After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Dems Crash Out in Munich, Swalwell’s Ick Poetry, and Erotic Wuthering Heights, with Hadley Heath Manning

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show in our new 9pm ET time slot with a dramatic reading of a cringe college-era poem written by Congressman Eric Swalwell, while jokingly noting his poetic skills do appear to have improved over time. Then Emily is joined by Hadley Heath Manning, Senior Fellow at Independent Women, to discuss her new report on young adults and what it tells us about our culture, their desire for love and marriage, and how we can promote happy, healthier lives for young people and our society. The two break down the success of the new “Wuthering Heights” movie and why its highly sexual tone is so appealing to women. They also discus research Manning found about family life. Then the conversation turns to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s working-class vision and claims that Western culture is “thin.” They discuss how cultural factors, not necessarily class, play a large role in shifting norms. The two also talk about mental health disparities among young liberal women and the ‘trad’ lifestyle. Emily rounds out the show with Hillary Clinton doubling down on unpopular gender ideology, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s weak answer on Ukraine, AOC’s struggle to talk about Taiwan, and more… Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY. Cozy Earth: Visit https://www.CozyEarth.com/EMILY & Use code EMILY for up to 20% off PDS Debt: You’re 30 seconds away from being debt free with PDS Debt. Get your free assessment and find the best option for you at https://PDSDebt.com/EMILY Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everyone. You're early. Actually, no, this is the time now that After Party airs, 9 p.m. Live Mondays, and Wednesdays. We're going to be joined tonight by Hadley Heath Manning. Actually, Hadley will be here in just one moment. Please make sure to subscribe. It helps us so much. If you haven't subscribed on YouTube, we appreciate it. That's the best way to help the show. Like, comment, all of that. And also, wherever you get your podcast, we do a special podcast-only edition of the show every Friday. So if you haven't subbed, wherever you get your podcasts, make sure to head on over there as well. Well, that's where you get to email me, your questions, Emily at doublemaicaremedia.com, and I go through as many of them as I possibly can, which is almost all of them. Every Friday, that drops around 5 p.m. But this is episode 65 of After Party. We've been here for 65 episodes now, and it's officially our first night in what I've decided is prime time, because I went to, as you know, if you listened last week, I went and confirmed that via Nielsen.

Prime prime time is like between 915 and 930. So technically, we have about 50. 15 minutes to go. But please do join us live. It's lots of fun. And I've started jumping into the live chat more. No problem if you catch up later. We like it either way. Big show, big show today. With Hadley, we're going over a new report that dives into some of the changes that have happened in the world of dating and motherhood and feminism in a very short period of time, but have changed things very, very quickly. So we have all kinds of stuff to talk about in the aftermath of the withering height. premier. Someone joked that they thought the Wuthering Heights discourse was going to crash substack. Lots to talk about. Lots to talk about when it comes to that. All kinds of stuff going on the pop cultural world that will hopefully get a chance to pick Hadley's brain about. But I want to be pretty focused today on what we saw from the Munich Security Conference. Not so much from Secretary of State Marco Rubio who got a standing ovation, which we will talk about. But actually,

a lot about what we saw from high-profile Democrats who attended the Munich Security Conference. We have some really interesting clips of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Hillary Clinton, of Gretchen Whitmer. And so we're going to dive into what they said and what it means. I would say especially when juxtaposed with Secretary Rubio. First, though, it is with deep displeasure that I inform you. The After Party Poetry Corner is back. Perhaps it is the... the curse of prime time. The news gods were aware that we were moving to 9 p.m. and dropped into our lap.

A daily mail story. There was a poem written by a man named Eric Swalwell, who first wanted to be president. Now he wants to be governor. Apparently as a college freshman, this would have been around 1999 or 2000. and a fellow by the name of Joel Gilbert, who was determined to take down Eric Swalwell's bid for governor, shared this poem that was written by Eric's Walwell at Campbell University,

Congressman Eric Swalwell, sorry, at Campbell University at 1999, shared it with the Daily Mail, and now I must share it with you. I read it, so you have to read it. hungover from Burgundy by Eric's Walwell. And their beauty was, formless and magnificent. A flurry of limbs and nails, she chased and I ran. I chased and she ran. Atop my hotel, she stopped, and I leapt for cloth and tan.

My anxious arms she bit. my scar is beautiful while I screamed she bent her lips to mine kissing till veins imploded and exploded till blood rolled down our chins for bounded mouths cannot speak of pardon in the morning I awoke beside beauty's shadow her form sloppy and her legs pale my scarlet lost. My lips cracked and dry, and we groaned simultaneously. Next, Wuthering Heights. That was actually a poem entitled, Hungover from Burgundy by Congressman Eric Swalwell, gubernatorial hopeful, one-time presidential hopeful around the turn of the millennium. We're going to bring, actually, it's very fitting. I forgot about this. I'm going to put this up on the screen just before we

go, I remembered actually, that Eric Swallow wrote a poem. I can't believe that I've just now figuring this out. Okay, so Eric Swallow wrote a poem in 20, what years? The, so, 2017. And it was about the Mueller report, I think. Oh, yeah, he wrote a haiku. And here, I pulled up my old article at the Washington Examiner from 2017. This was the hykoo.

President Trump claims nothing to hide or to fear. Still, no tax returns. I reviewed it at the time. So Eric Swallow and I go back when it comes to poetry criticism. In fact, he even responded to me on X at the time, which was Twitter all the way back then. Here's how I reviewed it. I thought it was pretty straightforward. I said, well, not a masterpiece.

Swalwell's effort would merit a solid C-plus in any eighth-grade creative writing class. His decision to use correct punctuation were warranted, but leave the first line unpunctuated, betrays a certain sense of recklessness, as though the author is expressing an ironic disregard for conventions. Maybe it was more a matter of laziness, but the poem's simplicity, seeming almost to embrace the voice of a child. That was so rude. It's hauntingly provocative. What is there to hide? What is there to fear? Is the president lying to us? Swalwell's poem poses these questions with a deft subtlety, choosing to juxtapose the president's claim with a suggestive final line that stopped short of explicitly supplying the answer. Okay. Well, I actually think the haiku is better than what I just

read, which means from the age of about 19 until the age of what, like 40, he'd improved. So that's some good news for Congressman Eric Swalwell. It'll be good news for the rest of us if no further poems surface. I don't care how badly he wants to be governor. I don't think we need to read these. Okay. On that note, a lot, a lot, a lot more to come. We're going to be back with Hadley Heath Manning in just one moment. But first, everybody is talking about weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic. You've seen them. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight but not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects? That is why doctors

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your fellow at independent women. I should also add in the spirit of full disclosure. I am a fellow over at IW. So Hadley, thanks for joining us. Yeah. Fellow, fellow, fellow. Thanks for having me. Whoa, fellow, fellow. I had to do the disclosure, so nobody mistakes me for an unbiased observer of this report. No, not of this report. I actually wrote the forward to this report. So very much not unbiased in this case, but Hadley, there are all kinds of entry points that I want to go into with the report, just given what's happening in the world right now. But if you could start by giving us an overview of what you all set out to do with a super, super interesting report and where people can find it. Yeah, we dropped this right in time for Valentine's Day.

