Emily Jashinsky rejoins High Noon: After Dark, the recurring month-end episode, to talk about the kickoff to the 2024 primary season, what new polls showing collapsing patriotism and connection mean for the digital generation, and whether casting a black actress as the Queen of England has artistic merit or is just a gaslighting political move.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And as always, we have Emily Jashinsky back on the pod to close out the month. Emily is of course a senior fellow with us at IW. She’s also the culture editor over at The Federalist. She does various journalistic things over at YAF, Young America’s Foundation, and she co-hosts Breaking Points on Wednesdays with Ryan Grim over at Krystal and Saager’s Breaking Points podcast, which I’m pretty sure has a much bigger audience than CNN. Emily, welcome back.
Emily Jashinsky:
Thank you, Inez. I hope we have a bigger audience than CNN’s Cable Network, the failing CNN Cable Network.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, CNN apparently really doing badly. Weren’t there some numbers released this week that they have basically a football fields worth of audience?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, it’s one of their worst. I mean, they were trending downward, but they recently, the ratings came out for 2022 and it was one of their worst years of all time.
Inez Stepman:
Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer crowd. Although I think that’s basically the story of nearly all cable news, right? It’s not just CNN, although it’s fun to dump on CNN for being the worst at it. So, there’s probably some hope actually there, but I suppose we have to, off-air I was talking about we have to talk a little bit about the Trump arrest and kicking off 2024. Neither of us is particularly in the mood to do it, but we’re going to hit the high points for you and then we’re going to go gossip about a bunch of cultural stuff that we find really interesting, and probably more important. Not because who gets elected in 2024 isn’t important, but because we’re going to have a year and a half to do this, people. This is going to be on your radar screen constantly for the next year and a half.
But that being said, I mean, Emily, what’s your 10,000-foot take on the potential for a Trump arrest, which seems lower and lower every day, the impact that that kind of arrest would have, and then how DeSantis is finally delicately starting to swing back against Trump, who has been calling him names now for several months. Oh, and which nickname is the best?
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, Meatball Ron. It’s not even a competition. Meatball Ron is perfect. Oh, no. Meatball Ron? Well, it depends on what you’re going for.
Inez Stepman:
That weight loss drug or something, he’s dropped a lot of weight. Have you noticed that?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, the Ozempic theories are rampant. And listen, I’m not going to rule anything out, nor would I suggest that it was the wrong decision for Meatball Ron, who I am generally favorable towards to get into the Ozempic game if he’s running for president. Looks are obviously very important in the presidential game. I think if Donald Trump was intentionally leaking that his arrest, his potential arrest was being leaked, if Donald Trump’s strategy to not get arrested was to float the possibility that he was going to be arrested, it was a brilliant strategy. Because what came afterwards was a really serious discussion in the political arena about why this is just, whether people were making this argument from a moral perspective or from just a purely pragmatic partisan perspective as Democrats, why this was going to backfire. Why arresting him on a trumped-up campaign finance fraud, campaign finance violation charge was a disaster. All of that seems to have chilled what was a very eager prosecutor.
And we don’t know. We don’t know. But he may have people around him that are putting the brakes on this or encouraging him to put the brakes on this, I’ll refer to Alvin Bragg when I say that. And as far as DeSantis responding to Trump it, to your point about why it’s annoying to have to talk about some of this stuff so early, and part of that from my perspective is just because we straight up don’t know. Everyone thought when Trump went in on John McCain, that was it. He was over and done with, but we didn’t know. And my instinct is to say that Ron DeSantis is firing back too early. It feels like a mistake to me to fire back this early, and to dignify the things that Donald Trump is saying with a response, no matter how dignified that response might be in and of itself, because you start mud wrestling and nobody wins when they mud wrestle with Donald Trump because he is the undisputed champion of American mud wrestling.
So, that’s my quick take on all of that. But it’s weird because people are making, I think some of the same mistakes that they made in 2016 in this race to speculate, and by doing so they might actually be affecting outcomes in ways they don’t anticipate.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I want to talk to you about the role of conservative medial in all of this, but I just want to make one point before I do that. I’m really disappointed that Donald Trump workshops his nicknames. I said this on Fox Business last week, but did you not think that they sprung from his head like Athena from the head of Zeus?
Emily Jashinsky:
No.
Inez Stepman:
This is very disappointing to me, honestly. It’s like finding out for the people who thought the WWE was real. That’s the moment I’m having right now. I’m really disappointed that he workshops the nicknames and tests them out on a focus group and all this stuff. This is very lame. I thought they spontaneously came to him and he just had this amazing talent for making these hilarious nicknames. But apparently they’re workshopped.
Emily Jashinsky:
I mean, I think it’s a little of both. I think he spontaneously comes up with, for instance, Meatball Ron, and then he thinks, “Well, maybe I can do better.” So, he tosses another one out there and maybe it’s Tiny D, and he kind of snowballs. But I feel like it’s unsurprising because he’s always used Twitter, and now Truth Social as his testing … It’s like his test lab.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like if he should be workshopping it with anyone, it should be with us, the fans. No, can I make the case for Tiny D for a second?
Emily Jashinsky:
By all means. It’s not a bad one. I just love Meatball.
Inez Stepman:
Ron DeSantis is not a tall man. I mean, he’s not short really, but compared to Trump he’s going to look short.
Emily Jashinsky:
He has tall guy energy though.
Inez Stepman:
And Trump is really tall, so he can drop the weight and then Meatball Ron won’t make any sense. It actually will make him sound more meaty than he is.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, I think Trump bullied him. This is why bullying is important, obviously. I think Trump bullied him into better health.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, my whole take on this is I don’t think anyone, including Ron DeSantis, can win in this kind of matchup with Trump. I think his only route has to be to say, “You know what? This guy wins this game. He’s very good.” Just to laugh at it and say, “He’s excellent at this kind of mud wrestling. You know why the media’s pissed off at me and why the left is pissed off at me, it’s not because I come up with a fabulous nickname. It’s because of what I’ve done. And I’m actually going after the institutional power of the left,” which he has done more effectively than any conservative politician in my memory. I mean, I said on Twitter, I do like Ron DeSantis a lot. I think I trust him more to be competent in office.
But the question I wanted to ask you is whether you think exactly people like us, and this is a Dave Marcus theory, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it, exactly people like us who are conservative media types, laying it on too thick for Ron DeSantis against Trump, I think we are actually hurting him. And I don’t think we’re convincing anyone. And I think the issue is underlying is much more about trust than it is about a list of policy solutions. I don’t know what you think, to what extent the obvious preference of “conservative media” or media figures who lean right for Ron DeSantis is actually a positive thing for him.
