On this episode of High Noon: After Dark, Emily and Inez kick it off by talking about America’s two indicted and/or indictable front runners for 2024, and then move on to putting the bow on the Pride backlash. The ladies also discuss why the number of high schoolers answering yes to the question “I do not enjoy life” is skyrocketing.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And those interesting people include Emily Jashinsky as she kept calling me out because I kept saying, “And Emily Jashinsky” as though she is not very interesting herself. She is an IWF senior fellow with us and she is also over at YAF teaching the next generation of right-wing journalists how to do the journalism better than the mainstream media. And of course she is the culture editor over at The Federalist and the co-host of Breaking Points with Ryan Grim, or Counter Points with Ryan Grim on Breaking Points, which just broke a million subscribers. So congrats for that, Emily, and welcome back to High Noon.
Emily Jashinsky:
I was going to say thank you, but all the credit there goes to Saagar and Krystal, who built an empire and are just super impressive. And speaking to, I think what a lot of people feel like is they just don’t feel represented in the media and they don’t feel like the media’s telling them truth, and I’m sure we’ll get to some of that.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Speaking of being disappointed, we have two likely front-runners for each respective party going into this 2024 election, that one, are both deeply underwater in terms of popularity, they’re both very unpopular figures in American politics. And now, as of this week, it seems very likely that we have created a situation, and I mean we, writ large, where each one of those potential candidates from the two parties essentially has to win this next election or go to jail. Trump for the obvious series of indictments both in the state and then now the federal level in terms of refusing to turn over classified documents, so it’s really a procedure crime he’s being charged with.
And then Biden now we have out this week whistleblower allegations from IRS agents saying that the DOJ and the FBI basically tipped off Hunter to a lot of the investigations. And they’re claiming that this text message from Hunter to essentially corrupt Chinese interests is where he’s literally talking about sitting next to his dad. He says, “I’m sitting next to my father right now. You better call me with this money, or my dad’s influence is going to be turned against you.” And he says that very directly actually in a funnier way than I just said it, but that’s I think a fair summary. So we now have a piece of evidence out in the public that potentially ties Joe Biden to his son’s corruption. All of that to say basically it’s win or jail for these two guys. What does that mean for American politics and for the country?
Emily Jashinsky:
Win or jail is the right framework for that because I think that’s new in American politics. There’s always been sort of endemic corruption and that’s a hard thing to avoid. I think it’s happening with greater intensity and on a bigger scale, and the Hunter story is actually the perfect example of that. There’s something so shameless about what Hunter Biden was doing before, by the way, we know that he was struggling with crack addiction and in the throes of a very serious drug addiction. We’re going to have a piece up at The Federalist by George Beebe talking about exactly how we know Hunter Biden was doing a lot of this sort of shameless influence pedaling in the timeline before he started struggling with substance abuse after Beau Biden’s death.
And a lot of this was just happening in full public view and nobody in Washington was batting an eyelash, an eyelid, whatever the saying is. Because in some ways everybody’s kind of implicated in that in D.C. at least. That’s not to say that Inez is implicated in that or that I am implicated in that. I wish I was implicated in that because we probably could have avoided some of the tech difficulties because we both would have state-of-the-art microphones, we started recording paid for by Burisma or Vladimir Putin, but that’s one of the things with Hunter Biden that I think is a worthwhile takeaway is just how shameless it was to begin with.
At the same time though, we’re now in an era where you and I may have the lock-them-all-up perspective in a different period of politics, and I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, if you’re corrupt on a felonious serious level, then yeah, you should go to prison, rule of law, etc., etc. But what we have now is very clearly a two-tiered system of justice, and that means fire is going to be returned with fire. And that leaves us exactly at the place that you said, Inez, which is really well said. And I actually don’t think internalized, I don’t think our dialogue about Hunter Biden is really, I think, missing exactly what you just said.
It’s so heavily about Hunter Biden, it’s not nearly enough about Joe Biden, but it also just misses the point that it’s Trump or Biden and the other side is going to nab the other. It doesn’t matter, that’s the point that we’re at. And it’s not because we have two particularly corrupt people, although that may be the case. Whatever would happen, whomever gets office, I honestly believe that if Nikki Haley were elected president of the United States at this point, Democrats would find a way to make the case for impeachment over Nikki Haley.
Now, Nikki Haley might not automatically start trying to impeach Joe Biden. She’s not here calling for the impeachment of Joe Biden that I’m aware of. But yeah, I really think where the average of both parties is exactly as you said, impeach, impeach, and stretching to match the two tiers of justice. And I don’t begrudge anyone for doing that. I said George Beebe earlier, by the way. I think I meant Matthew Beebe, but I don’t begrudge anyone for doing that. I just think it’s obviously what you said late Republic nonsense to quote David.
Inez Stepman:
That’s another David Reaboi phrase there.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
“Late republic nonsense.” I mean, I hope it’s late republic and not late empire nonsense, but I see that going either way, I think. But I don’t know, I guess I don’t think that corruption has always been endemic to American government. In some minor ways, yes, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, I should say that’s what I meant.