But I've become fascinated with family formation in the United States. And so that's why I wanted to do a deep dive on this report. And it's a follow-up report really to a report that I, you did 25 years ago on hookup culture, right? And some things have stayed the same, but a lot has changed. And one of the biggest changes that has been happening slowly over time is that a long time ago, your sexual debut, or the first time you have sex, you're losing your virginity, and your wedding night were very close, almost concurrent events or maybe a couple years apart in the 1950s, right?

And then fast forward to today, and these two events take place. more than a decade apart for the average American. That means we're getting out there into the world, usually around age 17 on average, and we're having relationships. Some of them are situationships now. Some of them are cohabitations now. Some of them are very serious relationships, but it takes a long time to get to the altar for most people.

And so I was curious, what does this mean for people who are in that decade of life? What are their experiences like? And also a 30,000 foot view for society. what does it mean to have this period of life, which used to be very short, on average, become much longer. Because everybody's talking about longer life expectancy and what it means for social security, you know, for example, that people retire at 65 and now they live much longer. We should be talking just as much about what it means to kind of leave your childhood, but not form your own family for at least 10 years. What does that mean? It's different.

It's a new thing in human development. This is why I wanted to get your perspective on the big weekend that Wuthering Heights had at the box office. It's actually pretty interesting that you take Jacob Allorty and Margo Roby, you put them in this intense Wuthering Heights rendition for the big screen. It has a number one debut, and that was powered by women. If we put this NBC headline up on the screen, NBC reported out that, quote, Hollywood is thirsty for more romance, adaptations. That's also very interesting because we're at the hopefully tail end of an era where it's just been all recycled IP, big blockbusters. And what's happening now is that streamers are not to get to the whole entertainment business aspect of this, but they're able to find audiences for like mid-budget stuff.

Although this is number one at the box office. So there's clearly an audience among women particularly for these types of stories. But the rendition was, as I understand it, I didn't see it. It had some shades of 50 shades. It was a little... Yeah. But you know what's funny is that some of the sort of secular normie reviewers are saying it wasn't sexual enough. So with that, Hadley, what do you read into?

All of these women being like, Bronte, give us these Bronte stories. But then elite women being like, just make them extremely sexual. Yeah, they're thirsty. Thirsty, all right. I mean, sex cells. I don't know who's in charge of social media for this movie, but maybe I clicked on an ad at one point, but they have just been hammering. Hammering every time I open my phone, it's like, come see Weathering Heights.

And I'm like, whoa. I don't know if I'm going to see it. It looks very sexual. As I was working on the dating decade report for independent women, I came across a lot of information about pornography. It's huge. It's blown up so much because, as you know, pornography isn't like Playboy magazine anymore. It's this cocktail of social media and explicit images that people are sending on dating apps.

And it's AI now. You can make up your own pornography and have your own AI boyfriend or girlfriend. But there's also a lot more erotical literature. And there's a lot more audio erotica. It's very popular with the demographic that you mentioned, Emily, the single young ladies, right? And I think Wethering Heights is just trying to take advantage of that. you know, I'm curious to see where it's going to go. It's a high drama love story in the novel, which I read a long, long time ago.

And then there's a separate debate about how true to the original material this book is. But, I mean, if you make trailers like that that are just two very sexy actors being like very sexual with each other, people are going to go see the movie. I have no doubt. Unless you're Sydney Swinney, whose last movie, didn't do so well. But anyway, that didn't she, she had like, like, uglied herself up for, exactly, yeah, that boxer, yeah, okay, point taken Hadley. But this is actually, I wanted to test my theory of true crime out on you here, because you're sort of steeped in this data. And my theory of true crime, why is the, why are so many, particularly millennial women? I think it

applies to Gen X as well, though, just completely, like, saturating themselves in the world of macab true crime stories. And my explanation has always been, you know, first of all, these are great stories. Like you said, sex cells, drama cells, of course. But there's something very particular happening right here. I think when you look at the numbers and the demos that are flocking to this genre. And to me, it seems like women have this, this urge to nurture. And when you are, you know, in your 20s or 30s and you're not, you know, taking care of a family or children. I say this as somebody who's 33 and not taking care of a family or children. When you are in that situation, other things I think that that feel real and tangible and like you're

part of it, part of solving the problem or you're part of understanding the problem, whatever it is. I feel like there's just something so real to true crime because it's almost always a true story. And I'm curious, help me with the rambling here highly, because I'm trying to I think of if with Wuthering Heights being intense and almost violent, there's something that taps into women looking for just anything to make them feel alive and female. Yeah. I don't know. I think that's to make them feel alive.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I was thinking about Wuthering Heights before our conversation. And I do think, unfortunately, there's this idea, especially among today's young dating population that, and if you listen to Taylor Swift lyrics, it's kind of been interesting over time. But her whole trajectory, you know, has been these relationships, many of which did not work out, but they're just so intense, at least the way that she writes about them sounds very intense, right? But there's this idea out there that if the relationship is tormented, that that's what makes it good and exciting. And on the other hand, I've got this, you know, this guy that I've been

married to for about 12 years and we're very happy, you know, it's not, it may seem boring to some people, but it is awesome and it's peaceful and it's good and, you know, it's not like you don't have some rough spots if you're married for a long time. But I think that there's this idea that getting married is kind of like the end and it's boring and then you're done and there's no more excitement. Like he's not ripping your corset off like in Wuthering Heights. But he is. You know, it's just we're not posting about it.

You know, like he is. It's just, yeah, I think that the whole uncertainty and insecurity of not being married yet, for some people, like for me, it was horrifying. Like I just didn't like it. I didn't like not knowing how the story was going to go. But for some people, I think that. adds to the thrill of it, right? And the truth is the thrill can continue after you get married. You can continue to enjoy life. In fact, I think the security of having that foundation in your

relationship is what can give you the ability to go out and take other risks in life and do things like have children together, which is a big endeavor. You know, so I think that there is something about Wuthering Heights and also the Taylor Swift trajectory and probably the audio erotica books and true crime that does make people feel alive because they feel like there's these big open questions, right? And open questions can be good and exciting, but I think, you know, the downside to all that freedom and openness is the lack of security. And, you know, like you mentioned with wanting to care for, nurture things, eventually,

if you do get married and have kids, then you get to do that in your own family. But there's a lot of ways to do it. I mean, you can care for your relatives. I would love to have more childless people lean into the aunt and uncle role. I would love to have their help. I would love to have them come like be friends with my kids and babysit for me every once in a while. So if you're looking for something to nurture, you probably have a friend who has kids that you could nurture their kids for them for like an hour or two while they, you know, take a shower.