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s horrible. In fact, I wrote about that right away, as soon as Donald Trump announced, I wrote a long piece basically about how conservative media was making a similar error to what they made back in 2015 and 2016 by pimping out DeSantis so much, and making it seem as though he is the only option. And it’s a similar mistake, and I have to sneeze. So, one second. It came on fast. It’s a similar mistake because it’s this disconnect between people who comment on politics in a public platform professionally or semi-professionally, and the rest of the country who does not trust, frankly. I mean, think about Ted Cruz. Think about Ted Cruz in 2015. Think about even Marco Rubio, to the extent he wasn’t scathed by the gang of eight, whatever. Scott Walker, 2015, 2016, and these people would tell you themselves probably what this looked like, but they had a serious problem with the public not trusting anybody who was a politician over somebody who’s not.
And Donald Trump is the guy who comes in and says, “Everybody else is lying to you. Every other institution. The media, the government, they’re all lying to you. But I’m not.” And that makes his, “But I’m not,” a much easier pitch because you’re the one who is accurately diagnosing the problem. Doesn’t mean that he’s telling you the truth. In fact, I think he exploits that trust a lot. But if the people who have just been railroaded time and time and again still trust Donald Trump over a guy who has been in politics almost his entire career, like Ron DeSantis, if they still fundamentally can’t get over that question, that is very possible. And the judgment and scorn of conservative media who says, “What the heck is wrong with you? DeSantis is right here. He’s obviously a better choice,” is rooted in the-
Siri:
I’m not sure I understand.
Emily Jashinsky:
Okay. Siri thinks that I’m talking to her. What a disaster. As I told Inez before we started, everything’s falling apart. But it’s rooted in that same fundamental disconnect and condescension, and people seem to be totally blind to it.
Inez Stepman:
So I mean, to fight back a little bit, I mean, I think I largely agree with this analysis. I understand why people are not going to take my word for this, that I think Ron DeSantis is the better candidate. I understand where that distrust comes from. I think my biggest worries about boomer politics, actually I think underlying the trust with Trump is this idea that actually, I guess I’m more black pill than the average boomer Trump voter, I think. And I think that is a function of generational change. I still think there’s a lot of boomers out there who have their hearts completely in the right place. They’re decent, upright, American people. They’re patriotic, they’re wonderful people, but don’t actually deeply in their heart of hearts understand how bad and corrupted our institutions are.
And they think that if they just get Trump in there and he does his thing, that it’s going to fix the country. And they think that they can just kick out a few bad guys, like Fauci or whoever, that they almost have a more, and I don’t mean this in a negative sense, they have a more conspiratorial view. I actually think it’s worse than the conspiracy. In other words, these institutions are so deeply corrupted and so ideologically captured that you can’t just get the one right guy in there. We know, you and I know, and people who listen to this podcast for sure know because I harp on it constantly, but that the presidency is not as powerful as you think it is. And that there is an entire unelected bureaucracy, you can call it the deep state, the administrative state, whatever you want to call it, that has aggressively moved against Donald Trump and his presidency for four years, and then after he left office as well.
And this trying to brag potential indictment is just part of that. The problems are more serious than that. And whether Donald Trump actually knows how to deal with essentially his own bureaucracy, and maybe he is learned his lesson this time. I don’t know. Maybe he’s so ticked off this time and he didn’t understand coming in, he is an outsider, he did not have a bench, there’s all these reasons why he might have changed his mind and look at the problem differently now. But it seems to me that there’s a generational divide here is the imagining that you can just elect this one guy, and without actual serious structural reform, a lot of which has to take place legislatively, that you’re going to do anything but just make the Libs mad and make the deep state mad for four years again, which I mean admittedly has its charms, but that’s what I’m worried about.
Just like I didn’t care much that the Republicans didn’t take the Senate in the midterms because the question was, what is Mitch McConnell going to do with that power? Well, not much important, not anything structural, that’s for sure, or not deliver any actual wins to the ability of the American way of life to survive 10 or 20 years from now. I have the similar, weirdly, a similar feeling about Trump where he didn’t really prove in his … He was a good president for 2012. He was a much better president than I thought he would be, but he didn’t actually structurally change anything. And you can see that every one of his achievements, especially his administrative achievements, have been overturned by the left. And a lot of them in the first 100 days. So, I just don’t know that he has that strategic focus that is necessary, because we know he is a narcissist. He’s the narcissist that we deserve, our country deserves.
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s true. Well, and that’s the thing. This is the benefit of a Trump-DeSantis juxtaposition, which is again, nobody knows if a dark horse … Everything is falling apart. Nobody knows-
Inez Stepman:
Collapse of the American empire over at Emily Jashinsky’s recording studio.
Emily Jashinsky:
Truly is so perfect. But I was just going to say, I think that’s the benefit of juxtaposing Trump and DeSantis. But I think there are actually a lot of Trump voters who are very favorable to Ron DeSantis. What will make them not favorable to Ron DeSantis is if the pundit class acts like Ron DeSantis is the only reasonable choice, and it’s irrational, conspiratorial, bigoted, reckless for anybody to still support Donald Trump over Ron DeSantis. That will be very, very bad because Donald Trump will be able to capitalize on that energy in the same way he did in the Republican primary in 2015 and 2016. So, where conservative media does play a really big role is in conservative primaries, is in Republican primaries. And that is when Donald Trump could totally ride that to another nomination with the base so divided and fractured, that if you have people split among Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, everyone else, Donald Trump can get 30% of the vote again and be just fine, even though the majority of Republican voters would prefer a non-Trump candidate.
So, all this is to say I think you’re right, and it’s something that concerns me as well with conservative media getting into the tank, or putting blinders on, pro-DeSantis blinders on that he is the reasonable iteration of Donald Trump in a post-Trump world. That this is the most a politician can be like Trump without having the things that, to your point, have prevented Trump from being an effective leader. And it’s the double-edged sword of Trump. You can’t have the successes of Trump without the failures of Trump. You can’t have him going after the media without him tweeting about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift. You cannot have a version of Trump without those things. And no matter how reasonable or responsible Ron DeSantis is, he will never have that appeal of also being the guy who’s tweeting about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift.
Which by the way, do I think most voters like that? No. Do I think some voters absolutely freaking love it? Yes. It’s like Trump the entertainer, an entertainer comes in and blows up American politics when you are a boomer who’s watched your town die, who’s watched … maybe you’ve been really successful, you live in a good community, but you’ve watched the country change and become basically unrecognizable before your eyes, and you’re just sitting back, like, “What can I do?” Trump looks appealing.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, I think we underestimate that to our own peril and just really … I don’t know, the big takeaway that I took from 2016 is I really don’t know. I did not know what the base was looking for. And I really felt like I did because I was part of the Tea Party, and we had been rowing together in the same direction. And I was very much part of that Cruz type of Republican who was anti-establishment and very much to the right of Mitch McConnell, but saw no appeal in Donald Trump whatsoever. And it was interesting going back and reading Tim Carney, your former boss, Tim Carney’s book, where you remind me, I think, is it “Alienated America” or is it the book before that where he talks about the differences in the base voters?
Emily Jashinsky:
Alienated.
