Emily Jashinsky is back for another docket episode. The ladies discuss whether independent media is finally breaking through, what the affirmative action SCOTUS decision is doing to the corporate DEI industry, the new trend of retiring the girlboss life for Lazy Girl Jobs, and of course, Barbenheimer.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And once again we are here with Emily Jasinski. Emily is a fellow with us over at the Independent Women’s Forum. She’s also the culture editor at The Federalist. And she is in charge of young journalists at Young America’s Foundation, as well as one of the hosts of the wildly popular independent media show, Counterpoints Subset of Breaking Points, which I always reverse going backwards. But she wears many hats. And one of those hats, we were fortunate enough to have her with us every month for one of these episodes where we go over some of the things that we thought were maybe undercovered or not fully fleshed out in, in the news cycle, in the wild 24 hour news cycle that is our political lives.
And on that note, we are not going to talk about the 2024 race. We are not going to talk about Donald Trump’s indictments and the fact that we now live in a Banana Republic where both contenders may possibly be either the president or in jail. We’re going to be talking about some other topics that I think are in some ways more interesting and more important. And I’m going to start it off with this is, I guess, tangentially related to 2024, but that’s not where I’m going to go with it. So we had this big forum with all of the presidential candidates other than Trump hosted by Blaze Media. And to my mind, this is the first time in my political lifetime that Republican candidates for president were actually asked questions that distinguish between them on the issues that Republican vote based voters care about.
So this is, you know, a huge shakeup. You get huge presidential, I got huge ratings. Right. So what do you think about this entrant of new media Blaze TV, right? This is not cable, this is sort of independent. Do you think that this is going to be a blip, or do you think that we’ve turned a corner in terms of really getting serious interviews on things that Republicans actually care about when voting for Republicans? because I mean, that sounds super basic, but I, at least in my political lifetime, like I said, I’ve never experienced that.
Emily Jasinski:
You’re right. That’s the biggest difference between what happened in Iowa and what happens at typical debates. And, you know, the first debate is a month away. The first formal debate is a month away. Donald Trump has said he probably won’t go. Ron McDaniel recently, just this week actually said, she thinks he’ll keep us guessing it’s set to be hosted by Fox News. So I would imagine that Brett Bear, Shannon Bram are the slate there. But it is a stark contrast. The Blaze event was a stark contrast with what we’ve seen. For example, I, I think the Chris Wallace debate was a really good case study. Any CNN debates have been good case studies. Basically, most of these legacy media debates are, a lot of people probably remember the K Crowley moment where she, in fact, checked MIT Romney incorrectly in 2012.
She was wrong. Yeah, she was wrong. Or shadowing the entire fact checking industry. Yes, exactly. Which was just a remarkable moment. But the Blaze stepping in and broadcasting the summit, which was going to happen either way, the point of the summit, they’ve done it in years past. The point of the summit isn’t, you know, the broadcast in the same way that a debate isn’t just for, you know, the 200 people that they can squeeze into the auditorium, it’s for the broadcast. But I think what the Blaze showed is that you can take new media and have a perfectly acceptable production quality. And you can get that packaged in a way where consumers are now being taught to seek out alternative media. So they kind of have the muscle memory to get on streaming. They figured that out. They know where to find things like the Blaze, like Blaze Media, and they’re going to get a product that a is better in some substance, and b is packaged in a way that is perfectly acceptable to sort of our standards.
You know, we have such high production value where, you know, CNN like basically broadcasts from a space shuttle now. But even if you’re not meeting space shuttle level production it looks good. You don’t have glitches. Sound is fine. Video is fine. Everything is in working order. And I think that’s a really, really big deal for new media, because not long after, actually, here’s a quick illustration of the point. The RNC announced that the ruthless guys would be doing, I think like a pre-debate, either a pre or post debate show in Milwaukee at that first debate. This was right after the Blaze Summit was successful, or the Faith and Family Summit broadcasted by the belays was successful. The RNC announced a partnership with Ruthless. Now, do I think Ruthless really, has their finger on the pulse of the average Republican voter?
No, but I think that’s probably why the RNC chose them, because the RNC wants to sort of have that happy medium between new media and populism. And that’s where they landed on the ruthless guys. But I really think the Blaze’s success is it showed people in Washington and in the sort of political establishment that other people are going to step in and do this stuff, and they’re going to do it competitively because the substance will be better and the packaging will be just fine. And that was, that’s going to work better for consumers as long as they’re able to, you know, log onto whatever platform they need to in order to watch it. If you can do that, then you’re in business.
Inez Stepman:
So, even aside from the actual questions that were being asked, and some of those questions were really good and questions from Tucker that I don’t think any other mainstream media figure would be asking Republican candidates. But also just the analysis around it, you know, the game time analysis, the very traditional cable newsy sort of thing, right? You have the analyst sitting around talking about, you know, how this candidate did on that answer or this question, like they were dividing the candidates out by whether or not they really were giving an answer to the fact that corporate America has swung pretty hard into the, the left’s camp on cultural issues, right? They were critiquing answers that were given on foreign policy, on the Ukraine war, all of these things. That just, I don’t imagine it just, it just reminded me of all those years that we’ve seen even Republican debates, like the best we can do usually is maybe we get one guy like Hugh Hewitt, right?
Or Mary Catherine Ham, like one reasonable person who’s, I mean, Mary Catherine Ham’s in the center. Hugh Hewitt is sort of on the center, right? Like, you get one person in, and then you have a panel of left wing legacy media types, right? And the, the Candy Crowley incident that you, you referenced is sort of peak of that era where you actively have the media and the moderator interfering on behalf of one candidate versus another. It when, and it turns out in an incorrect way, right? I just, it, it feels important to me the fact that this, this happened. Because I just, I can’t remember it ever happening on this biggest stage with presidential candidates.
Emily Jasinski:
Well, that’s another really good point. And I had been thinking about the Mary Catherine example too, because I, I remember part of the, she, she did a fantastic job. I believe it was a CNN debate, and I remember the sort of Republican commentary being like, wow, very grateful to Mary Catherine. And part of the reason for that, if I’m remembering correctly, was that she asked questions that Republican voters care about in a way that it was framed as Republican voters would have framed it themselves. You know, wasn’t the sort of Manhattan framing on a policy suggestion or a policy topic it was actually like the framing that people would want to see posed to candidates. And to your point, the way, you know, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is perfectly representative of the average voter, the average Republican primary voter on Ukraine.