But I do think that there's something about our cultural picture of marriage that has. made it seem like, you know, your single life is the party and you don't want to leave the party too early. Yeah, the startup versus merger. Right, but I think that if it with the right person, marriage is the party. Right. So I wanted to get there and I'm happy, you know, and I, I want other people to share in that happiness too, which is why there's probably a pretty strong, you know, pro-marriage undercurrent in my report. But that's also what a lot of the social science points to, too. It's not just my personal experience or bias. It's the social science says that, married people are in general more content, happier. They have the security and that gives them

a deeper sense of satisfaction in life. Yeah, really important point. I mean, people can go and look at the report. They can look at Brad Wilcox's work. There's like 300 footnotes and notes in the report. So it's there's, you know, I'm not just battling on with my opinions, but there's a lot of social science out there. No, and social science that is accepted on a bipartisan or sort of trans-deological basis. Yes. So important point there. Let's actually put some of this research up on the screen. We can start here with F-18. This is whether or not, and Hadley, remind me, is this of men and women, or is this just women? This is men and women.

Men and women, okay. So people may remember, and we covered it on the show, there was a survey recently that found more young men wanted to get married or said it was a priority than young women. Here we see 62% of all hope to get married. Only 6.8% don't want to. And that's an overrepresented demographic among like elite journalists, and people who would say that or even would say not sure. And that might explain, actually, why Wuthering Heights or these sort of tales of Star Cross lovers.

There's the new JFK Jr. Carolyn Bissette, Love Story, Ryan Murphy edition of that out. I was just watching it before we started. By the way, it drives me crazy when people romanticize that relationship, which had serious allegations, at least from at least one author, that they were abusive towards each other. Don't have to go down that. Rabbit hole Hadley, but all that is to say, people want this stuff. People want to see representations. They want to think about these things, want kids. Let's put F-19 up on the screen.

This is 45% of people saying they hope to have kids. 25% already had them. Only, what, 13% said flat out don't want kids. And so, Hadley, this is 45% saying they would only have sex in a committed relationship. only 30% saying I'm okay with casual sex and do it sometimes, 31.5%. The mind boggles when you think about what people are saying and what people are getting served to them by the culture. Am I right on that? Give us a sort of picture of what people want. Well, here's something that we did with our, you're citing our original polling from the report, which is great, because I wanted to know, not just do you approve of casual sex or not? Because that's, my goodness. If you're asking Gen Z if they approve of something, particularly Gen Z women, they are going to say yes.

Their last thing they want to be is judgmental, right? And if you don't approve of anything, you are judging somebody's choices, you know? And so these polls do you approve of casual sex, I think are somewhat worthless. The question I want to know is, do you do it? Do you like it? Do you like doing it? Does it make you feel great? Is it really what you want? you know, and so we ask a question about people's personal approach to casual sex. And it turns out some people say that, yeah, I do this from time to time and I enjoy it,

but the majority of people, if you include people who want to wait for marriage and people who say they only want to have sex within a committed long-term relationship, that's the majority of even young adults. So this whole, you know, the end of marriage, you know, would have Mark Twain say the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated? That's how I feel about reports of the death of marriage or the death of the family. I think are somewhat exaggerated. I mean, I think there's room for concern, particularly with things like a fertility rate,

because that's certainly related to this decade of dating. Many, many people say that they don't want to have children until they get married, which I think is a reasonable way to order one's life, right? So if you are in that boat, which I think 87% of women said they'd like to wait to have a child after they get married, And sometimes these things happen unintentionally. I'm not just talking about children. I'm talking about childlessness too. A lot of childlessness is unintentional, right?

But if you set out in life with a certain order of steps that you'd like to follow, and one of the steps takes a little longer for your generation on average, then that will compress the time frame for the next step. And that's exactly what's happened with childbearing for a lot of people. I mean, the dating decade is kind of prime time biologically. for fertility for women. And, you know, this has been reported from, you know, 1,000 million different sources, but it's, it's definitely the case that looking at our data, when you see 12, 13 percent of Gen Z saying, I don't want kids, that's not the story of falling fertility. Child free by choice is not

the story of falling fertility. The story of falling fertility is really unintentional childlessness due to compress, you know, childbearing time frame for many women. And that's basically due to delayed marriage. So the fertility crisis finds its root, I think, in our marriage culture and in our changing social norms that have pushed back the date of marriage on average. I'm so glad you used the word culture because Hadley, I'm very excited to talk to you about a couple of things Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference and about mom talk.

Obviously, why not? We are going to take a very, very quick break, and we will be back with Hadley Heath Manning in just one moment. First, though, how are you showing a little extra love this February? Great question. For me, as you know, it is all about creating cozy, comforting moments at home. I truly love those, and that's why I love cozy Earth and you will too. Their bamboo pajama set is a total sleep upgrade. It's lightweight but cozy, unbelievably soft, and drapes beautifully.

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You get a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, a 10, you know, warranty. So this level of comfort truly lasts. Of course, it's a 10-year warranty. So share a little extra love this February and wrap yourself or someone you care about in comfort that truly feels special. Had to cozy earth.com and use my code Emily for up to 20% off. That's code Emily for up to 20% off. And if you get a post-purch survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here on After Party. Celebrate everyday love with comfort that makes the little moments count. All right, we are back now. with Hadley Heath Manning. Hadley, I have to get, since you just spent so much time, and I personally know that you spent so much time mired in this report, the dating decade, and the facts that went into it, the research that went into it, I really wanted to get your take, and this is going to seem like a total, like it's coming out of a left field to some people, but I think you're going to know where I'm going with this on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, reacting to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, his speech at

the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. And she talked about culture versus material conditions, little echoes of Marx, not just faint echoes, more of like a overtone. Let's take a look at the first clip. One direction is we are going to blame this on the vulnerable in society, on immigrants, on people of different gender identities, on a culture. or the educated and an anti-intellectualist movement, that's the stuff that right-wing populist movements are made of. And that, of course, is all done as a distraction from the truth, which is that it is economic elites

that are taking the lion's share of growth for themselves and leaving crumbs for the working class. So the alternative to the lie, which is that it is the most vulnerable in society that is doing this. The alternative is a populist movement that tells the truth. A populist movement that says this is an injustice. You are being screwed over. And that story is not a cultural one, but a class one.

Woo! All right, Comrade Hadley. Let's take a look at one more clip here, much to feast on. But I think these two clips together give a good representation of where she was going with us. Marco Rubio's speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. I think it's also important to note how thin that foundation is. Culture is changing. Culture always changed. Culture for the entire history of human civilization has been a fluid evolving

thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in. And so they want to take this mantle of culture. At the end of the day though, is you know, it is very thin. And so

the response that we have to have is, again, it's material, it's class-based, it's common interest. Which, of course, by the way, the material concern is rooted in a cultural one, which when you continue to peel back the layers of the onion, there is a cultural

reason that we care about the vulnerable and the downtrodden and the socioeconomically disadvantaged Hadley, you and I are Christian, so we would argue that that's rooted in our tradition, and Western civilization itself is not thin because it is rooted in that very tradition. But I'm curious, when I looked at this report, I think we have, but one of the things that stood out to me right away was actually sort of something along the lines of what she was talking about. This is the reason young adults say they don't want to get married F-22. There are actually some material concerns. That's not to say that they are fully explanatory of what the trends have looked like in marriage.

