of the 90s and Aughts are ultimately hollow. They also dissect a Ross Douthat column pointing to the iPhone revolution as proximate — but not ultimate — cause of an entire generation’s very real mental fragility and examine the first shots fired in what may be a politically defining Gen X v. Millennial generational war.
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 talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And as always, at the end of the month, the last Wednesday, we have Emily Jashinsky back on High Noon to do one of these docket episodes, round up some stories for the month that we thought shouldn’t go without further discussion. And also to have a good time, as we always do, at these After Dark episodes. For those who are unaware, Emily Jashinsky is the culture editor over at The Federalist. She is a senior fellow with us at IWF, and she also trains up conservative journalists over at Young America’s Foundation; and to complete the long list of titles, which I could add further to, she also has a segment over on Breaking Points with Crystal and Saagar, and it’s called Counterpoints; I believe now it’s on Wednesdays, it airs on Wednesdays?
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s right. It’s hard to keep up. Also, Inez, far be it for me to critique your introduction, but I did like the way that you said, “Welcome to High Noon where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people and Emily.”
Inez Stepman:
Emily, one of our most interesting people. I thought we’d start on an appropriately political note here with the State of the Union, which kind of seemed to blow by this time. And frankly, I think that’s usually a good frame to think about the State of the Union. It very, very rarely actually matters beyond a week of chattering-class back-and-forth. But I did want to bring up one sort of 10,000- or 30,000-foot level point that I’m curious whether or not you agree with. And that’s that it really struck me that Biden is kind of the last guy standing who’s able to make this particular sort of Democratic pitch because this was a traditional Labor Democrat pitch. It highlighted government spending, it highlighted programs that gave it money and checks to people. It talked about investment even in infrastructure. It sounded a little America-firsty in places and it really, really downplayed all the things that we’ve been talking about, about the professional managerial class interests that now functionally runs the Democratic Party, whether that’s on culture or economics.
Notable to me, he barely mentioned — there was one word, which is annoying because I’m waiting to put out a piece on it and I thought I could use it as my hook — but he barely said a word about the loan forgiveness program, which is a direct handout to the new most powerful constituency in the Democratic Party, that professional managerial class. But what do you think about this speech? I would say the popular, relatively popular agenda that is not to say that it’s a good one, but the relatively popular agenda it represented. And do you think any other Democrat coming up in the ranks behind Biden can actually still make this labor Democratic pitch?
Emily Jashinsky:
We had exactly the same reaction to the State of the Union apparently, because that was my thought was how terrifying is it that Joe Biden is really the only Democrat I could envision talking about one thing in particular. And he emphasized it; he didn’t just mention it once. It was a theme of his speech, and he spent a good chunk of time talking about bringing back pride in the country; build back pride, he said several times, that we need to restore pride in the United States of America, and you really cannot envision another Democrat talking like that at all for myriad reasons. But it’s interesting, especially as we’re sort of getting to the end of Jimmy Carter’s life. It was announced late this month that he was heading into hospice, and there’s a lot of comparisons or parallels that have been made with the malaise he oversaw in the 1970s to the high levels of inflation, the high levels of foreign conflict that we have right now under Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden is really trying to project a sense of confidence and strength and optimism and patriotism, and I just don’t know who else is out there that is willing to make that argument at all — whether or not they actually would is a different question, whether or not they would actually believe it is a different question than whether they would even make the argument. So from a big picture perspective, the economic populism of Joe Biden’s speech, as you said, Inez, we have to basically grade ahead of the unions on curves, the liar curve; these are politicians, they’re going to say all kinds of falsehoods. Different sides are going to be hypocrites for standing up or not standing up.
We know that’s all going to happen. But for him to emphasize economic populism and patriotism — he did not touch much on the border or on China, which I think speaks to a huge flaw, both in the Democratic Party and the broader left, certainly in his administration from the populist perspective — but to emphasize those two subjects when they are as out of fashion as possible, not just in the Democratic Party of today, but in the Democratic Party of tomorrow, which we know because we know who’s coming up through the ranks of the Democratic Party…. It is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s bittersweet because I’m glad that you have a Democrat that’s trying to muster American patriotism and trying to restore it now, but sad that I don’t think that will last much longer. So I mean, enjoy the moment while you can.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean it’s obviously in sharp contrast with what his administration is actually doing. And by that I don’t just mean that of course every president, in every State of the Union, he’s taking credit for things he probably shouldn’t, he’s lying about the success of his programs. These are old hat, we expect these things in politics, but he really downplayed a lot of the things that his administration is doing. He has administration right after the speech put out a new DEI order that applies to the entire federal government and entrenches a lot of this cultural wokeism that is sort of the unpopular side of the Democratic agenda. And that’s hardly the first sort of cultural nail he has driven into the coffin. So his administration — largely the output, the actual policy output, has been for this sort of woke managerialism or, if you’re a part of the old-school left, the woke technocracy or neoliberalism. The blending of the extreme social views and extreme cultural views with a more moderate and moving away from labor economic politics.
This was the opposite. He barely said a word. I mean he said one word here, one word there, but I mean he really did not emphasize, he did not emphasize cultural issues. He did not emphasize the trans stuff. He had a line here or there to satisfy. This was really a meat-and-potatoes labor speech. But that’s not what his administration is doing. That’s not the output of his administration; it’s focused very, very sharply on cultural issues. But it’s interesting to me that he may be the last Democrat that at least understands that this is the popular part of their agenda and that the other part of their agenda is very unpopular except with this limited class group. And increasingly that’s all that seems to matter. It’s hard to imagine AOC giving a speech like this, for example.
Emily Jashinsky:
And I’ve been thinking about that for years because there’s this terrifying question lingering over the Democratic Party when it comes to people like Ilhan Omar or AOC, but even a Kamala Harris. What do you think is so good about this country and what do you think your voters think is good and worth preserving about this country? And obviously conservatives have been concerned by that question for decades. When you have legions of Chomsky followers that are flocking to the Democratic Party, it makes you nervous that this anti-American sentiment is becoming mainstream. But now I think you really have to ask a question. I pay attention to what Ilhan Omar says about this stuff, and I can’t think of what she possibly likes about this country.