I think polling bears that out. Although I do think there’s a lot of skepticism among Republican voters. I’m not sure that he’s and he would probably admit this, he, he’s probably a little further on that issue than your average Republican primary voter. But he was asking questions that actually exposed the daylight between different candidates really pushed them. And those questions you would absolutely never hear in a traditional media debate period. The format was great, where it was one-on-one with him, and then you could just sort of see, you could compare the, the videos to that. But I think your point, and as your central point is that these are topics like just in the sheer topic selection. And then of course, with the platform, that’s something that creates competition for traditional media. If all of a sudden Blaze is going to step in or all of a sudden, you know, hypothetically, like breaking points hosted
Inez Stepman:
I have gotten some presidential candidates recently.
Emily Jasinski:
Marian Williamson and RFK Jr have both been on breaking points. I’m sure there’s other podcasts that they’ve both done as well. But that’s, you know, if you have serious competition from people who are able to do the substance better and make the product look fine, you know, at least as good then you’re just, you are really facing competition like you have never faced in decades. Like what competition other than ABC, CBS, NBC have they faced amongst each other, like Fox when Fox came along? That’s those pretty much it. And those are all networks that come through antennas that have been competing with each other. And then you have the cable guys, and they’re sometimes competing amongst each other, but nothing dramatically new ideologically. And that’s, the Fox has pretty much been the only ideological competition to any of these folks.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. And Fox needs competition themselves, right? No matter which of, of sort of side of these various debates within the right one is on. And, and Fox appears to be you know, there was the big flat, they fired Tucker Carlson, right? And it’s, it’s not even that. I think Fox is like you, there are obviously lots of people who go on Fox and sheriff perspective, that was probably pretty similar to what we heard on the Blaze. But it’s individual people, right? It’s not the, the network anchors are not going to be asking questions like that on Fox. They’re not going to be asking the, the framing of questions the way that was asked by Blaze Media. You know, you’re not going to have a bunch of people sitting at their decision desk who are going to be thinking about the issues that way. Is it a decision desk at Fox, or did I just reveal my ignorance of what they call the, I don’t know, the election coverage desk?
You know, it does seem to me to be like a moment, just like the Super Bowl was kind of a moment a couple years ago, a handoff between boomers to millennials, all those like acts, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre or whatever. It was all like, nostalgia for the nineties instead of nostalgia for the seventies or sixties. And I feel like that that moment kind of happened in media a little bit, right? With this, there was sort of a handoff to no, you know, independent media streaming media, this is a real thing that is going to be competing, you know, sooner rather than later is going to be competing with legacy media, with cable. And I mean, I think that’s all, all to the good. I mean, I remember an article you wrote with Ben Doch like years ago, calling it, what is it? The new Contras, you
Emily Jasinski:
Call them The New Contras? Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that is only to the good because there really has been, that’s the problem with having, it’s not that Fox sucks, it’s that like, if Fox is the only voice on the right, and they decide that they want to go this way or that way on a particular issue, it’s, it’s like a blackout, right? For legacy mainstream media, it’s a blackout on a particular topic that’s, that’s a problem. And until now, the whole independent media world has been, yeah, like creeping larger and larger and larger and, and there was a big break with Tucker, but I don’t know, this actually feels, I was a little disappointed with how little Tucker moving out now, maybe he’s still going to do something wilder, but like this Twitter show that he does, does not seem to me to have the same mainstream purchase as a show on Fox. And it was kind of a lot, I think I’m going to lose a bet I made with a friend, by the way, about whether Tucker’s mainstream influence will be upward down in a year after having to leave Fox. So four, I have to say down, right? So, but this is encouraging, this is another like little blip of, hey, like this, this media scene really could go mainstream.
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah, I think the problem is that Twitter is not mainstream. It’s, it’s really only used by a very small slice of the population. Like, I’ve run the numbers before. It’s so tiny. What percentage of the population is a daily Twitter user? You know, people who have Twitter accounts, that’s still a small figure, but people who are using Twitter on a daily basis, it is. So, it is such a small percentage of the population. And what I think Tucker is trying to do, there’s also a Wall Street Journal story that he is courting donors for a big media venture trying to start something again on his own, as he did with the Daily Caller. But you know, in for this new era, post Fox you know, Daily Caller and Fox weren’t, you know, competing in any way. But he’s looking for that right now.
I guess maybe they’re competing in news gathering, but I mean, on the broadcast side. And so he’s, he’s raising money for a new media venture, so we’ll see. But I think both he and Elon Musk know, and this happened this week just with Elon rebranding Twitter to X. It’s apparently, according to Walter Isaacson and some people who’ve studied Musk closely since the late nineties, X has always been his sort of vi that is his fantasy is if, if he can create this company X that involves everything, finances, social media, news gathering, you can create a hyper mainstream platform, basically a one-stop shop. And Musk himself came out and said this week that Twitter, it was important for him to buy Twitter for free speech reasons, but also-. And maybe he actually even had the order reversed. Basically, he exposed that his real priority was in buying Twitter was not just free speech, it was really about creating this one stop shop platform.
And so I think, you know, that is a huge boon to independent media. If it takes off, that’s a huge, if of course, who knows whether he is able to turn X into something that’s more mainstream than Twitter. If he does, and you have people like Tucker sort of camped out on the platform that people are using for this variety of purposes, it’s great. And it’s another sort of big chip in the it makes a big chip in the power of the gatekeepers. So that’s a, is still, that’s a still big like TBD hanging over everything, but it is true that the gatekeepers are still very powerful to the point where you know, you can’t just put something on Twitter and have the exact same cash and the exact same sort of cultural penetration.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. it feels like this tipping point has got to be inevitable, right? The, the independent media sphere is just building and building and building. And I wonder if it’ll be obvious in the moment. Like, I thought that Tucker leaving might be that tipping point. I don’t know that it was. I mean, I, I suppose the jury is still out on that one. This also felt to me like, you know, this is a, this is, this is, this is a big spotlight. This is, these are all the, the presidential candidates I wish Trump had participated. Forgetting for a moment about, you know, whether he wins or loses the nomination, but it would’ve added to the sort of seriousness of the fact that of, of this showcase and made it more like impossible not to cover, right? But even, even without Trump the legacy media outlets had to cover this, right? All the President Republican presidential candidates answering questions, that’s a must cover you know, must cover event. So I don’t know. I don’t know when the tipping point is going to be, but I just, it feels like there has to be one and it has to be pretty soon.
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah, I had the same reaction. I thought the Blaze Summit really was, it felt like critical mass with independent media for me, not just because of the broadcast, but also this is another interesting layer. Every single one of the candidates say for Trump felt like they had to sit down with Tucker. The family summit taps Tucker for it, and every candidate went and sat down with Tucker knowing in the case I mean, maybe Chris Christie didn’t, but the, like, serious candidates to the extent that they’re serious based on polling, all sat down with Tucker Carlson, even knowing like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence did that they were going to get absolutely grilled. They sat down for this good faith exchange. And that in and of itself is absolutely huge. It speaks to the power of new media that somebody like Tucker Carlson can get pushed out of Fox News and still demand that level of respect from these candidates who know they’re going to get pushed very hard by somebody who is you know, just taking them on night after night after night.
