After Party with Emily Jashinsky - “Happy Hour”: Purging Controversial People, the Importance of Forgiveness, and European vs American Integration: Emily Answers YOUR Questions

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

On this edition of “Happy Hour,” Emily Jashinsky takes on a series of thoughtful and challenging questions about our culture right now. She addresses how we should deal with people like Nick Fuentes vs. maintaining a discourse with those on the left who also have extreme views. Emily also discusses the importance of forgiveness, cancel culture, thoughts on Batya Ungar-Sargon saying she doesn’t buy into the narrative of rampant antisemitism in America, how integration is different in the U.S. vs. Europe, and more.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome, everyone to a special holiday edition of Happy Hour, which in and of itself is a special edition of After Party that we do here, of course, every Friday drops around 5 p.m. just in time for you to open that Friday beer or make that Friday cocktail. Love it. Hope that. Well, actually now, I'm pre-recording this, but for you, it's December 26th. It is the day after, Christmas, and you might be cocktailed out. I don't know. If you're like me, sometimes it's too much. Here in D.C., over the first two weeks of December, in particular, I can't tell you how many, especially conservative groups, are just having open bars or whatever it is. It's just the holiday season. Your friends are doing it. But it's especially work events, you know, different things you

just have to go to because if you're a journalist, your sources are there. You've got to be able to talk to them, see them, put a face to a name, and there's no better time than Christmas to do it because ever it is at all of these events. And so by the time Christmas actually rolls around, I'm like, I have actually eaten too much food and had too much to drink. So that's my perspective. Maybe that's what you're experiencing yourself on December 26. I do always feel like that's the case. But anyway, it's almost an election year. So all of the excitement. of 2026 is we are right on the cusp of it, right on the cusp of it. So as you know, during Happy Hour, I take your great questions that you send into Emily at devilmaycaremedia.com

live. I have not read these before. Same with the questions that are coming from the after party Emily Instagram. Those are sent my way by producer Kelly. And I haven't seen them. They get to my inbox. I just flagged them because I think it's more entertaining to do it live as one. one great cable anchor once said. So let's do it live. Here's a question from Cruz sent to Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. How should we think about Nick Fuentes and whether he belongs in our discourse? He says things that are wrong, but on the other hand, the left supports the murder of unborn children. To me, it does not make sense to exclude people like him while maintaining a discourse with people on the left as their views are more dangerous. Just what your thoughts

on that love the show thank you well thank you cruz appreciate it this is a meaty question wow and it's a question that forces a deep ethical dilemma in a deep ethical question actually in and of itself right which is to the left some of them do not believe that a life in the womb is a life. Now, let me tell you a little bit about how I came to the conclusion that it is indeed a human life. By learning that it is a human life, the science of it, you just ask a couple of questions. You say, okay, so is it alive? And is it human? You put those two together. Even Christopher Hitchens, and actually Naomi Wolf, when Naomi Wolf was still a left feminist in the 1990s, wrote about this for oh man which which publication was it um man i want to say it was um okay well i'll i'll look it up

instead of just um you know it was the new republic i'm pretty sure it was actually the new republic uh wrote about how the left should actually acknowledge that if they support abortion uh they support ending a human life and just argue the fact, and this is how Naomi Wolf put it, that they believe it's okay to take that human life because they believe more

in the autonomy of the woman than the government being able to overrule the autonomy of the woman, both morally, legally, politically, all of that. Hitchens just said this, is it a human life? You're ending a human life.

And so when you ask those two questions, is it human and is it alive, I think it becomes tough. But the reason that I'm going through all of this is that I really believe Cruz that because I talk to a lot of people on the left. They actually do not believe that it's a human life. They do not believe that the life, I'm going to continue to say life in the womb, is alive. They use the clump of cells phrase all of the time, right?

