After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Is Jimmy Kimmel OUT? Elaine Chao Must Explain, Lindsay Clancy Jurors TRASH Holdout, & 1 Year After Charlie

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Semafor Media Editor and “Mixed Signals” podcast co-host Max Tani to break down conflicting reports about Jimmy Kimmel’s future at ABC and what they reveal about the rapidly changing late-night landscape. Max also details his exclusive reporting on Crooked Ideas’ effort to build creator-first programming for younger audiences as Democrats continue to play catch-up to the right in the new media space. Emily then examines explosive new reporting about Elaine Chao’s alleged ties to Chinese government and CCP-linked organizations and reacts to Lindsay Clancy jurors publicly criticizing the lone holdout in her trial. She also weighs in on the conservative civil war over Vice President Vance’s stay-at-home parent proposal and highlights new FIRE data showing some encouraging signs for free speech on college campuses one year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Emily closes out the show with viewer reaction to her recent segment on Hasan Piker, some additional thoughts on Piker’s controversial 9/11 comments, and flags new reporting raising questions about what U.S. and Israeli officials may have known ahead of the October 7 attacks. SelectQuote: Compare top‑rated life insurance options. Visit https://SelectQuote.com/emily to get the right coverage at the right price. PreBorn: Dial #250 and say “BABY” or visit https://Preborn.com/EMILY  Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/afterparty  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Party, everyone. Our guest tonight is Max Tanny of Semaphore, and we're going to dig into what could be a huge shakeup in late night television. Is Jimmy Kimmel out? Is the network ending the contract? Is Kimmel ending the contract? There's conflicting media reports that Max is going to help us parse. He also had a big scoop this week about Democrats trying to create their own Nick Shirley. Literally, that is the report, trying to create their own Nick Shirley via Crooked Media, you might know that as part of the Pod Save America extended universe. Man, MSNBC, I'm sorry, MSN now, also is offering a new direct-to-consumer app that will include guided meditations. So much to discuss with Max, I'm going to go through new videos where the jurors, or just a handful of the jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial, actually talk to reporters on camera, local news and their comments, if you haven't seen them yet, are shocking. already seen them, I hope we'll add some more context to the conversation as well.

Elaine Chao communist agent, question mark. I'm emphasizing the question mark for a reason, because Elaine Chao doesn't seem to want to explain. That's Mitch McConnell's wife, by the way, a new Daily Caller News Foundation report finding it appears as though Elaine Chao had been appointed by CCP officials to quote multiple government positions, many of which partially overlapped with her two U.S. cabinet posts. That was according to translated Chinese government and state media documents and reports that the Daily Caller News Foundation got its hands on.

I did some original reporting looking to try and get comments from people on this story. Spoil alert. I came up empty. I came up almost completely empty. I'll walk you through some of the reporting on why it matters. And the Great Barito debate has been replaced now

with the great stay-at-home mom debate. We have yet another flashpoint that is absolutely roiling, at least the online right. It's not just the online right. This has made its way into actual policy conversations in the White House and in the conservative media as well. But this is a new proposal for stay-at-home mom subsidies. The language here will be interesting. We'll dive into it. And I think there's a little bit of good news out of a new report from the Foundation for Independent Rights and Expression Fire. We've had Greg Lukianoff on this show before as we approach tragically the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. So as I said, there's a lot to get to

on today's show. Let's start with Max Tanny. Before I toss to Max, though, subscribe. If you're not subscribed, I'm going to forget to tell you. So please subscribe so you have to stop relying on me to remind people to subscribe because I will forget. It helps us so much. We really appreciate it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast where we are three days a week and subscribe on YouTube as well. comments, likes, those are all very helpful. Without further ado, quick break, then Max Taney. Life insurance, we all know we need it, but we keep putting it off because maybe it feels complicated, it feels expensive, or just like something that can wait. Stop waiting. Take care of it today with Select Quote. In just 15 minutes high quality coverage can be secured to fit any life

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for you for less at selectquote.com slash Emily. Go to selectquote.com slash Emily today to get started. When we may be looking at another major late night show casualty to help us understand what's actually going on, Max Taney of Semaphore, where he's the media editor, also co-host of Mix Signals, a great podcast you should check out. Joins us now. Max, thanks for coming back. Emily, it's great to be back.

Let's start with this crazy story about Jimmy Kimmel, which began when page six were, reported yesterday that next season of ABC's late night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, will be the last. Page 6 is told that was their sourcing. Quote, his contract is not getting extended. They attributed that to a source familiar with the situation. The next season begins Tuesday, so it did begin last night. Kimmel did not address this.

They say it would wrap up after 24 years on the air in May 2027. Now, on the other hand, ABC denied the report. So apologies to Matt Damon, Entertainment Weekly reported, but Jimmy Kimmel isn't out of time yet. On Tuesday, page 6 reported, EW says that Kimmel was set to end in 2027 after 24 seasons, citing a source as saying Kimmel's contract wasn't being renewed. But ABC is pushing back against this, quote, inaccurate report. They said, quote, this information is inaccurate that was attributed to an ABC Entertainment spokesperson in a statement to EW. Any reports about the future of the show at this point are purely speculative.

Kimmel, I think this is another bit of relevant context, previously shared that he thought he was going to walk away during the Biden presidency only to continue on. But last year, rather than offering the show's typical three-year renewal, ABC extended Kimmel's contract by just one more year to May 27. Max, do you know anything in addition to the reports that we have on the table? Can you help us parse the sourcing the reports as they came out? What's going on? You know, what I will say here is that obviously it looks like a kind of, you know, page six said, he said type of thing. I'll say this. In my experience, the world of late night hosts, particularly people like Kimmel is really, really, really small. It's not, there are not a lot of people who know the ins and outs of these contracts other than Kimmel's agent and manager. and who is also kind of a famous person in his own right

and manages a number of clients who also keep a very, very small circle. So I haven't heard anything like this, but I do think that it says something really interesting about the state of late night right now, which is that it's true that the contracts are getting shorter and shorter and these shows are just on a shorter leash. Obviously, I think you were referring to it earlier, Colbert's show,

on CBS ended and they essentially didn't replace it with, you know, with anything significant. John Stewart, who returned as the host of the Daily Show, I reported on this a little bit earlier this year. He is on a one-year contract, which is also redoing at a really, like, they're renewing it late and kind of last minute. These shows are really in flux now with the kind of rise of YouTube alternatives and things like that and the decline in traditional ratings. So it wouldn't surprise me if he left, given that his statements in the past and given the fact that the contracts are not nearly as long. And we've seen from some other networks that they want to cut down on the cost of some of these big shows, which have really, really big budgets

and can sometimes lose the networks. FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, just released its free speech college rankings, or its free speech rankings, which also found some data that I think marks a little bit of good news, a little bit of good news. So FIRE found that acceptance of violence among college students falls at 30% of students saying, say, using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases. that number is at 30%. Way too high. Unacceptably high. It is, though, down four points from last year. And over the last year, of course,