That I think really speaks to, to the power, because if he had just gotten booted off Fox a while ago, that summit doesn’t keep him on board maybe he wouldn’t have even been chosen in the first place, and the candidates probably skip it unless they’re one of the candidates like DeSantis for whom it will probably be good. So that in and of itself I, I think that you’re right, that sense of critical mass to me, I had the same thing. That this is finally, you have to take new media seriously, because the Blaze pulled it off. And then when the RNC tapped the ruthless guys, I think they had the same reaction. I think a, a sort of shiver went down the spine of people in the political establishment in media and actually in politics itself, because now they know that they really have to do business with the competitors, with the upstarts. Otherwise they’re going to be missing big audiences and not delivering the same quality of a product. And hopefully this means that because, you know, Fox feels pressure or the RNC feels pressure, they play ball on some things that they wouldn’t have in the past, not just with different creators, but actually just with different topics taking different ideas on.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s, I mean, I just think that would be a massive improvement over what we’ve got. Some other, I, we, I actually have a, a fairly optimistic docket today, so this is, this is good. We, we did a real, like deep dive depressing one last time. So some other good news we have after this, a big affirmative action case. So Supreme Court strikes down students prepared admissions, right? Strikes down racial preferences in admissions. It has all kinds of implications for other government programs, but it also has implications for, for private companies potentially. And I think with you elsewhere on Nacon and stuff, I said that my biggest hope for this case is not actually a direct, like it’s going to, it’s going to be hard to universities to enforce this with the universities. They are going to try every trick in the book to continue applying racial preferences to come out with the racial balance of, of students that they want.
It’s going to be an uphill battle. I think there are some, some levers to push administratively as well as continuing the law fair and the courts. But it is the beginning of a fight very much with universities. On the other hand, with corporations, it’s all about CYA and scaring them. And there is some good evidence or at least some positive potential signs that we are scaring them because even though this case doesn’t have direct implications for them the fact that affirmative action is no longer going to be an exception to the colorblind constitution has massive implications beyond universities. And there’s an article in the Wall Street Journal, there’s actually two articles correspondingly, one from about a week ago showing the number of DEI consultant and like HR consultant jobs just skyrocketing with a Biden election.
Like from, obviously from a very low point during the, the dark days of the pandemic and the shutdowns. But, but skyrocketing well above its previous trajectory in 2019 and early 2020. So like a serious flip over on the one hand for the last several years. And then this article saying, well, but hold up. There’s been a more immediate, in the last several months, there has been halt to potentially to a lot of these diversity programs, hiring people in DEI positions. And then Aaron Siberian, who does some great reporting on this his sources he announced on Twitter, he hasn’t put out the full report, I think, yet, but his sources are telling him that all the corporate clients of major law firms are calling the, the major law firms. They’re asking about the legality, the potential legality of their diversity programs, diversity hiring programs, and that, that most law firms, even liberal law firms, are telling them, yeah, you might have to watch out.
Like you might have to restructure these programs. You might have to get rid of them. There is potential legal liability there going forward. So, I don’t know, like just threw a bunch of stuff at you, but you know, what’s the potential for this? I mean, to me, this would be huge because every corporation in America right now, like major corporation is discriminating on the basis of race. They’re discriminating against white male applicants, and to some extent white or, or sorry, male Asian applicants and in favor of black and Hispanic female, etc., applicants, because they want that glossy photo. And they had a previous incentive from the Civil Rights Act and the EEOC to try to hire as much diversity as they could possibly swing. Well, now there’s legal incentive in the other direction.
Emily Jasinski:
Well, yeah, certainly good news for Christopher Caldwell and and people who follow the sort of Caldwell approach to all of this, which I found very persuasive basically that the civil rights bureaucracy instituted around the mid-sixties fundamentally changed the country, was a new constitution. And actually, this is the dissent, or this is the this is the opinion in which Clarence Thomas referred to new a new constitution, right? Like I think it was in the, the affirmative action opinion. Oh, I can look that up.
Inez Stepman:
This is where there’s that back and forth between him and Justice Jackson right on this question, not loss on anyone. They’re the two black members of the court. It’s a great opinion for its own sake. But yes. I mean, this is what I hoped for. I’m just so excited. I want –
Emily Jasinski:
You seem like, so excited.
Inez Stepman:
I want corporate cover your ass to go our direction. Well, that’s such a powerful force in the universe is corporate, CYA,
Emily Jasinski:
I mean this, like, this has been outright racism. Whether or not the, you think the ends are good or evil, it’s racial discrimination plain and simple. And I think what Caldwell persuasively argues is that when you do have, and it felt to me when I was reading the Clarence Thomas opinion, like he had read Christopher Caldwell but the, the Caldwell sort of argument is that that builds something completely, it reads entirely new things into the Constitution that fundamentally change the Constitution. And I completely agree with that. And actually, this is a question I wanted to turn around to you, Inez, is if you aren’t you personally, but the hypothetically you are sitting in a corporate boardroom looking over your diversity policies, what is it in the affirmative action decision that starts to feel like a legal liability for you? Is it that it opens the gate to potential lawsuits? Is it that because the Supreme Court has come to a consensus on this definition meeting racism or racial discrimination the, the definition of racial preferences finally meeting the definition of racial discrimination as the court found it did? Is, is that what would get someone nervous in the sort of sweet C-suite as they’re looking at potential challenges.
Inez Stepman:
Among other things? Right. so the 14th Amendment applies to state action. So it applies to everything the government does or everything the government funds, which of course, as you know, the, the lines between public and private are excessively blurred, let’s say. And, and there’s a huge amount of like money changing hands and a huge number of projects that are publicly funded, but privately executed, right? So that itself is a pretty big sphere of things. And there’s also the, it prevents the government. So like prevents the government from contracting with anyone who, you know, violates, you know anti-discrimination procedures provisions. But then there’s also a lot of cross pollination in terms of, yeah, theoretically under the Civil Rights Act, right? The similar language about discrimination as the 14th Amendment, and like theoretically, and, and sometimes indeed there are two different interpretations, right?
