After Party with Emily Jashinsky - "Happy Hour": AOC’s Inauthenticity Problem, Why Emily Hates “Ted Lasso,” and the Debate Over Gaza: Emily Answers YOUR Questions

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

On this week’s edition of “Happy Hour,” Emily Jashinsky reflects on what we’ve learned from COVID school closures and mask mandates, the lasting effects on children, why she believes the country still hasn’t had a real reckoning with what went wrong, and what she sees as Democrats’ continuing blind spot on COVID and Anthony Fauci. She discusses the leftward shift of workplaces and the dynamics of female-dominated fields. Emily explains why she takes calls to “abolish” institutions seriously, why precise language matters in politics, and makes the case for viewing Thanksgiving as a “glass half full” holiday rather than defining it by the darkest parts of American history. She also weighs in on AOC’s shifting rhetoric and discusses her recent video defending Hasan Piker against misleading criticism from Scott Jennings. Emily answers questions about President Trump’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu and how intelligence from Israel may reach the White House. She wrestles with how America could actually fix its healthcare system. Emily dives into a complicated discussion about whether what happened in Gaza should be described as genocide, why she considers the UN’s definition overly broad, and why civilized countries should own up to mistakes. Emily also explains why she hates “Ted Lasso,” reveals how guests are selected for “After Party,” shares her problems with superhero movies, discusses destigmatizing marriage and starting a family at a younger age, and more… Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, everyone, welcome back to Happy Hour, which is, of course, itself a special edition of After Party that we do every Friday here on the podcast feed. If you haven't subscribed on YouTube, go ahead and do that. It is very, very helpful on our end, leave a review. All of that, we appreciate it so much. As always, these are the emails that you all send into Emily at Doublemaicare Media.com, my real email address, as many of you know, because you go back and forth with me on that account. Now, I do read them live. I think it's much more interesting and entertaining that way. I also have an Instagram comment, I think, this week, that producer Kelly flagged. So I'm going to get to that as well. Let's go ahead and dive in. I'm going to start with Rachel, who says, hi, Emily, I appreciate something you said about COVID school closures on Happy Hour last week. So, yeah, I think actually I missed this email last week. It was referring to the week before, if I'm remembering this correctly, when, a teacher wrote in to say that learning loss, the way we measure it is, or if I remember the email correctly, it was basically like when we say learning loss, what we're really talking

about is school closures of a couple of weeks. This was a teacher who said basically his students were back in class after a couple of weeks at home. And for a lot of students, the quote-unquote lockdowns were technically pretty brief and not that big of a disruption. And what we were talking about is, you know, I'm sure I'm not paraphrasing thoroughly that email. But I remember we were going back and forth a little bit on the regional distinctions and what it meant for kids in schools with really powerful unions versus others. So anyway, let's get back to Rachel's email. Rachel said, I teach an upper elementary grade level. My district completely shut down in spring 2020, which I don't blame them for. It was a crazy time. Then we were online for the entire 2020,

21 school year. After COVID, I taught three kids who did not speak at all. Selective mute was the term used. These kids might have been shy pre-COVID, but they all spoke in school before the lockdown. When people get defensive about learning loss, I think of those three kids. Now that we are revisiting lockdowns because of the Fauci diary, it seems like people won't admit how bad school closures were because it comes off as picking aside in the Fauci fight. That's a great point, Rachel, because the school closures more than anything else I can think of. And not just the school closures, but the mask band-dates in schools and the modified learning in schools, that, I think, energized, animated such a broad swath of parents to the point where it was not just

right, not even right plus swing, it was just kind of normal parents across the board by 2021. getting really deeply frustrated with what they were seeing because especially in certain regional areas, again, it was rippling just away from just math scores or English scores, that sort of thing. It was clearly affecting the socialization of kids. And I think that's probably still in the back of many parents' minds, kids who were old enough to remember it, they're probably always going to feel like they were robbed of something and just politically and morally. People who wish to persuade people to one side or the other will probably be able to tap into that for many people. But I guess the political nature of the Fauci discourse, because

he's still bitterly defended by Democrats and really by a lot of people in the corporate press, as we've been talking about, because for them to repudiate him would be. be for them to concede a series of grave errors in their coverage. And that would be a pretty difficult thing to do if someone could come out and actually say, my bad. I think that would be very powerful. But we haven't really seen much of it so far. So yeah, I wonder if that's true that because Bouchy is such a political character and the lockdowns are so connected in our imagination to Fauci that it's not going to be remembered sort of as the transpartisan disgrace that it was. I don't know.

It's very interesting how we're going to remember COVID. How we're going to remember. We're starting to see it, obviously. The further it gets in our rearview mirror, the clearer picture we have of what the kind cultural memory of it is going to be. But certain aspects of it, I mean, first of all, you had to be there. It's going to be tough if people were so young, they didn't have memories. But what are, I mean, yeah, we really just haven't had a reckoning with a lot of what went wrong.

And we still don't agree on what went wrong, like as a country. You know, a lot of you and I agree on what went wrong. But as a country, a lot of us still don't agree on that. So this is a good point, Rachel. Appreciate your note. George says, when it came out last October, there was a lot of buzz around Helen Andrews' essay, great feminization, which argued that feminization of industries had led to wokeness. That article pops into my head every time you bring up the WNBA and its controversies. How much of the drama,

if any, in the WNBA, do you think is just a natural consequence of the internal dynamics and majority female groups? Good question, George. So if you haven't read Helen's essay, it was in Compact, Helen's a great writer. She's one of the great essayists, I think of the millennial generation, I think she's millennial, and O'Hallanabit, she's really smart and a great writer. That piece was like a powder keg exploded and some people on the right were really angry about it. Some people on the right really loved it. I think more people loved it than didn't and saw it as a reasonable explanation for the leftward drift of a lot of institutions.