Seriously, I really, really don’t know. Because some of the things you would expect her maybe not to like, she still thinks we haven’t gone too far on probably the issue, the full spectrum of LGBT issues. She probably thinks we haven’t gone far enough on the CRT-type policies, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, et cetera, et cetera. So what are you trying to preserve uniquely about the United States of America? What do you like it? Why is it worth preserving? Joe Biden has a very clear answer to that question. Hillary Clinton can give a very clear answer to that question. Barack Obama can give a very clear answer to that question.
Inez Stepman:
Let’s not be naive. I mean most of them are lying, but they felt the need to lie. That’s kind of the point. They were going for a different constituency, and they felt the need to lie about it. Now, I don’t know, actually, Biden might be out of those people the least lying about it. But in any case, it hasn’t gone along with substance for a long time for the left. But all of these successive Democratic politicians recognized that their oligarch cultural politics were only the tail to the meat of their party, which was labor politics. And now the tail is wagging the dog. And Biden is just sort of the last mouthpiece of this old Democratic Party that is even willing to lie on its behalf. And I wonder what happens when that cover goes away because to some extent the realignment has been more of a blip than a lot of people predicted. And I wonder what happens when the cover gets blown off.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yep, yep. That’s a good point. And it’s exactly what I was just thinking, basically, that one of the reasons I find this terrifying is if we can’t all agree that we’re part of a fundamentally good country, then the American project is not something we can do together. So if Ilhan Omar is not proud of the country she represents as a member of the House of Representatives, so she doesn’t think it is a fundamentally good entity, that it is a force for good — and we have reason to question whether or not she thinks that because she compared it to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a tweet. I mean, if you’re doing that, if you’re drawing moral equivalencies, which is exactly what she did — she was talking about, I think Hamas, put them all in the same level of committing atrocities — so if you can’t fundamentally say that you believe that we are all engaged in a project for the good of humanity, for the good of the American people first and foremost, then what’s the point?
What are we working on? Why will you bother to come to the table on issue X, Y, or Z if you don’t give a damn about America and you care more about, as people correctly point out, if you see yourself more as a global citizen, a citizen of the world than a citizen of the United States, and that’s really what this issue fundamentally gets at. I mean, you can’t govern together when a huge chunk of the governing population sees itself as more loyal to this cause of the world and the globe than it does to the country that it represents.
Inez Stepman:
Which, an interest, by the way, which also sits orthogonally to the traditional labor politics of the Democratic Party in a very direct and obvious way. I’m glad you’re bringing this up because there’s been a bunch of think pieces and tweets from folks on the left and the right to a certain extent about peak wokeness and whether this cultural movement, a large chunk of which is this idea that you’re pointing to, that the United States is fundamentally an evil, racist country, that there is no common project that is of any value that unites Americans…. So there’s all this talking about it being basically peak wokeness. And some of the evidence I’ve seen cited for that is simply high-profile defectors, usually Gen X defectors. And also I’ve seen some of the attempt to put statistical meat on this by saying the number of publications of sort of CRT buzzwords or the alphabet mafia buzzwords are declining in academic publication. So they kind of peaked in 2020, and since then they’re really going down, and people are arguing that, okay, well we are going to — and I would put in this category more substantively, there have been some actual victories for the cultural right, especially in regard to a lot of IWF and IWV’s good work in regard to women’s sports, for example. There does to be a certain amount of tide turning going on minor gender transition, where even the New York Times is getting blasted from their left flank for publishing just basic scientific information about how horrendous this kind of medical experimentation on children is. Of course, they wouldn’t phrase it that way. They weren’t inflammatory about it at all. The opposite; they went over backwards, but it made it into the pages of the New York Times. There was a Washington Post story as well about it.
So people are adding all this up and saying, well, maybe the tide is turning to a certain extent, maybe the most fanatical portion of this woke ideology is kind of behind us. I see something different, which is the final consolidation of institutional power to the point where it’s no longer avant-garde and no longer required to be sort of in the faculty lounges as main driving force. Now, it’s an executive order from the president. So I’m curious where you fall on that. Do you think that there is a certain kind of falling or victories against this culture meaningful, or is this merely the consolidation and the sort of standardization best practices, the kind of corporatizing of this ideology that is making it drop a little bit off the front lines?
Emily Jashinsky:
There was a compact magazine piece about this, wasn’t there recently? Yeah. That piece made me really angry and it’s not because… Obviously, I think most of what was in the article was true. It was pointing to, as you said, Inez, high-profile case studies of defectors and victories for those defectors in various institutions. And that is all accurate, a hundred percent. But the big picture question is so different than the vibe shift, and it’s just what you’re pointing out: that we can have this vibe shift in the energy where people start realizing, hey, we’re going to pull back on some of the stuff, whatever. But we don’t know the full scope of the damage yet and won’t for years. We do know, though, that multiple generations of Americans have already been educated in and conditioned in an environment where they don’t see themselves in the sort of republican — small-R republican — sense, as republican citizens of a fundamentally good country.
We know that they are litigating their private, personal, professional, academic lives on devices that are designed to function like slot machines, and we know that they are drowning in mental health problems. We know that they are incredibly obese and unhealthy, and we know that that cuts lives short and makes lives miserable in incredible ways. We know that they’re unhappy and frustrated sexually, even if they’re not taking those risks; we know that they aren’t not taking those risks in a totally healthy way. Things like teen pregnancies being down is a good thing. But if it’s because children are too afraid to engage in any risk-taking behaviors, that’s not a good thing. So you have an entire generation, two generations, that has yet to enter the workforce in large numbers, and the conditioning is so incredibly deep because they blew up the foundation in everyone’s minds.
There was no foundation of fundamental objective reality about this country, about God, about the world around you. What was built on those soils is rickety at best. They’ve been conditioned to have a lot of really bad ideas about their sex and gender, about race, about family and sex and all of those different things. When we are more under their control than we are right now, we’re not going to say that the Cultural Revolution ended in 2022 or that the wokeness died in 2022 and it’s fallen out of fashion with a good chunk of people who are in leadership positions in business, government and media. But even then it hasn’t fallen out of fashion with all of them, and they have already changed the perspectives and implanted this ideology in the minds of a couple of generations in huge numbers and on a scale we won’t be able to comprehend until they enter the workforce, just as we started to see this happen when millennials enter the workforce. So it’s just way premature and I think shortsighted to look at the vibe shift, which is real, and say it means that wokeness is over.