There’s no necessity that those two become an identity, right? That in other words, that the 14th Amendment means the Civil Rights Act and vice versa. The Civil Rights Act goes further in some cases, but there is a lot of cross pollination legal concepts involved, right? So like a lot of the same legal terms buzzwords go back and forth. You know, some apply in one and not the other, but there is a lot of cross pollination and a lot of the reasoning tends to flip over. And so, and of course, a statute can’t violate the Constitution, right? So if for example, the Justice has found that some provisions from the 1990s of the Civil Rights Act read in the way we have been reading them since the 1990s. Which violate this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, well, then those provisions will have to be narrowed in terms of their interpretation.
I doubt they’ll be struck down, but they won’t be able to be used in the same way. So yeah, like there’s a lot of different ways in which you can kind of follow the legal rabbit trail and through a series of hypothetical cases and end up with, yeah, this, this corporate program that very explicitly grants benefits to one race as opposed to another in terms of, of applicants, right? You could easily see that legal reasoning ending up. And apparently that’s what major law firms are, are telling their clients at least a large number of them are telling their corporate clients, look, you know, this is not something that’s happening tomorrow, but that, you know, if you want to avoid any possibility of being sued over this, then you should start to wind down these programs. And so we’ll see if that’s what they do. We’ll see who wins out the stuff we’re always talking about the, the college grad cultural revolutionaries, the, the sort of professional class that makes up a lot of the workforce of these corporations. They’re going to have very strong things to say about this one imagines. Yeah. But, you know, if, if the general counsel or the, the law firm on hire is saying you can’t do this without major risk of lawsuit, you know, there are going to be a lot of corporations that go the other way. At least that’s what I hope.
Emily Jasinski:
I Ithink that’s my worry ahead. There was a journal story. It may have actually even been one of the ones that you were talking about where they said, d e I, and we’ve seen this reported elsewhere. DEI positions exploded in 2020. I think they increased, like d e I listings increased it by increased by 55%, something like that in 2020. And they have been hit particularly hard in layoffs during this Biden economy or this moment in the Biden economy. And I saw a lot of people cheering that I, I get that. I mean, I, I think it’s possible that certain corporations that realize this sort of DEI agenda is a, A) consumer vulnerability to them, B) a legal vulnerability to them, and C), financially excessive. I get that. I think there are probably some smart people who have come around to that and who have sort of seen the excesses of the DEI agenda and recognized that it is problematic.
On the other hand the point you always make is constantly like ringing in my head about how we have educated a generation of people, some of whom are not yet in the workforce, other of whom are whom are way down on the totem pole, are not yet in positions of power who likely will not be moved on these issues because it is, so, it is the roots of their worldview. They, they don’t, they’ve been taught that truth is relative, America is bad, gender is fluid, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s those are very, very, very difficult opinions to fundamentally change. And so when you have that sort of waiting in the, the warming up in the bullpen you know, I also suspect that what they’re doing is really rebranding some of this stuff. Like Larry Fink no longer saying ESG.
Yeah. Right. He’s not just going to stop you know, doing what he’s doing via BlackRock because he stops using the phrase E s G, he’s publicly saying he’s going to stop referring to ESG and then doing ESG by another name. So to the extent, it also reminded me of when you were talking Inez about the big debate over stop woke the Florida leg, the Florida legislation, because a lot of stuff that that stopped woke sort of proactively targeted, and I think rightfully so, but a lot of that is actually already unconstitutional. And, and I think there’s a really good argument to be made after this opinion that some of these questions of like, what constitutes actual racial discrimination I think it really adds fodder to the, the right side of that argument. That is, racial discrimination constitutes racial discrimination. It doesn’t matter if it’s racial discrimination for a good end. If it’s discriminating against people based on immutable characteristics then it’s discrimination. And so, again, our legal routes, the, the conservative movement sort of landed on this, you know, we need legislation and we need good judges. I think that’s correct. But it’s sort of interesting to see what will, maybe the judges actually will win out faster than people anticipated because the conservative movement was installing judges at such a rapid clip for generations.
Inez Stepman:
Well, I mean, I hope so. And of course, there’s the question of what the left does in terms of the institutional power of the court. I, I don’t think the people who fought the elected president for four years in a bunch of illegal ways are going to just, you know, sort of say, oh, well, I guess we lost the court mm-hmm. so we’ll see what happens with that. But I want to return to the, the question of generations that you brought up about. So let’s, let’s talk about the, the, the Gen Z folks who are graduating into these institutions. There’s these corporate these like corporate jobs. There’s this great sort of, I guess meme or phrase now, the new trending phrase is lazy girl jobs
Inez Stepman:
And so that, there was a vogue piece about this. There’s a Wall Street Journal piece, you know, condemning it. It, it apparently went viral on TikTok with all these girls saying that they had these great jobs, these what we would call email jobs, where they do very, very little work. They do a few meetings a day, they send some emails and they have a really great work-life balance. So they make something like 60 to $80,000 a year. And they’re bragging about it, and they’re calling it lazy girl jobs. So I’m curious, like, what, what do you think about this phenomenon? You know, where do you come down on these lazy girl jobs? Like, I honestly could, I could see this being a positive or a negative depending on how it’s phrased or how, how it shakes out.
Emily Jasinski:
You’re totally right. I’m with you on that completely. I think the American work ethic is has created like untold prosperity. There’s, there’s no question about it, but I also think especially the way that it’s been pushed onto women is not, I’m, I’m choosing my words carefully as a woman with three jobs as a
Inez Stepman:
18 jobs, honestly,
Emily Jasinski:
Under county. You’ve gotta know that. No, I mean, I think I, so personally, I’ve always seen myself as like a fundamentally lazy person. Like, I, I don’t believe that you should be, like destroying yourself working yourself to the bones. Like I’ve, I always like took, you know, shortcuts on my homework. Oh, you know, whatever I can do. Like if I were in school with ChatGPT Lord only knows what I would’ve actually learned. But on the other hand you know, obviously there’s a lot of dignity and hard work, and to your point obviously hard, I agree that hard work is important, but this, this is I think, a rejection of the millennial girl boss lifestyle which was, you know, when we were, you know, in, in our, you know, high school, college years earlier you were –
Inez Stepman:
Going to say our youth,
Emily Jasinski:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. When we were, yeah, like in those years it was Sheryl Sandberg, like that was the peak of this, and the hashtag girl boss was not ironic. And then Gen Z took it and made it completely ironic, which they, they should have because, you know, that’s the, what women would probably rather be doing than email jobs. You know, in, in many cases, in the average case, when you ask women if they would rather be working full-time, working part-time or staying at home with kids you, you get the bulk of people saying they’d rather stay home with kids full-time or part-time. And so it makes sense to me that young women are rejecting the hashtag girlboss lifestyle, because I don’t think it’s fully aligned with like, our natural preferences on average. Again, I’m saying that as somebody who is, you know, 30 and working a few different jobs, like I get it there are people that really do like this kind of work, like Inez, both of you, both you and I are in that boat. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s not for everyone, but there are some of us that are very grateful to have opportunities that have been given to us. And that what women fought for, women who I wouldn’t have agreed with probably on everything in the, the sixties and seventies and eighties, but they did, you know, I can have a credit card, and I think that’s a good thing, although I might change my mind on that at some point. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Wait till you wait till you run up your credit card-
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah, yeah. No.