Inez Stepman:
On a local level, yes. I mean, obviously cities like Chicago and New Orleans, corruption is sort of endemic to the way that the cities function. Philadelphia, famously New York for a long time. I think a little bit less so now, but not really. But on the national level actually, it is actually, especially with all of the sort of volatile news coming out of Eastern Europe and Russia, it’s worth remembering how remarkable it is because I think this is actually a distinction that can be drawn vis-a-vis China as well. How remarkable it is that even so in America, even as degraded as our culture is, and the fact that we have these two guys who either one of them might end up in jail at any moment running for president, stuff gets from point A to point B without being stolen in America. Do you know how remarkable that is in the governments in the world?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
It makes America a king of logistics. It makes deploying our enormous wealth militarily very, very effective for us in a way like I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, we saw this of course with the Russian army and invasion, but it’s true for most governments, it’s true for China. They have an enormously difficult time getting things from point A to point B without having them diverted and cut several different times. I have a friend who lived in, I told this story I think before, but I have a friend who lived in a second-tier Chinese city for a year, and sometimes the trains, they were supposed to be running all day, but sometimes around 11 or 12 people would just say, “No more trains today.” And it’s because they were privately commandeered to make someone some money on the side.
Similarly, another friend of mine who lived in China, they ended up eating after several months of just getting burned by this too many times, they just ended up eating Papa Johns basically every day because there was no way to get food for basically any price that had not been cut with a bunch of things that were making people sick. And it wasn’t because the vendors themselves, they were trying to do the best they could to sell clean food to people, but at every stage of moving anything from point A to point B, bread, flour would get cut with sawdust and the excess sold off. Or buying bottles of alcohol, the real alcohol would be poured out and basically the kind of moonshine that makes you go blind would be poured in. It’s actually a pretty remarkable thing.
I think American culture and American society is pretty low corruption, it’s probably a legacy or sort of Protestant culture. And I mean, I understand —
Emily Jashinsky:
I accept your theory. As a Lutheran, I accept your theory. But I also think you’re totally right. Well, first of all, you’re trying to make China sound bad to me and saying that people have to eat Papa Johns every day. It’s just a really sort of unfortunate anecdote that you use to build your case in there.
Inez Stepman:
No, just that actually the only place to safely eat in China is an American chain with American logistics.
Emily Jashinsky:
The secret to Papa Johns, I think in the post Papa Johns era is getting the thin crust. And just trust me on that. I think it might save some people some angst in the future, but I should have been more specific and said that there was, endemic probably wasn’t the right word, but there was constant low-level corruption as there always will be, and various localities, cities, there’s just no way to have 100% corruption-free society, but this may be a point you’re getting to, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is reading the so-called robber barons sort of reflections on their eventual charity and Carnegie, who ended up getting a lot of grief, but then whether sincerely or not sort of decided to go on this charitable journey.
A lot of that I think really stems from something you would know about better than I would, but was the small sense of small R sense of republicanism, what Tocqueville wrote about. And whether or not, again, it was sincere because you had the sort of elite families who were beholden to these virtues because they believed in God and felt as though they were held accountable by God in a lower tech society, etc. Whether or not that’s the case, there was also this public accountability. It would be shameful and embarrassing to be Hunter Biden in 1883 in a way that it is not shameful or embarrassing to be Hunter Biden in 2023.
Inez Stepman:
I mean, it’d be shameful to be Hunter Biden I think in 1995.
Emily Jashinsky:
You’re right. Well, it should have been.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I think we talked about this a little bit in relation to some of the stuff that Michael Lin has been writing about labor and capital. And also, I’ve been thinking about it in relation to this book that one of, actually my high school compatriot, Malcolm Harris, who’s on the far left, wrote about our hometown Palo Alto that I’m getting through right now. Having labor and capital existing in the same town and in a Christian framework, I think was an enormous check on exploitation I think running both ways. And in many ways, I mean, I don’t agree with Malcolm’s overall assessment, of course, of America is a Marxist that he is, but I do think that there’s something about importing labor or outsourcing labor away from where the money is being invested and made on both sides.
Now, to some extent, this is libertarian economics. It may increase the GDP, we get better products for a lower price, but it also removes one of those key checks in which the guy who owns the factory and the workers who work in the factory actually have to go to church in the same places. They have to grocery-shop in a lot of the places and you can talk about how those things have pulled apart even within the same city and how sort of wealth segregated we are. And Charles Murray has lots to say about that, but it’s even more extreme where you can outsource your labor to another country, or alternatively, in California, import a labor force that doesn’t have a lot of ties to the place, is just getting their feet under them, doesn’t have the kind of expectations that more settled labor might have, doesn’t have the ability to organize in the same way. I’m obviously no communist, but there does seem to be —
Emily Jashinsky:
A heck of a way to start a sentence.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, no, I do think there’s been something lost in the sort of negotiating. The negotiation and bargaining between labor and capital seems to have broken down in a way because of globalism, because of mass immigration, and because of lots of other factors in a way that, for example, Germany, because they have those weird sort of cartels almost of professionalized labor and stuff, they still seem to be able to have a capitalist economy that is sort of well-ordered, but they still have this negotiating back and forth with organized labor in a way that seems to have broken down in America.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think that’s right. And actually Carnegie’s path is instructive of this. I was having this conversation with Christopher Bedford from the Common Sense Society, a mutual friend of ours, and he pointed out, he was like, “Do you really think Carnegie, when he was writing these letters and when he was reflecting on wealth, was sincere in any of that? He had been caught essentially and was reacting to that.” And my thought, my response to that is basically like, “Okay, what does it really matter? That might be the case, but it’s about social norms.” And around the time of the industrial revolution, you have Marx and Nietzsche, but particularly Nietzsche, we’ve talked about this many times, how do we replace God when it’s technologically impossible to believe in God or technologically becomes irrational to believe in God? What is rational for the human being?