Inez Stepman:
It’s also just not translating into anything but an acceleration on the ground itself. So one really good metric that it’s hard to measure, but just from talking to parents, for example: it is becoming harder, not easier, to find a pediatrician that will not shop they/them pronouns to your vulnerable child. It’s becoming harder, not easier. It’s not like, oh, there’s been this break and now those forces are all going the opposite direction institutionally; and this DEI order from the Biden administration, of course will accelerate that, not decelerate it. I think I’ve said this before, but I do think this is really driven by some high-profile Gen X defectors. And I do think Gen X is making a really interesting political turn here. According to all of the long-term surveys we have, Gen X is going more conservative faster than boomers did at their age.
So Gen X will probably be the conservative generation in America, but millennials and Gen Z are accelerated in the left direction, and they are not becoming more conservative as they get older the way that past generations have. And I really think you have this kind of — for those who are not watching, I’m making a V-shape with my hands — I really think you’re going to have a great generational warfare, basically, between millennials and Gen X, as boomers start to fade out of power. And one of the things that reminded me about this was Whoopi Goldberg talking about Nikki Haley and Don Lemon saying she’s not in her prime or whatever. Of course the response from the center-right and the establishment right was like, “No, she’s our girl boss, and you just don’t like that she’s the first minority governor and it just makes liberals’ heads explode,” or whatever.
That was her fundraising email that went out after. So that I found all incredibly cringey. But I do think it was interesting because Whoopi Goldberg backed up Don Lemon basically said, no, 51 is not the prime, that she’s not the new generation because she ran this whole ad on ‘we’re the new generation of leadership.’ And I really think this is going to be the shape of, with a boomer sort of throwing out the first generational shot between millennials and Gen X, I think largely the leadership in the Republican Party is going to be Gen X, and the leadership, the new ranks of leadership in the Democratic Party are going to be millennials, and we’re going to go to war with each other. Unfortunately for us, not as millennials, but as people of the right, millennials are a much bigger generation.
Emily Jashinsky:
And Zoomers, the generation… That’s the other thing. We talk about Gen Z, we’re always talking about the youngest generation as though it’s the generation that’s just about to enter the workforce. But imagine the kids that literally were given the 1619 project in American history classes. Zoomers were mostly already in college where that stuff has been used for years anyway. But imagine the young children, the kids that were five in 2021, 2022, whatever, when that started circulating through curricula; imagine the kids who were grown up with that, the kids who don’t remember a time before Wi-Fi was like oxygen just sort of floating through every little place where there’s air. These kids are not entering the workforce in big numbers yet; we have no idea how damaging this all is going to be on their ability to function and to help us keep functioning as a society. I mean, we can’t get planes out at Christmas. We can’t have a functioning USPS. We can’t get trains safely from one place to the other without hurting small town Ohio and then having government and private industry collude to cover certain things up. I mean, we just are struggling to perform basic functions now.
So even if there are changes around the edges, and by the way, just as we were talking, I saw vanity hair, Vanity Fair headline, not vanity hair, Vanity Fair headline about how New York Times staffers are criticizing the union for defending the Times in the anti-trans coverage debacle. So yes, such a promising sign that the Times stood up for journalism that should never have had to happen and should have happened five years ago at worst. But even that is not going quietly because there are still so many people in all of these generations who may not be as vocal because it has fallen out of fashion but whose….
But this is the big point. The big point is that we have taught all of these people that their sense of purpose comes from signaling their virtue, in racking up woke virtue signal winds because they don’t have a sense of purpose outside of that. And when you’ve taught generations of people to find their purpose in that, it is not unlearned easily. That is not a foundation that crumbles overnight for the vast majority of people. And so we talk about Nietzsche a lot here, who said that people are going to build their own religion, their own gods, their own idols in the absence of the sort of Western foundation, the Judeo-Christian Western Foundation. That doesn’t change if the vibe shift comes about and maybe superficially kills wokeness in like Sam B not being on the air anymore. That’s just not how it works. This is so much deeper that it’s good to celebrate what we’re seeing in the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface, the iceberg is still there and very dangerous.
Inez Stepman:
It’s also a direct patronage system. So it’s not just the cultural indoctrination, but it literally, we are creating at a faster and accelerating pace, not a slowing down pace — except maybe I have an amendment to this — but certainly in the government sphere, we are creating more and more jobs, grant programs, and various rewards structured around identity politics and around what you just referred to as racking up woke points. And that is not going away; that’s accelerating. So that’s one aspect of it; the only sort of bubble of hope in that regard, I do think we’re starting to see, not to give myself credit for this, but I do think we’re seeing what I predicted with regard to the Elon Musk model. We are seeing the DEI departments of large tech companies that are now going through contraction. They are starting to cut those jobs as fat to cut, that ultimately that rubber-meets-the-road sort of mentality, when you have somebody like Musk out there giving the example of, hey, you can actually just fire all these people, and if you need to cut payroll — and if anyone’s interested in that argument, you can either read it in the Washington Examiner or you can go to some of our previous episodes. I think you and I have discussed this quite a bit. But I am starting to see that happening, and there are numbers to back that up.
So that’s hopeful; to me, that’s more hopeful than this idea, but previous successions of sort of cultural revolutionary ideas that were then entrenched in American life also had this ebb and flow where we’re not actually scoring victories, we’re halting it, pausing it for a minute, until the institutional forces then overwhelm slowly. So I could see it being completely true that we might pause gender transition for minors here, but that’s not ultimately….
I mean look, I’m in favor of it. It’s a victory in the sense that it’s horrific what we’re doing to young people, and the detransitioners coming out are testifying to that. But if it comes to the compromise that like, oh hey, this is a great and celebrated thing, and in fact you’re going to get a patronage network job, six-figure job based on your being quote unquote “trans,” you’re just going to have a lot of people transitioning at 18. It’s not actually that different. Now, I’m glad in the sense that still, it’s still more horrible the younger and more vulnerable these kids are when they make these sometimes-irreversible decisions about their bodies. That’s horrible in its own right, so it’s not that I’m against any of these things, but the actual substance of the cultural movement itself, there’s no firewall between 17 and 18. It’s you’re going to have gender reveal parties for 18-year-olds. That’s not actually a substantive victory, it’s a pause.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, and let’s take one really high-profile example, JK Rowling. Say that we come to a cultural consensus on the question of transgenderism in single-sex spaces, restrooms, women’s shelters, prisons, and children. Say we get back just to that baseline of sanity on those questions. You are still left with JK Rowling believing, as she does, that transgenderism in adults is something that is perfectly acceptable and laudable as a treatment for dysphoria. And that is the case with many, many, many people on that side of the issue. So while again, I think you’re right, the incentive structure in certain corporations and certain institutions, government, the state governments in Florida and all of these little red places, yes, the incentive structure is changing and that is fantastic, but there’s a real question as to whether these are the levies in New Orleans that can withstand the first onslaught of the water, but then as it just gushes in the future, they break and crumble and we don’t know because we don’t know exactly how bad we can predict. The onslaught will probably be pretty bad because of all of these reasons.