Inez Stepman:
Your folks we’re, we’re against women having credit cards. Women be shopping-
Emily Jasinski:
We’re, yeah, we’re starting to sound like Pearl. We shouldn’t have credit cards. We sure as heck shouldn’t be voting. We could keep going with this. It’s fun. But that is to say, on the other hand, there is I think also a problem if you are rejecting work and for what, right? Like if they are getting like the $60,000 a year girl job, like a laptop job and just chilling, which by the way, I’ve gone up on my roof times at times in DC like in the middle of the day, and there are young professionals that are in there like swimming and drinking. And I think to myself, like, if I had one of their jobs, I would probably be doing the same thing. And then they go up to the, the pool chair and like, move the cursor.
Like, I watched that happen, move the cursor every once in a while, so it looks like they’re on their computer for whatever AI is monitoring their activity. And that’s here in DC So I, it’s like, for what, what are you doing with the rest of your time, is it anything meaningful? Is it anything that’s giving you a sense of purpose or dignity? Probably, probably not. Like, are you just doing it to sit on the couch and watch Netflix during the day and moving your cursor every 15 minutes halfway through an episode of the office or whatever? I don’t know. And that would be my real worry, is that you just, in the absence of meaningful work and in the absence of meaningful lives, you know, whether for women it is meaningful work or meaningful work in the home people are just at risk of drifting off into their own little silos without any tether to community purpose, et cetera, et cetera. They’re just sort of in dark apartments. Like that New Yorker cover in the middle of the pandemic of the girl who was dressed nicely from the top up, her apartment was a mess, take out containers everywhere, drinking a martini had pill bottles all over her desk and was talking to somebody over zoom. If that’s the, the girl, the girl work, then it’s bad. But if people are doing it for more like reasonable flexibility, then I guess fine.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean, I have a few questions like one, how much of our GDP is fake,
Emily Jasinski:
Right? Right. That’s a huge question
Inez Stepman:
Who’s paying for all this email job figure, right?
Emily Jasinski:
And do they know that they’re paying for
Inez Stepman:
It? Yeah. Right? So it’s built in, there is a cost here of paying these, you know, you have $60 or $80,000 in salary, that means a hundred to 120, and when you include full-time benefits, right? That’s a lot of money. And, and this is kind what I was pointing to with that piece I wrote back in January about Twitter and how Twitter could fire 70% of their people and still function that points to a lot of BSS jobs and a lot of fake value being created, right? And, and there’s a question there of who’s paying for this, you know where is this sort of totally unnecessary, you know, money coming from to pay for these totally unnecessary jobs, right? That consist of moving the cursor a couple times.
Emily Jasinski:
So this is part of the rider’s strike, by the way. Andrew Schultz made this point this week comedian Andrew Schultz, that the, what the writers might be doing is putting themselves out of business because they want to know what views some of these shows are getting in the golden age of tv. Whereas this, there’s this explosion of sort of gig style writing and producing jobs, et cetera, et cetera. Not production, but whatever those types of jobs that have exploded in the golden age of TV with all of these different streaming channels that are inflated by a lot of investments, even some of ’em are carrying a lot of debt. But as soon as we find out that nobody is watching some of these very expensive prestige shows that get good reviews on the, and the sort of glossy mags, but don’t actually get viewership among the public ‘because they don’t appeal to a wide swath of the public, then we could see a huge crash. And so, sorry, like, sorry to interrupt, but I I was thinking about that today. I think that’s
Inez Stepman:
A good point. I’m really wondering how much of our lives are fake? Like how much of American prosperity is fake, how much of, of what we produce is like, like what you’re saying, that there are these shows getting great reviews and everybody may be, have heard the name of the show, but then like nobody’s actually seen it. I mean, how much of this is all fake? So that’s one question, but like, let’s bracket that. Because That, that is, I mean, to think about in a serious way, what percentage of what we’re producing, quote unquote just doesn’t exist is terrifying. Mm-Hmm. But the second thing, if we just bracket that for a second and talk about like, sort of the cultural consequences. This is lazy girl jobs, right? Not like lazy person jobs. Presumably there’ve always been some people who are harder working than others, et cetera.
Emily Jasinski:
Yes, they’re called men. Sorry.
Inez Stepman:
Really makes me wonder, though is this is another ill response the way that Me Too was like to a real problem where I keep wondering if instead of these hard truths breaking through. So I think it’s a really positive thing if we’re talking about the fact that, you know, women maybe have a very different life trajectory, career balance, all of those things than men for all of these biological reasons, both in terms of, of you know, finding a husband and starting a family. They have different timescale than men do for that. But also just in terms of, of, you know, psychological traits and, and what makes people happy or feel fulfilled. You know, men get a lot of meaning and fulfillment out of providing for their families. Women seem on average to, to have less of that. And in fact, they get fulfillment from relationships.
And if you don’t have time to invest in your relationships, whether that’s within the family and home or outside of it with friends or whatever, that, you know, this is a much more lonely and, and difficult life for women than it is for men. So all that you could say, that’s all to the good. Like maybe it is a really good idea to get a lazy girl job from 22 to 30 spend a lot of time dating, trying to find somebody in a serious way you know, and then, you know, get married younger than the millennial generation did have kids younger than the millennial generation did. That decision is going to be easier if you, your couple is not dependent on the woman’s income, even as a professional, like for a lot of professional couples, dual income, you know, you, you, your spending catches up with what you’re making, and then it’s really, really hard for the woman to quit.
If she has kids, they need that income stream coming in. You know, if having a lazy girl job for the 10 years after college I, I think that could be an enormous improvement in terms of the life script that is now put in front of like ambitious, smart, professional women. Right? I actually think that could be a huge benefit. But then on the flip side, your question, I think got right to the point, which is, you know, to do what? So if they’re doing that, that’s great. And I think that that’s would be a, a very welcome cultural development. The question is whether this housewife, like, essentially what this is, is the housewife lifestyle with no kids and no husband. Yes. That’s well said. And, and so if, if it’s just to like, you know, hang out and very little work on the rooftop, right?