Charlie Kirk's assassination has been front and center. And so it feels like there's a lot of bad news right now. It feels like with all of the videos where people celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination on campuses and off-campus. a four point decrease is one that I'll take. It's not an increase and it's not a plateau. It's a decrease. And I think that is actually a testament. I think we would be doing ourselves a disservice on the right to gloss over that change. Even if it feels small, to gloss over that change, I think would be doing a service to, you know, as crazy as the social media conversation is, some of the substantive

discussions that have emerged in the year since Charlie was assassinated. So I did want to pause on that. It is up 10 points from four years ago. That's bad news. The good news is that it's going in a downward direction. Now, actually, they found when it comes to acceptance of shouting down speakers, that was down three points, self-censoring with fellow students. That was down one point.

self-censoring in the classroom, that was also down one point, and low trust in school administration. That was down three points from last year. Now, the question on school administration is students who say it is not likely their school administration would defend a speaker's right to express their views. That went down, meaning fewer students say it is not likely. Or fewer students, let's just put it this way. I don't want to get it to double negatives, which I was just about to do. 24% of students say it is not likely their school administration would defend a speaker's right to express the views. That was 27% last year. So a positive decrease on that point. Now, fire did overall find that there are, and has found, that there continue to be problems across the university system, some of which are new to the Trump administration, but some of which are actually good developments from the Trump administration.

administration, and I'd been meaning to mention on the show or to do a segment on the show about this fire report from last month for weeks, because it's getting totally drowned in the conversation, but it's very interesting. So the Washington Times reported on August 3rd, colleges are purging restrictive speech codes under the Trump administration and removing bias reporting policies that solicited anonymous complaints about microaggressions according to fire. The group flagged a record low 66 schools or 13.2% of all institutions with a red light rating for written policies stifling campus protests, speaking events, and online discussions. That's down 1.5 percentage points from last year and reverses two consecutive years of increases under the Biden administration. So again, to be clear, a lot of work to go.

But Fires 20th annual report awarded a green light, the Times reports, to 76 schools. for placing no limits on First Amendment rights. That's up from 73 last year and marks the second consecutive year of green lights outnumbering reds. That's 10% reds overall. So second consecutive year. Now, this year, 9.8% of public school surveyed earned red lights. That is the first time that share has dropped below 10% in 20 years. It even dropped among private schools.

24.6% of private schools earned red lights, roughly 1 and 4. or at least I should say, let's stick with the public school numbers because I think the private school numbers went down, but I'm not absolutely, I don't have that data from the report in front of me at the moment. Hilariously, the Washington Times reached out to Penn America, the free speech group. Nominally, free speech group, Penn America, about Fires report. And the Penn folks said, we remain concerned that the shuttering of DEI offices on campus on campus. across the country and mounting attacks on programs, including women's and gender studies, American studies, and other ethnic and area studies programs, chill the climate for free expression. You're worried that getting rid of the DEI departments is chilling free expression,

but you didn't have a lot of concern about the DEI departments themselves, chilling free expression. Now, I have not agreed with 100% of the Trump administration's policies on higher education. You've heard me cover here. Genuine free speech controversies. We had Greg on the show not long ago to talk about what the Trump administration is doing wrong and what the Trump administration is doing right about all of this. But the pressure on these schools, institutionally from alumni and then additionally from the administration, to actually, fire, by the way, is good across the board on this. So they're not just, they've been affiliated with conservatives for a long time, but a lot of conservative groups absolutely detest fire for defending people like Mahmoud Khalil. They're as close to the old school ACLU as you can possibly get to the spirit of the ethos of the old school ACLU as you can possibly get.

They're a very reliable source on this. So it's very good news that some pressure is creating a better speech climate. On the other hand, we're starting to see more students, according to Fires report, be targeted. We have seen faculty be targeted. A lot of this goes back to the administration. belief that certain positions on Israel are tantamount to hate speech that are beyond the pale of acceptable speech. And I think some of that is problematic, obviously.

But I also don't want to pretend. For example, one of you wrote in a couple of weeks ago to Happy Hour after Tucker interviewed Greg Bovino and said, you know, the interview was interesting. I listened to Tucker, but Bovino was talking about how the administration has a target on his back, doesn't like him, but they just did a record number of deportations in July. And I actually don't know if that number had come out by the time they recorded it. But the point of the email was basically about context. They always want to have the wins and losses, the progress or devolution in the context of the whole picture. And I think that's totally fair.

And so the whole picture here is complicated, but the speech policies that the schools had, I mean, I've dealt with them firsthand. They're extremely restrictive. They did foster a top-down, a top-down ideological indoctrination and ideological conditioning about what constituted hate speech, what constituted violence. And some of that is still there, obviously, but it's less formalized. in their speech code. Some of it, I'm sure, comes in formally. I know it comes informally from professors and administrators. But DEI departments are being cut. D.E.I. departments were a bastion for this type of censorship. This is good news. And I think the small win, a decrease from 34 to 30% of people who think it's appropriate to use violence to stop a speaker is a small win as well.

And was worth noting because Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck while he was speaking on a college campus asking people who disagreed with him, as he often did to come to the front of the line. And he wanted his quote, best libs. He wanted the school's best libs so that he could debate them in a crowd. It's kind of a proud American tradition. It didn't have to be the picture of calm. It got rowdy. And the cacophony is often a good thing when it comes to speech, when it comes to argument and debate. Theatricality and cacophony are two different things. Cacophony is good. Theatricality can be bad.

He was shot in the neck while he was answering a question about gun violence in a debate. And I think it is entirely appropriate to acknowledge that over the course of the past year, it appears students have become less supportive of using violence to shut down a speaker on their campuses. And that in the big picture,

a lot of these toxic speech policies, policies, which were then, in some cases, mirrored by the Trump administration, language-wise, to shut down anti-Israel speech and what I was uncomfortable with. A lot of those policies are going away. I don't think it's good if they're being replaced by other bad policies. But overall, what fire is measuring is the policies of the school. And so that's a good thing. And it's well worth right.