But we also don’t know how strong that incentive structure can be as a fortification. So obviously, yes, like encourage it, keep doing it. It is a big, big, big deal. It’s good. It’s going to save young people’s lives; there’s no question about it. But at the end of the day, even if we can do the very difficult work of coming to a cultural consensus on that stuff, which I don’t think we ever fully can, but to the extent that we can improve the cultural consensus on those questions, we’re still left with a culture that is totally lost. We’re still left with the culture of 2010, the culture of even 2015. And that’s not a great place to be. It’s better than where we are now, but it’s not a great place to be.
Inez Stepman:
That’s actually a great transition to one of the things I wanted to talk about, which is a Ross Douthat article on the introduction of the smartphone and mental health crisis among young people, in which he criticizes this. And I think this goes way beyond this particular technological argument and Jonathan Haidt’s thesis about the 2007 break, essentially, in an escalating like crazily escalating serious mental health problems among young Americans, but we’ll get to that actual substantive debate in a minute. But he really critiqued something that I think is very similar to what you just said about going back to 2010. And he has this wonderful, actually, paragraph, the way that he wrote it up, talking about how this is essentially, this was a hollow, this consensus that seemed like it was actually working out and we mocked the sort of moral majority right for having these “slippery slope fallacies” about where some of this permissiveness and hollowing out of the foundation, the Judeo-Christian foundation of the society would go. Because in that very specific and blip in time, in the nineties and early two thousands, those … essentially, the winds were mild. What Douthat writes, you know, America’s on top of the world, with people writing about the end of history, which is very unfair by the way, that essay. But it has come to stand out, I guess I feel bad for Fukuyama because…. But that phrase came to stand in for a certain view, America’s on top of the world, prosperity is going to continue to escalate. This social liberalism actually didn’t yield any of these sort of wild negative consequences. They seemed like kind of wild and crazy. The crazy moral majority Christians, oh yeah, there’s going to be, men are going to want to be women and we’re going to interchange. Of course now we look back and we see those, actually, if anything, they undersold a lot of those slippery slope predictions. And the slippery slope has been the big winner of the 20…. Big W.
But I want to read what Douthat wrote, the last paragraph. So he’s talking about the introduction of the smartphone as this technological break that may very well have precipitated, in specific, some of these mental health crises. But he says, “If you are comfortable with the world of the early Obama years, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the technological shock that brought us to this place, to lament an attempt to alter its effects. But those effects should also yield a deeper scrutiny because what looked stable and successful 15 years ago now looks more like a hollowed out tree standing only because the winds were mild, waiting for the iPhone to be swung, gleaming like an ax.”
I think that’s just, that is very much connected to this idea, both politically and technologically. If we can just get back, if we can ban minor transition, or if we can get an article for JK Rowling in the New York Times, if we just consolidate this nineties liberalism where everything was great, not recognizing that, one, the seeds of that sort of liberal agreement yielded exactly where we are now. And two, the only reason that it seemed okay or working out for some time is essentially it was an unprecedented period of global peace and without any major technological shocks, without any major direct danger to the homeland. I mean 9/11 really brought that era to a close, but politically it continued for the next 10 years. So I don’t know. This center liberalism and this idea — we saw it with Pinker as well, criticizing Rufo and Governor DeSantis for actively going in and trying to address the curriculum and the substantive values of public universities — there is this idea, if we can just turn it back a little bit, that we can fix all of this.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, no, that’s a really, really, really important point. And actually, it’s one that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about because…. And to some extent that’s reasonable, because we have to solve the problems that are in front of us. But we should talk about the problems that are in front of us in a way that appreciates their true root. You can talk about what we see on the surface, but that only gets you so far. If we’re going to be spending time talking about the problem of tech, talking just about social media isn’t that helpful because this is a brand new…. To talk about hyper novelty, Inez, you mentioned this is just sort of a brand new way of life for human beings. It’s a lot of the way that we live right now is just completely foreign to our bodies and our minds. And that’s why even for all of the health benefits of these technological innovations, we are struggling to be happy. And that trend line starts going down decades before the iPhone is introduced.
Arthur Brooks has written about that even as we started to live in bigger houses, at least with more material comforts than we’d ever have before, happiness is going down. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that prescription medication is, use of prescription medication is skyrocketing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that overdoses are skyrocketing. These things just don’t make a lot of sense if you aren’t considering the full scope of the change. So I agree with what Douthat said about the tree just waiting for the ax of the iPhone. But to your point, Inez, I’m not sure most of the right’s foot soldiers or most of the right’s, I shouldn’t say foot soldiers, I should say most of the right’s allies, most of the right’s non-conservative allies in the battles of today are allies in the battles that will ultimately count, if that makes sense. And the sooner we get to those, obviously, the better off we’ll all be.
I do think there’s some really interesting case studies of people like Dave Rubin who… And there are, I think, a lot of people are like Dave Rubin who come from the left and had their eyes opened up to the moral depravity of the broader leftist worldview by things like COVID, by things like the excesses of transgenderism and their sort of gradually incrementally moving not just to the center but to the right. So I do think that’s happening. I think it’s sort of a gateway drug. Some of these issues are a gateway drug to not just conservatism, but just to a healthier outlook on life. So I think that’s true, just like the FBI and Trump-era has been a gateway drug for conservatives to getting black-pilled on the deep state. These are all realignment questions, but it is true that some of these issues will bring people, will win converts, but you are going to need a whole lot of converts to improve the human condition at this point.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s really true about the converts, because I’ve seen this happening with the TERFs, the trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I work with a lot of TERFs — like IW, we work with some great organizations, Wolf in the past, for example. And so I count many of them as friends. But it’s interesting, I always make the joke on Twitter that people call me a TERF, and I said, “Don’t call me a TERF. I’m not a feminist. I am a trans exclusionary.” But I was recently in Scotland and happened to be there while there was this big gender rally. And it really struck me that the two sides of this, the sort of TERF side of the feminists was kind of the moms, the old-school feminist moms, and then on the trans side are largely their kids. Now it’s obviously true that being a conservative and raising your children in a conservative framework doesn’t protect them from the culture at large so completely; there are obviously cases where conservative families are dealing with this. So that is not my point, that only people on the left have to deal with this question or only TERFs do. But it did strike me as these kids didn’t buy what you said about the fact that there’s no right way to be a woman, for example, that femininity has nothing to do with biology. That men and women, actually, for all intents and important purposes like life, family, career — they should be interchangeable for those — but hold on, not for the 200-meter butterfly.