Yeah. then, then I think that that will just, it’ll be just one less peg in, in terms of schedule meaning attachment to community that’ll just come out, right? Whereas work is not the best thing for, for, especially for women to derive meaning in community. But it may be the only thing for a lot of women at this point, and it reminds me of two things. One, so like when Me Too first came up, right in a, as in a big way in like 2017, 2018, right? You could see how it was a response, a feminine response to a very liberal sexual culture and right to, and to, to natural women’s experiences within that sexual culture. They start, but the only way that our society could deal with it was to put it in this, to stretch the concept of consent, right?
To stretch the concept of harassment, to expand it way beyond what everyone sort of agrees as should be illegal and bad into, well, I didn’t feel good about the sex that I had last night mm-hmm. Right? I didn’t feel good about how the guy behaved to me during or after. And it was an expression of very real sort of feelings that I think were, were valid and, and had good reason. But then just like projected into this legalistic system that became a total like tyrannical minefield, right? For men. And I wonder if in the same way these impulses like that girl bossing is not, you know, is not as satisfying a life as it was presented to millennials as mm-hmm. That’s very real. But then it could pop up over here and okay, well then may, if the new solution is, well, you’re not going to work 50 or 60 or 70 hours a week, you’re going to work 10 hours a week and spend the rest of the time by the pool then that’s not going to solve the fundamental meaning problem even though it’s a response to something real.
So that’s kind of what I would worry about this, especially with friendship and decline with, you know, the dating sexual market being so much of a mess the apps and everything else. And everybody’s lives going digital. I mean, does this not just make us more pod people, just pod people with pools?
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah. Well, and most people aren’t pod people with pools. You know, there are a lot of ’em out there, but, you know, I think back to being young and hearing ad nauseum love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life which seemed like an old adage at that point to me, because it was being transmitted from wiser people. But except for the very upper echelons of Western society, dad has basically never been an option. That has not been a truism because you would have to love, like subsistence living, which I’m sure many people did love. Or in the industrial period you would have to love like bottling things or working on an assembly line. And again, like, I’m sure some people loved that, and I imagine people definitely found meaning in that because they had great relationships at work and it helped ’em provide for their families.
Inez Stepman:
It’s mine. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah. Again, like, listen, I think there’s meaning in some of the job. Like we’re, we’re not talking about everything, but there is something very, very different about an economy that is, is you’re contributing less and less to the physical manufacturing of things in your community or in your country. So yeah, like that’s different in and of itself. And I also think the original Girl Boss hashtag in the Sheryl Sandberg era was very much fixated on you; on women finding purpose and meaning in work outside the home. This is not just an acceptable sphere in which women should find meaning, but it is an important one. And that I think is what’s being rejected. I don’t know what to say, but it reminds me of Marx.
It reminds of like reading poetry in the, the fishing in the morning and reading poetry in the afternoon, whatever the order is of those things. Like, it’s this weird thing where you’re, you’re you know, fleecing a multimillion dollar corporation or you’re contributing to their bottom line just very, you know, and, and very small in a very, very small way that you’re overcompensated for and getting to do whatever the heck you want. And what are you choosing to do with your time? I mean, humans without that structure what are we going to choose to do with our time? We’ll probably get a slow buzz on at a, like a, a pool and then what Sleep for the afternoon and send a couple emails in between. I don’t know. I mean, I feel like we could talk about this for a whole episode and it’s just hard because it’s not the, it’s, it’s obviously not everyone. But there is, like the laptop class is going in a, in a direction that I think it makes sense women are rejecting and rejecting in unhealthy ways.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I just, I guess just something to keep an eye on and, and see how it gets goes forward. ‘because I could see it just like, you know, this feels to me like a moment where to, to make another comparison. You know, there were certain quarters of, of the right, I think in a dumb way cheering the decline of teenage pregnancy Mm. Right. Out of wedlock and like, yeah, that’s a good thing. Mm-Hmm. It’s a good thing that there are fewer teens getting knocked up before they get married. Absolutely. A good thing. Why is that happening? Well, is it because people are making more virtuous choices? They’re making more responsible choices? No, it’s because teens are retreating into a digital world. Nobody’s having sex and no one’s like going to parties. The same thing with a steep decline in, in drinking and partying among high schoolers.
Is it a good thing that high schoolers were, you know, crushing beers at somebody’s house when their parents were away? Not necessarily, yes. But the alternative is they don’t have any friends and they never leave the basement and they live entirely online. Like, that’s actually, that decline is not indicative of something. That’s good. And I wonder the same thing about this, right? That in terms of, of the cultural trajectory and the, the life cycle of, of the girl boss, I feel like this is a big positive, but it may just be an indication that one more sort of one more institutional pillar or communal, communal pillar is just being knocked out from people and they’re finding it harder and harder to feel that themselves a part of anything. They already don’t feel a part of their country. They already don’t have a national identity.
They don’t have a religious identity, right? All they have are these sort of intersectional and half of them made up identities and, and now they won’t even have work, even though work was taking on this very unhealthy place in replacement for all those other important things that bring people meaning. So yeah I guess I’m just wondering, I keep an eye on it and see where it goes. The other thing is it just might just be, it might just be a generational difference. One thing I always felt was very unfair, some of the critiques that boomers made of millennials of, of our generation, I thought were very fair. There’s a certain entitlement mentality, like millennials did not want to start at the bottom right? They wanted to do something that that had meaning, that gave them meaning, right?
There was the cliche that you were pointing to about do what you love, right? And millennials felt very entitled to do that. But one thing I always thought was unfair was lazy. I don’t think our generation was lazy. In fact, no, I think it was just connected to before, like in, in the late nineties, early two thousands, before everybody had a laptop or a phone. I feel like it was just boomers looking at what people were doing on a computer and saying, that’s not real work. You know? Which I think I haven’t thought about that passing away in terms of, you know, even, even 80 year olds understand now that even if they don’t spend a lot of time with the computer, that computer, you know, sitting at a computer is quote unquote real work, right?
Depending on, I guess whether you’re sometimes but you can do real work on a computer, but I really didn’t, I didn’t feel like that stereotype was actually true of our generation. I feel like we actually, we worked long hours, we didn’t have a lot of separation the way that the Bieber generation did, where they step away from their desk and they actually disconnect Yeah. From work. Like, you know, millennials are tied to their phones, answering emails on the weekends and so on. So I actually just never felt that that was accurate from what my friends tell me who are managing Gen Z though, that they feel that it is accurate, that Gen Z is lazy or that they’re mentally incapable of handling basic instructions and work. Obviously this is big generalities. There are plenty of hardworking Gen Z kids, I’m sure and plenty that can handle this sort of work environment.