Inez Stepman:
Okay, because I re-read it for having Tim on the podcast about a year ago, and I was shocked to discover … Because when I first read it when it came out, I was like, “Yes, this is what’s wrong with people who are so into Trump. They don’t have ties to community, they’re not actually living this conservative lifestyle that is a key part of being a conservative, they are alienated and they’re complaining about the game being rigged and that’s just a conservative form of victimhood.” And then reading it back, reading it again after, let’s say in 2021, I was shocked at how much I agreed with the interviews he did with the Trump voters. And in fact, I was the one who didn’t see how fundamentally corrupted, rigged, whatever word you want, the institutions of this country really were. I’m not a generally a humble person, but that just gave me a big dose of a big dose of humility.
Emily Jashinsky:
But your self-awareness is good.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, I have my opinions but I’m very aware that I don’t speak for a large part of the Republican base. And frankly, I think in 2016 they were more right than I was. So, why would I really privilege my own thoughts on this matter? I mean, obviously to some degree we all agree with our own opinions, but I have a measure of humility now, I think after that because going back and reading that book, it was like what everything that these guys are saying in these interviews is actually completely true. It’s in the open now.
Emily Jashinsky:
But this is an opportunity for DeSantis, I think to the extent that you cannot mud wrestle with Trump. There’s just no way you can do it. One thing I would say though is he could play that exact card. He could say, “I learned a lot from Donald Trump’s election in 2016. I learned a lot from you, Donald. I think this is the only shot the country had at being back on the right track is your election in 2016. I support it immensely. I am somebody who acts and who wins. I have acted countless times in ways that are taking on the institutional power of the left, and I am winning. You can’t say the same.”
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s a pitch convinces me, I just don’t know when it’s so fundamentally about trust. And I think you’ve seen what the reaction has been against DeSantis. DeSantis is, in no conceivable policy sense, establishment. But when it’s more about signaling and trust than it is … And the that’s not an illegitimate basis for somebody to make up their mind on when they’ve been burned so many times in the past, especially by Republican politicians saying one thing and doing another. I can understand why that trust gap is there. And I don’t think we really can convince people. I think that’s the uphill road that Ron DeSantis has is to really make his case and say, “Look, I know that there felt like there was nobody at all to trust, but this is what I’ve actually done and this is what I intend to replicate at the national level. And I think you’ll compare it favorably to the last Trump administration and what Trump is promising to do now.”
I don’t know. I don’t know if that case succeeds or not, but you know what? Like I said, we’ve done 20 minutes on this and-
Emily Jashinsky:
It was supposed to be five.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I know. We will have many opportunities to talk about what I’m sure will be a very nickname-filled GOP primary. So with that, I’m going to lay down my one prediction for the GOP primaries. I’ve already been wrong about it slightly once, but not in essence, which is I don’t think Nikki Haley can break 5%. I said 3% before. Now she has 5% in some polls.
Emily Jashinsky:
Think you might be wrong about that.
Inez Stepman:
You think I’m wrong?
Emily Jashinsky:
You actually might be wrong about that.
Inez Stepman:
You think she would be a [inaudible 00:22:57] candidate?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, I think she’s-
Inez Stepman:
Reaction to her.
Emily Jashinsky:
And I’m somebody who laughs at the idea that anyone would vote for Nikki Haley. But I think there is some boomer appeal out there for Nikki Haley. So, I’m not prepared to say the same.
Inez Stepman:
I mean, look. I know that she was a decent governor, so it’s not that, but there’s something about the way she talks that is just rubs me so much the wrong way, especially when she’s got that whole Republican girl boss vibes where she’s like got her book. She’s like, “Anything men can do, women can …” What’s the name of her book?
Emily Jashinsky:
I think it’s called Lean In.
Inez Stepman:
No way. I think it’s If You Want Something Done, dot, dot, dot. And the implication is asking you to lean in.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh man. Don’t put ellipses in your book title.
Inez Stepman:
You’re right. Maybe there is a boomer appeal for that. Anyway.
Emily Jashinsky:
No, there is, I really think there is. But it depends. Can anybody, other than Trump and DeSantis, break 5%? I think that’s an open question because when you have about 30% of the base, somewhere between 20% and 30% of the base totally loyal to Donald Trump, then everyone else is going to be split. So, it really depends on how many people run, I think.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. If everybody can collect their 5%, you might end up … Yeah. No, I definitely think you’re right. But we’re going to move on to what I think is a little bit of, underlying a lot of this primary battle. I’m going to show a couple graphs on this screen.
Emily Jashinsky:
Inez learned how to do the graphs on StreamYard. So, if you’re listening to this just imagine. She’s in a baseball hat, which is good to see in and of itself.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, Peachy Keenan.
Emily Jashinsky:
And she’s coding.
Inez Stepman:
“Domestic Extremist” coming out soon. We got you, Peachy. Cool baseball hat that I have on. Yeah. No, apparently, I mean, literally 1% of our audience is on YouTube. But if you’re listening, for the record you can see our lovely faces and Peachy Keenan’s “Domestic Extremist” hat, and you can see the graphs that I’m going to put up badly because I didn’t put the white background in. So, they’re just going to pop up over our faces badly and I don’t care. But I think they’re important to show for the 1% of you who are actually watching on YouTube. And I’ll talk through them for people who aren’t. So, there’s these two different graphs. So, this is a long-term study that measures percentages of people, and it’s like a systematic year after year survey, and it measures what percentage of people say a particular value is “very important” to them.
So, it asks people a series of values like choose which ones you think are very important, important, neutral, not important, whatever. And there’s a massive slide. So, patriotism as a very important value has gone from 70% to 38%. Religion as a very important value has gone from 62% to 39%. And this is from 1998 through to today, 2023. So, having children, 59% of people in 1998 said that was a very important value to them. 30% of people say that today. Community involvement, really interesting. In 1998, 47% of people said community involvement was really very important to them. And then it shoots up in 2019 and then completely crashes, which I think is really … We can talk about that. That’s really interesting. So, it shoots up to 62% in 2019, but by the time you get to 2020 has completely cratered 27%. So, just over a quarter of people think that community involvement is a very important value.
And then finally, we have money going from 31% in 1998 to 41%, to 43%. So, an upward trend saying money is very important. And then before we kick off the discussion with Emily, I want to put one more graph on here, which I think these are kind of related, or at least they work together in a demonic whirlpool. So, this is a percentage of 12th graders who respectively have a driver’s license, have ever tried alcohol, have ever been on a date, and have ever worked for pay. And they’re all completely cratered since the late 1970s to the point where you’ll have half as many … I mean, no. So, it’s not a zero baseline. So, going from driver’s license goes from like 90% all the way down to something like 72%. And you can see it’s continuing to drop. Tried alcohol is way, way down, down below. So, just over half of high schoolers have tried alcohol, ever worked for pay, and ever gone on a date.