What she did was use numbers to track as different. industries or careers became more heavily female, did that then map onto the timeline of their leftward drift? And Helen came to the conclusion, yes. Now, others would say it's not necessarily just about, like, maybe that's not the salient variable. Maybe it's more to do with the macro-cultural picture of leftward shift, right? You can't blame it all in women. But I think what was most controversial about it is that Helen took some of women's kind of defining characteristics. And in some negative ways when you're talking about like a workplace context, used that to explain what's happened in workplaces. And it's not something we should be scared to talk about,

right? It's important for the right to acknowledge that men and women are different. And so we're not widgets. When we take over a workforce, it's not gender neutral, right? We can concede that a relevant variable to the culture of the workforce. Is it a relevant variable to the culture of the workforce in a negative or positive way? That's, I guess, the question. I do think about this with the WNBA to George's point that, like, do they have any male leadership? Honestly, they might. But it's remarkable to think of this, like, company so dominated by women. And, I mean, no offense, but, like, particular kinds of women who tend to be. aggressive, but they're still women, like aggressive, competitive, right? If you're into professional

basketball, a lot of them have played professional basketball, meaning they were from a young age conditioned to be extremely competitive. And so you get into the workplace, you have a bunch of women who are competitive. It seems like a nightmare. It seems like a nightmare. I like a mixed gender workplace personally and not one in the world of professional sports, but it does seem catty and hostile. And I wonder if, again, the relevant variable here is that they're all women or if the relevant variable is that they're all a very particular type of competitive, aggressive woman. Like you would have to do some social science research into that. But I mean, a lot of you who are, you know, in female dominated fields, nurses, teachers, the like, you're obviously, you're

obviously going to have a different experience. Like, you know, college is clearly majority female at this point, just if you're in, if you're getting an undergraduate degree, also at graduate and PhD level. But for the most part, you know, every school is majority female at this point. I would guess that's true of college administrators. I'd have to check that. But a lot of us are in heavily female dominated fields. And it, of course, changes the culture. Of course, it changes the culture. There is a difference in working in like a very female workplace versus a half and half workplace or a very male workplace. So maybe some of you have experiences with that. I've had experiences in very male workplaces that I thought could use some more women, to be

honest, because I think women can balance, especially when you have like a client-facing type business. I think women can bring a helpful balance to that or a student-facing business, that sort of thing, a nonprofit or whatever it is. But anyway, it's a good point. Katie writes in, no one should have to apologize for pointing out that Thanksgiving Whitewash's history. Oh, this must be in reference to Francesco Hong. Celebrating how well the pilgrims got along with the natives they genocided. I am worried this is just another example of partisan cancel culture where it is wrong to cancel someone for something racist, but it is perfectly fine to cancel them for saying something against Israel. I have celebrated Thanksgiving

every year of my life, but I have no problem understanding why some people find it uncomfortable and pretending this is some wild, woke idea is insane. If AOC wants to redefine the word defund, we shouldn't let her. It can mean to eliminate funding or reduce funding. People have used both definitions, but she was clear which one she meant. Quote, defund means defund. Words matter, and she's a weasel. It's possible that politicians who support abolishing prison have not been clear. But anyone who thinks it means that we open the prisons and let everyone out tomorrow as an idiot or they're being very bad faith. Abolishing prisons is about reforming society so we don't have more people in prison than China, 25% of the world's prison population. It's about getting rid of a profit motive with

private prisons and having more of a rehabilitation concept for drug offenders and more education and reform for people who are going to be rejoining society. It is a smarter way to handle crime that benefits everyone. Katie writes in occasionally, which I really appreciate with some criticism. So thank you, Katie, first of all, I do genuinely appreciate it. And there are a few things here. So I'll start last and go up from there. On the defund versus abolish point, I think part of the reason when people hear abolish prison and think people want to abolish prison, it's exactly because they had that experience with defund. That AOC said defund means defund. And then when it became politically inconvenient, like Katie said, acted a little weasily.

and tried to say, well, it's about this much more broader social shift, a paradigm shift that needs to happen in policing. And so I have a hard time actually not taking people who say abolish prisons seriously. I do think Angie Nixon, the DSA candidate who won in Florida, handled that question very well. She was on CNN or MS now, I think, after her victory when she was asked about it, she said it means abolishing for-profit prisons or private prisons. She said one of the two. And if you want to make that point, you should change your slogan to abolish private prisons. That's catchy enough. But to say abolish and then do this whole thing, we're like, well, it's not really abolish. It kind of reminds me of when people in Iran say death to America and the American left says, well, it doesn't necessarily mean death to the American

people. It means death to the American government, death to imperialism. It's like, well, we could go and have a nuanced conversation about that. But when you have rallies with hundreds of people chanting death to America, then you have to. It just doesn't matter of self-preservation. Take that seriously in the same way that we've seen criminal justice reform efforts backfire spectacularly in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, here in Washington, D.C., where they've been rolled back by the same people who implemented them, I do take abolished seriously

because I've seen how quickly some of the... I see how quickly Overton window shifts have happened. I'm both the left and the right, by the way. Trump shifted the Overton window on trade so dramatically that, you know, it's the Republican Party, I don't know what happens after him. But anyway, all that is to say,

things are changing really quickly in the country right now. Zohraamam Dani is the mayor of New York City. So I think it's entirely fair to expect people to use precise language. And, you know, I'm not really... I think our private prison system is often disgusting. And it's not one of my top issues. I haven't spent a lot of time on it. I, you know, just understand fully that we have enormous problems.

The criminal justice reform efforts have enormous problems too. So the language precision is important. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to question the abolish prison people on what they mean by abolish prison because of the experience with defund the police, which did happen in some cities. It didn't happen in every city. But if you look at where police were defunded, yes, the murder rate did go up after 2020. Now, there's some cities again where that didn't happen, but there are cities like Austin, for example, where it did, and you saw a murder rate that went up higher in places where there weren't cuts to the police and the like. So anyway, let's go to the Thanksgiving point. Yeah, I think pointing out that Thanksgiving

Whitewash's history is perhaps fine, but to define, but to define Thanksgiving as something that whitewashes history, to define it by some of the stories we've told that are not necessarily historically precise is a huge problem. It's certainly a political mistake, but I think that's a different question that what Katie is getting at as to whether it's a moral mistake. Thanksgiving was implemented in the midst of the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln precisely because we were seeking to find gratitude in a very dark time period, right? That when a country is at its lowest, we should practice the virtue of gratitude. That is uplifting.

It is generally soothing. And I'm with Matt Meen, who we had on the show a couple months ago, that we do need national myths. Like, as a culture, we need national myths. And I think the Thanksgiving one is actually a great myth. The way that it was taught, to me at least in the 1990s and 2000s in public school, is really kind of a multicultural myth, to be honest. And so to say that myth whitewashes history, if you're saying that it's imprecise and then it gets details incorrect, fine. If you're looking at the entirety of the Thanksgiving story is one of genocide, then I think that's a major mistake. Now, I did see another question come in on genocide if I'm remembering correctly.

And so I actually will save, I'm scrolling through now to see if I am remembering correctly. I'm pretty sure one came in. So I'll save a little bit of the definition question for that, because it's important to what Katie is saying. because I just disagree with our modern definition of genocide. What happened to natives, actually what happened in both directions was abhorrent. What happened to natives often was abhorrent. We haven't told that story enough.