And in more broadly, new media space, saying that seems to me really significant. if Crooked is trying to compete with Nick Shirley. That's pretty interesting. And I'm curious as to how they're going to do it. What do you think? Yeah, you know, one thing that's happened since the 2024 election is there have just been these endless calls, meetings, private symposiums, whatnot, gatherings of people on the left in the Democratic Party and particularly those in the digital.

space who've watched the party go from the kind of having the Obama era advantage on the internet in 2008 and 2012 to feeling like they had not only had they had obviously lost the election in 2024 but they had lost the advantages in the media space as well. I mean Donald Trump ran a campaign where he effectively circumvented the mainstream media and leveraged this kind of world of online creators on YouTube and podcasting and, you know, everybody kind of, I'm sure people watching the show are very familiar with this. You know, the, the manosphere, the term, I think, came out of kind of the, the, the, the, the, uh, naval gazing, uh, you know, as a part of the result of this election. And one of the efforts that you're seeing from a lot of democratic groups and

some media organizations is, uh, investing in, uh, in these types of, uh, creator first, podcast first, short form social video first efforts. Obviously, this is one of them. And just to kind of explain a technical thing, you know, this is part of a nonprofit kind of sister to crooked media. The Daily Caller has a version of this as well on the right, the Daily Color News Foundation. So this is not totally, it's weird, but it's not totally it's quite a way to organize a business. It's actually a very clever way to organize a business. There are a couple of other publications that have it too, but you have a nonprofit that's not affiliated. It shares the same name, but can share the content. Right. And I am not,

I have, I am not a lawyer. I don't know how exactly it works, but there, it kind of exists alongside. Anyway, so they, they obviously announced that they want to do this, you know, in focus, particularly on YouTube and short form social video. And, you know, I think that it's a, there was another organization as well, American Bridge, which helped incubate this company called and media, which has been launching YouTube shows, such its most famous one is relaunch of Keep the Meter Running, hosted by the Subway Take Sky, Kareem Rama. So you're just seeing a lot more of these types of efforts,

you know, efforts to kind of catch up to the right, you know, and try to win back. In particular, young people, politically disengaged people, people who are not getting their information from watching television or reading the news, but who are, you know, scrolling through TikTok or Instagram Reels or finding it on YouTube. What do you think? Do you think that this is a good idea or do you think it's going to work or or is it just kind of cringy? I mean, I guess it depends on the execution. It's interesting that more perfect union is crushing the space right now.

So it's not as though there's no audience for kind of the nonprofit apparatus or there's no way to be in the nonprofit apparatus of the broader left and make intriguing content. Clearly people are hungry for stuff about AI safety and certification and all of that. I mean, it's, it's worked before. And it seems to me like even as they're trying to catch up with the right, it feels like they're trying to catch up with more perfect union and Midas touch. Yeah. You know, that's actually, that's a great point. I think that there is also something here to the focus on, you know, things that feel a little bit more anti-establishment and that don't feel like a Normie Dem kind of version of this. Like it's not like they're like we're launching, these shows that are going to focus on, you know, Donald Trump's norm breaking or whatnot, right?

It's really focused on these issues that I think a lot of people are obviously focused on and angry about, whether that is the economy not working for them or things kind of getting worse, which is the insidification element or, you know, the broad anger, you know, around and skepticism around data centers and uncertainty around AI. So it'll be really interesting to see that. I did think, though, and you pointed this out, the Nick Shirley element is really interesting. There is this, there have been, and I think that the right has just done a really good job about this kind of over the years. I think even in like on Fox News with, you know, Jesse Waters, you know, for Bill O'Reilly, just the kind of man on the street style reporting and journalism and the deeper kind of reported stuff that, you know, that Nick Shirley and some others were doing. Not that, I mean, I have some issues with some of the stuff that, you know, he's put out there, but the effort, what they're trying to do, the efforts.

Going to Cuba, right? Yeah, giving it, yeah, trying. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's really interesting to see that people on the left are, you know, believing that this is something that they should be doing their versions of. I'm not really sure what it's going to look like, you know, because obviously Nick Shirley's is focused more on like kind of this idea of fraud and whatnot. It'll be interesting to see what form this takes.

But it was something that Kyle mentioned to me, and he mentioned again in their public statement. So clearly they're going to be cooking something up for the midterms and the presidential. Yeah, I mean, there's that guy that goes around asking people as they're going into like just random places, if they want to free Palestine, he's like gone extremely viral. I forget what his name is. But yeah, there's, do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I have seen the, I have seen these. Yes. And the reason man on the streets were always, the right always gravitated towards them is honestly that they're cheap and they're compelling content. People, I mean, like,

you can't control the other people on the street that you talk to. So you can often just get such, energetic and interesting man on the street responses that you can't script because it's just people. It's reality TV, basically. Totally. And I mean, you just see this over and over again. This stuff actually does. Yeah, continues to do really well on YouTube. I even think about like, you know, the first time that Zoran Mamdani went, people knew who he was or he went viral before he was even running for mayor, he did this video. I think this was the first time maybe I had heard of him. He did this video where he, where he interviewed Trump voters in Queens about like why they were doing it. It's just man on the street interviews with Trump voters, why they're.

vote for Trump. And like that was that was something that went viral. And you see I there's, that's how he got on breaking points by the way. We had on a week after that. Right. Right. And I mean, he was and that was, I remember thinking that's a really compelling, that was a really compelling piece of content. And it got at something that people were wondering about, which is New York, people in New Yorkers, particularly outer boroughs, outer borough non-white people voting for Trump. There was a lot of that. And it wasn't something actually that we'd seen told in such a compelling way. you could read a New York Times article about it or something like that. But that was kind of more leaned back and chin scratching.

To hear it from the people themselves is obviously super compelling content that's going to go viral across a whole bunch of platforms. So it'll be very interesting to see what form this kind of enterprise takes. Yeah, and you said something interesting. I don't want to gloss over, which is creator-first content. And it's become like kind of a legible buzzword in the industry, but it has a lot of important implications. And it reminds me of this other story I wanted to ask you about

in regard to the MS Now direct-to-consumer app that was just announced. We have a media tarot sheet here. They report the MSNAN membership will include MSNOS 24-7 live television feed, exclusive new streaming series, daily live Q&As with top talent, a moderated member community and guided meditations from calm. The membership will be the first time MSNOS live feed has been available without a cable news subscription, something CNN Plus did not offer with its failed attempt at a streaming network of original content,

which vindicates my original theory. By the way, Max, that CNN Plus was actually a really good idea just executed poorly and pulled way too soon before it could thrive. But going back to this point, I'm so skeptical. I mean, on Substack, it's creator first. It's Heather Cox Richardson. To get people to subscribe to MS now, you're asking them to subscribe to a network.

And maybe their overhead is low enough that this will be like sustaining 24-7 live streaming will be fine for them. it'll still be profitable, but people are subscribing for personalities themselves. People also don't realize Rachel Maddo's podcast is very successful. It's not MSNBC. It's a Rachel Maddo podcast brought to you by MSNBC. I'm sorry, MS now.

So I don't know. I'm skeptical about this. It's really interesting. Like you wonder, is there a version of this that they could have done where they're, you know, launching all these kind of individual products and then kind of, you know, funneling some of that upwards? it's, yeah, like bundling or, yeah, like either, you know, doing a bundle or, you know, just essentially just launching a bunch of individual products that people could kind of subscribe to.