But marriage does not make financial sense for me. That is not insignificant number of people who said that among both sexes and among women. that's a that's you know Hadley that's one reason that people say that there also when you look at other surveys student debt so i just wanted to hear from you having thought so much about this recently and by the way with having kids that's 20% say having kids would make it harder to achieve my career goals this is f23 while we're at it and um what was the other one yeah career goals and 24% say i would like to have kids but i do not think I'll be able to afford them. So there are some material things going on here, but there are also cultures that have much less wealth and even wealth disparity, if we were to use that term than ours, where they have higher birth rights. Yeah, I mean, my first, whoa, I have so many reactions to- Let's go, let's go.

I'm court, Cadley. What Representative Casio-Cortez had to say. And, I mean, one thought I had is, I'm constantly thinking of that dress from 2015, that some people looked at it, and they were like, that's a blue and black dress. And some people looked at it, and they were like, that's a white and gold dress. So there's part of this that I think when you and I listen to AOC talk this way, we're hearing one thing. And other people, it's almost like she's using like a dog whistle for basically trying to call everyone on the right a racist, I think is a little bit. what she's trying to do by saying like, oh, you're so worried about culture. Do you mean you're worried about your white people culture? You know, I think that's a little bit like she's trying to say,

you're blaming immigrants and you're blaming the vulnerable for trying to pollute the American culture with different skin colors. Like, I think that's essentially language that she's trying to use here. So I think it's... The other thing I was going to say, Hathie, super quickly, is that she accused conservatives of being anti-intellectual. Well, she also blamed economic elites. That is an anti-intellectual stance.

And actually, like, I think there's an anti-intellectualism. If the intellectuals were the ones that were saying women will be more fulfilled by having lots of meaningless sex, then conservative anti-intellectualism is vindicated when women are saying, nope, that did not work for us. Yeah. Yeah. So there is another part of me that listens to this. And you and I don't hear this as an argument about immigration, I think, so much as it is.

And she's making a direct attack, I think, on Western civilization and some of the Western liberal, lowercase L liberal values that were foundational to America and that I think are still important to setting the tone for our culture. I mean, there's nothing like, you know, capitalism, representative government. These things don't stick if the culture's not right for them. Right. Right. And so that's what I'm thinking about when I hear her talk. I think you can't attack the culture that was the foundation for so many of these things. And obviously, she's not a big fan of capitalism, you know, so she'd be happy to see it go.

But I think people have to appreciate it about America. It's 250th year. What we're celebrating is not just 250 years of the American government. We're celebrating 250 years of the American people being what we have been in a culture that has been shaped by Christian values, shaped by Western values. by lowercase L liberal values of believing in the inherent worth of every individual human being and also believing in a strong society where we work together outside of the direct channels of government. So there's a lot about American culture that is worth celebrating and that has been ultimately the reason for our success. So I think her attacks on it, I think are kind of ridiculous.

list. But I also appreciate, as you're pointing out from the survey data that we had, if you look at certain things that are happening in the culture, we are, and we have been seeing for a long time, a break a bit in different socioeconomic classes in terms of what cultural norms are being embraced or not embraced. So for example, some of the data in the report shows that people who actually have a college education, people who are more well to do, people who are more financially secure, are more likely to be married. And you could say, well, some of that is because they got married, right? They pulled their incomes. They lived in one household. They saved together. They had the cornerstone marriage, right? But some of that is also cultural. They are in a subculture

where they understand that there's a benefit to behaving that way. And on the other hand, people who who are not college educated, people with lower incomes, for a variety of reasons, are less likely to be married. And so there's a catch-22 happening there where I can see that class and culture are kind of stuck together in some ways with regard to family formation issues. And so I think she's completely wrong

in saying that Western culture is thin and there's nothing to build on there. I think everything's really built on it. And when you start to change some of the cultural norms and values that have made America great, then you are creating a bad environment, not just for our system of government and our economic system, but especially maybe for the most vulnerable in our society. Which we do care about. Of course, we care about.

I mean, that's the, that's, we shouldn't even have to say that. Like, that's just ridiculous. But I think that there's a lot of different reactions. that people will have to listening to her say a comment like that. And you and I immediately go to our culture, but I think some people will hear it like she is attacking the right for being scared of other cultures, for being xenophobic, for being, you know,

pissed off about Bad Bunny's halftime show, right? And that's not really where you and I go mentally when we are thinking about Western civilization. That's a super interesting point. Um, yeah, how looking at the report, how do you think? And actually even as somebody who's spent time with young women just like helping them with their careers through IW and all of that, how do you think in this economy where homeownership has been tough for millennials, it's been tough for Gen Z.

There is a lot of student debt. And like what is the interplay between affording a family and just like maybe even using that as cope because you haven't found the right way. I think I know where Hadley's going to come down. You know where I'm going down. Yeah. Because I think Taylor Swift was coping for a long time. Like she actually really wanted what she seems to be on track to have right now. And she's thinking about having the, you know, suburban life or whatever, the basketball hoop in the driveway. Yep. Yes. But before that, she was talking about how she doesn't need a man, blah, blah, blah, anyway, you get the point. How do you think of, she's not somebody who had economic concerns,

But how do you think about where the average American women is experiencing that? Yeah. I mean, I do think, again, it looks a lot different depending on your situation. If you're really, I do think there are some people who say, I can't afford to have a child. And I think that that's a reasonable framework. If you are having trouble making ends meet, you can't provide for yourself, then you may not be in a position to provide for a child. And I don't want to suggest that that doesn't happen. I do think when I've looked at other surveys, the number of people who say that finances are keeping them from having another child.

You know, I think of my grandfather who was like the eighth child in his agricultural family and probably slept in the drawer of a dresser for the first year of his life, you know. That sounds cozy. They could afford it, you know. Put some cozy earth in there. Right. So I don't know that I don't put as much stock in the affordability. claims when it comes to dating, when it comes to marriage, and when it comes to having a kid, I think the cultural element is 10 times stronger than the economic one. Because we do,

compared to the rest of history, live in a very rich time and a very rich place. Now, we have choices that our grandparents didn't have. You know, we have access to more effective forms of birth control, for example. And that's where I think the two questions. The two questions, come in. One is what is a choice and what's not a choice. And the other, the other is what's influencing our choices, right? So secularization, it's a huge piece of this. If you look at who's having children, the most children, it's more likely to be people who are religious, who are not just identifying with a religion, but practicing and attending religious services more frequently. Those people are more likely to be married, the more likely to have kids. So I think

that there's a worldview thing going on here. And that's why the number one issue, the number one answer that we got in terms of why you don't want kids was actually, I don't think I'll be a good parent. That's a cultural thing. That's not an affordability issue. Because we also provided the option of I don't think I can afford to have kids. So that was a separate answer. And yeah, so we had more people say, more people cite the cultural questions, you know, whether it had to do with climate change or not liking kids or even fears about their future relationship with their children. So those got more answers than the economic ones. That didn't surprise me. It did surprise me a little bit that so many people lacked confidence

to be a good parent. That was sad to me to read that poll results. A little bit it makes sense because I do think we have unrealistic expectations for parents in today's society. But I think the marriage question and the fertility questions are way more cultural than they are economic. I think it has to do with where you derive meaning in your life. And I also wonder if those are shades of cope too. And I just, there's so much depression and anxiety. And it makes sense that someone would look at a survey and see that answer and say, that's, that's it. I just, I don't think I would be good. even though the real reason is that they just haven't, and this was one of the provided responses. They hadn't found the right person, something to that extent.