And that is being eroded at the time. And it takes, I would say, arguably the century after that to fully come to fruition in the year of 2020 in the West. And though we saw it breaking to the surface here and there, but the social norms had not been corroded. And the fact of the matter is that Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden as Matt Beebe writes about in 2008 that was starting Rosemont Seneca, whatever year it was, he started Rosemont Seneca and started very clearly and not discreetly at all trading on his father’s name with these foreign businesses. This was all happening in daylight what Tony Podesta and Paul Manafort were doing with the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. This was all happening in daylight.
Podesta in particular, I remember looking at the logs when he had to actually disclosed things that he never disclosed of his meetings with the State Department, and they were vast, and this is all happening in plain sight. His meetings with the media all happening in plain sight. It would’ve been difficult to show your face at whatever the 1880s version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was if you had been Hunter Biden personally and professionally. And because Hunter Biden, there was a lot of attention on him. It’s not to say people weren’t doing bad things, it is to say when they were caught, there was a different sense of, I think shame for elites who now are able to A, have other elites cover up their mistakes and paper over them and smudge them, and B, are just fully in control.
And people rarely cover the insider trading in Congress, for example, until once in a while it breaks out, but nothing ever happens about it and the media doesn’t pressure anyone to make sure anything happens about it because it’s just not on their plates, it’s just not on their radars as to what’s important.
Inez Stepman:
Do you think the corruption charges and now evidence hurts Biden more than it hurts Trump? Because it seems like Trump’s appeal has always sort of, I think even his biggest fans would acknowledge that he has not always operated above board in his business dealings or anything else. And in fact, he acknowledges it. And I mean, he ran on it in 2016, he was like, “Yeah, I know exactly what’s going on because I pay these people and they give me favors, and that’s what I’ve been doing is a billionaire, but that’s how I’m going to take the whole system down.” Now, whether he is able to do that, totally different story.
But Biden really, his appeal is really, or at least seemed to me to be some kind of return to normalcy. We’re going to have a normal calm seas, and if we’re not going to have calm seas because of world events, then at least we have somebody in the White House of whom we cannot be ashamed. And so it seems like it might hurt him more. What do you think?
Emily Jashinsky:
That is a really good theory because a quote that’s been in my mind from Donald Trump in the last week or so, an old quotes from 2015 and 2016, I think he said it more than once, but he said, “I alone can fix it.” And it was in this context of him knowing the system. And it’s not like he went out there and was like, “Listen, I’m corrupt so I can fix corruption,” but that was kind of the implication of all of this. He’s basically saying like, “I’m a businessman who’s been in the room when people are talking about these trade deals and lobbying Congress, and taxes, etc., etc., so I can fix it.” And that was the implication of like it was an implied campaign argument. And in a pretty central way, you have this billionaire businessman who knows the swamp. He’s telling us all about it, he knows it, he says he’s been there and that’s why he can fix it. So I do think that’s really baked into the Trump cake.
I also though think there’s a powerful strain of the DeSantis case that is, if he makes the argument well, it does make Trump vulnerable by casting his legal problems as a giant distraction. And saying, Ron DeSantis I think is well-equipped to make that argument because he says, “I’ve gotten all this stuff done in Florida and no distractions. We basically just say, ‘Screw you, Disney, and get on with things, pass the legislation.’ We don’t really care, we move on.” And so I think there’s a world in which that’s hurtful to Trump if that argument is made well, but on Biden’s side, yeah, he was restoring normalcy, and that was a huge part of his pitch.
And that’s I think why he wins his primary in 2020 because voters felt that a Biden presidency would be a more normal presidency. He is a familiar face, he’s an older face, meaning he is not representative of anything scary and new like a lot of the left is, and for him then to now have been president and not have the normalcy that people expected to see from him, but in fact to have more what feels at least like more ranker and pain and strife, then yeah, it does. If this is one of those things that emphasizes that one of his big campaign narratives is a lie, yeah, but I think that’s hugely consequential to your point.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Or people are just so exhausted that they now assume that everything is corrupt. I mean, the point where you felt compelled to use the term endemic corruption, which I don’t think is supported in American history, but is perhaps supported by the last several elections. But look, it seems to me that that was Biden’s pitch, but maybe actually his pitch is just, “I’m not Trump.” And maybe that’s enough, that might be like Trump brings a huge turnout and he also engenders a huge hate turnout from Democrats and people who just really, really don’t like him.
So anyway, I mean, I’m not in the game of making these predictions, but it does seem like the central pitch that Biden made in 2020 is much less true, not only because of his presidency, but now because he’s sort of torrid with the same endemic corruption brush. But having the media in your pocket and being willing to brush it over with, “Oh, I love my son.” I mean, hell, it might work. I don’t know.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. And we’re not the dumb pundits who sit there and say, “Because X, then Y.” We know that it’s so much more complicated, and it’s all of these different factors that are playing together and overlapping. And if there’s a snowstorm in Nevada, one of those factors is going to matter more than another, and we’re not going to know about that until maybe the day before there’s a snowstorm predicted on election day in Nevada. It’s just really, these prognostications are exhausting.