So, all of that to say, Emily, what do you make of this cauldron of changing values where essentially anything associated with tradition, community, religion, nation is all on the decline, any kind of risk taking behavior is all on the decline, but you have an increase in people saying that making money is a very important value to them?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yay. This is what we were actually just talking about, I think the conversation we just had is surprisingly a useful preface because when we look at where people in normal American families, neighborhoods, communities still find appeal in agents of change that are anti-establishment from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, to honestly Maryanne Williamson, the reason they’re doing that is it’s hard to put a finger on, and we all kind of know that. We can do what Michael Anton did in Flight 93 and walk through all of the serious looming threats to our institutions, or urgent threats to our institutions from a legal or political perspective. But there’s also just something that has shifted so dramatically that’s hard to put your finger on. But I actually think if you look at these charts, and I recommend people do, they’re in today’s Wall Street Journal, this is March 27th, they are stark and they allow us to visualize and to quantify to some extent the vibe shift that has taken place for both, I think we would agree, cultural and economic reasons over the last several decades.
And so, when boomers are just reeling, looking around, grasping for some sense of understanding and reason, and maybe they make irrational political decisions, it’s because we are in very irrational dizzying times where it’s a sense of emergency. Nobody is, hardly anybody I should say, is rational in urgent emergency situations. There are people thankfully who are and are trained to do so. We don’t have many people who are trained to address political emergencies, actually.
Inez Stepman:
If there’s a real collapse, I’m going to my father-in-law’s place in Rough and Ready California. That guy would make a really fair warlord.
Emily Jashinsky:
I bet he would.
Inez Stepman:
He’s a retired firefighter, he grows his own food. He’s not even a prepper, he’s just good at it. In other words, he’s not prepping for Armageddon. This is just how he lives his life. So, that’s where I’m going when all this collapses.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, but think about this. This is what drives me crazy. And again, I am referencing Maryanne Williamson again because I recently interviewed her on Federalist Radio Hour, and it’s not like she’s the same as Bernie Sanders. But this politicization of both the psychological and the lifestyle is long overdue because we are living through a period of time, as I just explained to a group of high school students a couple weeks ago at the [inaudible 00:31:00] where Betty White, who they all knew, her first time on TV was an experimental broadcast. It was an experiment of TV, and she died in the age of TikTok. This is incredible. And the way that human existence changed, air travel, having globalized ingredients shipped, and food made with those globalized ingredients, mass-produced so that you don’t have to do subsistence living like your father-in-law out in Rough and Ready, California.
This is a rapid and dramatic transformation. We talk about hyper novelty here all the time, but it is really the big thing. When you look at this chart, it shows what hyper novelty is doing to norms and is doing to them really quickly. And it actually, I think, makes it very easy to understand why people would still go for Donald Trump over Ron DeSantis, why people would still go for Maryanne Williamson over Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden even, or why people would go for Bernie Sanders over any of them. I mean, or people just staying home and overdosing on fentanyl, or numbing themselves with antidepressants, or food. I mean, all of these different options.
And I think to the extent these numbers help us understand these are the flip side, or these are the other side of those numbers about de-industrialization, about fentanyl overdose, about breakdown. These are the soft consequences of all of those things. And I see the Journal poll has just sent shockwaves through the media today. And again, that tells me that they’re not living in real America, in so-called real America, I hate when people say that, but they’re very much living in media bubbles because none of this is surprising whatsoever.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I think this was the fundamental bottom line about a lot of these technological conversations, which I think are, I think you’re right to identify them very strongly with the trends towards alienation. But I think there’s kind of two halves of this, which I think is always our bit of a back and forth. There’s the Mary Eberstadt half of this where you are unable to deal with rapid technological change because all of these other bases of identity, healthy bases of identity, one might say human bases of identity and connection have been disappearing for a while. Whereas perhaps if the iPhone was introduced in, even in 1953, we might’ve been able to deal with it in a better way because people would have all of these built-in connections in terms of they would be going to church in person every Sunday, for example.
That was the average American would do that. Your average child was in a public school where the parents actually, and then this just goes both ways, the parents could to some extent trust what the school was teaching, that it was a patriotic school. And at the same time, teachers’ complaints are validated because if the child misbehaved at school you could count on the fact that the parents were going to punish the child and institute some discipline. That kind of high social trust arrangements, and I’m not by no means saying 1953 America is the pinnacle of everything that is just, good, and beautiful. But in terms of these high trust relationships, I do think that our society was a much higher trust society in 1953, and therefore you have a way to pull … If you have that high trust and high connectiveness, real in-person connectiveness in society, I think that’s actually the only anecdote to pulling people out of a very online world.
I like Twitter as much as anyone, I’m constantly tweeting and stuff, but when I’m not thinking about Twitter is when I’m hanging out with actual people, because in-person conversation is always more attractive than the facsimile of it online. And I worry that if you never get that experience, and especially for the teens, it’s even worse for the people who are doing their teenage years during COVID, they never really got that experience. And so, they have nothing to compare it to except these very awkward first attempts at doing it as young adults. And I don’t know, that really scares me. The lack of a basis in the modern philosophical framework, you might call it a theological framework absent a God, but whatever we want to call that framework, the lack of actual reasons to not live in the metaverse really does scare me. There’s very difficult to justify remaining human if you don’t draw on this larger Western tradition.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, it’s a sort of nihilistic hedonism. Nothing matters except pleasure, so might as well be happy. And you see that all the time in the language of the post-modern left, and it’s not just the left. It’s post-modernism in general, it’s actually seeped into curriculum in public schools that, obviously we could go on forever about this, but the sort of feeling-centric, self-centric approach to life. And you get into asking a fish if they’re wet when it comes to social dynamics and relationships. And my experience working with students, they tend to be more conservative, the ones I work with, so it’s not a perfect sample size, but post-COVID is that they know they’re missing something. It’s sort of a version of the God-size hole. It’s the person-size hole. It’s the interpersonal relationship-sized hole, the normal life-sized hole. And it’s hazy for them because they have always existed in a world where WiFi is like oxygen.
You don’t think twice about it. There’s no wire. There is no wire, you are not tethered to technology in any sense whatsoever, unless you’re in a rare time where you’re just fully out of service, or you live in a very rural area where it’s hard to get service sometimes, you’re always, always connected to the internet, thus you’re always, always connected to every single person in the world basically. And every fact about the world that has ever existed is the sum total of human knowledge, as I think Phil Wegmann put it once, it’s in your pocket at all times. And that’s strange. If you didn’t grow up in a situation before that, I mean, the smartphone and WiFi are really dividing lines. And I remember when I grew up, it was having older people would talk about times when the phone was on a cord.
And I remember my grandparents still had their phone on a cord in the kitchen, and that was very normal for people probably just 10, 15 years older than me. But that was the, “Back in my day, I had to talk to the guy I had a crush on in front of my parents because the phone had a cord. So I was pretty much relegated to the kitchen.” And that was like-
Inez Stepman:
Can I add a story about this?