And I don’t want to take anything away from the TERF movement. Honestly, I think sometimes they take more direct fire than we do on the right because they are still very much plugged into those left-wing networks, meaning their friends are the ones who are abandoning them, their jobs are the ones who will fire them. We are kind of pre-canceled in that way, so it’s still takes enormous courage to do what they’re doing. So I’m not taking it away from them at all. And I do consider them allies in particular fights. But nevertheless, I feel like it’s important for conservatives to articulate these differences. That you can’t actually go back to nineties feminism as a subcategory of this general, let’s-go-back-to-the-nineties kind of movement. You can’t do that without setting up all of the conditions that led us to where we’re at right now. But I do think you’re right that there’s a certain subset of those TERFs or other commentators outside of that TERF world who are just kind of on their way to being conservatives. This is a stop over on a way of a more deep political conversion. And that definitely happens. But I think it’s a minority of the folks who kind of stand in those classical liberal, IDW, TERF kind of networky spaces. But it does happen for sure.
I definitely, I know some people who, they still call themselves sort of folks on the left, but on every substantive and deep proposition, they’re starting to really examine what their beliefs were in the nineties and two thousands and the connection between those beliefs and what they have definitively rejected today. But I do think it’s important to talk or to speak to, and I have our arguments speak to those actual distinctions and go to the heart of them.
Emily Jashinsky:
And Libby is a good example. Libby Emmons. We talk about Dave Rubin, but Libby is such a great example too of somebody who the trans wars and political correctness was a total gateway drug that really changed her mind about her own worldview and brought her to a more traditionalistic outlook on things. And I think in a porn-saturated world, especially the world of Gen Z, but the generations behind Gen Z. Totally porn saturated, totally post Sex in the City. We can’t just be content to say, yeah, let’s get back to a time when internet porn was really hard to look at. It was really hard to get to internet porn.
Yes, that is a great step, but that doesn’t preclude us from having every Kardashian’s ass on Instagram at every given moment. And it doesn’t preclude those children from putting their asses on Instagram, on a Finsta where their parents aren’t seeing it, or on Snapchat where it disappears, whatever. Because if you’re back to the sort of sexual mores of 2010 when Jezebel reigned supreme, that’s just not good enough. That is a very unhappy and unhealthy place to be as a society, and it’s not sustainable.
Inez Stepman:
Well, and the last bit is important. You can’t just freeze in time in the nineties. These ideas have a way of working themselves out. These permissive structures, whether it’s about sex or gender or it’s about any other political structure. These assumptions have a way of actually working themselves out. They don’t stand still in time. You don’t get to just declare a certain kind of permissiveness and then be surprised when, for example, the civil rights revolution extends more and more to new and invented categories of victims. Once you establish the idea, the fundamental idea that we’re going to reward identity politics victims, there are necessarily going to be more characterizations of identity politics victims. And a really good example of this, of course, is the increasing ramp up of a political movement to declare MENA a category on the census — what is it? Middle Eastern and North African? — to basically exclude more and more people from that evil category of white male, cis, straight oppressor. You can’t be surprised about the consequences of this.
I do want to ask you about the underlying, or I should say just the example that Douthat uses because it’s something that you talk a lot about, the effects of technology, and I think you use the word rickety, rickety foundation earlier when we were talking. And we kind of come back to this a lot, I feel like, but the relationship between that rickety foundation and then these very concrete technological revolutions that are producing an enormous amount of fragility. To the point where it’s very difficult for two people on this side of these generational divides in a way that I don’t think is true about, say, older millennials or Gen X and boomers who are maybe the same number of years apart or even more years apart, but it doesn’t feel like talking to the other side of the black mirror in the same way. So what do you think? Is there any kind of solution for a couple generations of Americans who are going to be this fragile? And it seems really difficult as adults; how do you get out of that? It’s almost like a psychological problem, but ultimately a political one.
Emily Jashinsky:
I don’t know if you know who Maggie Rods is, she’s roughly my age, the singer. She’s a great artist —
Inez Stepman:
Your age is young in comparison to my age being old, no, continue.
Emily Jashinsky:
Meaning born in the early nineties, that’s what I meant. She posted on Instagram yesterday. I just saw this while I was scrolling through my feed and thought it was interesting. She posted yesterday to say that something that has never happened before is happening at her concert. She’s noticed in the early stages of this new tour that she’s on, she said people are starting to have panic attacks and pass out in the audience in more numbers, with greater frequency than she’s ever seen before. And she has a big, as someone who’s been to her concert, a big Gen Z following and even maybe even younger than Gen Z because you’ll go to those concerts and it’s one where people are there with their parents and their parents are supervising a group of 10 teenage girls in Birkenstocks with socks on, which is something that I did, not ironically, in 2006. But that aside, I found that really interesting. It’s like a window into what’s to come because that’s just Gen Z.
Think about the kids who grew up behind Gen Z who were literally children during the pandemic, and maybe it took them longer to talk, maybe it took them longer to pick up on human emotion. I don’t know. But that’s the part of the thing. In a weird way, this is a weird parallel. It reminds me a little bit of what’s happening in East Palestine, Ohio right now, because you don’t know how damaging these chemicals and the air and the water are going to be to people; like we really don’t know. In some cases with 9/11 first responders, we didn’t know about the accumulated carcinogens and how they would affect people’s health. With some cases, we’re still learning, and it’s just going to be….