But to the point that you also just made, that’s another problem for Trump is that he said he was… I’ve seen DeSantis hammering this a lot lately, and it’s not just DeSantis who can make this argument or the other argument about distractions. Donald Trump said he was going to come drain the swamp, and DeSantis is out there saying, “Oh, okay. Did you do it?” That is the benefit or it’s the disadvantage of having been in office for both Trump and Biden. Biden doesn’t bring America back to normal, Trump doesn’t drain the swamp. That does take the air out of their sails a little bit on some really central parts of their pitches.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, it certainly hasn’t helped DeSantis in the polls. It seems like he’s actually losing ground, not even vis-a-vis Trump, but vis-a-vis all these other people who are now in the race in some of these polls. Not massively. I mean, he’s hanging on to his basically one fifth to one quarter of the electorate. And look, Trump won with a third of the electorate, of the Republican electorate in 2016, so the race is far from over, but I think it’s a fair thing to say that Trump is now the presumptive front-runner and probable nominee of the Republican Party. And I mean, there’s a lot more things that could happen with Biden too, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Whatever could you mean in this.
Inez Stepman:
The actuarial tables, Biden may be defeated by the actuarial tables before we —
Emily Jashinsky:
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Inez Stepman:
2024.
Emily Jashinsky:
I have no idea what you could possibly mean in this.
Inez Stepman:
It’s a sad thing to say. I mean, in all seriousness, I do really, I hold a special place of hate in my heart for the, what is it? Gisele Fetterman and Jill Biden.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
For allowing. Like this is something that if you have a man, totally separate from politics, if you have a man, a husband, and you love him and you let him go and embarrass himself repeatedly. I mean, Biden just said, “God save the queen” at the end of his–
Emily Jashinsky:
What is his new thing? Also, it’s like best of luck in your senior year. My favorite one that he’s said lately is, “Best of luck in your senior year.” Have you heard him say that?
Inez Stepman:
No.
Emily Jashinsky:
Why? But I guess this just means it’s time for us to have a conversation about Jared.
Inez Stepman:
Jared is in full mental faculties.
Emily Jashinsky:
So says you.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, truly, I do find it really gross.
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s gross.
Inez Stepman:
On a personal level, a disgusting moral impulse. Yeah. But what can you do? It is funny. Actually, speaking of Jared, he had a great column for the Daily Signal over at Heritage, just reminding us all of all the 25th Amendment discussions while Trump was president about being incapacitated in various ways because they didn’t like what he said or did. Say what you want about Trump, and I know he’s an old guy too, and I’m not thrilled by these two guys from 1946 running again. That being said, I mean, Trump seems vigorous and put together in that sense.
I mean, he seems very similar to how he always was. I don’t really see that argument working the same way on Trump simply because he doesn’t seem that old. He seems like he’s still plenty energetic for the role, and he doesn’t seem like he’s in mental decline. And just that’s the way the cookie crumbles when you get that old, some people are doing just fantastic even into their 90s, and some people are not, and that’s just the hand that fate deals, but-
Emily Jashinsky:
Did you just call him vigorous?
Inez Stepman:
He is vigorous.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, you’re right, but it’s a little hot when you say it like that, Inez.
Inez Stepman:
No, it’s a description. No, he seems like, you know what I’m saying, he has energy when he walks around.
Emily Jashinsky:
Virile.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s right. I think that was actually my mentor, David Azerrad laughed at that, but wrote this piece about the virtues of Trump, and one of them was like manliness and virility or something like that.
Emily Jashinsky:
I do remember that. I remember that. Oh, Azerrad.
Inez Stepman:
No, but it’s just not going to land the same way. The attacks about being old, they’re not going to land the same way on Trump because they just don’t apply in the same way, I think. But I actually wanted to move on from predictions about 2024, which are my least favorite activity. I mean, it has to be done, it’s so important for the country, but it also seems in some fundamental way disconnected. As you’ve always, I think rightly pointed out, we have all of these both structural and then cultural, large cultural problems that underlie our politics that just don’t get the airtime that they deserve. They don’t even sort of seem to bubble up to the surface when we talk about these elections. They’re not on anyone’s presidential agenda, but they are factors that seem to really actually influence the lives of Americans.
You pointed out obesity, this one gets a little bit of play, but the fentanyl crisis and overdose crisis in the United States, these are things that affect a lot more people’s lives in some way than a lot of the things that we talk about in our politics, but get very little place in them. One of those sort of cultural fights that has gotten a lot of airtime is the fight this month over pride. And now that we’re coming to a close, this is our wrap up for the month of June, I’m curious what your thoughts have been on, has this month been different than, I feel like I’m asking the Seder questions, how is this month different from all other months?
No, but how is it different than pride months in the past? Do you think that this is a backlash that is sustainable or sustainable past sort of an immediate couple, sort of taken down a couple companies, Bud Light, Target, and has achieved some amount of pullback, but what are your predictions for what this means, the fact that we have seen for the first time some substantial backlash against pride?
Emily Jashinsky:
This is the first pride where I think it’s been conspicuous to even the left, that the T and the LGBT is threatening the LG. And because it’s become you’re sort of able to isolate the variables and look at public opinion on gay marriage, which I know you and I have talked about going up and fluctuating and perhaps in interesting directions, but this time around when you have people wondering why would Bud Light walk away from Dylan Mulvaney? Why would Target take down some of these pride displays? I’ve heard it even happening in coastal locations. Why would they do that? Because people reacted not to the LG part of LGBT.