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, please, I’d love to-
Inez Stepman:
Because it’s hilarious and old. So, I got a cell phone when I was in eighth grade, and it wasn’t a smartphone obviously, it was like a flip phone where you still had to type with the keypad, which I got really, really fast at doing, by the way. I actually did not the transition to the actual keyboard because I had figured out with predictive text how to do it really, really fast with one finger.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, the no look. The no look in class. You just pull it out of your phone pocket, put it next to your leg and look up at the teacher and-
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, exactly. That more than anything defines my era. Anyways. Well, but this is when text messages exploded overnight. And so, they were 10 cents per text message, and I was sending thousands of these text messages and my parents would get this bill, and they were so mad at me. It was like $800 worth of text messages.
Emily Jashinsky:
I have a really similar story, actually.
Inez Stepman:
They took away the phone from me. I was in deep trouble.
Emily Jashinsky:
I have a really similar story. And maybe this is kind of relevant to the problems that have always been baked into social media, especially Facebook. You probably remember there was a time when you could post to people’s walls on Facebook via email. You don’t remember that?
Inez Stepman:
Maybe I just never did it. I don’t know.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. So, you could set up email on Facebook. So, my phone, to go on the internet was stupid expensive, but I could use data to answer emails during the school day in 2007 or 2008. And I was using so much data to post on Facebook to respond to people’s wall comments, to respond to people’s private messages, that it was the same situation as you. It was like, my parents got a $700 bill one month, and were like, “What the hell are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m just on Facebook.” But it was because during the school day, it was becoming really difficult to be separated from the internet. Even back then it was becoming pre-iPhone, early iPhone, it was becoming really difficult to be away from Facebook for the entire school day because there was action happening on Facebook. Other people were on Facebook, there was stuff to be seen on Facebook. There was stuff maybe you missed from the night before, and you’re being pulled in that direction. Even if it costs, to your point, 10 cents a text message, your young mind has a hard time resisting that.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, that was the thing. That’s what I’m thinking about and the reason it’s relevant, not that it isn’t funny that I texted my crush so much that I ran up an $800 phone bill. That’s hilarious. But no, that’s what I was thinking about. It was impossible for my parents to stop me. Even back then, they just had to take away the phone because as soon as the phone was there I was going to text this guy. There was nothing they could do about it. There was no threatening that they could do about it.
Emily Jashinsky:
You were just thirsty.
Inez Stepman:
It was much a part. Yeah, I just loved the way he played Led Zeppelin.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, no.
Inez Stepman:
It’s so embarrassing. No, but there was no way they could stop me. My parents were generally, they were great parents and they were overseeing my activities and stuff, but there was no way. I was addicted to doing this because this was very important to my social life. And yes, the only way they could not get an $800 bill was to take the phone away from me.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. And it was brand new for parents, and it still is. That’s why I think parents are groping for answers from politicians, and they should be looking more into their own communities, of course. But we’re getting to a point where people who are now parents never grew up with good communities, and don’t know the value of being able to live comfortably among neighbors in a high trust environment. So, we’re getting to a point of almost no return. If you never know how good that is, then you have nothing to strive for. It’s just lost. And I think that it’s totally understandable. When I look back on those times, parents had no reason to … They really couldn’t have known, truly. And I have nothing but empathy for people who are going through this as parents now and have been going through it for the last 10 years, especially parents … I mean, I’ve interviewed, as I’m sure you have as well, people who dealt with rapid onset gender dysphoria as parents, and got absolutely no help from the public school system or from their community in some cases-
Inez Stepman:
Which of course is no help. Yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
… and in some cases you just want to be slack jawed. Why were you letting your 12-year-olds on Tumblr or wherever it is? But they really, really didn’t know because it came so, so quickly.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. And it’s just such a part of the world that it’s really, really difficult. I mean, you almost do have to go full Benedict option to protect your kids from this stuff. And that’s not a tenable way to organize the site. I’m not saying it’s not the right call for a lot of these parents who do really just make sure their kids have no access any of this stuff. But it’s not a tenable way for a society to operate. But I’m glad, I think it was really well phrased a few minutes ago when you said there’s a person-shaped hole in a generation of children who hasn’t done the normal socializing. I hope that’s true, but there’s such different reactions to this. This is one of those things that weirdly continues to shock me, is the number of people who listen to what we’re saying and agree with it, and don’t think it sounds dystopian.
They think it sounds awesome. There’s this guy, Jeff Jarvis, who I guess is some lefty guy I was going back and forth with on Twitter, per usual. He’s a professor at CUNY and something called Buzz Machine. And anyway, but he posted these interviews that the Times did with kids, early teens, and he thinks, “Oh, these kids sound totally fine.” And the reaction that he can have, I mean, the teens, I’m going to read some of it. It says, “I talk a lot more online than I do in real life for the same reason. I’m more myself when I’m online. In school I feel like you’re just being watched by teachers. You can’t do as much stuff as you would at home.”
Let’s see. “Online feels more peaceful and calming. You don’t have to talk to anybody in person or do anything in person. You’re just sitting in your bed and chair watching or doing something. When I’m online, I can mute myself. They really can’t see me. I can’t just mute myself in real life.” This sounds super depressing to me, but this guy, Jeff Jarvis was like, “They’re just fine. Don’t project your own views about what life should be on these kids.” These kids sound desperately lonely, and he doesn’t even see that. And I don’t think it’s an ideological front, I think a lot of people legitimately … There’s the sort of lefty Jeff Jarvis view of this, and then there’s also just the tech utopian-ist, whether left or right, who believe, no, this is actually the evolution of humanity. This is superior. It will be superior for all of us to be in the matrix.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think there’s a reckoning with that somehow happening. I don’t know why, Elon Musk reportedly pulled a lot of funding from ChatGPT from OpenAI, which is in charge of ChatGPT, and obviously Elon Musk has Neuralink going, and that’s dystopian in a lot of different senses. But I wonder if part of the reason he dropped out of the OpenAI project is because he’s started to maybe question some of the techno-optimism that just soaked Silicon Valley where you grew up obviously, for a very, very, very long time. And I think, so that’s possible to me. I don’t think-
Inez Stepman:
That’s nice that my life span is a very, very, very long time, Emily.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, it is a very, very, very long … I’m about to join the 30s club. I’m real close. I’m on the precipice of my 30s.
Inez Stepman:
[inaudible 00:47:20] anyways.
Emily Jashinsky:
I’m two days away from being 30. So, you’re welcome.
Inez Stepman:
Happy birthday. Happy advanced birthday.
Emily Jashinsky:
Thank you. Thank you. That should have been the whole focus of the show, obviously. No, I’m kidding. Yeah, I’m old. Just like Inez-
Inez Stepman:
The show will then come out, if I’m doing my math, which is always a question, this show will come out on Emily’s birthday, so everyone has to wish her happy birthday.