Emily Jasinski:
And I think in some ways I actually hadn’t thought about those stereotypes of millennials in a really long time, because now everybody is contrasting millennials with Gen Z. And it’s interesting to look back on that because it was the era of these absurd office spaces, Facebook, Google they made that movie, the internship, which sort of blended really hard work with open, whole lot of fun. Yeah. Ping-pong, whatever. And yeah, the computer stuff, all of that, like gave this, and I do think some millennials really did check out of the economy in 2008 and maybe haven’t quite checked all the way back in. So I think all of that’s like sort of, and there was Occupy Wall Street contributed to this idea of, of millennials that it was in some ways only representative of a small slice of millennials, very loud and politically active slice of millennials, but a small slice nonetheless. And it’s another reason I think I’m tempted to see the girl, what is it, girl job as a, a good thing, lazy
Inez Stepman:
Girl job.
Emily Jasinski:
Lazy girl job as a good thing. I like how I just acted as though it was redundant and just shortened it unintentionally the girl job. But that’s why I’m tempted to see it as a good thing because the time theft that companies have inadvertently robbed people of, and I’m talking about executives themselves the, the psychological harm that they’ve done to themselves and families and communities over email and text messages, when you really cannot check out of work at any hour of the day in a lot of jobs you know, even if you’re, let’s say you work at a Starbucks, like you probably are going to keep checking your phone if you’re worried that someone needs you to pick up a shift. These things just happen. Like there are reasons for us to constantly be tethered to our phones no matter what kind of work we do for professional purposes.
Not just, that’s not even a talk about the personal reasons, but just for professional reasons. And so I understand it, and I think Gen Z being perhaps a bit lazier and a word that I would use as maybe entitled comes from partially the, the psychological lack of distance between personal and professional. Where if you’re always, if you’re growing up and your schoolwork looks like emails and then your real work looks like emails and your personal life looks like emails or your personal life looks like text messages. And then your work life looks like text, text messages, which a lot of workplaces conduct business over text message now. Because It’s easy. It’s Slack
Inez Stepman:
Channel or whatever,
Emily Jasinski:
Right? And then it’s just like, whoa, okay. You know, I <laugh> like, you don’t know what to do. You don’t know what you’re not on, you’re not punching a clock in so many cases. And it’s psychologically not an easy thing to, not an easy sort of wall to build.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean, I take your point, and it’s a good one, which is that like, if you’re expected to always be on, then, you know, maybe they’re just more assertive than millennials about saying, well, like, you know I’m just not available today because I’m on 24/7, so anytime that I need some downtime, I just like email back and say, Nope. I’m taking a ‘me day’ today or whatever. So it’s a good point. It’s worth considering before I let you go, since you are the culture editor, so we have Barb Heimer or whatever this huge box office weekend for these two movies the biggest, I guess, in recent history at least since 2019, this was an industry that was fading and, and people, you know, having difficulty getting people back to the theaters after the pandemic in part, I would argue in part because the what’s on offer was so appallingly bad, but this seems to have brought everybody out of the woodwork. Have you seen either of these movies, by the way?
Emily Jasinski:
I haven’t seen either of them. I saw a movie a couple of weeks before. I do go to a lot of movies, but I haven’t had a chance to see either of these yet. I’m amazed by the people who did both in one sitting. That is just an incredible psychological feat to go from one movie to the other and to stay in these theaters and the condition that they’re in. David Marcus had a nice steel mail piece on the condition that theaters are in now for that long of a time. Like, listen, there’s no way that I could do that. So God bless you. Butthe monologue that I did on Barb Heimer for counterpoints was the sort of joke is these things are so completely different. And that’s why it’s funny they’re playing on the same day.
Like one is very masculine and serious, one is very feminine and kind of trivial or seen that way at least, even though like Barbie from all accounts and Greta Gerwig account, et cetera is not, is not trivial. It’s, it’s supposed to be something deeper. And there’s a raging debate and the conservative media right now as to whether it’s really deeper, if it’s just sort of woke plum that we didn’t get into having not seen the movie. But I do think it’s funny that we think of these things as so different. Because Barbie was part of this plastic post World War II plastics revolution actually manufactured. The first Barbie was manufactured in Japan in 1959, as it was sort of clawing out of the whole of the post World War II hole. And without sort of American hegemony and American power in the Middle East this like the plastic revolution, the plastic boom that fundamentally changed human life.
If you look around yourself, like there had so many things that are made possible because of plastic and so many things that were just made cheaper because of plastic or whatever it is, it just completely changed human life. That’s because of Oppenheimer. Like, there’s a real argument that the Oppenheimer brought us mass plastics. And who knows what would’ve happened? You know, if America doesn’t goes beyond saber rattling and, and is not the first country to use the, the nuclear weapon I don’t know what happens. But it’s, it seems pretty clear that our decision to do that which then sort of cemented American victory, that it, it ushered in a, a new era and not just a prosperity in the West, but also of plastics and Barbie is a huge part of it. Just something that it’s so silly.
People had dolls before they were mostly wood. But here you have the ability to take oil from Saudi Arabia and in Japan, turn it into a doll and then ship it back en masse to the United States and all of these different varieties. It’s very, very new in the scope of human history and it’s very much a post Oppenheimer event. I’m also like, just glad to see another death rattle of the monoculture. I think, you know, probably once a year in the future we’ll have some type of monocultural experience, and we’re still getting a few of them every year now super Bowl.
Inez Stepman:
So for people who haven’t heard that term before, like me, I assume you mean a, a cultural moment that has broad and mass appeal where people from very different sort of spheres of life or background and, and who would normally not be interacting with the same media are all focus in on. ‘because You’re right, this is, this is maybe the biggest since, I don’t know, game of Thrones maybe was the last thing that like, everyone, even if you hadn’t watched it, people were talking about it. Everyone knew, everyone sort of knew that it was of the moment, right?
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah, exactly. It’s, you know, you, you get a huge percentage of the country watching the Super Bowl every year, a majority of the country watches the Super Bowl every year. But it actually used to, we used to have those on an almost nightly basis and especially in our communities you know, so baseball games, football games, whatever. But when there was more choice than just CBS, ABC, NBC, we stopped watching, you know, the same shows and we got really splintered into silos. And then when the internet came along, we weren’t all reading the local paper. We weren’t all listening to the local radio station. We weren’t all watching nightly news. Nightly news used to be a huge part of monoculture Walter Cronkite. The entire concept of appointment television or water cooler television was this idea that if you didn’t watch American Idol the night before, stay away from the water cooler because you’re going to find out who got voted off.