Because it's so, so, so, so teeny, tiny. that clump of cells, which, by the way, not exactly factually incompatible with also being a human life, but they use clump of cells as sort of the shorthand. They talk about the fetus. They use language that is, I think, intentionally dehumanizing because people don't believe it's a human life. And I think a lot of people have not been exposed to the life science that has made many people anti-abortion. So the reason that I personally, quote, maintain a discourse with people on the left to Cruz this point, I mean, I would maintain a discourse with people, my position on this, I talk a lot about the days when Oprah and Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld, I meant Jerry Springer, Jerry Seinfeld, maybe I was thinking of the soup Nazi, but Oprah and Jerry Springer would have

like Nazis, KKK people on the show, and just they would look so foolish instead. because they would be confronted with their idiocies. I just believe in never, never stopping the conversation, no matter how bad the other person is, because I think conversation makes their idiocy look idiotic. I just believe in the power of the truth. And outside of the truth, there's nothing that you can, you can't control other people. You can be persuasive. And I think there's nothing more persuasive than actually hearing from people. Now, that doesn't mean I think you have to constantly be putting them on the air. People should be treated in proportion with their importance in the discourse, right?

And I think it's actually one of the things that probably Springer, not Seinfeld, but Springer did wrong, was over-emphasizing how many of these people were out there because it really was a handful of freaks. And I think it still is a handful of freaks. But that's one of the reasons that I don't equate literal, Nazis with, and people who believe in intentional slaughter of others based on, based on anything, of course, but based on characteristics that they can't control. So just because there are a lot of people who are coming at this from that perspective. And I'm basically as anti-abortion as anyone,

I mean, maybe not literally anyone. I know a lot of people. I know a lot of of real hardcore activists who do some amazing work. And of course, maybe some work on the fringes that I disagree with. But, you know, people who do absolutely amazing work. But, you know, that's even as someone who's pretty, pretty anti-abortion, which, by the way, I'll say pro-life or anti-abortion because I think both are accurate. I have no problem being called anti-abortion. Obviously, there's a double standard in the media, but I personally have no problem being called that. So back to the flintas of it all, that was my way of saying, I give some grace to people on the left on this who have been taught the clump of cells narrative. And that has come from, you know, in many cases, the upper echelons of our institutions.

And it's really, you know, it's difficult. And there are a lot of, by the way, horror stories. of, you know, cases of rape and incest, obviously, that I know move people. Of course they do. And there are a lot of people who move people into the pro-life camp, too. A lot of stories who move people in the pro-life camp, too, especially this myth of pristone stuff. All that is, again, my long way of saying, I give people a lot of grace on this and on many

different things. and with Flentes, this has roiled the right since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It goes back to before Charlie Kirk's assassination. Actually, it goes back to, you know, early in Charlie's career when Groypers would follow him around and try to, you know, it's doing two things. One, it's trying to convince people that the, let's say, establishment conservative movement, not the establishment Republican Party, but the kind of conservative movement organizations that have been around since the Reagan days and all of that

are too weak, too moderate, et cetera, because there are some people at those organizations who have or continue to have weak and moderate positions. So it exploits that, right? it exploits that among people who, for example, like the H-1B conversation is a real gateway for others, because if you're defending the H-1V program, yes, of course, you're defending a program that in some cases deprives Americans of job opportunities that end up going to, maybe in some cases highly qualified foreign workers, but foreign workers nonetheless, and that creates a talent pipeline problem, well-meaning people on the right disagree on the H-1B issue. that's a gateway. That's why it's a gateway for Fuentes and others to something much darker because there are still people in the kind of conservative establishment who will act like you're ridiculous for questioning the H-1B program or that you're a nativist or whatever. They'll call you names for questioning the H-1B program. And that gives an opening for the

phoentes of the world. So I don't, like the question Cruz asked is how should we think about Fuentes and whether he belongs in our discourse. I just don't think anyone gets to decide who belongs in the discourse. I think if, you know, let's say I ran something like CPAC, the conservative political action conference or say I ran a conservative magazine. You know, I would say that's not a he's not a conservative voice. So it's not like it would make sense. I mean, but then again, I would publish liberals in conservative magazines, whatever, well-intentioned liberals, who I think are coming from a good place and believe in, you know, full quality of, based on my faith, right? There is no Jew or Greek. Yeah, like, fine. But I don't think Fentos really fits that criteria.