It also doesn't mean that the stories we haven't told should or do define what happened. And so I fundamentally disagree that they define what happened. I think the way to define what happened is rightfully remembered as something good, which is that people who were seeking greater freedom, greater religious freedom, particularly, settled this continent at great risk and personal sacrifice with an enormous amount of bravery. They were people of their time, of course, but they constructed the best blueprint for constitutional republicanism that has

ever existed that paved the way for democracy around the world to evolve and grow positively. So I think that's what the problem is. You know, I think that's what a lot of people's problem is when we look at Thanksgiving as a glass half empty holiday. It's not to say that it is a little empty, but to look at it as glass half full, I think is more correct and more moral. And I think that's how most of the country sees it. It's like we can have. a day. This is a different argument. I actually kind of have more overlap with the left on Columbus Day. No offense to my Italian friends. But, you know, maybe some of the similar reasons to Katie's point, but I go back and forth on that one. But, you know, there are a couple of days to look at

the glasses as half full, and that is healthy. It is healthy to have national myths. It's healthy to have mythical figures like Christopher Columbus overall. They were people of their time. We should tell the correct history. We shouldn't do a full Zen, Howard Zen, on Thanksgiving or Columbus, because that also often is myopic and misses the big picture, too. Thank you, Katie. I do genuinely appreciate it.

This is from Bob, who says an inconsistency in the abortion argument, which has bothered me for decades, as the it's just a clump of cells notion. If that's so, why has the medical science explored and made great strides? in prenatal care. Public money is spent on both sides of the argument. With the medical knowledge available to carry a baby to term, then kill is just, or with the medical knowledge available to carry a baby to term, then kill is just evil. But I think you're picking up on something that has been an issue for the pro-abortion movement, which is that yes, you know,

the more we've spent developing research in that field and treatment in that field, the more we've seen the humanity of the baby in the womb. And that's really uncomfortable for the pro-abortion side. I always recommend that Naomi Wolf essay from the New Republic in the late 1990s where she grappled with some of this. But yeah, it's a fairly valid question. Now, I'm sure just again, to kind of steal man the argument, people on the left would say, well, there's nothing wrong with giving somebody who wants this baby to grow into more than a clump of cells, you know, plenty of tools to maximize those chances, to make that happen. I'm sure that would be the response. But though, of course, as we have developed those

tools, we have seen the humanity of the baby more and more. This is from Jen who says, Hey, Emily, love your show from a comment you made in your conversation with Michael Malice, Wilma Flintstone, not Velma. Velma, Velma was a character on Scooby, too. Keep up the good work. Oh, my gosh, that's hilarious, Jen. I remember saying that to Malus, because we were talking about Rosie and Velma,

yeah, I said Velma, but it's Wilma. I said something about Rosie being Velma in the Flintstone's movies, but of course, that would correctly, or just movie, that would correctly be Wilma. My apologies, full retraction. This is from Mark who says, listen to a parse what AOC says carefully,

listen slash parse, what AOC says carefully about woke 1.0. She does not say it was crazy. She offloads that description attributing it to someone else who called it crazy. Future fact checkers will say she did not admit it was crazy. This is akin to candidate Obama's platitude that marriage was between a man and a woman. The left knew he was saying it only to sound moderate for the election. Love the show.

Thanks, Mark. That's a good point. I mean, I noticed it too. She offloaded it to Shia Ose, her local city councilman. And, I mean, I think the clear implication, because she laughed at it. is that she agreed with it. But as we noted on the show, the day after she made that comment, she then went on to defend Woke 1.0.

So to get back to Katie's description of AOC as a bit of a weasel, she's always doing this. She should be asked point blank to Mark's point whether Woke 1 was crazy. And then she should be able to reconcile that with, or she should be asked to reconcile that with what she said after making the joke about that comment on woke 1 being crazy, laughing at it. She absolutely should. We keep making the point that, listen,

if you're still saying that there should be government funding for medical treatment for minors who want to transition sexes, you're probably still in Woke 1.0. Do I sound like? Who did that? It wasn't Jeff Foxworthy. It was Bill Engvall, right, who did, Here's Her Sign. Do you, like, here's your sign.

If you still think you, here's your sign, you're still in woke one. Yeah, that's, man, I just, no offense, boomers. I just did a, I think I just boomer maxed. But in all seriousness, you can't let go of some of that stuff. The Equality Act is something all of them should be asked about. All the DSA adjacent candidates and the DSA candidates should be asked about. Absolutely. There's still a real, I think, problem with that.

I genuinely believe Bernie Sanders learned. And when AOC was traveling with him on the fighting oligarchy tour, you know, that moment, that famous moment, infamous moment in 2016, where the BLM activist literally seized to the podium from Bernie Sanders and he seated it to them eventually after putting up a little bit of a fight. That is a poetic moment. It was a metaphor for the left. It turned out to be really a harbinger of what was to come for the left. And Bernie is trying, once again, to assert the materialist definition of democratic socialism.

over the identitarian version of democratic socialism, I think AOC is really torn between those two. So we should keep trying to pull it the thread and see where she is. Let's see. Oh, Howard says, greetings, Emily, be mad. So we got an extra standalone Emily ran on Friday. Hassan Piker must be shocked into silence to receive support from you, a principal over politics, enjoyed it as always.

Thanks, Howard. Yeah, I did do, if you're only on the podcast feed, this might not have popped. I'm going to try and just do more stand-alone videos because we're only on YouTube two days a week, right? Like the show airs. Then we post the videos, you know, on a schedule throughout the week. But yeah, it's really fun for me to be able to react to breaking news. And so expect more, like definitely subscribe on YouTube if you're interested in that.

I did like a 20-minute video about how I thought Scott Jennings was in a genuine murky territory, potentially dangerous legal territory by saying Hassan Piker wanted to bring back Linne's When Hassan Piker was on video from a stream, some of the comments Jennings was reacting to were him reading the comments that he was getting on the stream, not actually saying them himself. Like, he said the words, but not actually attributing them to him. It would be like if I read a quote from Lenin and everyone said, Emily said this, like, well, yes, I technically said it.

I was quoting someone else. I do think that makes a significant difference or him joking around. And it's not like a massively important story, but I used it as an example if you didn't catch the video to talk about how I think the right is getting piker wrong. And it just was, it was so annoying to me because I hate people taking quotes out of context. And I just think it's becoming such a huge force in politics that any time it drives me nuts. Like you probably, you probably remember Michael Malice and I talked about this with a Tucker thing that was getting. And I said, you know, the crux of the argument he was making was objectionable in and of itself. The same thing with As Sond Piker.

It actually makes it worse then because you start losing more and more trust with people. As people figure out, oh, wait, that's not a real quote or, oh, that's not actually what he was saying. So anyway, a lot of people disagreed with me on that video. A lot of people, which I respect and understand. But it's a serious, I mean, moral and political problem. So anyway, thank you, Howard. Stephen says, what are your thoughts on characters like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy? What was your upbringing with them? And if you bring children in this world, what you tell them about these folks?