Emily Jashinsky:
Thank you. Another year closer to death. It’s a big accomplishment. Well worth celebrating. Anyway, all that is to say, I don’t think it sounds utopian to the majority of Americans anymore. And for the life of me I can’t understand why people still insist that all of this is going to be worked out. It’s all going to be for the good. There’s no part of me that understands that, much like you. If you look at the numbers on insane levels of depression, especially among teenagers, anxiety, our obesity levels are basically all you need to know about whether this curve is going to be … Is the moral arc of technology long and bending towards health? No, it’s not. It’s creating a hyper novel situation where we prize pleasure over pain, or struggle, or anything else. It’s all happening very quickly to the point where people’s heads are spinning and they don’t know what’s up and what’s down.
But I think it’s clearly going in a bad direction, and the techno-optimists have faded into minority status and are just … The TikTok hearing last week on The Hill, it always makes me nervous when you see bipartisan consensus on anything. So, as a good skeptic I felt extremely nervous watching Democrats and Republicans agree so vehemently. And that entire thing on TikTok should have happened five years ago. I mean, it’s just absolutely ridiculous that anyone is applauding the bipartisan nature of that tech hearing. But I will say you sensed in that conversation a lot of … I mean, Facebook was not treated that way in 2008. They were not treated that way in 2008.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s good, but ultimately there’s no way the government is going to be able to keep up with the technological developments on this stuff. So, to some extent, whether you’re in the camp of being open to more regulation, as I think I am at this point of big tech, I do think to some extent it’s folly to believe that we could get out ahead. I mean, if we were getting out ahead this would already be in the rearview mirror and we would be talking about regulating AI. And we have not. We’re still in the, “Ooh, look and see how many teeth this AI thing can add to a really creepy image of a hot anime chick with too many teeth.”
Emily Jashinsky:
I never got into political media or media in general to write about tech. I’ve always been fairly interested in tech, but I never expected it to be such a focus. And now I feel like it’s really all that we should be talking about in politics because it’s making it impossible to reverse the trends in the Wall Street Journal survey that you just posted. If people are watching in reference, if people are listening, it’s making it fundamentally impossible for us to rebuild. Even if we wanted to, even if we could get to a consensus on some of these things, which unlike free speech, we can’t, if we can go back to the old American norms of legal and social speech boundaries, we’re going to be in a better position. But we can’t rebuild that in this tech climate because, to the point that you always make Inez, of our institutions are now staffed by people who are hostile to that, that went through our school system, who still have all of these broken incentives on their internet platforms, Twitter, Instagram, whatever.
And so, to dig ourselves out of that hole is virtually impossible in this social media, smartphone, digital, hyper digital environment. And part of that is AI is about to explode like a nuclear bomb, literally like a nuclear bomb. I mean, I said literally but I meant metaphorically because I’m a white millennial woman-
Inez Stepman:
Literally in the internet sense of literally.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. But I meant it in that it is going to be the parallel, and I’ve heard that by people who work on this. I’ve heard people who work on this literally refer to it as an Oppenheimer moment, the red flags that are being raised about AI right now. So, we think our conversations right now about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are bad when AI is fully baked into our social cake, our ability to rebuild these blocks, and I’m talking next several months, not in several years, we do not have time. It’s going to become even more difficult than it already is.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, when he was talking about the institutions and the ludicrous idea that we talked about last time, about how we are nowhere close to peak woke, and I think it’s ridiculous to think that we are, when you look at the institutions I think the last one to fall really in some sense, I guess you could say the military, but I mean, the military definitely. There was a DEI hearing as well in the last week, and it was the most disappointing, terrifying thing you’ve ever heard. All of our top brass repeating, “Diversity is our strength,” basically word for word over and over again, while being asked if this is actually helpful for military readiness or recruiting. My husband was asking me, “Do you think that you need a lobotomy to be in the top ranks of anything in American life right now?”
And I kind of agree. It’s not even that they’re really far left, that they’re repeating these platitudes that they clearly have never thought about for half a second longer than it takes to just imbibe them and then regurgitate them back out. Just really terrifying. But the military being one case. But I think we would be amiss not to talk about what happened in the institution of law in the last month, which is the Stanford DEI incident. And you have law students in one of the top law schools in the country screaming threats at a federal judge. And to me, this is kind of old news in a sense, but I know for a lot of people, like my friends who are lawyers and then people who don’t follow some of this stuff on campus as closely, this was really shocking, especially attacking a federal judge that way.
I mean, once upon a time mere ambition would protect against something like that. Even if you thought it, you probably weren’t going to be screaming at a federal judge. I mean, every single one of the students who behave that way, they should be asked about this on character and fitness for the bar. I think there’s a lot to commend. Ed Whelan came on the other podcast IW does, At the Bar, where we talk about legal issues along with Tim, I can’t remember his last name, but he’s the chair of FedSoc over at Stanford who actually put together the event. And Ed Whelan was suggesting we need to basically make on the clerkship application under penalty of perjury. Have you ever participated in this kind of disruption? But when the judiciary goes in this direction, I really think bleep is going to hit the fan because there’re basically two cushions between the longhouse DEI mostly female administrators who govern increasingly every aspect of American life in the elite, and this core of people mostly in the middle of the country, but certainly in rural areas in blue states as well.
But there’s still a lot of men with guns in this country, and there’s a certain amount of cushion between that kind of soft power that is enormously effective and the kind of hard power of still heritage American types in the center of the country. One of those is federalism, but the other one is the rule of law. This is the institution that we all ultimately need access to. Even if you’re off the grid, even if you’ve removed yourself and Benedict optioned yourself out of society, you still need the government to enforce your rights sometimes and to enforce the rule of law. And when that really goes, I mean, I don’t think actually our future is civil war, I think it’s a series of Waco’s or just mass public disorder, mass low level public violence, vigilantism. This is not a pleasant idea.
And to see this happening at Stanford University, Stanford Law School, is unsurprising, but should be a reminder of what happens when these people run the DOJ and become judges? What happens when let’s say Joe Schmo from the middle of the country, the judge that hears his DUI case is one of these people. I don’t think a lot of us have fully thought through what kind of chaos and violence that could create. Because this DEI deal, and she’s talking to a federal judge, I think his composure was amazing, that kind of soft power application where you’re also just screaming “Ow, ow, don’t hurt me,” as you’re basically stepping on someone’s face. She was saying, “I’m so uncomfortable to be up here. It makes me so uncomfortable. It makes me so uncomfortable.” That’s maddening and enraging. And I don’t know that the left has truly thought about, or maybe they have and don’t care, but to use your analogy of the nuclear bomb with tech, what kind of nuclear bomb metaphorically you can set off by applying that kind of power to guys who live on ranches in Texas.