And would that, in the aggregate, end up being more than doing the MS now, you know, premium subscription that they've just announced? I mean, look, they're going to try to lean into some of that. They are doing these, like, I think a big thing that they want to lean into. And I think maybe the thing that they're hoping appeals to most people is super fan, you know, to the super fans who might be possibly interested in this, is, you know, you can basically Rachel Maddo is going to be on there every Monday and you can ask her a question in the chat.

theoretically, she's answering you and it's not a staffer or AI. But, you know, they're going to be doing these with each of their different hosts every day, like these day, essentially daily chats. And I mean, like, look, if it's, you know, if you can really like message back and forth on there with, you know, Joe Scarborough or Rachel Maddo or, whatever and you're a big MSMMS now fan like yeah i mean maybe maybe that'll work but but but i agree it's um it's it's it's it's it feels like a stretch to me and you know we haven't heard a lot about how cnns cnnn rolled out their own uh direct-to-consumer app recently and we haven't really heard how

about how that's done fox nation is another interesting uh in a pathway here they launched they were first they were first by years um they launched pre-covid and And they decided, they first launched as kind of like a Fox News, but kind of just kind of worse. And like, I mean, like I went on it back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. Just like a worse studio, kind of the people who were on just on occasion. And it's like, you know, it's, you know, and I think they still ended up doing okay.

But they essentially, what they realized that they wanted to do is they were like, okay, what we should do is kind of this extra programming that was. that we would never put on television, right? Like, they got, like, a documentary by Martin Scorsese about, like, you know, Catholicism. And they got, you know, this Kevin, and like, Kevin Costner documentary, you know, nonfiction stuff about America. Like, that, they decided that they wanted to create stuff that otherwise the Fox News viewer was watching, but that wasn't connected to the actual kind of news of the day

and things like that. And I thought that that was actually a really, really smart idea. MS is trying something, they are kind of doing something. something in between. They're launching, I think, a bunch of extra podcasts and whatnot that I think are going to be behind the paywall. But I agree, like, look, substack has had a lot of success because it comes directly to you in your email or you can download the app and you've got all of it right there. I think with MS, you're going to, you have to take a whole bunch of steps to kind of get there. So we'll see if it works out. But they have a huge audience. Millions people

watch it every night. So maybe just a sliver pay that'll be successful. Yeah, it's bigger than people realize. And actually, even just as we're talking, I'm thinking about how the MK Media Network is organized in a way that makes more sense to me than the MS now idea, which is like Megan leans forward with the different personalities and kind of lets that speak for itself, but it's all under one umbrella. That to me seems like the future more than continuing to try to push a brand and bundle. But I guess, Max, my last question is, you cover this as well as anyone. Is the sense still on the left that they're behind the right? Because that's interesting to me, because I still see them with a lot of traditional resources that buoy some of the leftist or the liberal and left creators. But obviously the right has had in roads in ways that 10 years ago were unimaginable.

I think that the, I think the smarter people who I talk to on the left realize that, you know, there is still, look, the most popular podcast in America is, you know, by far. is hosted by someone who, you know, whose ideas are kind of, and views are kind of fluid, but essentially is, you know, not a guy who is inclined to vote for Democrats, Joe Rogan. And if you look at the, if you look at the top of the podcast rankings, which are, you know, feeding out onto YouTube and onto social feeds, you know, it's really, it is really dominated by a lot of really big voices, I think, who lean right. And I think that Democrats see that and think that's why they've still kind of continued to struggle to get a, you know, Joe Grogan of the left. And also when they do, when they do have some of these figures who are notable, you know, people like a Hassan Piker, like there's a significant part of the party, which is not comfortable with them, right?

And so I think that there's more kind of internal divisions. But I agree. But look, like, you know, and I don't know if everybody kind of would say. this, but I think that most Democratic comms people, people in democratic politics know that, like, you know, they would prefer to go back to living in a world where everybody just read the local newspaper and watch television. They felt like they had an advantage in those formats, you know, because they felt maybe like journalists, a lot of journalists were kind of on their side or opinion pages were on their side or whatnot. So I think that they, I think a lot of Democrats still feel

really uncomfortable in kind of the world of new media. And I think that they still look at people like, they still look at people like Joe Rogan and whatnot and think like we don't have that. Michael Barbaro for the Daily is not that. Oh, that's a great example. For more of this excellent media coverage, you got to listen to mixed signals with the always interesting Ben Smith and Max. And then of course follow Max's work at Semaphore where he's the media editor. Really appreciate your time today, Max. Thanks for having me back on. It's so much fun.

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You can give it to her. Just $28 helps provide one life-saving ultrasound. $140 helps rescue five babies. All gifts are tax-deductible. Please give today. Dial pound 250 and say baby. That's pound 250, baby, or visit preborn.com slash Emily. That's preborn.com slash Emily. Well, a handful of jurors from the Lindsay Clancy trial are now speaking to media. In particular, this video from NBC Boston, I think is important to watch as their comments are now

pinging across the media, being debated, and rightfully so. Let's go ahead and roll this clip of a handful of the female jurors. Now, we know this was a mostly female jury, nine to three, nine women to three men. These women, you're going to hear them say, the one holdout. They confirm that there was one holdout and that he was a man. So let's go ahead and take a listen to what this handful of the Clancy jurors told NBC Boston. He was very arrogant. He really did not take anything that anybody said. The nurses, he tried to ask a question about the medications, and we went back to the report from South Shore Hospital. We had the toxicology report. We could see exactly the amounts. The nurses in the room spoke to that and talked to that. There were nurses on the jury.

Yes. And they spoke to that, that specific thing. That was a question that he had. And he just, completely disregarded the information that they gave. I mean, he had reasonable doubt. He admitted he had reasonable doubt. After we watched that video of the interview, I think that's when it was. He admitted he had reasonable doubt. And I started filling out the forms.

I was so excited. I actually, there were three forms I had to fill out. And I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one. And then he said, but I'm still not going to say that she's not guilty by reason of insanity. I'm not sure if Rogue is the right word, Sue. But every one of us, in the hours of a frustration,

would get up and walk the room, because you just couldn't sit anymore, and would all go out of the cart with the exhibits. He, I think, got up to the cart once, very briefly and went back to his seat. He would not, he would not interact. interact with us and try to understand.

We read him on numerous occasions, the definition of reasonable doubt from Judge Sullivan's instruction. He actually said one day in the end, well why don't we have the judge come in and read it again? And we were like, no, we have it in front of us. We don't need that and we would highlight it. And you know, so and so, this is, the definition of reason about.

But he had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children. That last quote, and I wish we could just replay it 10 times over and over. He had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children. Who says that? Who says that?