Well, I imagine we sometimes have kids listening. So I will say I love Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. They're always very, very good to me. Always very, very good to me. Had great experiences with all three. And I'll leave it at that. Thanks, Stephen. Let's see. This is from Jay. This is a long email. This is, oh, it looks like it's about COVID. Democrats seem to have conveniently forgotten,

but as someone who refused to submit myself should be used as a guinea pig to test an experimental gene therapy, I remember Joe Biden, government officials in the media talking about the unvaccinated, the way the Nazis talked about the Jews. I remember the poll showing so many Democrats believe that the unvaccinated should be locked in camps

and their children taken away from them. If they had their way, we would have had numbers tattooed in our arms and letters brain on our foreheads. I'll just step in and say, I actually don't remember those polls. They may exist. Maybe I can Google them afterwards. But I'm sure there would have been some number of Democrats because we saw the, like, what were they? Like the voluntary camps in Australia and New Zealand, just as, you know, I'm sure there

are plenty of people who wanted to make those mandatory throughout the West. I always say that's one of the difficult realizations I had of COVID. is so many people, I don't know, I think it's like thirds, roughly, roughly, where you had a third of the country say, get your boot off my neck, third of the country say, push the boot harder on my neck, and then a third being like, please just give me the facts. And, you know, overlap between the three of them. Everybody thought they were operating from facts, but a third of the country just being like, I don't know what's right, basically. So Jay writes in, and Democrats have the gall to call Republicans and Trump fascists. I write that as someone who basically,

voted Democrat all my life, never again. So much ugly truth is coming out now, but Democrats will never hear about it because their media will not tell them and they will never listen outside their little bubble. I remember. I do think this is a blind spot for Democrats. I think Fauci lockdowns, all of that. We were talking about this early in the show. I do think they underestimate, of course, what that did to institutional trust. Sometimes they understand it, but they blame it on Donald Trump and Republicans rather than on Fauci for being a a liar himself and others, you know, Rochelle Walensky, Joe Biden, others for telling them lies, people in the media for telling them lies. But I think they just have this massive blind

spot about how teenagers and adults lost trust in institutions, not, you know, because of Donald Trump and Republicans, but because of actual things that happened. And, you know, I think there is a not insignificant portion of the country that is going to become, sadly, more favorable. Hopefully not. I could be wrong about this. But I've mentioned Rod Dreher's Wymar America thesis, which I disagree with his diagnosis of where we are right now. Obviously, I've talked about how I wildly disagree with him and have done my own reporting on how many gropers are hiding amongst Republican Party staff here in D.C. But Rod makes a point that in Germany,

Weimar Germany turned pretty quickly, right? It didn't happen overnight. But you saw the Nazi party making inroads. Also, by the way, the leftists making inroads politically in increments. And

when things start to feel really bad and people start to feel really desperate, the impulse for either maybe a red Caesar or a blue Caesar to take control, or just, starts to like more appealing and more appetizing because people want one-stop shop solutions,

band-aid solutions because they're desperate. So I think COVID was a moment that revealed how close a kind of Western constitutional republic, the populace of one, can come to that, at least in modern America. It's the Ronald Reagan quote that freedom isn't passed down in the bloodstream. It must be fought for by every generation. I think that's totally true. Let's go to, thanks for the note, Jay. Let's go to Casey, who says, you went over on last Friday show about Trump, got bad intel about a potential assassination from Israel. Do you know who's feeding him this intel? Does he get texts from Bibi? Does he get texts from Bibi? Is there another way you have heard? It seems like the president is getting a lot of bad intel on the war and in Iran and things surrounding it from Israel. Do you think he ever finds out that a lot of this intel is bad? Or do you think he gets more text from Bibi saying, good thing you got on that other plane. If you were on the original plane, you would have been blown out of the sky. I know our intelligence services haven't always been on the same page. the president, but it seems crazy that he would trust in other countries more than his own. Have a good weekend. Casey. Thanks, Casey. It's an interesting question. I think, like the processed, I actually don't know. We know in the lead-up to the war because really nobody has denied the

specifics of Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman's reporting. And Jonathan Swan, by the way, I have a lot of opinions about Maggie Haberman. But Jonathan Swan is probably the best Trump reporter on that beat, and he is a fair guy. And know that. He's a fair guy. And so, The way the process of intel passing work then is Netanyahu was in the situation room sitting across, sitting across from Donald Trump, sharing Israeli intelligence. And the understanding is that Israel has more intelligence assets in Iran than basically any other country that has Mossad agents sort of in Iran in a way that other countries don't have assets. That's the understanding generally. And so that gives a bit more weight to their intelligence among a lot of American officials who don't. have that same level of access to what's happening, but also know that Israel, of course,

has a different interest than the United States and is more existentially threatened by Iran at any given moment than the United States is. So that's something to balance in a way. It's not easy. But what we know in the run-up to the war is that it was literally Netanyahu sitting across on the president saying, for example, their evidence suggested a revolution was lying in wait, that a strike would mobilize revolutionary forces who would be likely to be able to take the reins of the government. And so that's how that seems to have happened. On a day-to-day basis, I actually don't know that Trump would have heard the intelligence was Israeli, heard what even the intelligence was. I mean, it's possible that our intel

and Secret Service made that determination to put him on, to take him off of Air Force One, that they made that decision quickly and on their own. So I don't know. I think that's a good question. I'm sure he has more phone calls with Netanyahu than other people would have or other presidents have in the past. They have had a fairly close relationship. Obviously, a son-in-law is Jared Kushner. Netanyahu literally slept in Kushner's childhood bedroom when he was a kid. He got kicked out of his bedroom so Netanyahu could stay in it. So he's pretty close. And a lot of Trump's donors like Miriam Edelson have ties to the Israeli government and may even have clearances or those sorts of things.

And the information could get passed in one way or another. I'm sure no formal intelligence is being shared through donors. But you could see it going through Jared or potentially Steve Whitkoff, who's doing a lot of these negotiations. But I'd be curious about that. someone should write a story about the, I don't have White House sourcing quite good enough to do that. Or, you know, CIA type sourcing, maybe NSA type sourcing, that would be good enough to do that Secret Service type sourcing. But that's, I think, a very good question. Again, we know in the past that it's come from Netanyahu directly here in Washington. In immediate security situations like that one, I would question whether it actually even goes to Trump.

But this is a great question, Casey. This is from Jay, again, who says, I've become a fan of your podcast. I'm pressed with your willingness and ability to think deeply. Healthcare is a big issue for many people today. My question is, what good is access to health care if that health care sucks? I'm taking the liberty of sending you a link to a piece I wrote quite a while ago discussing this. This is from jsocrates.subsec.com. Thanks for passing it along, Jay.