Emily Jashinsky:
So yes, and that is-
Inez Stepman:
[inaudible 00:58:11] Domestic Extremist hat this chat.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes. I think that’s very well said and stark to think about it that way. It’s a series of Waco’s. I think that’s a good indication of where we may be going. I would say, I think to some extent we have already entered that era. I think probably we look back on the leak of the Dobbs decision as the moment we knew the rule of law was crumbling quickly in American society. I’m pretty confident in my theory. I have no in insider information, but pretty sure that was a Sotomayor clerk. And it seems like that the lack of willingness on behalf of the Supreme Court to punish that person, that person’s incentive to leak to Politico. I mean, I was among the people who said, “Oh, within 24 hours, whoever did this they’re toast. They’re toast within 48 hours, whoever did this, they’re toast.” You can’t do this at the level of the Supreme Court of the United States and get away with it, surely.
But either there’s a combination of incompetence or cowardice over at the Supreme Court that has meant we have no punishment for whomever did that. And their incentives to do it, I think are very clear and bad. It’s not like Daniel Ellsberg. It’s a very different type of thing who tried to use different channels. We could have a different debate about that, or we have a different debate about Edward Snowden or whomever else, but what happened with that was very different. And to see that, I think it’s similar to why the Stanford law situation is shocking. This is the cream of the crop. This is the best and brightest.
These are people who have been entrusted with the responsibility of attending a top tier law school, and all of the privileges that come with it, the responsibility and privileges of clerking on the Supreme Court of the United States, and breaking those norms, I mean, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. And it is frightening sometimes. I feel this in myself, I went to public school, to not have a sense of republican virtue, small R republican virtue that Tocqueville would write about, and that was like an unquestioned strain of Americanism. It didn’t matter who you were, what your background was in this country, for decades that was the hallmark of Americanism, was that small R republicanism that built our little platoons, built our communities, built all of our institutions. And if you don’t have a sense that when you take an oath to clerk on the Supreme Court, or when you are studying the law and are preparing to be barred, that that means something. That these institutions have history in a Burkean sense, wisdom in a Burkean sense, and meaning, my goodness.
And it’s not that everyone had this intellectual conception of what that was before. It’s not like they were actively thinking of it, but there were certain things that just made sense because the world made more sense, and we talked to each other, and were healthier, and all of that. And it’s just when you have nothing but pleasure, we’re just going to be, like you said, Inez, heading towards some really brutal scenes I think in the years to come. And I know that that’s pessimistic. I’m not saying that’s definitely going to happen, but if I had to bet, sadly, that’s probably where I would put my money.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, the only thing I’d add to what you said is we do have norms. They’re totally opposed to the norms that we’re making of the stuff of American life in some continuous way before this. Now, I think we are comparable. The one Civil War comparison I think makes sense. I think we are as fundamentally divided about really critical underlying values as we were in 1850. That doesn’t mean it’s going to play out the same way. I actually don’t think it’ll play out the same way. I think a lot of the other factors are different, but we do have real norms. Compare how unafraid these students are to scream real threats, by the way, that they screamed at a federal judge. They hoped his daughters would get raped. Look how unafraid they are rightly of consequences. There are no consequences. Stanford’s already ruled out consequences for the students involved in this.
How unafraid they are of any professional consequences or administration consequences for what they’ve done to somebody who quietly, without telling anyone, works for a big corporation, and for example, donates to an organization that is in favor of traditional marriage, for example. Or how afraid somebody would be to use the biologically correct pronouns to describe somebody who claims they are the opposite sex in the office environment. We do have norms. They are ruthlessly enforced. The difference is essentially those norms are ruthlessly enforced in all of the institutions that have anything to do with elite power. And I don’t know if they are reckless or stupid, the people on the left, probably a combination of both that they don’t realize that there isn’t an entirely different way that half the country is living in a day-to-day world.
And sometimes I think this makes the David French’s of the world, that they have too rosy a view on what’s going on because they live in nice communities where a lot of these traditional American values are still the norm, and they don’t realize how badly those norms have taken a beating and actually been replaced with opposite ones in large parts of elite society and elite institutions.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Charles Murray writes about that in “Coming Apart.” Super zips look a lot more traditional than everywhere else.
Inez Stepman:
I’m not sure I agree with that in what I’m saying though, I don’t think they have traditional values. I think they are enforcing these new norms. And I don’t think that’ll hold, by the way. I don’t think the Charles Murray thing about the traditional class dynamics of having the elite families be intact, I think this trans thing might blow that up. But anyway, that’s a whole different subject. But the point I want to make is just that comparison between who’s afraid in these elite institutions. I don’t think a lot of people on the left understand that there are a lot of people in this country who do not live their lives in that cowed way day to day. And they’re the ones who are not dependent or interacting with these elite institutions. And I don’t just mean random guys on a ranch.
I mean, there is still a large part of the country, millions and millions of people who live their lives not in everyday interaction with these elite institutions, and who are not … They’re not afraid in the same way that everybody who operates in these circles accepted, like people like us sort of accepted because we get paid to, which is an incredible privilege by the way, which I keep repeating, we get paid to say the things that other people are afraid to say. But anyway, I’m rambling a bit here, but I do think that there’s a collision coming and I don’t know if the left understands what that collision is going to look like and what they’re provoking. Just like before January 6th, they didn’t think that the right would riot. And so, they were totally, totally unprepared to control a riot that broke out at a protest because nobody had ever rioted on the right.
Emily Jashinsky:
Not on that scale, right.
Inez Stepman:
Not on that scale. I think in the same way they’re completely unprepared to deal with what actually happens when you … What’s her name? Dean Steinbach or something like that? When the collision course of the Dean Steinbachs from Stanford Law School and the rancher in Arizona that for now are still buffered from each other.
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s funny you say that because I actually went to Arizona for the first time a couple of weeks ago and was having a lot of the same thoughts that you just expressed looking around. And I would see on Twitter people posting images from our cities and saying things like, “America as a failed state.” And I was in California right before going over to Arizona, and I was looking around and I was like, “Even in California,” which I think on paper is a failed state, “People are living a very high quality of existence.” A lot of people, not everyone, but there are a lot of people, not just the super rich. And it doesn’t mean there isn’t injustice. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be having better life existences, but it is not Haiti, even in California, and it’s not even close to it.
And then in Arizona you realize people in healthy communities, you look around, man, a lot of people in a lot of this country have still not been as infected by some of these poisons. Now of course, with trans stuff, it is absolutely everywhere. It is seeped into every community. Doesn’t matter where you are geographically, it doesn’t matter where you-
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, it’s metastasizing into the working class now. 100%, yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, I think it was working class first, but that’s another debate.
Inez Stepman:
We can debate that some other day. [inaudible 01:08:25] down but I think it’s ubiquitous now.
Emily Jashinsky:
But this is the odd juxtaposition of American life, and I think it’s this, what’s the best way? It’s the sort of indication that an earthquake is coming. It’s not uniform. Not everybody is having the same experience that people who live in Manhattan, and pay all of their taxes, and prefer not to step over human feces, or people who flood San Francisco. Not everybody is having the same experience in America, but some people are having a really bad experience, and some people’s experiences are on the precipice of coming into conflict with the same forces that caused those other people to have a really bad experience. So you’re right, I think the clashes between normal and abnormal is imminent. And even people who still have the privilege of enjoying that normal existence, that bubble is being popped incrementally. And yeah, I think that if normal can win out, I’m really pessimistic because it’s normal, but by this curve of hyper digital existence that we live in, normal but obese, normal but depressed. So, it’s just a sliding scale of sadness.