So I think it's fine to debate people who disagree with that. And I don't believe in, like, the performative six degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game of like I don't believe in that method of being like well if you have ever said something nice about someone who interviewed Fuentes you must now condemn Fentes and cut off your ties to this person like I hate that stuff I hate hate hate that stuff I think it turns people off I think you shouldn't be sneaky and and try to like be careful about what you say. You should say what you think, of course. You know, you shouldn't be like trying to creep around and play footsie with neo-Nazism, of course. But I also don't think that there's anything productive about giving in to the pressures

to just like performatively condemn Nick Fuentes. If you have nothing to do with Nick Fuentes, as you're not talking about him. It's just all so counterproductive. Talk about the issue, debate the issue, do it in great detail and great substance. And ask salient questions. That's what wins the battle. You know, there are a couple of people I thought did a good job of that.

I thought Patrick Bet David did a very good job of that. I thought Glenn Greenwald did a good job of that when they, when they had their discussions with Flintas, which is bring up specific points, ask them, don't do it, like, no offense, but Pierce Morgan sometimes does these, he's just trained in the old cable news model and does these performative, theatrical cable segments.

And I think it's better than not talking about some of this stuff, but I also think it's better to just drill down, you know, rationally, because you end up finding, I think, in the case of, you know, especially, there was this point in the middle of Tucker Carlson's conversation with Flintes that I thought got totally overlooked, where Tucker started questioning him on blood guilt. And Flentes tried to act like he doesn't believe in that, though he talks as though he does believe in that all of time. And that's a real problem. So on the one hand, I don't think, I think all. all of us are now susceptible, every American, in this low institutional trust place. You know, I think Rod Dreher, for example, is someone who I believe has overstated the Groyper problem. And Rod and I have talked publicly about that. But Rod has been writing a very, very interesting series on his substack, just in his daily diary, about parallels between America and 2025 and soon to be 2026 and Weimar, Germany. And how decadence can

lead to scapegoating. Decadence and decadence can lead to misery and scapegoating and how people sort of easily get primed to fall into identity-based scapegoating. And I do think that's something that we should always be cautious about it, whether it's the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s. I think we should always be on high alert for that. So that's been a very interesting, he's been commending cabaret to people as a kind of current exploration of some of those themes. And I do find that argument to be very interesting. I just don't think a lot of people are being productive. I'm not talking about Rod here, but a lot of people are being productive in you're turning this into, man, this is like the longest answer I think I've ever given to a question on happy hour.

But it's one of those that you have to kind of do justice to. So I hope you guys don't mind me kind of going on about this. I just think there's been way too much focus on it, first of all. So, first of all, I think people are just talking about it too much and are too obsessed with either purging him. I don't think he considers himself conservative, by the way. I think he just considers himself Trump-adjacent, America first. And so I don't think you have to purge someone

who doesn't even consider themselves part of the conservative movement. But anyway, all that is to say, I think it's been, over-discussed to its disproportionate to its actual importance. I do think the issue is important. I don't think it's as important as some of these food fights have made it out to be. I think the average Americans' daily life should be the focus of anybody who's engaged in politics, improving the average American's daily life, especially if you're in, it should be the focus of anyone who's engaged in the act of politics or is engaged in political,

in the political arena. And I don't think the focus on this has been proportionate to its importance to the average Americans' daily life. So I think that's been a problem. I think it's been cynically weaponized by people who don't recognize their own bad impulses, their own tribal impulses. And, you know, I'm more on the side of people who are against suppressing speech and against purging. I don't think Fuentes is somebody who needs to be purged because I don't think he belongs.