I believe this is the juror, by the way, who has since been revealed to have supported Karen Reed, have been a very vocal social media supporter of Karen Reid during the Karen Reed trial. And I don't want to do apples to apples comparisons of these two trials. But obviously, the gender dynamics in both cases, cases were salient. And because the gender dynamics were salient in the conversation about women's reactions to Lindsay Clancy, we've covered here some of the TikToks that women were posting women, women's women were posting of them like throwing dolls over the railing, acting like those were their kids.

how they had some level of solidarity with Lindsay Clancy because they had gone through a postpartum depression and the like. Now, part of this was, and I made this case on the show, so many of the women who are outside of the courtroom, not on the jury, but who are outside of the courtroom, were coming up to Kevin Redington, the defense attorney, and saying, thank you, I went through this, I went through that. That's why I'm supporting Lindsay Clancy. I literally went through, like, the last couple of weeks of the very popular GoFundMe for the Clancy family and found all of the times or many of the times I pulled out and showed last year in the last week here on the show, how many times people donated to Lindsay Clancy because me, I, over and over again.

And that dynamic was picked up on by people who were just observers, members of the public, members of the media. And so now you have all these women talking to local media shortly after this high profile, high stakes case is concluded, seeming to be a group of women bitching about one do it on the jury. We are getting one side of the story for now. They did not cover themselves in glory with this. I was trying to think today about why it felt unseemly. As a journalist, you want as much information as possible to be in the public domain. You are eager for jurors to talk to the media. I have no problem in principle with jurors talking to the media. I welcome it. And I think they should do as many interviews as they want. On a moral level, what felt unseemly to me is their

willingness to come out so quickly and trash this guy without saying, hey, we had disagreements with one holdout. And he is entitled to his opinion. He is allowed to believe what he believed. We all disagreed with him. And yes, there were frustrations. We'll let him tell his side of the story. There was a way to do these interviews with class. And I'm sorry, but the way they handled that, just griping about their colleague on the jury who seemed to be a holdout for reasons of his conviction. One of them in an interview said he just couldn't get around his conviction. Yeah, he's allowed to hold fast to his conviction. And also, while we're on that point, jurors have the right to vote their conscience. The Cato Institute actually just started a libertarian

think tank, by the way, with which I have many disagreements on many different occasions. But they actually just started a project for people who are serving on juries to kind of know their rights when they're serving on juries. And they know, you have the right to vote your conscience. Even if the evidence meets the legal standard, you can vote, quote, unquote, not guilty, if conviction would be unjust. This right has been protected since 1670. So when you hear the woman talking about how he had, he admitted, allegedly, by the way, we don't actually know if he admitted he had reasonable doubt. We have, you know, three sources from inside the jury, at least as of that interview saying he admitted he had reasonable doubt or agreeing he admitted he had reasonable doubt.

But you actually, if you think that a conviction is going to be too severe, you can vote your conscience. You can vote your conscience as a member of the jury anytime you want. And so if your conscience tells you that rendering a not guilty verdict is not the just outcome of the case, you can still do that. No matter what, you can still do that. And so it's not a slam dunk that he admitted he, quote, had reasonable doubt. It's interesting, though. And I look forward to hopefully hearing from him and to hopefully hearing, I think, some classier conversations about what happened behind closed doors in this very high-stakes trial. It's so easy to come out and say, listen, again, you know, there were disagreements.

There was one holdout that tells you what you need to know. Unfortunately, I'll let our colleague speak for himself. whatever. But this is a one-sided narrative from people who all agreed with each other. We're clearly emotionally, deeply frustrated with the story. And I want to emphasize, again, that juror saying he couldn't, he just couldn't get over that Lindsay Clancy viciously killed her children. That's exactly what frustrates so many people about this case. The idea that people should, quote, get over it because of the polypharmacy, which is a lot, alleged in the civil suit because of these extenuating circumstances. And I'll put aside the more

conspiratorial theories about Patrick Clancy and just focus on the different reactions. One, you have people who say, listen, Massachusetts law, Jed Rubenfeld wrote some good stuff on this in the free press. He broke down how Massachusetts law has real quirks when it comes to what constitutes voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, how that changes, what judges are able to inform the the jury of and how that changes whether or not somebody like Lindsay Clancy meets one standard or the other. And it's complicated. Sally Sattel, also writing in the free press, my friend Sally Sotel, wrote a piece talking about how actually as a practicing psychiatrist, that cocktail of drugs Clancy took over the course of three months would seriously, could seriously,

influence a real insanity situation and a real diagnosis about that. So there's different camps. There are people who accept both of those points from Rubenfeld and Sotel and others who have made those arguments and say, yes, fine. That doesn't mean she should, all of that may be true. She still did it. In her civil situation, she did it. Her defense didn't dispute that she did it. So at least not yet. So in that case, if you do it, all of those extenuating circumstances, about your life and your mindset and your medications don't matter. You should be locked up. Some people take that further than I would as a non-support of the death penalty

and say you should still be executed. And again, not my position, but the point is when the juror comes out and says he couldn't get over the fact that she viciously killed, nobody should be getting over her vicious murders. you can hold two things at the same time and say she viciously murdered her children and she also may have had extenuating circumstances she may have been failed by the medical system

she may have been failed by her husband and I think she belongs in prison not a psychiatric hospital a lot of people's wires are getting crossed on this and they're arguing past each other but there are so many things that can be true at the same time in this case The jurors coming out and gabbing to local media like this, man, I also kind of think it's dangerous. They're welcome to talk to media as much as they want. But we're also in a period where we just saw this case of, this is so awful.

I don't even want to read it. This case out of Illinois, Corey Walsh. News Nation reports, an Illinois mother of four charged with killing her two-year-old son was texting in a group chat about the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy just hours before her son was found dead, according to prosecutors. Corey Welsh 40 appeared in court Tuesday morning where the judge ruled she will not be released from jail ahead of trial, citing threats Walsh allegedly made regarding harming her other children and husband. The judge also tasked the prosecutor's office with ensuring she receives the medication she was recently prescribed. Walsh is charged with three counts of first-degree murder after her son, Barrett, was found

hanging by his neck in the basement on September 1st in the family's suburban Chicago home. Prosecutors say Walsh was, quote, very invested in Clancy's trial, which has been discussed nationwide and had been texting about it before her son was discovered by a neighbor who then called 911 and began CPR on the child. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital. According to an autopsy, he died from asphyxia caused by ligatured compression of the neck. Walsh was found by police in the bathtub with self-inflicted injuries to her wrist and thrives. You can see echoes very obviously of the Clancy case here. And then the explicit invocation by prosecutors that, Walsh had been, quote, very invested in the Clancy case. Now, again, this is one-sided because the defense hasn't commented yet, or Walsh's representatives haven't commented on this yet. So very invested could mean she was very opposed to Lindsay Clancy. It could mean she was very sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy, that she was outright expressing solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, that she was one of the people agreeing with TikToks, TikTok moms throwing baby dolls over the railing to simulate hurting their children as though it was a lighthearted joke to draw attention to.