The reports of Starbucks potentially, I don’t know how true they are, but you have some of the Starbucks union workers saying that they’ve been suspiciously instructed not to emphasize pride displays, not to put up decorations. Why would Starbucks, a pioneer for gay rights on the corporate level, one of the very early proponents on the corporate level that was ahead of the country on gay rights before Obama, before Biden, why would they in 2023 be de-emphasizing pride? It’s interesting, and I think the very obvious answer that has been very clear this month is the T, that the T feels excessive and wrong to Americans that when you’re seeing, to a good chunk of Americans, probably a majority of Americans, and I think there are probably way too many Americans who would defend books like Gender Fluid, including Pan America.
It should be said, one of these great free speech civil liberty groups defending Gender Fluid in high school libraries or accessible to even younger students, defending Dylan Mulvaney, these obvious excesses, these radical characteristics of the LGBT movement that are disproportionately the T. Pride parades with children around where this isn’t necessarily a T thing, although it happens at certain drag brunches and stuff, where there’s nudity and just explicit sexual content. Many conservatives would argue that this is inextricably intertwined, that this is a necessary consequence of what happened on the LGB part, but at least to a lot of normal people who are probably still supportive of gay marriage, that T part feels disconnected, it feels unnecessary, and it feels extreme.
And that I think over the course of the last month has been conspicuous in a way it hasn’t in previous pride months. And I also, I don’t know about you, have felt that independent media has hit a point of critical mass where it’s actually really bypassing the gatekeepers in a way that’s super meaningful, not just relegated to the activist wings of either party, but that between Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, the Inez Stepmans of the world. But you know what I mean, I feel like it’s also hit critical mass, and a lot of these stories are circulating in ways that reach average Americans that they wouldn’t in the past.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, no, I think it’s definitely true. And more or less, that argument that you just made was basically what a lot of folks who are gay on the right, or at least on the sort of center left where they’re critical of wokeness more or less said to Bridget Phetasy over at The Spectator, they have this piece up called Why Pride Lost the Public, and she basically asks some of these folks on the right or on the center left, “What has happened? Do you feel a shift in terms of…” And most of their responses were pretty much what you just said, that the T is sinking us all, that actually average Americans are very accepting of homosexuality, of gays and lesbians, still very supportive of gay marriage, but are shocked by the T part. And that’s probably true as an assessment of where the American public is.
I’m less certain, because you kind of alluded to it at the end. I think it does beg the question, what are the connections between these things? So we have a lot of folks, even on the right, like Douglas Murray, who’s a friend of mine, smart guy. So it’s not that I don’t like these folks or anything, but it strikes me as though this actually is a moment to think about what the consequences of the sexual revolution really have been. And maybe there are some consequences that we like, but we have to think about now how inextricable some of those consequences that we like are from the consequences that we don’t like. And now maybe that’s not the case, maybe they’re not that connected, but this is why.
So Spencer Klavan, who’s been on this podcast a couple times, he has a really great thread on this. I think talking basically about, yeah, we need to think about how these things may or may not be linked. We don’t get to just brush this under the rug and say, “These things have nothing to do with each other.” We have to actually have this conversation and I think the explosion of books about the sexual revolution from a critical lens, coming out, a lot of them from turf-type authors and Louise Perry, I think there is this moment. We talked about this last time, apparently our conversation pissed off Jane Coaston at The New York Times. Hi, Jane.
Emily Jashinsky:
Thanks for listening.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. No, but I do think we have to reopen some of these questions.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, and the problem with that is, by the way, is I think people in positions of power are fair game for journalists. In fact, that’s a big part of what I do. But the reason there’s a podcasting boom right now and an independent media boom right now is that people feel like they can’t have this conversation openly without being the subject of a bad faith New York Times hit piece and-
Inez Stepman:
Oh, I’m not worried about that.
Emily Jashinsky:
I know. But that’s why as a culture, it’s hard to have that conversation, even to have a debate like Spencer’s threat, I commend it to people. It is something that is territory a lot of people don’t want to tread on, especially a lot of people in media. And part of that is because it’s this culture of just assuming, or not even assuming, but just taking bits and pieces and not letting people have the space to participate in these arguments in good faith without fear of unfair retribution.
Now, if you do something that warrants retribution, by all means enjoy the retribution. But simply asking questions and having a conversation in a public space or in the public sphere, the public discourse, I think the fear of treading in these areas or towing these lines is genuinely problematic because to me it’s always been strange that the left is on board with criticizing the industrial revolution and not something that is inextricably intertwined with the industrial revolution in the most obvious ways. And that’s the sexual revolution, where you have commercialized abortion care. Abortion has been happening as long as humans have been alive, but what happens now is totally different where you have birth control pills and all of the consequences that Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have done poignant work addressing, these things are inextricably intertwined.
And yes, we’re talking about just particularly women, women’s roles in society when we talk about Mary and Louise, but also, it’s obviously not a coincidence that the norms in the West right now surrounding sexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, are at a very different place than we’ve really seen in a long time. Yes, there’s been gender fluidity and different cultures on different scales at different periods, but what we’re seeing now is definitely novel on the scale that we’re seeing it on, what the sort of Tavistock treatment that has been walked back, this stuff is new to territory and it’s obviously a consequence of industrialization because of technology that changed the way fundamentally we react and we relate to each other.
And I just feel like one of the most important things that can happen in our politics is to understand and for there to be a realization collectively that we are, that is first and foremost the world in which we’re operating. It’s like if we can all accept the predicate of hyper-novelty and go from there, just realize that we’re Guinea pigs in this incredible experiment since the printing press and go from there and not say that we throw the baby out with the bathwater, get rid of all this amazing medicine and books and wonderful things like that, but question fundamentally, what is healthy for humans? What norms are healthy for humans? And I’m sure someone listening is going to say that I’m saying everything is unhealthy for humans, but the norms, I think that is genuinely a question.