It’s very hard. It’s very hard to know what happens when, for instance, Gen X, as you’ve laid out, when they hit 40, when they hit 45. Well, there have been big changes because now they have kids and now there’s an iPhone and now there’s porn everywhere. And you have no idea what happens when the kids younger than Gen Z hit voting age. We have no idea what kind of technologies. We’re talking about brainwave technology for your employer. This is something that was talked about seriously at Davos in an interesting speech. They’ll be able to track your brainwaves to tell when you’re focused and when you’re not. It’s —
Inez Stepman:
So creepy.
Emily Jashinsky:
Right. And imagine the safetyism that comes with that. I mean, you have the Haidt/Lukianoff book from 2015, The Coddling of the American Mind, and you have, what was the Bloom book, the shrinking of the American mind — The Closing of the American Mind — decades before that one. So just imagine what scale this problem is going to be on and the sort of tinkering around the edges or dealing with the tip of the iceberg that we can see above the surface because it’s where we can find consensus. It’s just not going to be enough. And I think if our society feels like it’s not sustainable now, I don’t think it’s getting substantially better. I think it’s getting superficially better.
Inez Stepman:
And in terms of the mental fragility of young people, it’s getting demonstrably worse and measurably worse. And actually here I’m going to quote somebody who…. I feel like, and the reason I’m quoting him, is this guy is that we went to high school together. He was one year under me. We had some friends in common. I mean, wouldn’t say we were best friends or anything like that, but we knew each other in high school, and he’s definitely a guy of the left, a communist. But I feel like, actually, we both got a seat to this revolution a little bit earlier in the sense that Palo Alto was already in mental health crisis, in part because perhaps we had access to some of these technological advances earlier. But also I think because of that reign of this kind of nineties liberalism was so strong in Palo Alto and so advanced in Palo Alto that, in many cases, it was the first…. But I remember my dad being completely shocked with the percentage of people of kids in Palo Alto that were on, they all had therapists, half of them were on mental medication.
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s not Poland.
Inez Stepman:
It was like, what’s wrong with all these kids? They have great lives as far as I can tell. And there was a series of suicide clusters that was recognized by the CDC. There were Atlantic articles that became a national story. What’s wrong with the kids of Palo Alto? Well, now I feel like that’s extended to most kids. That frame is now the frame on an entire generation and possibly two. So this guy, Malcolm Harris, he wrote in the Intelligencer a few years ago, but he retweeted it in context of the debate today. Said, “When it,” meaning this crisis, “When it’s framed as a youth mental health crisis, the solutions are individual. One malfunctioning brain at a time, even as the issue is obviously social. The scholarship on long-term developments and cohort mental health suggests it’s not individual disasters that matter, but rather enduring social changes. America has become an increasingly difficult place to be a happy child, and it’s well past time to start treating that as an urgent political problem.” He highlights political; obviously his solutions are literally diametrically opposite from what you or I probably think is a good set of solutions. He points, for example, to climate change and the end of the world as the reason that kids are depressed and kind of downplays the technological aspect of this. But I do think that that consideration is worth considering.
And it reminded me something of your speech at NatCon where you were talking about how problems like mental fragility, increasing SSRI use, obesity, diet, these kinds of problems actually should be political problems; we should think about them as political problems rather than as individual sets of choices. And neither side, the left or right, has really come up with a political framework for thinking about the fragility or how to deal with the fragility, and the very real fragility. I feel like a lot of people on the center-left and on the right believe it’s like fake. These kids are faking it. I increasingly don’t think they’re faking it. I think they actually are passing out; I think they actually, they believe they have — what is it? — the identity disorders where they’re the system and they swap out different identities. They really do feel more uncomfortable in their bodies. They feel more disembodied. These are, I think, real, and the question is, one, is it a political problem? Two, what is the beginning of a political framework to address it?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, and it’s interesting because I think to the extent the left does think about these things — if I think about Michael Bloomberg, who I am placing firmly on the left here — his solution is to increase government power over individual choice and ban Big Gulps when it comes to obesity; he’s really taken it to Coca-Cola by banning Big Gulps. Well, again, I mean that’s not even coming close to what might need to happen here, which is evaluating whether the products that Coca-Cola sells should plainly, whether they actually are fundamentally edible. That sounds like a ridiculous question, although people should know you can actually… Yeah, she’s drinking Coke Zero. Even though people should know you can actually clean your toilet with Coke. It’s like it is that chemical and that sort of unnatural as a chemical unlike, I mean I know there’s some natural chemicals you could clean with, but you get what I’m saying. This question about whether some of these foods are fundamentally edible, whether they should meet what basic FDA standards are.
It’s not that we need to put more government control over individual choices, it’s that what we need to do is use existing parameters of what is and is not okay for corporations to do. We don’t let corporations sell food that hurts you. We already do that. We just need to ask bigger questions about what hurts you. I think the left’s answer in many cases with social media is to ban things, to increase government and corporate control over private life. And the problem with the right not coming up with workable solutions beyond just punting it to the private sector is that it’s a huge vacuum the left is going to fill with more government. And I was thinking about this this week with the Roald Dahl stuff; I did a little segment for Breaking Points on this. One thing the right really gets wrong, to your point, Inez, so important, the right gets wrong that they believe people aren’t actually offended by these words, that people aren’t actually offended by the fat shaming of Augustus Gloop. Well, they are.
It’s not every kid, but there are a whole lot of kids who have been taught from their earliest level of consciousness that these things are hurtful, that they actually should cause psychological injury. And so when you’re conditioned to be psychologically injured by those sorts of things, you will indeed be psychologically injured by those types of things. And that’s why the whole Ben Domenech had a good post on this not too long ago about conservative mockery and ranting and raving against cat ladies is completely, first of all, counterproductive and also just morally dubious because people are really suffering and they’re suffering for good reason. Because the culture that you’re constantly decrying, rightfully so, has done exactly what you said it’s doing. It’s hurt people. And so they are actually influenced in that way, exactly the way that people predicted. Like, people actually are offended. They actually are emotionally fragile.
They actually are hurt, and mocking them and acting as though that doesn’t exist is not the way to solve these problems. The way to solve these problems is to think really deeply about the parameters that we’ve already drawn. We say certain things, we have parameters for speech. Speaking of Elon Musk, that’s one of the things he understands, is that applying a broad First Amendment principle to something that functions as a common carrier, whether you believe that’s a legal definition or not, is actually really effective. You don’t necessarily need to devise all of these new ways to censor people. We have parameters from the FDA; we all agree as a society that you shouldn’t be able to sell something that is addictive and hurtful, and these things are just clear. You don’t necessarily need more government to do them, but you do need to think much more seriously about whether these products that we’ve just sort of come to accept as good. And I’m talking about products like obscenity, not to sound like Tipper Gore here, but Camille Paglia makes great points about how art is better when you have parameters that police obscenity.