what female fatigue and all of that. So some of the conversation here I do think is genuinely dangerous because what we don't want to create is a culture of permissiveness, even if it's a subculture of permissiveness, among the Clancy conspiracy theorists, or that's not even the right term for it, because there are a lot of women who were wearing pink outside the Clancy trial who weren't necessarily Patrick Clancy Truthers,

but were people who just said she may have done it, but she should be found not guilty. She shouldn't be severely punished. She's already been punished enough, that sort of thing. So we don't want to create a subculture of permissiveness where the enormous amount of suffering and pain and anxiety and in some rare cases, psychosis that can come in the postpartum period, is seen, this permissiveness is seen or influences. the way people think about their own actions when they're in these states of postpartum depression, anxiety, potentially psychosis, especially among people who are suffering postpartum depression, who maybe have underlying bipolar, other conditions,

who are not thinking clearly, just about every single person on this earth, save for the few genuine sociopaths that exist, just about every single person on this earth is in love with their children. They love their children. they don't want anything to happen to their children. They don't want a hair on their child's head to be injured. They would sacrifice themselves to help their kid any day. But what you don't want to do is create a situation where people who are not of right mind, who may be on some weird cocktail of medications, have in their mind

because they were participating in this subculture that they have been so victimized by a system that refuses to hear women, refuses to hear out. women's pain, a medical system, a legal system, and a cultural system, that then influences them to indulge their worst instincts. That influences them to, frankly, give in to some of the bad instincts, right? We don't want to create that type of culture or subculture. And I think it's fair to worry that the ideological victim culture that's cropped up around this case could be creating problems in that subculture or greater likelihood that people do bad things who've been exposed to that subculture. I'm certainly not worried about this becoming a mass phenomenon. But one case is too many.

One case of somebody being influenced here is too many because it's unnecessary. It's an ideology based on a falsehood, and it doesn't need to proliferate. It doesn't need to spread around the country. So there's so much to say about this case. I could keep going, but I'll leave it there because I want to cover this Wild Daily Color News Foundation report about Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chow, our former Secretary of Transportation, one of the most important positions an American can hold in the government, the Daily Caller's excellent reporter, Philip Linchicki, had an expose, and it wasn't exclusive to the

Daily Caller News Foundation. The headline here is Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, held appointments from Chinese Communist Party organizations while serving in the cabinet. Now, Elaine Chao, again, Mitch McConnell's wife, according to Linchiki, who went through Chinese government documents and state media reports and translated them, found CCP officials a polluxial. pointed Chow to multiple government positions, many of which partially overlapped with her two U.S. cabinet posts. We're not talking about some small town mayor. We're talking about the person who oversees the entire department of transportation and has cabinet-level responsibilities. So, to go through some of Len Chiky's reporting, and then I'll add some of my own reporting.

Actually, lack thereof, because nobody wanted to respond when I asked them questions about this, curiously enough. Chao, he writes, has also received at least four Chinese government positions since 2008, including, again, just pausing, 2008. We're not talking about 1970. We're not talking about 1980. We're talking about 2008, after the Bush administration, which she served in. So, Chow, according to Lynchieke, has also received at least four Chinese government positions since 2008, including within arms of a CCP influence and intelligence agency called the United Front Work Department,

according to his translations of Chinese government and state media reports. Beijing uses the UFWD. Again, that's the United Front Work Department to steer foreign policy and, quote, gain access to advanced foreign technology. That's according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Chao did not disclose any of the reported Chinese government positions during her January 2017, DOT Secretary Senate confirmation hearing, which required her to list all positions held within the last 10 years. Chao's late sister, Angela Chow and father, James Chow, founder of shipping firm Formost Group.

Also, by the way, an enormous conflict of interest with her position at the DOT. Obviously, an enormous conflict of interest given the business that Foremost Group has done with China over the years with the Chinese government over the years. You must read Peter Schweitzer's excellent work on this topic. For years, it has been, I think, abundantly clear that there's good reason to suspect Elaine, Chao has intelligence ties. Now, are they intelligence ties to the U.S.? Is she a U.S. asset that is allowed to serve in the cabinet because she is providing information to our government? Is she a Chinese asset? Is she both? These are all very fair questions now that more information is coming up. But Schweitzer's been reporting on this for a long time. Now, when Shiki went to the spokesman for

Chow and foremost group, Patrick O'Connor, who denied that Chow, her sister or father had held such positions. This is the statement. She has never held a position with a foreign government or acted on behalf of one. We are not aware she has met with representatives from UFWD entities. And he had been sent Chinese government and state media photos. Lynchiki reports published between 2010 and 2026, showing Chow meeting with officials from the CCP or the UFWD. The quote goes on. Such a suggestion disregards her nearly five decades of faithful service to the United States and is unfounded and deeply insulting, hurtful and racist. The Daily Caller is racist for trans, translating Chinese documents, finding Elaine Chao being apparently appointed to positions, good evidence of it.

And now they have the audacity. Chow's camp has the audacity to call the shoe leather reporter a racist. So, when Chiky followed up and said, why is that racist? O'Connor replies, no one seems to care when most American business or political leaders hold meetings in China. So it's suspicious. By the way, that's not true. Elaine Chow was at a meeting in China. Well, her husband was suffering. We covered it here on the show. The problem wasn't that she had been appointed to government positions. We didn't know that she had been appointed to government positions. We just knew that she was at a meeting with Chinese government officials. So I'll go on. O'Connor says, so it's suspicious when the daily caller makes insinuations about a former two-time cabinet secretary of Asian descent, especially based on photos, some of which are decades old. The secretary is a proud American who has devoted must of her professional life to serving the American people to question her patriotism. is a double standard at best, racist at worst. Incredibly cynical invocation of one of the ultimate insults to decent human beings. Now, Len Shiki writes, Chow, who was born in Taiwan and obtained U.S. citizenship at age 19, received three positions in UFWD arms and a Chinese government advisory role,

according to his translations. Those reports describe Chow's appointments in various ways, with some stating she had been, quote, hired or had, quote, accepted an appointment letter, while others simply note that she was then among those, quote, holding a given title. Between at least October 2004 and August 2018, the homepage of the UFWD website for Shanghai's G-D district featured a series of biographies on Chow. Oh, the homepage did. That's nice. Those biographies were showcased alongside figures celebrating by the UFWD as celebrated by the UFWD as role models for United Frontwork. What can you do but laugh about them?

So insane. And how is this just coming out in 2026 because an enterprising reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation, which has so many, fewer resources than all of the corporate media outlets do? How is this just coming out here? Several years after receiving the honorary appointments, Lin Shiki writes, Chow and her father were identified as advisors of the subsequent council of Kofa's G. Ding branch. The fourth council of Kofa's G. Ding branch ran between and by the way here, that's the Kofa. I just want to make sure that we're all clear on that acronym. It's Chinese Overseas Friendship Association. The fourth council of Kofa's Ging branch ran between September 2012 and 2017 and likewise partially overlapped with Chow's DOT tenure, according to DCNF translations of state media and Chinese government reports. Now, her sister was later identified as a director of Kofa's national organization in 2019, the Daily Caller News Foundation found. After her DOL tenure, a CCP official also tapped Chow to serve as a Wuhan municipal government international advisor in October 2009, owing to her, quote, extensive experience and resources and international affairs and perceived ability to, quote, create more favorable conditions for Wuhan in matters of foreign affairs and attracting overseas talent. You know, I have to agree with them on that one. Perhaps Wuhan needed to attract more overseas talent.