And I would use an example I think we talked about last month, which is drag. Is it healthy for drag to be a product for children? Plenty of dissident drag queens would say, “No, it doesn’t belong anywhere near children, and you are ruining the art form. By putting it in public libraries, you’re diluting it to the point of meaninglessness because it is necessarily counter-cultural and it thrives as a subculture.” You can’t even say that. I mean, a few people can say that, but you can’t even have that conversation on the left right now.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, this really does go back to the third way. So there’s sort of three options in front of us. One in my view is sort of pretend, to play pretend that we can divorce these final stop consequences from the rest of the sexual revolution as though that has nothing to do with it. Now, that doesn’t mean that inevitably A leads to B leads to C always, or best I should say L leads to B leads to T.
Emily Jashinsky:
Right.
Inez Stepman:
But I actually think, like I’ve said many times, I actually think that transgenderism is much more downstream from feminism that denies sex differences than it is from an acceptance of homosexuality. That being said, something like gay marriage could only become accepted in a cultural moment or a culture that accepts the idea that maleness and femaleness and the complementarity between them are not essential to marriage. So it has to be downstream of the sexual revolution. Actually, personally I think it’s one of the less pernicious consequences of the sexual revolution, but it seems to me to be playing pretend to imagine that we can completely divorce gay marriage and acceptance of homosexuality more broadly from the other consequences of the sexual revolution.
And we can pretend that this transgender sort of stop on the train is completely different from the feminism that came before, it is completely different from the gay acceptance movement that came before it. That just seems to me a little bit of revisionist history. On the other hand, we have this option that most of us don’t want to take, except the most hardcore people on the right, which is to say, “No, we are going to restore the pre-sexual revolution norms.” Now, first of all, my biggest objection to this has always been how?
Emily Jashinsky:
The obvious answer to that is a Catholic monarchy.
Inez Stepman:
It’s like except sexual revolution is wrong, step one, and then a bunch of question marks and then restore pre-sexual revolutionary norms and-
Emily Jashinsky:
Papal supremacy, yeah. I got to ask that a podcast with someone on the left.
Inez Stepman:
I think it’s just impossible to change sexual mores. Obviously the left has done that very effectively, but it’s sort of a big question mark to me as to how. And furthermore, it’s not clear to me even leaving aside what’s popular, I mean, last time we said we don’t want to live in Uganda, there are-
Emily Jashinsky:
Controversial.
Inez Stepman:
I think both of us probably do want to live in a society where there is a certain amount of tolerance for subcultures, and which apparently is very offensive to say that being gay is a subculture, even though it’s obviously a sexual minority. Anyway, that’s aside. But so there’s a certain amount of tolerance for subcultures. And actually this guy named Ed Krassenstein, who I’d been blissfully unaware of until now.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, Krassenstein. Yes. You were unaware of Krassenstein?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I don’t know. I was blissful, I was blissfully ignorant of Ed Krassenstein. So in an attempted dunk on DeSantis, I think he actually brought out a really great comparison. So he was talking about there’s videos, mostly a lot of them from New York. I mean, we walked by some of these right in Washington Square Park and in Tompkins Square Park over the last weekend, there were naked pride celebrations with naked people running all around. Of course, this is a public park. There are people with children there.
Emily Jashinsky:
Jared should not have done that. I’m just picking on Jared today.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, this is like the Pick on Jared Podcast.
Emily Jashinsky:
He’s not here to defend himself.
Inez Stepman:
No, he’s like a Christian boy. He’s even more horrified than me whenever he sees this stuff because he grew up in Christian school and he’s like, “Why are there naked adults splashing in the public fountain?”
Emily Jashinsky:
James Guttman, one of the good ones for sure.
Inez Stepman:
No, but so this guy, Ed Krassenstein, who again I was not familiar with until now, he tries to dunk on the people complaining about these videos in New York and elsewhere of adults naked dancing around with children present, exposing themselves to children. And he says, “Well, what about nude beaches in Florida?” And then Florida’s not the only place. Nude beaches, most coastal states in the US have several, at least, nude beaches out there. And actually I think that’s a great comparison, just not in the way that he’s talking about, because nude beaches and nude colonies are a subculture in America that has had absolutely zero purchase on the mainstream.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
No one goes to a nude beach not knowing what it is. They put out big signs everywhere saying, “Hey, there’s going to be naked people on this beach. And if you don’t like that, you don’t go.” It’s not in our children’s curriculum, in public schools, there’s no unit, there’s no month celebrating nudity on beaches and nudist colonies, there’s no chapter in the history textbook about the oppression of nudist colonies in the United States. Essentially, in all ways, you can avoid nude beaches and nudist colonies in the United States culturally and in the public square unless you seek them out.