That’s absolutely true because you, actually, artists have lines to subvert. They have lines to cross. So thinking about whether we are all psychologically better off — what actually constitutes obscenity, what actually constitutes sexual, whatever laws that we have or regulations that we have, even if they’re self-imposed in Hollywood — just thinking about what meets that bar, rethinking it, that’s a really hard thing to do because people have been conditioned to believe that basically nothing should be out of bounds for Hollywood. And if it is, then somebody who thinks it’s out bounds is necessarily bigoted or stupid or evil in some way. I get it. It’s hard. But as people start suffering more and more and more, it’s incumbent on the right to actually make a bold argument instead of just finding that common ground with our kind of allies on the surface. You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, I think.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because I kind of disagree with that Ben piece, Ben Domenech’s piece. I mean, he makes a really good case about the cat ladies, about overly mocking. There, I think, the difference to me is I’m not in favor of mocking, essentially, the younger generations that I believe are actually fragile. I do to some extent believe in making an example of people —
Emily Jashinsky:
Sure.
Inez Stepman:
— who have made bad decisions in the hopes…. And the missing piece for me in that column that he wrote, which was otherwise convincing, was the younger generation coming up. It’s one thing and cruel and unnecessary to mock, let’s say, a generation of women who forwent marriage and family and in favor of girl boss careerism or whatever. But it’s only constructive, I think, to the extent that we should be able to tell younger women who still have those decisions and possibilities in front of them, “look, you don’t want to end up like this person that has certain elements of patheticness in what they’re chasing in life now.” And by the way, this is an aside: Chelsea Handler’s video is a joke.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, that was a joke.
Inez Stepman:
It’s satire. Please, for the love of God. This is a message to conservative media. It’s self-satire, it’s self-deprecating. Stop treating it as though it’s like an earnest video, please. Because it’s really embarrassing. Anyway.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think the first half of it was not self-deprecating. The second half of it was self-deprecating and it was kind of confused on its own merits. So I originally retweeted it because I only watched the first half of it, and then I went back and watched the whole thing. So the first half of it I was like, I can’t watch any more of this. It was making me too uncomfortable. And then I forced myself to watch the whole thing and I was like, she doesn’t even know what she’s doing with this joke. This joke is just terrible.
Inez Stepman:
I was confused about it as well. But it was clearly satire.
Emily Jashinsky:
Poor Chelsea.
Inez Stepman:
But anyway, it paradoxically, we talk a lot about narcissism and the culture, and that’s obviously something that has been a political subject for a while. But the sort of psychological definition of narcissism is not somebody who’s overly sort of asserting their selfish interests above all, but rather somebody who is incapable of having a core self without just imbibing and reflecting other people’s opinions of them. That’s the clinical, apparently, definition of narcissism, as a pathology is actually not having any sense of self-worth. And you can see how that makes you, one, fragile and, two, extremely controlling of the people around you. Because if there’s no core to who you are, it’s just a fun house of narcissistic mimetic reflection all the way down. And it becomes very, very important to make sure that nothing ugly is reflected in those mirrors around you of other people. And I do think this describes our politics fairly well.
Emily Jashinsky:
And when did Christopher Lasch write Culture of Narcissism? Decades ago. So again, I can do the meme where I hold hands with the TERFs on trans issues, but even the left never fully reckoned with Christopher Lasch. They just never did it. They haven’t really reckoned with Houellebecq. They haven’t really reckoned with a lot of people who have made these really smart criticisms of the left, largely from the left, if not entirely from the left, but largely from non-conservative perspectives. Because the left is built on this self-perpetuating model of…. Now, the philosophy of the left fundamentally has to preclude criticisms because those criticisms are all bigoted and therefore they have no place in the left. So when you’re operating on this model, you are never going to reckon with that inter Nicene criticism. So sure, great, let’s do the meme, but we will still be in a culture of narcissism that is eating itself from the inside out.
Inez Stepman:
It’d be remiss here, if we’re talking about technological shocks and psychology, not bringing up before we close the advancements, or the recent stuff with AI. And it’s become really clear, for example, that there’s, I guess for some of the chatbots, there’s the real AI, which is really imbibing, is “noticing” the entire internet and noticing patterns, and then there’s sort of controlled AI. So the programmers are actually putting a filter on most of these bots, these AI bots, in order to make sure that, for example, they think that Charles Murray’s scholarship is off limits. There’s questions surrounding this. Apparently you can get around that filter, you can create, there was something that went super viral on the internet like Dan, right? Dan is the bad AI. And you can program the AI, you can prod it into thinking, if you didn’t have this filter and you were this evil version of yourself, what would you say? But it turns out that AI is noticing things that the woke left would not like it to notice.
And how this is going to impact the advancement of AI is one question I have for you. And the follow up question would be something truly, a truly horrendous possibility that was raised for me by somebody who was giving a really interesting talk I was listening to about AI is not just that…. Because we’ve all already thought about the fact that people are going to potentially lose their jobs and there’s potentially going to be a lot of leisure time depending on how much we can automate. That is a scary but familiar question at this point. The scarier question he was raising was at what point is there no unmediated, no contact between human beings, that is unmediated by an AI? And if that AI has a certain filter, will it cut off the possibility of authentic connection or spreading of ideas that essentially the AI doesn’t want spread? I mean, that’s a really one level more terrifying to me, especially given all the trends for isolation that we’ve been talking about over and over again.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes, exactly that. Yeah. I was on having a conversation with Crystal about this on Breaking Points today, which is the Google layoffs. A lot of people who were laid off speculated that that was a product of an algorithm, that of some algorithmic influence. And Google says that’s not the case, but human resource managers around the country say, basically, this is inevitable, if not already happening at many companies. And we were having this conversation, and I was thinking to myself, well, first of all, some of this already happens in Amazon warehouses where people are surveilled. But when you think about the brainwave tech that we talked about earlier, that will happen really quickly — think of how quickly Zoom happened. Think of how quickly email happened. Email might actually be, low-key, the biggest example of the sort of professional intrusion into people’s private lives that was just accepted immediately, basically.