And maybe the problem is that they had too much overseas American talent running that lab. Chao's father and late sister had both also received Wuhan government advisory positions by 2019. Now, contemporaneous Chinese state media reporting about this appointment said during Lansheki writes, during one May 2010, Chinese language state media interview conducted in Ningbo, Jijing province. Chow appeared alongside her father who said he and his daughter were both Wuhan government advisors, according to a DCNF translation of the report. Oh.

He said they're, quote, both advisors to the municipal government of Wuhan. That's from her father. That's from her own father. Now, Elaine Chow was affiliated with the Hudson Institute. Holds a position at the Hudson Institute. one of the preeminent hawkish foreign policy think tanks in Washington, D.C. Very hawkish on Iran, very hawkish on Taiwan. Interestingly enough, very hawkish against China.

And I thought that was interesting. I sent two comment requests in the last 24 hours to the Hudson Institute. I'm just going to pull them up for the heck of it and see. what I asked them. So everyone has the exact quote in front of them that I request a comment on. I said, I'm prepping a segment on the Daily Color News Foundation's reporting with regard to Elaine Chao potentially being linked to the Chinese government. Does Hudson plan to sever ties with Chao in light of this reporting? Or does Hudson dispute any part of the DCNF story? We'd love to have any additional context you can provide as well. Want to make sure the audience

has a full picture, as full a picture as possible. sent one of those at 7.42 p.m. Tuesday night, sent another one at 2 p.m. told them what my deadline was. Nothing from the Hudson Institute. Interestingly enough, Nikki Haley is also affiliated with the Hudson Institute. I sent a comment request to Nikki Haley's people asking if they'd like to talk about whether Nikki Haley has concerns. Nikki Haley and Hudson are extremely hawkish against China. And there's a good argument for being concerned about rising Chinese power, what that would mean for Americans at home and abroad, what that would mean for global politics and economics. Now, I have some concerns. What that would mean for human freedom.

So it's very interesting with that a hawkish think tank very credibly accused of an affiliation with someone. who looks like a CCP asset, very credibly accused of being a CCP asset. It's very interesting that a prominent hawkish think tank where scholars spend a lot of time agitating against China, arguing that the United States and certain business people and politicians are way too cozy with China, this looks like Elaine Chao being way too cozy with China. And the Hudson Institute and Nikki Haley had nothing to say. I reached out to Jeffrey Kane, who's been on this show. And Jeff kindly did give me an answer on this.

Thank goodness. He's author of the perfect police state. He's lived in China. He said to me, wow, Chao's people accusing a journalist and China scholar of racism for looking into appointments from CCP-aligned organizations. That's, by the way, because they asked, the Daily Caller asked Gordon Chang for comment on this.

And Chang was like, obviously, what is going on here? This is insane. Let me pull up his exact quote so that we have it in front of us. It's, you know, basically what you would expect it to be. He said, no American, no matter how high and mighty, should have any ties with the Communist Party's UFWD, this organization is dedicated to destroying our country. This should not be hard to understand. Yeah, to say the least.

So Jeff said, wow, Chow's people accusing a journalist and China scholar of, quote, racism for looking into appointments from CCP aligned organizations while serving in the cabinet. We've all heard the racism card before. Yes, my interjection here is we remember it well from the early days of COVID. Jeff goes on to say, and reaching for racism means you have no actual defense. Investigative journalists have looked into Tim Cook's, Bill Gates's and activities of many others in China, so clearly this has no basis in racism. Can Chow's team answer as to whether Chinese state media reports are actually false? If they are invented stories, why didn't Chow's team publish their own correction and dispute the reporting at the time. Even Chinese state media can be reached by phone and

email. The entire story is unsettling and the response is unprofessional, and Chao has many questions to answer. So again, Jeff, who's an expert in the space, his questions are, can Chow's team answer as to whether Chinese state media reports are actually false? Are these reports false? Now, if they are false, why didn't Chow's team publish their own correction and dispute the reporting at the time? Two fantastic questions. would be very easy for Elaine Chow's team and perhaps even the Hudson Institute team to clear up quickly. But then again, Elaine Chow and her husband are not the most forthcoming people in American politics. How long did it take us to figure out what actually happened to Mitch

McConnell when he was conspicuously absent from the Senate, hospitalized, despite being in positions of enormous importance? You think Mitch McConnell is having his senior year before retirement? No. He pointed himself to very important appropriations subcommittees for defense, specifically in his own words, to make sure that the spigot was turned on. So there could be other things going on here, right? It could be that Elaine Chow was, if I'm remembering correctly, in 2017, nominated by a voice

vote in the Senate without any of this coming out because it was known or it was made known to the Senate that she was an asset. It was made known to the Trump administration, the people who were making these decisions at the time that she was an asset. And this has been kept under wrap for years because again, these appointments, according to the Daily Caller, go back to 20 or 2008. That's just what we know about. And apparently for years, this information has gone unknown to most of the public. It could be that she was a Chinese asset for part of that time. If she's not an American asset, which we will never, if she is, we'll never get the answer to that.

But if she's not, the compromise that could have been collected over the last two decades defies quantifying all of the dinners. cabinet meetings, access through her husband, DOT meetings. It's incomprehensible the amount of material that could have been passed on to the Chinese government. And again, this is in the Daily Caller. It was gleaned by translating Chinese government documents and state media reports. It is specific, incredible. It is presumably the kind of recording, reporting, I'm sorry, that every corporate media outlet could have been doing at any point during the last couple of decades.

And it's so serious that if it gets treated with the gravity it deserves to be treated with, it could actually take down one of the most powerful political couples in U.S. politics, Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chow. and combine it with Peter Schweitzer's reporting on Foremost Group, Elaine Chao's father, and you're starting to have a more complete picture of the conflicts and potential security breaches. Again, the McConnell family doesn't exactly have a record of transparency. We're all acutely aware of that after this summer where Mitch McConnell, and actually over the last few years, where Mitch McConnell has been less than forthcoming about his own health struggles, even as they have become visible, conspicuous,

during his freezing spells, but he was so desperate for power that he clung and obfuscated and continued to because he's on these important subcommittees where he wants to keep the appropriation spigot on for foreign policy priorities that he has, though it's no surprise at all. No surprise at all.