And actually, I think this is the third way to go back to the two options where we have, okay, completely roll back the sexual revolution and all of its consequences. I don’t know if that’s even possible, but also that does seem to us moderns a bit harsh. And then on the flip side, it’s pretend that these things have nothing to do with each other. It seems to me that Polya has really driven a truck through the middle and said, “No, we need to be able to establish a sort of family sex difference affirming norm in the public square, and then we can be tolerant of subcultures as long as they hold up their end of the bargain, which is not to be aggressively encroaching constantly into the public square and demanding fealty and acceptance.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes. And that just requires a consensus on healthy norms. And we have not always had that in this country. In fact, the nude beaches is such a good example of pluralism working. That this is really not harming anyone, the laws allow for it, people do their thing, and it doesn’t cause immense social discord. But we’ve had problems with this in the past. Obviously, the most obvious example being there was a norm with a wide swath of the public that if you were Black, you were subhuman and therefore it was fair to subjugate you to the white man. And this was a very fundamental disagreement. And we now look at that rightfully as abhorrent, but it was a fundamental disagreement that like can a country function where you don’t agree on the concept of humanity if you don’t agree on what constitutes a human being and what constitutes subhuman being?
And it was on a bigger scale, but I think what scares me is that we’re seeing sort of the early phases of something like that on sex, and something like that even on humans, again, especially as we get into, we don’t have to dive into this now, but reproductive technology when it comes to IVF and embryos, etc., etc. When we cannot, there’s a brief period in American history that feels like it was for most of us, much more sort of these halcyon days where pluralism was working sort of post Jim Crow. And yes, there were still problems, but from 1964 until, I don’t know, like 2012 when the Trayvon Martin, then Michael Brown, and that ball starts rolling down the hill and we start seeing some of this stuff come to the fore again, it felt like pluralism on racial, sexual questions was by and large allowing for a flourishing in everyday life for the average American.
And that’s not to say everyone, but it is to say the average American. This project was working and pluralism doesn’t work when you can’t have some of those basic definitions met. If you have these healthy norms where everyone agrees on basic definitions, yes. But when you start to break down that sort of consensus about what should constitute a norm and threatens healthier norms, what is a norm for marriage? What is a norm for a locker room or a bathroom? I mean, that’s part of the second wave is getting women single sex spaces so they would be safe when they had to go to the bathroom. And when you lose that, you lose your ability to exist together and you lose your ability to be a pluralist society. And that’s what really scares me right now.
Inez Stepman:
There is actually no contradiction between saying that the married progenitive, I guess is the word I’m looking at, family deserves a sort of central and special place in our norms that it deserves to be the ideal propagated in the public square. And there is actually no contradiction between that and saying, “We love our gay friends, our gay family members, we want them to have safety from legal persecution, we want to find some way of recognizing their relationships as distinct from other relationships.” There actually isn’t a contradiction between saying, “We want to propagate and propagate an idea of normalcy in the public square.” And then saying, “Okay, there are people whose lives are not going to look like this ideal at all. They’re going to look very different.” And that’s also okay, but we seem to have enormous difficulty maintaining a mainstream standard.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Jack Phillips.
Inez Stepman:
And I think that actually in that case, it erodes our ability to live together. It makes it into what you’re saying, this sort of war of all against all. It erodes our ability to actually tolerate one another when it’s just a matter of planting your flag, LOL, planting your flag in the public square. That is actually what small illiberalism is, is having that space between the mainstream and the counterculture, the space between what’s demanded and what’s forbidden.
But before we wrap up here and I’ll let you go, I wanted to turn to something that I think is very much on point with what all the things that you are always discussing about hyper-novelty, about the introduction of the iPhone and transhumanism and just a lot of the issues, especially that the youngest generation seems to be having, the youngest generation hitting adulthood, Gen Z, and then I guess Generation Alpha after them at this point.
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s what the next generation’s called, Alpha?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, we had to recycle back around to the beginning.
Emily Jashinsky:
Wow, okay. I was wondering that, so thank you for–
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure they’ll pick up a new name. We have Zoomers now as opposed to Gen Z, but I’m sure they’ll pick up a new name. Gen Y was Millennials. Anyways, so there’s this new survey out and it shows basically data of percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who agree to these three statements. The first is, “I can’t do anything right, my life is not useful, I do not enjoy life.” So those are the three statements, and they’re using it as a proxy for depressive symptoms. And every single one of those answers for 8th, 10th, and 12th graders starts shooting up right around 2013 to the point where initially it’s numbers in the mid 20s for most of these statements goes all the way up where all three of these grades, it’s approaching the 50% mark of basically young people in middle school and high school that are agreeing with these statements that sound very depressive.
I guess we’ve talked a lot, we talked a lot about why that’s happening and how social media and the iPhone might be related to it, worth saying that it explodes in 2013, which is a little bit different from some of the Gene 20 narrative about 2007. What do you think is driving this? Do you think it’s real or do you think that people are trying to get cache? I mean, there could be a little bit of both. I don’t know. What do you think is happening here? Because like 50% of teenagers basically saying they don’t enjoy their lives is pretty shocking and scary.
Emily Jashinsky:
I’ve always thought it was real and I think that the proof of that, as Abigail Shrier has rightfully pointed out is in some of the expressions of angst. For instance, the social contagion that we’ve seen in different schools of transgenderism that when you talk to young girls is a manifestation very clearly of depression and anxiety. And it’s the twingy thing to your point, I think there’s also, and I think she’s talked about this, the 2013 versus 2007. 2013, what you really have is a proliferation of the iPhone and critical mass of iPhones and the combination in a way that didn’t exist in 2007, the combination of critical mass iPhones and social media.
It all sounds really specific, but when you combine the fact that you have a smartphone with the fact that you also have social media on that smartphone, meaning that instead of having to be tethered to a landline, you have it everywhere you go and that every second of the day you could be getting the best or worst news of your life from this little box in your pocket. That is why you get pocket vibrations, or phantom vibrations, that’s what the phenomenon is. It’s because it’s a very rational, and obviously it’s hyper rational when you’re talking about depression and anxiety, but a constant need to look at this box is truly rational when you consider what could be on that box at any given moment.