I don't know. Just did you find anything in this report that speaks to just how many? I mean, we hear this all the time, the reports of how women who identify as liberal also seems to identify as miserable. High rates of depression, anxiety. What did you guys find? Yes, it's absolutely the case that young liberal women, particularly young liberal women, particularly young liberal white women have very high rates of mental health challenges. Many, you know, a majority of people in that group have been diagnosed or have been told by a health care provider

that they have a mental health care issue. Now that could just be anxiety, depression. I don't mean to say just, those are very serious issues. Yeah. It could also include things, more serious things like schizophrenia or some mental illness. But I would imagine that many of people in that category of struggling with anxiety and depression. And if you are, it would make sense that you might say, I don't think I'll be a good parent, even though I think for me getting married and having kids have been some of the best antidepressants in my life because, you know, having those relationships and changing my lifestyle to be one where I'm focused on those things, has been really good for my mental health, among other things. But when it comes to the political

piece of this, I think that's a really interesting question, because young conservative women, women aren't suffering as much when it comes to their mental health. And Jonathan Haidt has a great article about this, but he kind of examined a few different things. One of the things that stuck out to me, and I wrote about this in the report, is the question of your locus of control. Do you have an internal locus of control?

Do you believe my destiny is mine? I can make choices and have control over how my life works out to a degree. Or do you have an external locus of control where you say, everything is happening to me. And I noticed in what AOC was saying, she said something like, you are getting screwed.

You know, like she's propagating this idea that what happens to you is because somebody else is out there and they're out there to get you. You know, they're taking the lion's share of stuff and they're leaving crumbs for you and it's their fault.

And it's also a little bit defeatism because I do think often with these messages comes a sense that there's nothing you can do about it. If you have an internal locus of control, then you think I can accept responsibility for my choices. I can be happy and celebrate when something that I do is successful. And I can also own it when I made a mistake. I made a wrong choice there.

Something didn't turn out the way that I had hoped. And it kind of sucks when you have to face that reality. But the flip side is that you feel like you have agency. And I think that is very important for Gen Z. I think it's at the heart of some of the differences politically in mental health outcomes because we want people to have hope. And I am not trying to suggest that you have perfect control over your life. As I've mentioned, there's a lot of unintentional outcomes when it comes to family formation.

And that's why I stress so often in this day and age, you have to be so much more intentional if you want to get married and have kids. I think for millennia, it was just kind of presumed that most people would get married and have kids. And today, because, in large part, because of access to very effective forms of birth control, it has become almost like not a question of why don't you have kids, but like, why do you have kids? You don't have to do this. That's flipping the script that's turning history upside down, you know, because kids were. traditionally kind of the

outcome of sex, the outcome of romantic love and boom, kids are there. But now that we have these technologies that allow us to control that, it very much becomes a different question. And so if you're thinking through this question and you're thinking that for any reason, you might not be prepared, I've had young women ask me,

how did you know that you were ready? You know, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a little bit of a silly question. You know, you're not. I wasn't. You just do it. You know? You pray.

You hope that and you grow and you grow with the job. You learn on the job, as they say. You know, but that is, I think that's a big piece of this, that it has become an opt-in rather than an opt-out. And because people feel like they're not up for the challenge or don't want to take that kind of risk. I think it's a very risk-averse. generation. And getting married is taking a big risk on somebody. And having kids is taking a big

risk. And so that's been an element and an undercurrent in a lot of the report as well. Well, lastly, Hadley, actually, on that note, I wanted to ask about this article in the cut that caught my attention on the, the headline is really good on this. The way we put it up on the screen. It was, under the Mormon influence, how the women of Utah blogged and posted their way into American hearts and wallets. And it goes through sort of the secret lives of Mormon wives and mom talk and ballerina farms and even the real housewives of Salt Lake City. And the author writes towards the end, let me say I highlighted this quote. So it was very interesting in the context of everything we've just discussed. The contradicting visions of Mormonism right now,

she writes, are perfectly suited to a country in the middle of an identity crisis. Its sister saints can be feminists or tradwives. They're moving us forward and taking us back. We can be sure that the church will benefit regardless, referring to the Mormon church. But all that is to say, Hadley, that is an interesting point about, you know, Heather Gay is one of the stars of Bravo's Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. And she talks about how her daughter, Heather Gay wrote this whole bestselling book about surviving Mormonism, leaving the church and how she's very much in the camp of, I don't need a man, I'm more fulfilled without a man after my dad. divorce and the church was stifling me, suffocating me. But now her daughter made a common,

offhanded comment to her about how she's an influencer and she's in her trad era. And she was like, this is everything that I tried to get away from. So having just been steeped in all of this data, what can you tell us Hadley about why maybe there's a generational divide, but also even a divide within Gen Z where you have like one side polarized in one direction. And I don't know, what is going on. Just tell me what's going on. Yeah. In some sense, it is nothing new, right? we've been hearing about the career woman versus the housewife for a long time. And I do think that binary is just manifesting once again in tradwife versus girl boss. I think a lot of this is kind of lives online. Yeah. And I think it's maybe really not very helpful or relevant

to most women's lives. The Institute for Family Studies has some very wonderful, interesting data, but one of the things that they have been talking about recently is the number of married mothers of young children who work full-time has recently surpassed the number of unmarried mothers with young children who work full-time. And, you know, traditionally, we would think, yeah, if you're a single mom, you probably would be working full-time or trying to earn as much money as you can because there's not another earner in the household. Maybe you have child support, but there's not someone, you know, it's hard for single moms. And I would expect that they would work. On the other hand, with married mothers, sometimes you have a choice not to work

or to lean back from work depending on your husband's income and how you structure your family life. But I ask Wendy Wang, who's the researcher who did this at IFS, I said, how many of those married mothers of young children have some kind of remote work or flexible work arrangement? And she got back to me and she said 54%. Wow. 54% of the women in their study who worked full time who had children under the age of five had some kind of remote work situation. So they're kind of like me, you know, like this is my home office. Most of the time I'm in the other parts of my house chasing my kids around. I don't consider myself to be a girl boss.

I mean, I love doing reports. I love working at independent women. You love bossing people around. I like bossing people around. I like bossing my kids around. I don't consider myself to be a trad wife, but I am very traditional in a lot of ways. So the binary isn't really helpful for me. And I don't think it's really helpful for a lot of people.

I think a lot of people want to take advantage of modern life, which actually gives you 50 shades of gray in between the black and white choices, of working as a girl boss and staying home as a trad wife or whatever. So I think it's kind of like for clicks and engagement, mostly the binary. But I do think it's that, you know, if you look back at our survey results on why you don't want to have kids, women were much more likely to say I'm concerned about how this is going to work with my career than men, naturally. So it's still a question at the front of a lot of women's minds. You know, what am I going to do? How am I going to juggle through this season?