I will click on that link when we're done recording here. And I appreciate the kind words. health care is obviously, if fixing health care were easy, someone would have done it, because that would be a massive political gift for Democrats or Republicans. The problem is that right now, it's hard because the political gifts are from the people with an incentive to keep the system complicated and to keep it bogged down by essentially a system of crony capitalism. And I've said for the last five years that within 10 years,

I expect will be staring down the battle of serious Medicare for All, which the way I've described it before is our system right now is bad. There is a better system out there that's not Medicare for All. It's possible that Medicare for All is better than our terrible system right now. I'm less inclined to believe that these days. I think you can make a serious argument for it. It is not my preferred solution at all whatsoever, period. There are a lot of things that terrify me about Medicare for all and how it could potentially affect research, medical research, prices, wait times, all of those things, of course. But on the other side, it's really tough to do a true free market system without having some element of government intervention to have a humane system, right? things like pre-existing conditions.

That was, that system was, was inhumane. And it was more inhumane than demanding coverage of pre-existing conditions. And that would have been a crazy thing to say for somebody on the right back when we were debating Obamacare. But I just think that's true. And to act like our system now is necessarily more humane, that's politically a problem because people are so upset with the current system. So I don't know how to fix it. And I would be crazy to act like I did because I've talked to health care experts on the left and the right. And I read a ton about how to fix the health care system. Some of it is totally over my head because, you know, it gets into complicated sort of calculations about what X, Y, and Z will cost. And you're trying to do, you know, dynamic analyses of what will happen if we tax X, Y, and Z. And it's tough. But we have kind of a worse of both worlds. worst of the socialized and free market systems right now. So I don't know.

I don't know what the right way to do it is. And I'm happy to talk about it. I like talking about it and thinking about it. Like, is there a way to have a limited public option that's not quite Medicare for all? I don't know, but that preserves the existing system for people who like it. I'm not sure. But one thing to Jay's point that we don't want to happen is the quality of care. Once you have passed that barrier, you have the access to the care.

What we don't want to happen is the quality of the care to go down and to look like Canada or the United Kingdom. So, yeah, that's a definitely important point. Let's see. All right. This is Hank, who says, in your heart, you know he's right. Our country lives or dies based on how we address the very real problems that have put the American dream far out of reach for most people. It's a link to a piece called, we can't save the American dream by pretending everything is just fine. by my former editor, Sean Davis in The Federalist. I did read this piece and I think he nails the

political question. So I definitely recommend it to people. A lot of it is about the kind of J.D. Vance versus Ben Shapiro fight and Sean is firmly in the Vance, pretty firmly defending Vance in that particular back and forth. So yeah, I definitely recommend that one. All right. Let's see. else we got here. Matt says, I've heard you talk about the importance of a print-based epistemology and politics, but it seems like the discussion around reading usually focuses on books. Can you talk about how you think newspapers and magazines ought to factor into a healthy media diet? Are there any publications you subscribe to, even if your job didn't require it? Are there any you insist on

reading analog and not digitally? Finally, while I understand the importance of print, I'm not quite sure how we change. Is there a realistic way to re-emphasize print over audiovisual media over, say, the next 20 years? Can we put the toothpaste back in the tube? Matt, great question. No, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the tube. But I do think what we can do is make reading a kind of premium experience, right? You don't have to read your news in print form every day. This is what Neil Postman and amusing ourselves to death, which is where we talk about print-based epistemology versus social media-based epistemology on Happy Hour here a lot. You might not have to read your news every single day on a hard copy. I never do that.

you know, it probably is a better system, but because of the social media incentives for memory, cognition, addiction, all of those sorts of things. But, you know, I think what we can do is make reading, like, a really premium experience. So I like people who are experimenting with, like, County Highway, magazines, newspapers that, you know, they put that experience right up front. but it's not in every it's not your daily news experience right so they make that experience more beautiful right put a lot of money into or a lot more money than you would to just a daily paper

into making something look and feel premium and special and that's one of those things when you you kind of brick your phone and you go sit in the reading chair your lounge chair or your couch or maybe you go outside you can just focus on imbibing good magazine articles, magazine style articles, newspaper articles. I really do like County Highway a lot. So I think that's a good thing, right? Or still teaching kids how wonderful it is to escape into a hard book where there is no, there's no option to open up another app and to have your train of thought

get messed with, but to actually just be absorbed by a fictional world or a really great piece of writing that's physically in your hand and to kind of cherish that experience, that I think is possible to preserve. And again, we're going to have low reading rates. Not everybody's going to do it. But I think the premium reading experience is still going to be with us and it will matter for the people that you are taught to care about it. And again, it's not going to be a huge number of people probably, but there's something

so wonderful about just having a hard book on the beach. like a hard copy book on the beach or on a Saturday that's so good. It's totally different and not just for nostalgic purposes. It's totally different. So let's see, what would I subscribe to if my job didn't require it? It's kind of hard to disentangle those things for me. I have an Apple News subscription, which I like because it gives me the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, which I don't read all of the time, Atlantic, which I don't read all of the time, but it's, you know, probably I'm reading from each, like, around a dozen articles a month, some for work, some for pleasure. The New Yorker is in that subscription as well. I used to have a New Yorker subscription, but was getting less impressed

with the quality, to be honest. I had an experience where the New Yorker, I think, published something about the Federalist. And it was, like, in media, the New Yorker's fact-checking division is legendary. It is supposed to be. unimpeachable, the industry standard. And they got several things just outright incorrect in that article. I was like, you've lost me. You've lost me. I think I had unsubscribe before that. But also the quality of the magazine itself was unimpressive. I do read a decent bit of articles there and occasionally we'll appreciate the quality of the writing. I subscribe to first things and I would definitely have a first thing subscription just for spiritual reasons.

Man, I subscribe to a lot of things. You don't want to look at my subscription list. You really don't want to look at my subscription list. But I would encourage people to look at if there's a magazine that they could get maybe new criterion or first things or I used to read hard copies of Jacobin. I unsubscribe from Jacobin recently too. It was expensive, but that sometimes hurts me because I want to read an article for work purposes. So anyway, they put out a really premium product.

And even if you don't agree with it, I would encourage people to sit with a hard copy of a magazine every once in a while just to think through a difficult issue. Maybe it's like a death penalty piece in the Atlantic. But to think through it without scrolling, there can be something really great about that. Let's see. This is from Rodney, who recommends Bill Whittle as a guest on the podcast and says he did communism for dummies and has done several programs for The Daily Wire. I feel like I remember Bill Whittle from Red Eye back in the day, if I'm remembering correctly. Thanks, Rodney. I haven't kept up with them, but I appreciate that.

This is from Abe, who says, great discussion of R. Day this week. I'm a big Michael Malice fan, too, by the way. all of it is rather absurd and tragic and kind of predictable, but honestly, after all that, does it really rise to the level of killing oneself? It seems like someone so steeped in a life of lies to this level and for this long would have had themselves mentally prepared to face accountability at some point. Well, I guess I'll just, this is a long email. I'll pause right there and say, it seems to me that Jason Arde was deeply mentally ill. And so in a case like that, it's impossible for somebody who's not in the throes of that mental illness.

to rationalize, right, at all. And, you know, please, if you ever find yourself in that mindset, you need to call someone, please. But it's really impossible to rationalize from the outside. So I don't know that it was, there's a way to rationalize what Ardei did because my strong impression based on digging into his career is that he was not well. Let's see. What else we got here? Oh yeah, this is a long email.