When you think about these things and you think about how quickly and easy it is to imagine one company starting with brainwave monitoring tech and then that getting adopted more broadly because under the guise of like, oh, this is good for us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, someone who lives across the world, on the other side of the world from you, could be monitoring your brainwaves and seeing that you are not focused for X hours. And maybe that’s not a mistake. Maybe you are in mourning, maybe something horrible happened to you. Maybe you’re going through a divorce, whatever it is, and you’re still getting your work done, but your brainwaves are showing that you’re distracted because that’s a normal part of human existence. And somebody in, let’s say, Singapore fires you because the algorithm, the numbers that you are reduced to on their end, they’re just not working out and the company needs to cut some fat.
Well, that used to happen on a local level. That used to happen in communities with people who knew each other and were largely accountable to each other, and businesses just used to exist on a much, much smaller scale. That’s not to say there weren’t big businesses, but for the most part it was human interaction and human interaction on a relatively local level where you could say, “Hey, this person had a rough day or a rough week, but I know it was because their loved one passed away. I know it was because they had a cancer scare. And I also know that they’re a really good leader.” Which is not something that AI is going to ever be able to capture. That’s an intangible thing that the person looking at the algorithm in Singapore or in Palo Alto, maybe you’re in DC, they’re not going to be able to see that, and they’re not going to be able to capture that. And not only will that be unfair, it’s not even good business, but it will happen quickly.
Inez Stepman:
And as you say, this is something that, essentially with the possibilities of AI versus just old-school surveillance, is jumping into the professional managerial jobs. This has already been the case. Your boss is the algorithm is already the case in Amazon warehouses. It has been for quite some time. It has been, for example, for delivery workers who are working with DoorDash. There’s been some great reporting done on how essentially the algorithm only recognizes how quickly you’ve gotten your deliveries done. So for example, if your bike breaks down or your car breaks down, if it was a human boss that you were interacting with, they’d say, “Oh, that’s not your fault.” But the algorithm will just punish you so you’ll get worse deliveries.
And it starts a cycle where, if something outside of your control happens, it kicks off a cycle whereby you’re going to be making less money and less opportunity to then improve your standing, right?, with the algorithm. So it’s essentially stratifying workers in a way that a human boss almost certainly would not, or at least we would consider that very, very poor management of human beings. Well, now with the possibilities of AI, this is extending into the professional class, where before you couldn’t tell if somebody was paying attention or not as long as they were turning in their work at the end of the day.
Emily Jashinsky:
And again, one of the interesting things, as somebody who has been subpoenaed by the NLRB — believe me, I don’t want to compliment the NLRB — but they did recently put out a statement saying they’re looking into, this was back in October, potential abuses of surveillance capitalist technology on workers. What does that tell us? What is the implication of that? There are already laws against much of this stuff. It already violates things that are on the books. Do I think sometimes in a DeSantis type of way, you need legislation that is more specific? Perhaps, but it doesn’t need to create any new principles of governance, of regulation that don’t already exist fundamentally in the divide between personal and professional, private and professionals, so it doesn’t require — I think Sohrab has a piece in, Sohrab Ahmari has a piece in Compact Doubt right now about how conservatives need to embrace the administrative state, and I haven’t fully read the piece yet, but it’s about East Palestine and JD Vance’s role in all of that.
You don’t really need to embrace the administrative state — without having read the piece, I say this — in order to believe that we should have regulations that protect people from chemical spills. You don’t have to have an administrative state to do a basic thing like that, to perform a basic regulatory function, and you don’t need to have an administrative state of oppressive government encroachment to enact basic protections for workers. That came about in the industrial revolution. This is not calling for more government. We have a framework to deal with a lot of these things, but do we have the will? Do we have the power? I think that’s an open question.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. And that’s not even digging into the apparent reality and, just like the administrative state, AI may well be sort of algorithmically stacked against a conservative worldview. It might be stacked against, say, a particular kind of worker’s interest or stacked in favor of particular kind of work. This is not dealing with this idea that you can wield, for example, the power of the administrative state or the power of an AI or algorithm. It’s almost like akin to this idea that you can be objective. That comes around a lot on the left like this, that actually we can do the science of governance, and we’re just advancing the science of governance by turning it over to an AI or turning it over to the administrative state that’s supposed to be “apolitical.” It turns out that these political judgments are necessary and they remain necessary, and that the science or the algorithm or the AI or the administrative state doesn’t solve these problems of governance, and it’s very, very difficult to use those tools once built, I think, against their unstated, but nevertheless substantive set of ideological principles.
And it’s very, very difficult for conservatives to wield the administrative state. That doesn’t mean in all cases we shouldn’t be looking at what we can do with the power that we have. But understand, every conservative who has any pretension to power should understand that you are…. Imagine trying to implement what you want through the faculty lounge. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible; Chris Rufo is doing it, wielding power in a smart way within the faculty lounge, essentially, of this university in Florida. But understand that it’s going to be difficult. You can’t just flip the switch and turn this entire leviathan against itself, against its often-unstated political commitments. It’s not that easy.
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s turning the Titanic around to keep with the iceberg metaphor.
Inez Stepman:
All right. Well, this has been a long one. We’ve gone over an hour, so I think I’ll let Emily go, but before I do, I wanted to point you to some of Emily’s other sort of places where you can hear Emily in one of them.
Emily Jashinsky:
Too many places.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I’m just going to call them Emily’s places. But if you enjoy this podcast with Emily, if you enjoy High Noon, consider tuning into her other podcast, Federalist Radio Hour, just daily podcast hosted by her and occasionally other folks from The Federalist, The Federalist team of fearless journalists, including Molly Hemingway, Eddie Scarry, and David Harsanyi. They all join in on the fun. They break down politics and culture through interviews with politicians, entertainers, and thought leaders. It is smart, irreverent, provocative, and on the cutting edge of American political thought. We would expect nothing less from Emily, as she interviews thinkers from the right, the center, and even the left. The show covers every topic imaginable from data privacy and immigration to big-picture issues like feminism. If you want to be part of that conversation as well as this one, don’t miss Federalist Radio Hour, which is available every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
And I’d like to thank the listeners to this podcast. 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 and leaving us a comment or review — that really helps with those AI algorithms that are now and forever going to rule the world. But you can find it on Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave. We’ll see you next time on High Noon.