I don't think he's in the space to purge from. But I think, sure, he should be argued against. Absolutely. I think he should be argued against. And I think he's been too cute by half in how he presents what he really believes. So there's just been a lot of – and a lot of the people, by the way, who are demanding purges and condemnations aren't really paying attention to the people who they demand those purges. and condomations from who have actually said all kinds of stuff disagreeing with Fuentes and flinticism. And same thing goes for Candace and Candacism. So that's my very long answer to your

excellent question, Cruz. Thank you so much for sending it in. Here is a nice note. This is from Jenna, who says, thank you for the sentiment you shared on Megan's show today regarding the importance of forgiveness. And Jenna says she's been reacquainting herself with faith. Oh, this is a really, really interesting email. It talks about forgiveness being important, present in her life lately because she says it's not just about the other party. It also forces us to analyze our own accountability,

which then introduces humility. and grace. Then adds in parentheses, I sound like, Kevin Neeland and Happy Gilmore. It's circular. All good things. Oh, my gosh, Jenna. What a great email. The substance of it is fascinating and rich, and the references are rich. So just 10 out of 10 as far as emails to the Emily at double my care media.com account go. I really appreciate that, Jenna, because it's important. I mean, this is something that reminds me of, again, like it's sort of a truism about prayer. It's not just about, or reading scripture, actually, too. It's not just about you kind of doing your duty. It actually also changes you. That's the important thing. That's one of the important things

about it. And that's so true about forgiveness. And I hadn't thought about it exactly in those words. But when you forgive, it forces your humility because it's downstream of treating others the way that you want to be treated, right? When you make a mistake, you want to be forgiven. And when you forgive others, you are forced to kind of confront that, right, that you're forced to have mercy as Christ had mercy on us. And that's part of the reason cancel culture was so disturbing, by the way, is this idea that in the court of public opinion,

we had to treat people just like we do in the court of law. And that's, you know, lock them up and throw away the key for, you know, a matter of years or whatever. And there are some people, I think, by the way, you really deserve to sort of take time away from the business so that, like, a Louis C.K., who I actually got to see I Love You Daddy while he was being canceled. And it was a really brilliant movie. genuinely, it was getting panned by the critics who had had early access. to it, but it was actually a very provocative and interesting film. That, like, Louis C.K. should absolutely have hung his head in shame and gotten out of the business for a while so that he wasn't tempted to treat other women in the disgusting way that he treated women during that time period. So sometimes it's reasonable, but other times it's like you're demanding

total ostracization for people who you think. made a minor mistake in saying something you disagreed with or, you know, making a joke that maybe was okay 20 years ago, but it's not okay now, and they're, you know, 80 years old, those sorts of things. I think that was really a problem with cancel culture because it exposed the extent to which people lacked humility. They lacked humility. They didn't extend the grace that they wanted to be extended to themselves to others. So this is a really, I think this is a really important, a really important point, Jenna, that I hadn't quite thought about in that same way recently, at least, because that is, and Jenna says, you know, took her a while to connect

those dots. So true. Yeah, that's so true. And to remember, we are all fallen. And And that's, especially in this algorithmic social media age, I always, I'm like a broken record on this, I know, but the algorithm is just constantly forcing us, or it's incentivizing us like a casino game. It's incentivizing us, A, to talk, to say anything, and then B, to have what we say be strongly emotional in one direction or the other, right? It does not incentivize you to say, I don't know, maybe it's this, maybe it's that. because the algorithm isn't interested in that. It's interested in strong emotion because that's what makes people stay longer on the app. That's how you maximize ad dollars. That's how you maximize screen time, whether it's X or Instagram or TikTok.