But yeah, Abe goes on to say, who was truly a victim of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes, I agree with that. Totally agree. Let's see. Hank says, Annes and Rachel were spot on last night on the futility of calling everything the left proposes socialism. It solves nothing and convinces no one. This is kind of what Sean's point was in that article. It's similar to how leftists try to claim everything good that government does is socialism.

You like roads and sewer services. That's socialism is their talking point when it's actually just good. government. I've been covering local politics for a quarter century and I've yet to see public works employees repave a road, install a park's playground, or repair a library building. The legislative body takes in bids and lets private companies do the work. That's capitalism. Yeah, that's funny. Let's see. What else do we have? I do agree with Annes and Rachel on that, though. I think, you know, if you're calling, this has genuinely been happening and this is not a straw man. It's actually happening where Rachel gets it especially hard because she's out there.

They're taking so many slings and arrows on social media. But, you know, we'll say something about the $20 burrito and be denounced as a socialist. Now, you can make an argument that Trump has been disappointing from a free market perspective. But this is the administration, let us not forget, that cut more federal government employees than I can remember in modern history. I don't know what the precedent for what happened during Doge with some of those cuts is. the administration that passed the one big beautiful bill tax cut. I mean, you can make an argument that it's crony capitalism. Like if you're a hardcore libertarian, you can certainly make the argument that it's crony

capitalism that could give way to full socialism. He's taken all these stakes in private companies, talked about a sovereign wealth fund, and all those types of things. You make some of those arguments about him. But because J.D. Vance wants an industrial policy, that's not socialism to. rebuild the American manufacturing base, that's industrial policy. It's not socialism. Industrial policy at a certain scale can be defined as socialism. But again, if people are trying to solve problems in reasonable increments with maintenance of the free market, it's not socialism.

So yeah, I don't think it's particularly helpful. This is from Donald, who says, just finished Monday's episode and wanted to give my thoughts on something. Annes says, stating that, quote, the left has inflated the definition of genocide by pointing out what's happening in Gaza. Okay, yes, this is the email I was thinking of who we were talking to Katie. Donald says, which she is completely wrong about. The left has seen what Israel has been doing over the past three years and correctly diagnosed it as genocide, unless there's some other word that would describe intentionally killing innocent men, women and children by the tens of thousands, but to my knowledge there isn't. This really bothered me, but I would like to hear your thoughts.

God bless and have a great weekend. Thank you so much for writing in Donald because I have a lot of thoughts on this. Let me pull up the definition of genocide. This is the UN definition of genocide. I've gotten this question a lot before. You know, a lot of it stemming from breaking points coverage and that sort of thing. And I actually think that it's very interesting. This is the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9th, 1948.

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethical, racial, or religious group as such. A, killing members of the group. B, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. C. Deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. D. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. E. Forcibly transferring children of of the group to another group. So again, any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, that is a wildly broad definition of genocide from my perspective, passed in the immediate aftermath of an industrial scale act that fits this definition, which I think was the apex of human, evil, again, at an industrial scale. And in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and in the aftermath of

World War II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, we came together as a global community, literally at the UN, a global community, and set out to ensure we would prevent such horrors from ever being visited upon the world again. is there a way to create a legal framework that almost every country in the world agrees to that does genuinely bind them morally or legally and prevent atrocities on a world historic scale? That's the question we all set out to try and answer. And I'm so glad that we set out to try and answer these questions and create these legal frameworks. Um, obviously it is a utopian fantasy to believe, and I'm not saying actually anybody who set out on this project did believe that this would prevent humans from doing evil on a national scale. Nations are led by men and men are fallen. Um, now if you believe that it would decrease atrocities, that's a different question.

than whether we believe that this would actually really prevent something from happening in the future at global scale. Now, believing it was the best way to decrease atrocities. Again, different question. But I think some of what came out of the World War II framework was unrealistic to the point of being, what's the best way to put it, knowing that certain countries wouldn't abide by X, Y, and Z. Now, again, if you're a country who is signed on to everything, which United States is not, Israel is not, but if you are a country that has, that's a binding agreement. You have signed it. And unless you're democratically elected leaders want to remove themselves, you're bound by it. That's an oath. And I think olds are sacred. If you are, different question. But I don't think all of the guidelines. are as precise that came out of that period, and for very understandable reasons, are as precise as they should be or could be. I think this definition of genocide absolutely fits what happened

in Gaza. So if you abide by the UN definition of genocide, I agree with Donald. I think you basically have to say what happened in Gaza fits this definition. I do not accept this definition. This definition is overly broad as to define almost all warfare as genocide. Why do I say that? Because, and this is a complicated thorny discussion, and I say it with nothing but love and aspirations for peace and Matthew 5 in mind. But if you say any of the following acts, committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethical, racial, religious group, which could include deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. So if you want to, again, deliberately inflict

conditions on a national group that would destroy it in part, then I think you have to say Vladimir Putin is doing genocide in the Dombos. And I do not think it is moral, as awful as what Vladimir Putin is doing in the Dombos, I do not think it is moral to inflate the definition of genocide to the point where you lump these things into the same category. I think it should be a narrow category that is reserved for the worst of the worst. the worst of the worst. Now, people use it differently, though. And so I know people who use this

perfectly consistently. Again, it's a definition I disagree with, but they use it consistently. They'll use it to talk about, for example, what happened to the Uyghurs. They'll use it to talk about what happened in Gaza. But it's not used consistently by everybody. And I do believe that the definition is overly broad. And I think that's part of the disconnect here. So it's a good question. Donald, it's a difficult question, Donald. You know, again, it's, for me, watching what happened in Gaza, what happens in the West Bank, you know, and to see kind of the propaganda battle to determine what was really happening. Sky News did an incredibly thorough, and this is Sky News, by the way.

not a leftist publication, did an incredibly thorough investigation into the civilian deaths in Gaza. And it is abhorrent. It was wildly disproportionate. On the other hand, if you are somebody who, through a sort of historic lens, says, well, it's not all that unusual. You know, this is warfare that you see in the Old Testament. And I am not one of those people, to be clear. But then you say, well, no one's expected to feed their enemies. Nobody's expected to, you know, nobody throughout world history has been expected to feed your enemies. I mean, that is true.