Inez Stepman:
I would say that’s a really great pessimistic note to end on. But I really know we’re running pretty long here, but I would be amiss if I didn’t ask you before you go as culture editor, and somebody who pays attention to these kinds of cultural debates and realizes the importance of these cultural debates, there has been a bit of a back and forth over, I think a Netflix show that recast the Queen and then princesses of England by Black actors. And I don’t even want to do the normal Twitter level culture war of tomato throwing back and forth. But to ask you this interesting underlying question about resetting characters, and casting, and what is the difference between a forced, or a PC, or a kind of recasting that makes no sense? And I don’t know, for example, here’s a crazy idea. You can rewrite Hamlet to be played by lions and in a Disney movie. That’s basically what Lion King is.
So, where is the line between? So, this Netflix show, is it just ludicrous? But where do we draw the balance between allowing actors to act, in other words to play characters that they themselves do not represent in 1,000 different ways, physical and mental, or psychological, and this kind of really blatant and obvious DEI-ing, gaslighting everything to death where they’re writing out every white character they can, including the Queen of England?
Emily Jashinsky:
Where do you stand on Hamilton?
Inez Stepman:
I mean, it didn’t bother me as much as the historical nonsense. I never went to go see Hamilton because same thing with Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. I mean, I never want to see, I’m not a big musical person to begin with, but I guess the historical inaccuracy would bother me more than recasting Hamilton as a Hispanic guy. But I think it would be different if it looked totally, totally different from him. I also wouldn’t like to watch a casting of Hamilton where Hamilton was portrayed as a 6’4″ blonde football player.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, yeah. No, I see exactly what you’re saying. In Milwaukee, they do a great annual rendition of the Christmas Carol, as they do in many communities. And I think this is probably more out of necessity than anything else, anything that’s sort of PC or ideological. But it’ll be half of the Cratchit family is white and the other half is Black, Hispanic. And for me it’s just always been like you lose the suspension of disbelief at a certain point. And again, I don’t know if that’s ideological or not, but I do know in the ideological sense, when that stuff is contrived you never get the suspension of disbelief, which is completely essential to art. You have to follow the rules that you set, and if you’re using somebody else’s work, you can’t reset their rules.
Or if you’re using history, you can’t reset the rules of history. And I’m not opposed to that being the open inquiry, the domain of artists to feel like you can openly question, and play with, and challenge some of those things. But I do think with history, if you are doing something like that in an ideological, expressive, political way, which I think is probably the case with the Netflix series, that it’s not rooted in some sort of challenging … If anything, you’re not challenging norms you’re just reaffirming the left’s norms about what is politically correct, and what is palatable, and what gets the cheap applause lines in our social media culture. And so, I think that’s all it is. It’s not the debate over a Black Ariel from Little Mermaid. I mean, it’s a very different thing when you’re taking real history. So, I kind of agree with both you and Dave. I don’t know. I’m somewhere in the middle, I’m riding the fence.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So, for the record, Black Ariel bother me, didn’t hit me the same way because it was a totally fictional character. So, why can’t you? So, the line I’ve been trying to draw but admittedly it’s a messy one, is between a kind of essential and incidental Aristotelian distinction between the essential and the incidental characteristics of a character. Where my comparison that I made was like, okay, you couldn’t have cast somebody of normal height to play Tyrion Lannister and Game of Thrones, because him being a dwarf is part of the story. It’s an essential part of the story. It’s an essential part of the character. His psychological profile on his actions don’t make any sense when you change that characteristic about him.
Emily Jashinsky:
Getting a little nerdy for me now.
Inez Stepman:
But with Ariel, it wasn’t an essential part of the character to me what color her-
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, the fictional mythical creature must also have the same skin color.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. There’s a blue octopus who’s the main bad character in that. I mean, it’s not a bridge too far for me in that context, I guess to your point about suspension of disbelief. It’s not a bridge too far. I mean, I think you would have to change the entire setting to make the Queen of England Black.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, that’s the thing, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
You could reset it, the story, you could imagine a parallel universe where England is a multiethnic country back in that day as opposed to today, and where there were Black queens and kings of England for hundreds of years. You could imagine that world, and I think faithfully represent something of a character, but just to throw it in there as the … I don’t know, I just feel gaslit about a whole thing. Yes, we can have a discussion about whether or not it’s possible for somebody to make that believable and actually create suspension of disbelief, but that’s obviously not what’s going on. They’re obviously just gaslighting us because they’re doing it to make the DEI quota. That’s why. And I kind of resent being told that I don’t get to notice it.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well yeah, this is exactly it. If you are subjugating the suspension of disbelief, which is the essential component of fiction, if you are subjugating that to politics, what you are doing is not art. Does it bother me too much that artistic types have fallen for the woo-woo ideological bait? No, not at all. It’s not surprising whatsoever. We’ve seen it time and again, whether it’s with casting women and blah, blah, blah, and we could have that whole conversation. Do you make George Washington a woman? And then do you have to change America? All of that. But at the end of the day, if you are subjugating the thing that is absolutely essential to good fiction, to fiction period, which is the suspension of disbelief to politics, what you’re doing is more politics than it is art. And I think it’s entirely fair to say so, and to critique somebody for saying so is absurd.
Inez Stepman:
Well, we have it on record that Emily thinks I’m not absurd, so I’m going to use that one going forward.
Emily Jashinsky:
I don’t think Dave is absurd either. To be fair.
Inez Stepman:
Dave is always absurd. Dave is a friend. Next time he comes on, he’ll be smoking his cigarettes on the podcast. Actually, before we sign off I just want to throw out a shout-out to other guests and friends of the pod, Justin Lee for winning, speaking of art, for his short story winning the Passage Prize category that he submitted in. The story is delightfully creepy when the Passage Prize book comes out I highly recommend it because the story is still creeping me out. I read it, I don’t know, at the end of last week, and I’m still kind of scratching my arms in creepy terror. So, I think that’s a good sign for Justin’s story. So, congrats to him. And on that note, I think we’ll let Emily go after an hour and 20 minutes of excruciating talk with old people.
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s right. Hey, I’ll do it for you Inez. I know you have an early dinner to get to.
Inez Stepman:
Absolutely. [inaudible 01:18:57]
Emily Jashinsky:
The special at Perkins is about to end.
Inez Stepman:
All right. Well, thanks Emily for coming on for another one of these After Dark episodes.
Emily Jashinsky:
Anytime.
Inez Stepman:
Thank you to our listeners, High Noon with Inez Stepman, including After Dark 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 on Apple Podcast. Acast, Google Play YouTube, yes, it does exist, or iwf.org. Be brave, we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