But I don't think it's something that people typically approach with this like mindset of I'm going to conform to some hashtag or the other, right? People just want solutions for how this, what does this actually look like in my life? Yes. Yeah, and when you say that, I mean, as I'm thinking of it, the Mormon boom, the Mormon pop cultural boom, kind of combines a couple of things. It's almost like it combines the true crime stuff because people are interested in what's actually going on at the Mormon Church. But also I think people Hadley have this curiosity of what it's like for people to live under a more traditional moral scaffolding, even if I have all kinds of criticisms of the Mormon Church, which I absolutely do. There's this curiosity of people

who have just been in a very secular culture to be like, what is that? Like you guys seem happy and rich and you're just drinking soda? Like what's going on? Yeah, there's almost a fascination. I brought this drink tonight in honor of the Mormon topic because all my Mormon friends. I live out west. I live in Denver, Colorado. I just spent the weekend in Salt Lake City. So I was doing research for the show actually. No, it wasn't. I was just visiting with friends. But it is interesting because I do think the influence on the culture in Utah is huge. And even in neighboring states, like there's definitely a much bigger presence of the LDS church in Colorado, New Mexico, and some of the

these states that are closer to Utah. I mean, I grew up East Coast, not encountering this very much at all. But I agree with you. It's like, it's almost like any religious group has become more interesting, like, what is that? You know? Right. More people are living kind of unchurched or secular lives.

And so it's like, it's kind of like having kids question. It was kind of built in, I think, in a lot of subcultures in the United States. that there were some kind of religious practice and religious holidays and going to church and all that stuff kind of went together as part of your culture, AOC, you know. And now that religion has become a decreasing influence in the lives of a lot of people, it has created this fascination with it as like, what is that? You know, and I think it's not just Mormonism, but I think, you know, Jewish people, Catholic people. Even the evangelical church is like, what is going on there? You know, people are looking at it more from the outside in. But it depends on the people looking.

You know, I think that if you're a reporter who covers religious things, it helps if you are religious, if you have some kind of experience with it yourself and can treat it fairly. But I'm hopeful. I mean, all the data and the dating decade about the influence of religion suggest that Gen Z is less religious than any previous generation. I mean, I've seen so much stuff online about the comeback, the revival, you know, how Gen Z is flocking to the high church or whatever.

And the data doesn't really show that. It doesn't bear it out. You know, it doesn't really bear it out. And I'm praying. Like, I'm hoping that people will come to Christ, obviously. But I think in terms of our culture, we would be wise to, you know, understand the position we're in, I think, as, as, Christians. I read a great book called Evangelism as Exiles. It's great book. I'll just plug that book here.

But I think if you are living in a culture where your religion is not predominant, that changes things for you. And that changes the way that we act and interact with people. But I haven't watched any of the secret lives of Mormon wives shows. So I'm probably not the right person to ask about that. I've seen a lot of articles about how they all have the same plastic surgeon. So I'm like, whoa, it's different from what I would expect. But more like secret lives of wives and less LDS, you know. It's really people gawking at hair extensions of plastic surgery at the end of at the death. Hadley Heath Manning, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about the dating decade. Yeah, thank you for having me, Emily. Of course. Appreciate it. All right, everyone, more show to come.

Also, just a couple of points I want to make to the AOC, uh, culture, material world versus culture question. I mean, I've never liked that binary. I know why Marx and Hagle and others, uh, establish that binary. What the point that Hadley was making about agency, listen, it can be, two things can be true at once that this broader framework can absolutely be built in a way that is screwing you over and you are being left with crumbs. That can be true at the same time.

as you accepting that you have control and agency over a situation. And people are always going to be screwing. Like the big guys are always going to be screwing the little guys. The best thing we can do is have a system that minimizes that. It minimizes the ease of avarice and all of those effects on our culture. At the same time, the hype mental health research, and it's not just Jonathan Height, there's all kinds of mental health research about people who see themselves as a victim,

as opposed to seeing themselves as somebody with agency. see, that's a question of actual life fulfillment and happiness. And there's plenty of research that the less empowered you see yourself, it doesn't mean that people at the top aren't trying to disempower you. But you do still have some powers, right? It's like a glass half empty, glass, half full situation. So it doesn't mean you stop fighting corruption and greed and a bad system. But it does mean that as an individual, you should also accept more agency, even at a time when I think we're feel way less powerful than we have before. And that's why we cling to some illusions of power,

like tweets and TikTok posts and all of that sort of things. They can be powerful. But they can give us a false sense of power as well. And finally, the other thing that I wanted to note is there are, I've mentioned this before, there are, there's good research. And there's been a survey of some of the research. I cited it on another show. I don't have the name of it off the top of my head,

but academic research on, on indigenous tribes and life satisfaction. Across the board, basically, people who don't have the same, even material imaginations that we have, they'll say a couple of things are consistent for life satisfaction. It's not being lonely, having a community close to you, and your health.

So another reason I think Republicans are wrong to downplay the importance politically of healthcare and allow the system to continue swallowing people up. But that's topic for another day. Dem crash out in Munich to come, But first, a fresh start as possible. Debt can feel like it's getting worse every month, speaking of the broken system. But that only continues if nothing changes.

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naturally just all this is to say I'm not going to talk about the dem crash out for the sake of dunking on Dems. There's plenty of we could be dunking on Republicans for and indeed often do dunk on Republicans for. So I'm sure we'll have more to talk about along that line on Wednesday. But this performance by high-profile Democrats at the Munich Security Conference after Secretary of State Marco Rubio goes and gives an address that at the Munich Security Conference receives a standing ovation. You'll recall not long ago what happened in Davos, with the Trump administration being greeted very coolly just several weeks back. The fact that Secretary of St. Marco Rubio was able to conjure a standing ovation out of the crowd at the Munich Security Conference speaks to his political talents.

And that's actually really what we're talking about in this segment. I thought the substance of it was pretty defensible. You know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about Western civilization as a sort of predicate for criticizing the European society as, being thin. And kind of being the predicate for conservative reactionary politics right now is being thin. Well, Marker Rubio was talking about how actually rich Western civilization is from New York being called New Amsterdam originally, being built up as New Amsterdam to then becoming New York and taking the European continent and building off of it on the American continent. He talked about how many of our roads have names that, you know, harken back to Europe and how we do have this

shared, in some cases, language, but this shared touchstone, civilizational touchstone, and why that matters. So the point I'm trying to make is that Marco Rubio, you can ideologically to test that speech, but for somebody, a representative of the Trump administration, to come in and make a substantive criticism of European politics and the sort of transnational globalist politics that define the Munich Security Conference, whom to come in and make that criticism in a way that also invites a standing ovation is a political talent. Now, that is what the Trump administration put forward in this high-profile speech. High-profile participants from the left were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Clinton, and Gretchen Whitmer.

Obviously, there were other people from the right and left there, but these are the people that got the most attention. So let's go ahead and start. Hillary Clinton, by the way, said immigration went too far. Amazing. What a time to make that point. Thank you so much, Hillary. She had more to say, though, let's go ahead and roll.