It doesn't mean it's right. So that's where I kind of disagreed the part on that level, because I do think many of the lessons we took after World War II were good ones. But I think some, there was an effort to build this legal framework that as virtuous as it was was not one of 100% correct. So it's a good question. It's a very, very complicated question. And I appreciate you all giving me the kind of flexibility here or the air here, oxygen here, to talk through it, because it's a question I've got before. I remember if I've addressed it on Happy Hour before, but that's where I'm coming from. I think we should minimize, I think a civil country minimizes civilian casualties deliberately. And in fact, does everything to avoid ever harming

a single innocent civilian and stigmatizes any accidental and this is what I think is very unfortunate about how the administration has handled what happened to that girl school in Iran that decision not to own up to that

and apologize for that is sad. As an American, I find it sad. And I think the right in the Cold War mentality which was, I always say, rational paranoia after nuclear technologies developed, got into this mindset that may have made sense then or in certain times it may have made sense, but it does lose some of Matthew 5. It does, as a Christian, I think, call into question the way we look at these conflicts,

some of these conflicts now. the contras, for example. You have this rational paranoia about the spread of communism. And in the name of this existential battle, we allowed some awful stuff to happen and allowed and enabled some awful stuff to happen. And I don't think it was necessary to our ends. So anyway, I just wrote a long essay about that. I hope it's coming out soon. But some thoughts.

Thank you, Donald, for the questions. I could go on about this forever. and I'm just trying to convey that across the board, you know, I was just reading today, actually, about how there was a group of DSA members who resigned to their membership after seeing how the DSA handled the aftermath of October 7th and saying, you know, we're Democratic Socialists and we're horrified that there were DSA members in the streets on October 8th, basically, in a way that seemed to not demand Hamas own its violence. and its atrocities to civilians. And polarization right now is such a drug. It's such a drug. And so I just hope everybody understands.

I'm coming to this from the perspective of wanting nothing, nothing but peace and the protection of civilians. So appreciate it, Donald. Steve says, given your affection for sitcoms, I have a TV show recommendation for you. Ted Lasson has got a lot of elements of standard sitcoms that's centered around where. workplace. Second-rate underdog soccer team as coaches and managers owners, but it's very much a

modern TV show. Not afraid to go into a lot of deeper places emotionally the most sitcoms that ordinarily go. It takes characters into places you wouldn't expect, but it does a lot, does it with a lot of heart and affection for the characters. Virtually nobody is a stick figure by the middle of the second season, but no matter how much they started out that way, Steve, I laughed because I hate Ted Lassow. I actually enjoyed the first season of Ted Lassow and watched it before there was much hype. When the second, second season came out. I thought it devolved into a, frankly, cartoonish, one-dimensional rendering of the story. And it really irritated me. It started to feel, um,

like, cheap. Like, it was doing some, some cheap emotional work, uh, cheap cultural work. the it's like political therapy cultural influences I really didn't like and I did find it to be kind of flat so I'm so sorry I disagree with you on that one

but I could not make it through the I truly could not make it through the second season Howard says oh this is a long one Harry and Megan are going back across the sea good reasons every time I sit here called Duchess I want to gang

let's see what else goes do oh this says I was curious how you select your guests. You seem to know a lot of them personally. I wonder if you just call people yourself and ask them or if you have a team of bookers, select the guests based on the news of the day. Do you run the thing yourself or are you the pretty face of a big machine that manages the operation? I do know a lot of the guests because a lot of them are people I met originally doing Federalist Radio Hour, or just in my job throughout the years. But a lot of it was because Federalist Radio Hour was every single day. And so people who have been on the podcast circuit, a lot of them are authors like Michael Schellenberger.

I think I first had him on from, what was it called, this California book? Because Ben Dominic had him on with his environmental book. Again, if I'm remembering correctly, that's what happened. But Schellenberg is a good example of that. A lot of people I just know through that space, and as in Rachel, are genuinely friends, and as used to live here in D.C., and we all are just in similar kind of social professional circles. So guest selection is kind of just a lot of. on a rolling basis. We get pitched a lot of guests. I tend to, you know, just like to have a good

rotating stable of reliable people who I know are going to make super interesting conversation and who aren't like desperately promoting something. If that makes sense, no offense at all. I have been in the position of desperately promoting things. But Federalist Radio, I was a show where that made more sense for me because it was five days a week and we're only two days a week. So for me, that means I want to be sure that I'm just going to have a good conversation. somebody the audience likes. And so you've probably noticed a lot of like similar people,

a lot of repeat guests. It's kind of like a roster and we're just going to, all right, and as in Rachel, kind of like how Megan does. Like, when's your next time on the show?

Like, what can you do this month? And it fills up really quickly because we're only two days a week. And they do tend to be people I know because I tend to know people that do podcasts because I've been doing a bunch of different podcasts

for a long time. So anyway, I want to also be better about leaving shows open for like just The audience seems to like it when I have the kind of room to do a show based on topics that I'm super into. And so I want to be better about leaving shows open. There's just so many people who want to come on or who I want to have come on that it's hard to leave a show open.

But I want to be better about that too. We do have a great team. You know, we have a producer Kelly, you've heard me mention. And then we have some people who do social. We have people who do production. Some of them are shared between the MK media shows. So, for example, Next Up, Marine Show, there's some overlap and the people who are working behind the scenes on all of that.

Great, great team. Can't say enough good things about them and how grateful we are for them. This is from George, who says, during your Spencer Claven interview, you mentioned that you couldn't stand superhero movies. Can you talk about your dislike of them? Some more Ross Douth that wrote that Hollywood Recycling Comic Book IP was a sign of our decadence.

Yeah, he wrote a whole book about decadence. It was called the Decadent Age, Decadent Society. I'm sorry about that. I think about that whenever pundits discuss these children's movies, like their high culture. At the same time, my nephew loves superhero movies. And at their best, I do think they contain important moral lessons. Maybe it would have been better if you were more into sports, but I've spent some very introable weekends,

taking him to old comic book shops in the movies. Oh, I love that. George says, so is your dislike a superhero movie specific to our current moment and the infantilization of American life? or is it so broad that you think it's better if parents keep children away from comic book movies more generally also the first Toby McGuire Spider-Man movie came out in the early 2000s what do you think it means for American culture that today's young adults

probably can't separate going to the movies from going to see a superhero movie I had not thought about that last part George I wonder if that's true it strikes me as something that could definitely be true I do not know that's a great point I have a like for me it's just personal my I think there are like cultural, I agree totally with Ross's. His book is so good on this, but I agree with Ross's diagnosis that there's an element of of decadence to the IP recycling. I remember talking to

Chris Fenton years ago about Hollywood, why Hollywood had gotten so risk averse. And it's just, you know, they were going for the cash machine, the easy pull. And it stopped working, which is why they moved away from it. But that's where a lot of these recycled IP superhero movies were coming from. And I think a risk-averse Hollywood is really sad because I think that's where American culture has historically taken amazing risks to great effect. But let's see, what else? Basically, a lot of my annoyance at superhero movies is really just me projecting my annoyance with conservative media, because I think conservative media had this problem where

it's culture critics for a long time, where were guys in their 30s and 40s who were obsessed with comic books and superhero movies, who would define conservative. cultural criticism, like it would either be new criterion level reviews of the latest opera, or it would be superheroes. And I thought that was really unhealthy for conservative media. It's why I loved doing commentary at the Federalist on middlebrow or lowbrow things like reality television, because that's what Americans were watching and are watching. And to have nobody doing what I hoped was high-level cultural criticism in that space, trying to analyze it through the lens of Pollya or Tocqueville, those sorts of things.