That's exactly what the deal is. And so because of that, we are being programmed, not even just when we're online, but IRL to react with really, really strong emotion to anything at all. and anything new under the sun and to react, period. Sometimes you just don't have to say anything. And the fact that we now are constantly tempted to say when normally we wouldn't even have anything to say

and then the format with which we expressed that is on social media in a way that we're incentivized to package it with strong emotion, that is unhealthy. That is unhealthy. And so this is one of those things that strong emotion, What is not a strong emotion? Humility, grace, mercy, understanding. I mean, they require strength, of course, but they're not full-throated condemnations or full-throated exonerations, right? They're the gray area. And I think that's why we're just seeing so much less forgiveness in our culture now. So really, really great, no, Jenna. I appreciate it. And I think I'm going to be thinking about this in the days to come. So thank you for the message. Here we have a,

message from Hank. Ooh, this is an interesting one. Subject line, Batya's naive. Hank says, E.J., I love Batya, but I think she's overly optimistic about Muslim assimilation. Things may be fine in her Brooklyn neighborhood now, but Muslims in America make up only about 1.5% of the population. What happens when they're 8% to 10% like in France or 6% as in England, Germany? And France, Hank says, Will we see the kind of European conflict that Roger talked about on your show recently when Muslims start to dominate locations and goes on to say, I'm not as optimistic as Batya. I hope I'm wrong. This is a really interesting email as well. All due respect to Batya, by the way, because Batya made a point that I generally agree with. And it was a brave point for her to make. By the way, she had just come from the Vice President's Christmas Party. I'm sorry, Christmas, the Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's Christmas Party. The Vice President's, the Vice President's President's Hanukkah party and was having a wonderful cocktail. I was not having a cocktail that night and I was jealous the entire time, but I'd just been so burned out by all these thing

Christmas parties and holiday parties. Batya said the she does not buy into this narrative of rampant American anti-Semitism because the American people are not like that. The American people are fundamentally decent, the American people are not like Europeans. And part of that is because, as we were discussing, the history of America is so different from many of those other countries, where we were founded, and much more recently, by people from all different parts of the world who, you know, and even just all different parts of Western Europe, who considered themselves to be very different at the time that they came over to the United States, blending together. in the frontier in these sort of bustling cities with close proximity but also in these difficult

frontier lifestyles where it was like every man for himself everyone was fending for themselves and that was a very interesting cauldron that created this like version in the United States of America, this version of a Western Republican society. So that I find a very compelling because as we were just talking about in response to Cruz's question, I actually do really think there is a moral panic about anti-Semitism that overstates the problem. I also agree with Roderer. You have to be careful not to fuel anything to stoke it, right, in ways that, you know, you should say, things that are true. You should not censor yourself. You should not, for example, fail to talk about the fact that there was discrimination against white men in the workforce just because it's going

to, you know, give the white nationalists a W. That's not the right way to approach this. You should still say things that are true, but you should say them in proportion to their importance to people's lives and to the broader policy discourse. And I think this is a mistake that the left made was wildly inflating the problem of racism in the daily lives of the American people in like 2011, 2012. And it erased, essentially it erased so much progress, the way that you were hearing prominent liberals talk about racism from 2010 to 2024, were essentially via critical race theory and Black Lives Matter and a lot of white liberals, by the way. One of the wildest things I saw in 2020 is I was going down by the White

House many days in that summer because there was always so much protest activity happening and I could walk pretty easily from where I lived at the time. I saw a white woman in Lulu Lemon leggings at like 1 p.m. on a Tuesday or something shouting in the face of a. a black female cop. Getting like the spittle in the face of a black female cop or maybe not because I think she was wearing a mask at the time outside, of course. It was like, what in the world is going through your mind right now? You could Google it.

I took a video of it. So if you Google it, I think it was in like the Daily Mail and I put it in the Federalist at the time. And it's just the craziest video in the world. I couldn't believe it. I was seeing as it was happening. I mean, I could believe it, but I couldn't believe it. And it was like, you're the anti-racist crusader?