Hillary Clinton, on a panel, I'm not making this up. Hillary Clinton was, I think she was actually the host of this panel. Yeah, this is amazing. Host of a panel that was like just ripped off of a t-shirt from Broad City. It's called Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights. I can't even say it without wanting to die, fighting the global pushback. And who was invited onto this panel with Hillary Clinton? But Representative Sarah McBride.

Let's go ahead and watch the clip. You've been on the front lines of this fight, and you've also been on the receiving end of so many threats and attacks that come from, again, in many ways, organized efforts. We are facing, as you mentioned, a well-organized, well-funded, right-wing regressive movement. And they really have placed trans people at the center of that effort. but we should be clear, but the consequences of this anti-trans effort, not only out of proximity, but out of intentionality, will include consequences for women of all backgrounds. Because at the end of the day, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and sexism are all rooted in the same prejudice.

The belief that one perception at birth should dictate who you are, how you act, what you do, who you love, and how you dress. So it's true, my prejudice towards truth being something that is not relative, but actually is what's encoded into your body. I mean, for the listening audience, I said, that's a man, not to be rude, but simply for the sake of saying, if you're listening to this, that is representative Sarah McBride. Sarah McBride is a man and was on this panel called Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights Fighting the Global Pushback with Hillary Clinton. and this is who the left is putting forward. This is what the left is putting forward. A panel on girls just wanting to have fundamental rights. I don't know why I keep saying it with Hillary Clinton and Sarah McBride

at the Munich Security Conference in the Year of Our Lord, 26. That's something everybody should have just scrapped and should have been like, nope, we're not doing this. Because to the point about girls having fundamental rights, that's actually why Hillary Clinton's generation fought for things like Title IX that Sarah McBride's generation said, we're going to include the dudes, too. Yeah, we're bringing them all.

Like, we know that you thought this was a big win to get some stuff for girls over here. I know you think that it's like, girls just want to have fundamental rights, but also like, hey, maybe we'll, I don't know. Maybe we'll let the guys in too, right? Like, let's give guys a chance.

And I don't even want to joke about it, But it's so absurd that in 2026, this is what's still happening at things like the Munich Security Conference. And this is what Democrats, high profile Democrats are still participating in. It shows that they're genuinely, Roy Tachar is written about this. They're really locked into a difficult position on this issue. I've talked about before how I think it's a litmus test for whether voters should trust you. If they sense that you're bullshitting them on whether you think a man should be able to play in women's sports or use a girl's locker room, you have to have an answer to that.

Maybe you think that is okay. But either way, you have to have an answer that doesn't feel like you're bullshitting them, and that's going to be very difficult for the vast majority of Democrats. And in fact, here we find ourselves. Let's cut to Hillary Clinton using gender equality as a cudgel against a populist European who she was on a panel with. By the way, Gladden Pappin was also on a panel with Hillary Clinton. That was something else over in Munich.

Munich was trying to include, obviously was trying to include some populist voices, which I guess is a step in the right direction. But here is Hillary Clinton going back and forth with, I think he's what the Czech prime minister. He was the vice prime minister, deputy prime minister, the Czech deputy prime minister. Here's Hillary Clinton having a meltdown. We saw the cancel culture. We saw the woke revolution. we we don't I don't agree with the gender revolution the climate for the listening what is gender women have right

I think there are two genders so but but some of some of us some of us some of us think that there is more than one more than two sorry more than two gender I think there is male and female and the rest probably is a social construct so this is something that went too far But does that justify selling out the people of Ukraine who are on the front lines dying to save their freedom and their two genders? That's what you're worried about. Can I please finish my points? I'm sorry that it makes you nervous.

I'm really sorry for it. What was that? Hillary Clinton is like she's in a high school debate tournament and she's the bad girl who keeps interrupting when they tell her to stop. Oh, listen, that is rough for Democrats that Hillary Clinton is still out there so so smug and confident in her position that she is saying, but Ukraine, to an entirely reasonable point. Of course, she seems to have conceded on immigration. Even there, she didn't do it intentionally, but she concedes, you know, men and women, half the population. obviously Hillary Clinton knows that there was an overreach. And then to say people, and it just reminds me so much of what AOC said that we were talking

earlier in the show with Hadley Heath Manning about culture and material conditions. It's very, very important for the left to understand. It's not just that elites use cultural norm shifting as a distraction. They absolutely do that. Jen Kueger talks about this a lot. That is true. But it doesn't stop there. They also use it as a way to disempower and disproportionately impact people down the socioeconomic rungs from them.

Tim Carney writes about how he has the Lena Dunham fallacy, where elites in glossy magazines and in Hollywood productions are constantly downplaying the importance of marriage and children. And at the same time, they're getting married and having more children. Just getting married at higher rates, at least. I'd have to go back and refresh on the children. But when you look at the research, it's true. I was just looking at the New York Times weed mea culpa. The editorial board wrote that they had been incorrect about some of the harms of legalized marijuana. And whatever you think about legalized marijuana, I'm not opening up that can of worms right now. But whatever you think of it, people lower down the socioeconomic ladder are more likely, I went and pulled the data, are more likely to be smoking weed, then I'm just going to be

really precise with my language and find the exact study that I relied on for this. Give me a one quick second. Yep. So that, yeah, so they're more likely to be within the last 30 days using cannabis. If you are in a lower level of education or income. So those are two good socioeconomic proxies for class. And so the New York Times just playing in the sandbox, normalizing things for people that are going to affect, they affect everyone, but they especially affect people lower down the socioeconomic rungs. And AOC is like, oh, it's just, listen, the economic elites, they're screwing you. Don't worry about gender. Don't worry about immigration. Bernie Sanders, used to be one of the most articulate

arguers on behalf of how economic elites use immigration to disempower the working class. So I think a lot of times there is a totally false binary between culture and material conditions that is useful to people on the left but is not actually borne out by the patterns that we see among elites. So that's just a huge problem.

a huge problem when you think about the amount of working class families and I've talked to them who were affected by the gender norm craze. I know Abigail Shrier wrote in Irversible Damage that it did seem to be a social contagion among suburban girls, like well-off families. All I'm saying is that people who are less privileged didn't have the ability, like the parents are working three shifts or they're working two shifts. They're working the night shift. And they're not the ones that get to be home, you know, have a stay at home parent or have two parents and to constantly be at every school board meeting or to be at every sports event. They're the ones that actually desperately need scholarships for the kids to go to college.

Those scholarships, by the way, that get taken when you are falling further down the rankings because you're a track athlete and there's two male participants. in the state of, let's say, Connecticut, which is a good example. You can go look up the cases that I'm talking about. That does matter. That does matter. And you do have fewer resources to fight back against all of that. And it is coming from the same economic elites. Those economic elites that AOC is saying are leaving crumbs of materialism,

or crumbs in the material conditions left over for the rest of us, she knows damn well. They agree with her on just about every cultural issue. Just about every single one. Who but Kamala Harris signed that insane ACLU petition on what was it? The one that got used in the Kamala is for they, them ads. They agree with her on everything culturally. And so it's not just, it's not just material conditions.