I thought that was a shame or even just enjoying it for the sake of enjoying it. And I just think because conservative media was heavily male, there was way too much superhero comic book coverage. I don't think I would try to keep my kid away necessarily from superhero movies or comic book movies or comic books themselves. But I also find those fandoms to be aesthetically off-putting and morally probably, probably or culturally problematic. They're so dominated by people who are unhealthily obsessed, and it does retard, I think, their development into adulthood. There's an element of, like,

there's an element of, like, genuine arrested development to a lot of those fandoms. So I'm just exhausted with the genre completely. I've seen a couple, like the original Iron Man I really like. I thought that was a great film. And it was very kind of timely. But I'm not, like, opposed to the genre as a whole. I'm just exhausted. Let's see. This is another one from Abe. He said like the Schellenberger interview. He says he used to spend a lot of time on Lucian.

She was the mother of Jonah, instrumental in helping Linda Tripp, exposed Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Yeah, I think Lucien is depicted in the Ryan Murphy impeachment series. I loved. I have a lot of thoughts on Ryan Murphy, controversial thoughts probably, but I really loved the impeachment. He's doing an Eileen Warnos with Sarah Paulson. That's coming. I just saw this today. but I loved his impeachment and I asked Anne Coulter about it once and

and Coulter really liked the Colby Smothers the Colby's mother's portrayal of her so I think Lucienne is a character in that if I'm remembering correctly anyway thanks for the email let's see a couple more here this one is from Sarah who says was listening to your money show with the gals who I love and I thought by the way in the thought occurred to me that one of the most pernicious aspects of feminism is the elevation of academic credentialism in the context of career importance in most middle class families going to college immediately falling in high school as a given. Once a college, a girl is urged to choose a major that will lead to a career. Once the degree is obtained, it's expected that she will work within that field in order to

maintain the credibility of her credential. A better model for young women to take advantage of their most healthy years from a fertility perspective is to get married and have children young and pursue higher education in the credentials that accompany that when her children are older, there are many years in a woman's life where she can pursue a career, there are relatively very few that she can healthily have two babies. Love your point, Sarah. Fantastic, well said. That's very true. It gets this debate of whether you can have it all or whether you can just not have it all at once, but most women say they want marriage and children, and we know that those things will be most fulfilling to most women. That will be the thing that while you're at your end of your life,

you're glad you prioritizing, glad you did. On average, of course. And I think what that means is women should be encouraged to pursue lives that make that most possible. And I think you're right. You know, I think that does involve destigmatizing marriage in your early to mid-20s. You don't have to rush into it. I'm not saying that. But you're destigmatizing that, make in normalizing. that, which I think is happening. And yeah, understanding that you'll probably appreciate having kids in that time frame as well, because you have the most energy by the time your kids are grown, you'll have the most energy to raise your kids and to have healthy pregnancies, healthy babies, and to be active with them. And I'm saying that, by the way, somebody who's 33. So I'm not saying

this is for everybody. But I think for most women, that will probably be the most fulfilling option. And most women say that they prefer flex work or work from home or I'm sorry, flex work or being fully stay-at-home moms. And again, we should destigmatize that, normalize that, especially post-COVID. There's so many different career paths that are available. So I think that has a great point, sir, and well said. And I actually am kind of hopeful on that note. This is from Andrew on Instagram who says, hey, Emily, just wanted to throw a question at you in regards to the woke 1.0 being a little crazy from AOC. I feel like one perspective. that hasn't been commented on.

And I'm curious what you think, given the modern political environment, is that this would show she doesn't have a quote-unquote steady hand that voters look for in a president. Since she can't stand by one of her core positions that vaulted her into power, what do you think? Should we show less grace on an issue if this is fundamental to an elected officials rise? Or should we allow grace? And I just listened to a call from no labels,

and they say drop-site news is perpetuating, aligning themselves with the red-green alliance. So be careful out there with your co-hosts. kidding. A lot there. Let's see. I do think it's a problem politically for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, yes, to have leaned so hard into one thing and then to try and brush it off. That's definitely an issue for her. No question about it.

Because, yeah, it makes you look flaky. Totally makes you look flaky. That means, but that said, I also think people want honesty. and if you change your position, people are relatively forgiving if you explain why you've changed your position. And that comes across as authentic and not opportunistic. The problem that I think you're picking up on with AOC is how she tried to laughingly brush off Woke 1.0. Because that makes her look flaky and, you know, yes, flaky, unprincipled and, you know, obviously it's a problem because woke one was upsetting to many

Americans and Democratic voters ultimately as well. So they have real problems with it and they're not okay with it being kind of casually brushed off by somebody who was pretty important to that movement. So, yeah, it's politically a big issue. I think if she honestly grappled with it, and maybe did a full sit down to talk about what she really thinks and why she changed her mind, that would be helpful. But I think the problem is she hasn't really changed her mind. I think she's seen the political benefits and has learned the political benefits from Bernie Sanders. Again, they went on their fighting oligarchy tour and Bernie really clearly was trying to mentor her towards this materialist democratic socialism and not an identitarian democratic socialism. And, you know,

we could probably on a deeper level talk about how identitarianism is also kind of materialist and materialism cannot lead itself than the identitarianism for the same reasons. But anyway, that's to say there's a distinction. Like Bernie rejects identitarianism, or he tries to. And I think that's why he is intentionally trying to mentor her. I think she has learned that it's politically toxic to get caught up in identitarianism. And that's what she means when she says it was important to have that conversation about policing. But she needs to do a way better job. job for this not to have negative political consequences to explain why she changed your mind and if she changed your mind. I do think people forgive policy changes and other changes, you know,

more like attitude shifts if you can explain it. And I think right now in a democratized media, it's easier than ever to make those explanations. Some people might never believe it was they see her as opportunistic and cynical. But I think she could neutralize. some of the problems by being honest. I just don't think she can't because I don't think she knows where she stands on that. Anyway, what an edifying edition of Happy Hour. Thank you, everybody, for your great emails, as always. Appreciate them. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. A reminder, subscribe on YouTube. I'm hoping to do another standalone video soon, maybe over the weekend. If there's breaking news, appreciate it, everyone. Again, have a great weekend. God bless. Thanks again.