What are you thinking? What are you talking about? So you're yelling at this woman for being racist? Like, it stemmed from this big, in order to do that, you had to inflate the definitions of these terms, right? Like, you had to say that people who did not believe in any, like, racial hierarchy were racist. And in order to do that, you had to define people who you believed, believed things that led, led to. to disparate outcomes, you had to say that that was, those were people who had racism in their hearts because you believe some of their ideas led to disparate outcomes. That's how they did it with

racism and bigotry, et cetera. And I think that's a really, really, really, really, really dangerous, dangerous way or a dangerous game to play. And I think we saw exactly why that was such a dangerous game to play over the course of what like the last 10 years or so uh all that is to say i think it's very brave for botty to say that because there are a lot of people um you know that she agrees with on many issues who are who are acting as though the right has this massive anti-semitism problem like nick flintus is much more representative of young conservatives than he really is and i spent a lot of time with young conservatives by the way and that's part of what Rod and I were publicly disagreeing on.

So that point to me was just very, I think, brave and accurate from Bata. And I think maybe I agree with Hank. I don't know. I haven't talked about you at length about this. And I will be curious to talk to her in the future about it because I'm in the camp of people who really do see there being a big, I don't know, it feels very obvious to me, a big. a big compatibility problem with the American Republic and Western liberal, classical liberalism, and immigration from heavily Islamic countries or countries where their government is actually has emerged with their faith. I think there are some obvious compatibility issues that are going to be difficult if you have

especially very rapid integration. And Baja was saying it hasn't quite been like that in the United States. I think if you look at Minneapolis, we look at Deerborn, there have clearly been some rapid integration problems. But I think Batcha is probably correct that it hasn't happened nationwide on the scale, as Hank mentions. It's happened in some of those European countries. But listen, like in Somalia, don't tell me that it isn't, that people in Somalia who have a 99% female genital mutilation rate among women don't see that as connected to their faith. Who am I the Western liberal to tell them that's not connected to their faith? I mean, that's a thing that Islamic reformers will have to do, right? that's the rest of us can say it's wrong. I can't say it's wrong because of what's in their

sacred texts, right? So that's on that that's a nobody's going to listen to me, right? Like if you are a Muslim who believes that your faith mandates a 99% rate of female general immunization in the country that you live in, there's nothing that I can do about that. And the That's a, obviously that's a problem. It's obviously a problem. It's not to say, it's not like that in every Muslim country, of course. But when you have these, like, certain patterns, then yes, of course, they're going to be difficult integration problems. So I think, Hank, you're sort of onto something where if the scale increases, I think both are correct here.

If the scale increases, the scope and scale increases really quickly, then we're going to see more and more problems. Yeah, I expect actually to see more and more problems in the future. I hope I'm wrong too. But yeah, I think that's, it's, man, what that's doing in Western Europe, you know, just over the last year plus working with unheard and at unheard, for about a year. That was, you know, it's a European publication, or I should say it's based in London. So they cover a lot of European issues all the time, and especially the UK. And you just

see, I mean, the Pakistani gangs, don't tell me that that cultural import wasn't in some ways stemming from a, or don't tell me that that wasn't stemming from a cultural. predisposition and the way a culture views women. And I think we should just be able to say those things. And I do think part of the integration problem is when you have really high concentrations that develop really quickly. And we should be able to talk about this without someone impugning your motives because we're not talking about somebody's, by the way, people are free to say all of the problems with Christianity. Christians put up with that. a lot in the United States.

And it's just obviously difficult for the sake of political correctness to not have these conversations. I mean, that will be the problem. If we can't have the conversation and if it happens too quickly, I think that will be the problem. That's what Europeans experience in the last couple of years. So I'm going to say the rest of everyone's great questions for next week's edition because I'm pre-recording here on December 9th.

19th. So next week's edition of Happy Hour will still be a mix of questions that were sent in the first couple weeks of December along with some of that were sent in that last week before Christmas. And I look forward to talking to you guys from the past in the new year. So make sure you tune in next week because I still have a lot of questions to get through. And if they're anything like this week's questions, they're going to be a lot of fun. So Emily at double my caretmedia.com, you shoot me an email there. You can shoot us questions on the at after party, Emily, Instagram, there will be another new one. I won't record that a new one until the week of the fifth. So anything that you send in the next couple of weeks,

probably won't see until then. So thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. And we'll be back here next week with another happy hour.