And the studies I think are especially alarming that our brain functions differently just when our phone is in the room versus when the phone’s not in the room. So when there’s that possibility of checking versus no possibility of checking, everything we need to know about what these things are doing to psychology is right there. And just recently been talking someone through a breakup and the level of anxiety that they’re feeling. I was just thinking in the 1970s you would be at home alone and just waiting by the phone. There are a million songs about waiting by the phone. But now there’s really no escape from that because you can go to the movies, you can go to the mall, you can go on a run, and you basically have to take your phone in case of an emergency unless you have one of those light phones or whatever. But even then, they still have SMS. So you just can never escape the possibility that someone’s texting you and that someone is saying something bad or saying something good or any of those things. It is now inescapable and it’s entirely rational for those things to make you anxious and depressed just from a purely sort of biological standpoint. So it’s weird for us to sit here and talk about these numbers because to me it’s just like, we have to be calm in this space, but this is an emergency, this is a five-alarm fire.
Those numbers and they’re not varying greatly. This is constantly what we’re seeing over and over again for years now. And it is a public health emergency, but in an even more immediate sense than I think obesity is, this is a very serious threat. It is changing the way people are going to be now, but also 30 years from now because they couldn’t get over their anxiety and depression to start a family, because…. You know what I mean? This is the effects of what is happening exactly right now. If we don’t get a hold on it, are going to be felt, I mean, already we know they’re going to be rippled into the next century and in not a good way, unless this is all used for the good of turning the ship around and coming up with a way to have this technology healthily, exist healthily, have a business community that promotes healthy use of it. So I think it’s a five-alarm fire and it’s terrifying.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we always have these two polls every time one of these new data point comes out in this discussion between your emphasis on technology, which I don’t disagree with, but correspondingly, I mean, I know that you agree with us a lot as well, but that the sort of Mary Eberstadt thesis that we do not have enough in real life relationships to pull us out of that. Because I even think personally about the only times that I stop checking my phone, really, and I forget about the little vibrating thing in my pocket, is when I’m in real life talking to people that I care about, people that I love, my family. When I sit down to dinner with my friends, I’m not constantly checking my phone.
I’m aware of it in the way that you’re saying, like if I get a phone call, for example, and I look down and it’s a close friend or a family member, then I feel the need to pick it up or at least to text them back and see if anything is the matter or whatever, but I do tend to forget. I think those in real life relationships are so much more compelling that it’s almost easy. When you start to actually enjoy those relationships, it pulls you out. It’s not even a matter of like, oh, denying yourself the ability to check, it is just so much more compelling. It’s almost in the same way that C.S. Lewis wrote about heaven and hell, that he has this conception of heaven as hyperreal, where even the blades of grass actually, if you don’t belong in heaven, they hurt your feet, they’re like diamonds on your feet because actually that’s so much more real.
I feel like one of the problems with being born as a fully digitally immersed generation is a lot of people in Gen Z and then I’m sure even younger, they don’t have that. They haven’t actually experienced how beautiful reality is and how much more compelling reality is than the virtual most of the time. And that’s a really hard thing to describe without sounding sort of out of touch, old fogey in the same way that C.S. Lewis talks about heaven, it’s impossible to describe to the demons in hell what it is.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
They experience it as this exterior bizarre thing that they can’t really enjoy or interact with because they just don’t have that experience.
Emily Jashinsky:
But there’s a real glass-half-full take to that and I was actually talking to some students today about this very thing in that the reason they’re anxious and depressed is I think human nature is giving them this nagging sense that they’re missing something deep because they do have those moments from time to time with compelling personal relationships where they’ve just talked all night and not looked at their phone. That happens just by being human. It doesn’t happen as much, it’s not the norm, it’s not the default for them anymore. But they have that nagging, nagging sense that they’re really missing out on something.
And the glass-half-empty take is a really persuasive one too, although I say this as a pessimist, I actually am very persuaded by the glass-half-full take that there’s just something deep tugging at them, telling them something is wrong and that can bring them to what’s right, that could be their sort of north star because it’s miserable and inescapable, and the only way out is to find reality. So that’s the glass-half-full take, and I fully understand pessimism about it.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. And we’ll wrap it up there, but I think obviously another large piece of this that we’ve discussed at other times is our secular society really doesn’t have an account of suffering. And so I think when people do encounter suffering, they don’t have a framework. It both makes them very narcissistic because it’s easy to solipsistically imagine yourself to be the only one who’s suffering. And they also don’t have any either secular or ancient framework, Stoicism is also not a widespread philosophy. I mean, there is no framework for suffering except a sort of pathologized or medical framework where like, “Oh, there’s something broken in you because you’re suffering. We need to give you a pill, or we need to fix that.” Or even worse, “We need to fix the world so that there’s no suffering.”
And all of those things are just not the best frameworks in which to deal with suffering, in my opinion. But we got to let Emily go because she’s a busy lady. Emily, thanks again for coming on After Dark once again. We do these wrap-up episodes at the end of each month, the last Wednesday of each month are dedicated to Emily and I talking about the things that we think matter. So that’s Emily Jashinsky, you can check her workout at The Federalist and at Breaking Point/Counter Points. And thanks to our listeners.
High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.