It's not. Material conditions as we were talking about with Hadley are completely influenced by class. They are completely influenced by, I'm sorry, they're completely influenced by, I'm sorry, they're completely influenced by culture. Even the idea that we should have a fair system is based on culture. That is based on Marx came from a specific culture, springing forth from a specific culture. And his idea of what was good was fishing in the morning, poetry in the after, whatever the hell it was. That was based on a cultural concept, I would argue, you know, a sort of Christian-infused cultural concept of what a good life looked like,

departed, of course, from Christianity in some important ways. But that in and of itself was based on a cultural assumption that AOC shares, that she shares. And the problem is that the elites no longer share that core cultural idea of what the good life actually is, of what is fair. They're going in a Nietzsche direction. And that's very, very different from one, from the one that AOC wants to go. And even though she may share the Nietzchen distaste.

for Christianity or anything along those lines. So getting far afield because I want to also play this clip of Gretchen Whitmer being asked about Ukraine. And then we're going to get to AOC on Taiwan, which I, after I, let's just go with Whitmer first. On Ukraine, what does victory look like? Ambassador. Oh, please.

I'd love to hear your answer. I can do that because it's my accent. The two that I am on the panel with are much more steeped in foreign policy than a governor is. But, you know, I do think that Ukraine's independence, keeping their landmass and having the support of all the allies, I think is the goal. From my vantage point, go ahead, Ambassador, do a better job. That about solves it. Why is the governor of Michigan at the Munich Security Conference? Well, because she wants to run for president.

That's pretty obvious. Why is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference? I will give her the benefit of the doubt because I think she's at least sincerely interested in some of these core conversations about ideas. I think she does see herself as their future of Democratic Party, and she genuinely believes in democratic socialism. I have no idea what the hell Gretchen Whitmer believes in. But I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a worldview.

she believes that it behooves the world for her worldview to be more and more powerful. And so I think she's considering whether or not she's the right person to take it forward. But she went to Munich to advance that worldview. And here is how that went for her when asked not about Ukraine, but about Taiwan. Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move? You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, you know, I think that this is a, I want to die. I want to die. This is, of course, a very longstanding policy of the United States. After I watched Glenn Greenwald's thorough fisking of that answer, I told myself I would never watch that video again.

But I decided because we had Hillary Clinton, Gretchen Whitmer, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falling on their face at different points in time. And by the way, I think actually AOC did a not horrible job conveying this broader worldview. But to make a mistake on Taiwan, go watch Glenn's thing on this. Because to make a mistake like that where I think they counted 19 seconds until she actually answered the question until she actually started like spitting out complete sentences, that's devastating. And it does recall the Margaret Hoover interview when she was a younger politician where she couldn't explain what she meant by occupied Palestine. And she basically did a Maya Koppel on that. She should do a Maya Koppel on this one. But it's amazing that she's been around as long as she has been now and wasn't able to, in that moment, maybe she was under pressure.

Of course, it's a lot of American politicians are under pressure. That's why you have a canned Taiwan answer ready to go because the pressure is so significant. And the fact that she wasn't able to spit that out, I think speaks to obviously a very, a much more significant problem. Same thing goes for Gretchen, if you're going to go to the Munich Security Conference, if you're going to say that you are potentially the commander in chief, the candidate for commander and chief of the president of the United States, that is not a difficult question to answer by any means, by any means. And so those are, I mean, Hillary Clinton got embarrassed by getting, even just letting the, what the, the deputy prime minister, the Czech deputy prime minister get under her skin like that to have the girls just want to have fundamental rights panel with someone who is not a girl. I mean, it just, it was, it was a bad showing for the left. And I think, yes, it reflects a problem that this happening on the right now. Now, because Trump is in power, you're going to see a much more united voice at things like the Munich Security Conference

because they all represent one person's views at the end of the day, and that's Donald Trump. So to some extent, it's explainable that you'd have Democrats with a more or a less coherent message. But what that was, that wasn't even a problem of coherence. That was, that was Gresham Whitmer and AOC struggling to answer basic questions. So that was that was pretty rough. That was pretty rough. Kind of like Gavin Newsom at Davos rough. Now, I'm not saying politically, Democrats have have no answer to Republicans. I think that's true. I think they do, I think they do, of course, especially because Trump is vulnerable right now. Republicans are vulnerable right now. The RCP average shows that Dems are less favorable than Republicans nationally, but they're ahead in the

generic congressional ballot. This is a midterm election. election season. So it's not like this is all sunshine and roses for Republicans and would not make that argument. I don't think that's true. What I do think is true is that the, what do they actually believe? Like, what do they actually believe when it comes to the policy of men and women's locker rooms? That's not nothing. What do they actually believe on immigration? Because AOC is saying that's a distraction and Hillary Clinton's saying, oh, it went too far. What do they actually believe on Ukraine? I mean, this is Christian Whitmer. This is a purpose. state governor with a hugely affected working class by various trade policies over the course

the last several decades. And her answer on Ukraine is that bad. I know that sounds like it has nothing to do with anything else. But if you talk to a whole lot of people, you go into a bar in Michigan, you ask them a question about Ukraine. A lot of people are going to say, look at what happened to Flint. You want to talk to me about Ukraine? You want to talk about sending more money to them? That's the vein in which Gretchen Whitmer should be operating. It should be, it should be, it should be, like, well, people in my state, you know, I do have to make an argument to them about why this is important and why this matters.

And that argument's not even being made. It's just reflexively, well, you know, America loves Ukraine. End of story. And AOC, well, this is just reactionary distraction. This culture stuff is just a reactionary distraction. End of story. And then Hillary Clinton doing whatever the hell she's doing. But that's a real problem.

That is a real problem that would make me rather nervous. It's not a problem that's just rooted in the muddle of being out of power, which Republicans dealt with during the Biden presidency. This is a fight for like sort of the core belief of the Democratic Party. And yeah, again, Republicans are dealing with that to some extent too. But their power right now. So it makes it slightly easier to have a coherent message. And Marco Rubio articulated a very coherent version of that message, one of the most coherent versions of that message.

That's why the speech is going so viral that you will hear. So that's why you then need Democrats to produce a version of what Rubio did. And that shows it's coming from a well, right? That this is the conservative well that these policies are springing from. if the progressive well that the Democratic Party's policies are springing from is AOC saying culture is all a distraction. They're in serious trouble, serious trouble. Now, we're in the era of lesser of two evil politics. So whoever can consolidate like a plurality in a primary and then, you know, make the other person seem much worse. And a general election probably do fine. That's kind of sad, but it is where we are. So it's not to say, you know, it's just on. two-way with Mark Halpern today saying, I think there's a serious case for AOC and disagreeing with Mark a little bit on that. Not that I think he dismisses it all together, but I think there's a serious

case that AOC come out a bid for Senate or president going forward. But, but you're going to have to have a really weak Republican candidate, not that I would rule that out in any circumstance, but you'd have to have a really weak Republican candidate to completely downplay everyone's cultural concerns in a national election, maybe even in a statewide election. So on that, Now, thanks for joining us here at our new time, 9 p.m. That's where we'll be back here on Wednesday. When will be back here on Wednesday. So I'll see everyone then, helping have a great rest of your evening, a great Tuesday,

and we'll reconvene here on After Party on Wednesday. Thanks, everyone.