Everyone’s going to be talking about it. Or you can go back further to the mash finale, which I think is the most watched television finale of all time still. Everybody in the country was watching that. There was these shared cultural sort of touchstones. You could, you know, talk about what was in the most recent the most recent edition of Life Magazine with someone, and they would know they would be able to engage in conversation. It’s, it’s most likely that they would. And so these shared experiences, I think were good things. They’re not normal. You know, it’s very much a, something in that came up of mass media. But it did, I think, help unite our country very much. And it’s, it’s sad when we lose those things, especially as we lose our connections, our social connections to each other. I think those things can play a really important role in patriotism and in community and bring people together and have like certain things that we can talk about. So I, like every time I, we experience, you know, a death rattle at the monoculture, I savor it. Because we will have fewer and fewer in the future, I think.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good point. I guess two good points. One that this mass production culture both literally with the plastic Barbie and, and with our enormous cultural influence around the world in terms of American television starting in the golden age of Hollywood just and after World War ii, I mean, American pop culture, it conquered the world. And I mean, it, people laughed about the like oh, the Cold War, they hate our freedoms, right? No, in the Middle East, they hate our freedoms. I think it was something quite concrete. It was that American culture became unavoidable mm-hmm. Every corner of the world, right? To the point where, you know, the guys in the Taliban are worried about their daughters listening to American music and watching American TV shows, right? It became so ubiquitous in the world. So it’s been a huge part of our huge part of our, our, our cultural success.
I think also potentially a huge negative if America goes bad. But leading that aside for a moment, the possibility, a depressing possibility of becoming an evil empire. Also, just, you’re right. I mean, about this, this mono, I’ve never heard this word before, monoculture, but it really is true. I mean think about like the Ali fights, right? Muhammad Ali fights these, these like yes, pop culture moments. Were, were in a particular sort of period of time really starting in the forties and fifties in America that, that sort of peak pop and mass culture probably in, you know, ends in the, the peak, the peak of it ends in like the eighties and the nineties and the early two thousands. And after that, with the internet, you really do get, on the one hand, you get people being able to connect with each other over minute sub interests there as you get the explosion of Countercultures, right?
But on the other hand, there’s not really so much of any mainstream pop culture anymore to to be a counter-cultural force too, right? We, we have lost any of those common cultural reference points where like, I don’t know, friends or some, or even Sex in the City became that kind of cultural flashpoint in the nineties, late nineties, right? Like, but these shows that people, as you say, would talk about at work you could, you could, there were holdouts, but you could assume that e everyone had either seen it or they were going to see it, or you know, they had some particular reason for not wanting or not a being interested in it and wanting to see it, but they would be very aware of what it was. And they would know what you were talking about when you talked about the show. We don’t have, we have fewer and fewer of those things. And yeah, this is, this does feel like that. It feels
Emily Jasinski:
Like, yeah, like Top Gun too.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Everyone is talking about these two movies are making jokes about it. You know, even people who haven’t seen ’em yet, they’re either planning to, which one are they going to see? They’re going to go, both people dressing up on Instagram, and everything. So it, you’re right. Let’s, let’s, I guess enjoy the, the monoculture moment even if, if it comes at woke Barbie expense all right.
Emily Jasinski:
You’re too optimistic these days.
Inez Stepman:
And as it’s, you know, gives me worried up, upbeat, upbeat show, generally we’re, we’re going to scare corporations. DEI people are being fired. We got Jesse running away from Girl Bossism, and we got off. I did see Oppenheimer, by the way. I thought it was Oh, quite good.
Emily Jasinski:
You did. Okay, good.
Inez Stepman:
I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting because obviously it’s, Oppenheimer was very sympathetic to left-wing because and all kinds of accusations about his communist connections and so forth. And the movie definitely plays into a idea of, of the McCarthy eras, the Big, bad evil but nevertheless, like a really a well-written movie, well acted movie, great soundtrack, just, and also just this is something my husband has a column out talking about this, but it almost feels pleasant to have somebody in the past sympathetically portrayed, even though Oppenheimer not my favorite out of the sort of guys in the past undeniably a huge part of American history, an important figure in world history to be sympathetically depicted. Hmm, interesting. Like a human being, like, like as though people in the past were actually just like us and, and you know, discovering new technologies and weighing moral consequences, you know, just like us, that we are not so, in fact, morally superior to people in the past. I, I thought that it did that really well.
Emily Jasinski:
Didn’t he? Didn’t he try to murder a girl with an apple when he was a teenager?
Inez Stepman:
They depict that, actually. I don’t think it was a girl. It was Oh, they do his like, oh yeah
Emily Jasinski:
It was a guy. Yeah,
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, yeah. His professor. Yeah. No, but it depicts some, it depicts some, I think sympathetically, it just shows some of his flaws. It has some of the critiques of him as a person. Anyway, I thought it was a good movie. It’s a good movie. I enjoyed watching it, enjoyed the three hours, you know, was immersed in the subject for three hours, which isn’t enough of a, I mean, I feel like so few movies even hurdle that bar for me anymore, where I just, I get bored and I don’t even forget, I don’t forget that I’m in a movie. There’s no suspension of disbelief. I just remember that I’m sitting in this theater and I want to check my phone, but I don’t, because I’m polite
Emily Jasinski:
Yeah, you have to drink to forget.
Inez Stepman:
Well, they do have that now.
Emily Jasinski:
I know. That’s you. The goodness.
Inez Stepman:
You can buy a glass of wine. You can buy a beer in the movie theater.
Emily Jasinski:
You can buy a bottle of wine.
Inez Stepman:
Oh, geez. Come on now.
Emily Jasinski:
You can.
Inez Stepman:
You can, there’s, there is a there is a movie theater out here where it’s almost like, it’s like a dinners. You sit with like comfy chairs and they serve you dinner. Yeah. And like, they bring you a bottle of wine and you like, have like your friends sitting at a table, like, it’s like going out to dinner with your friends, but there’s a movie playing.
Emily Jasinski:
I think there’s a future of movie theaters. Yeah. I love that. I think there’s a future. I think it’s how you get people back to the theater.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Well, it got me back to the theater. It’s much more enjoyable. The seats are comfier, you know, although I, we did pay $9 for a popcorn, a small popcorn.
Emily Jasinski:
Small popcorn.
Inez Stepman:
That is almost classic, you know, like getting overcharged for movie theater popcorn is such a nostalgic feeling for me that I’ll let it slide.
Emily Jasinski:
Biden’s America.
Inez Stepman:
All right. With that Emily, thank you for this episode of High Noon After Dark. We’ll, we’ll be back with Emily in another month to see what, what cultural monocultural moments perhaps have taken place in, in between. Thanks so much for coming on, Emily.
Emily Jasinski:
Thanks Inez.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. Hight 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 leading us a comment or review at Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