to see evidence. They continue obfuscating in an effort to cling to power. But this is disturbing and serious, and it deserves to be treated as such, both by Republicans, the media, by anyone who has an affiliation with Elaine Chow. There's a lot more to come if people treat this story with the seriousness it deserves to be treated with. And I'm going to keep sending requests to people about it, and we'll keep covering it here. Now, you remember the great burrito debate of the summer of 2026. Now, we've entered the phase of the great stay-at-home mom debate, which has usurped the burrito debate, roiling the right, the kind of flashpoint de jour, roiling the right between populist and anti-populist, because the Trump administration, according to the New York Times, is considering, quote, a new proposal from the White House to expand child care. I'm sorry, this is from the Hill,

to expand child care subsidies to cover stay-at-home parents, which they report accurately, is dividing conservatives. Yes. No kidding. The New York Times had more details on the nuts and bolts of the policy. They wrote the Trump admin is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy champion by Vice President J.D. Vance. That's key, by the way, because I think some of the reactions here are pure Vance derangement syndrome. The Times says using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions. The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children,

one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration, to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families. To do so, you may remember this from the 90s. To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department Fund that was created in the 1990s, Clinton-era welfare reform, to draft to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school. Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year,

potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money. Yes, about 80% of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of the mothers, according to health department data. They also report the proposal creates the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care that will allow one married parent to receive CCDF assistance to care for their own child while spouse works at least 35 hours a week, according to a draft document viewed by the times. Unmarried couples in which one parent stays at home would not qualify under the draft. Single parents who do not work are currently not eligible for the subsidy, nor would they be

under the new proposal for married couples. So why did I just spend all this time getting the precise language according to reports. Because there is a question of semantics on the table. Right now, there have been some utterly unhinged reactions. Some reactions, I think, are perfectly understandable and defensible, and there are people that I like, very fine people on both sides of the great stay-at-home mom debate. But let's just go through some of these tweets. This is Meg Brock of the Daily Wire, who says, the weird conservative war against women working and the push to embrace a tradwife lifestyle makes a lot more sense when you understand demonizing female employment is a critical part of justifying a conservative socialist policy agenda.

Demonizing female employment is a critical part of justifying a conservative socialist policy agenda. Conservative socialist policy agenda. Interesting way to frame, and this post was, by the way, issued in the midst of the swirl around the policy itself. But a conservative social policy agenda is a really interesting label being used to frame a debate about allowing stay-at-home parents to use some of the funds that were designated by a government program in the 1990s to reform welfare to working parents. So we're already providing the subsidy to working parents. The Vance proposal, the Trump Vance administration proposal, is to say, you can get that money. for a stay-at-home mom. We believe that's work.

We believe that's labor. And we believe that it should be compensated. That if you use as Patrick Brown, who actually disagrees with me on this, but well, kind of disagrees with me on this. Patrick Brown wrote in the Washington Examiner, the program is engineered to help poor parents, usually unmarried.

He is one of the best writers on child tax credit, one of the best thinkers on child tax credit, all of those sorts of things. He's been very involved in this, a total expert. So he writes, the program is engineered to help poor parents usually unmarried, stay connected to work, and it works fairly well. In most cases, parents who are eligible for the program receive the equivalent of vouchers to take to the provider of their choice. In many states, this includes the options of grandparents

and relatives. About 6% of children in the program are looked after by a relative. States can even allow homeschooling parents to count their teaching hours to qualify for the program. Recipients can use the vouchers at the child care provider of their choice, including Auntie Abuela or the neighborhood church down the street, but all parents present in the household must be working or looking for work to be eligible to receive the voucher's certificate, as it's called. For married parents, that means they can receive subsidized care if both are working, but they cannot use that money to subsidize their household expenses with a stay-at-home parent. So changing that to allow the voucher to apply to a stay-at-home parent is the conservative socialist

program, apparently, because conservative socialists just want to demonize female employment. They want women barefoot and pregnant in Betty Ferdand's comfortable concentration camps. So I rewind the clock to that. Now, of course, are there some fringe conservatives you can nutpick and say that's ultimately their goal? Yeah. This is from the Trump Vance administration. This is a Vance proposal. J.D. Vance is not one of those people.

You disagree with J.D. Vance all you want. He is married to Ushah Vance, who has had a successful career of her own. Let's go through more tweets. This is from Angela Moributo. I've always liked responding to my friend Tim Carney, who was going back and forth in a debate. Angela said, I'm a new mom. My husband and I both work. Taxing working moms to fund someone else's stay-at-home lifestyle is a gut punch.

Carney said, do understand if you use formal child care, you have multiple tax breaks available to you, and your husband that are not available to me and my wife, such as the CDCTCTC. So is that taxing me to tax fund dual-income lifestyle? Angela said, yes, and it's also wrong. We shouldn't privilege one family's decisions over another. Now, that's a particularly interesting response, and more nuanced response, and a more consistent response. If you believe that all of these programs should be gone, period.

I am with you. I am so with you on this. I posted, if I had my way, there would be no child tax credit or stay-at-home mom voucher because there would be a flat tax. I love a flat tax. I would even consider a consumption tax. I want to simplify the tax code. I was so hopeful that our deal leader Paul Ryan would get the tax code down to a postcard, as he said he would back in 2017 when the tax cuts and job act was being debated. Didn't happen. We all know that. It was slightly simplified. Wasn't on a postcard.

All of that political capital. As I put it, that quite obviously doesn't make the CTC or the state-at-home mom proposal, socialism are well-for, and abandon. of conservative principles. Western democracies have mixed economies that don't align perfectly with ideological capitalism or socialism. Michael Lind, by the way, just wrote an excellent piece on that for an herd. I recommend checking it out. Much like school choice, these proposals operate within that world. What is school choice? A voucher system. It is a voucher system that accepts we cannot fix public schools in one fell swoop. We are not on the cusp of fixing the public school system in the United States. And I know many diehard school choice advocates, I've interviewed them, I've talked to them, they will tell you it is an acceptance. In many cases, the system is not on the

cusp of being revamped. Our system is so bad that what you have to do is give a lifeline to kids who desperately need it. And you can talk to kids who have benefited from these lifelines, desperately needed in the form of a voucher, a credit. So go to a private school that will give them a better education. The other point that I brought up was it's hard to take the pushback seriously now from people who aren't libertarians who are very consistent on this, of course, on the right, people who didn't freak out about all the credits that Paul Ryan and Donald Trump signed into Tickja, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 and the reauthorization. There are tax cuts. I'm sorry, there are credits that are very similar to this proposal. There's a credit for adoption. If you adopt a kid,

you get a tax credit from the federal government. Is that welfare for adopted parents? Some people, maybe Angela, would say, yes, that's bad. We need to simplify the tax code, so there are no carve-outs. But you know what's interesting is that carve-out was pushed against Paul Ryan, interestingly enough. I went back and looked at all the history. It's so interesting by Susan B. Anthony list, pro-life groups, focus on the family, because they believe that you can credibly give or you can reasonably provide a tax credit to working parents, I'm sorry, to adopted parents without calling that conservative socialism or welfare or whatever else. There's a tax credit to hire former inmates to hire felons. There's a tax credit to hire veterans in 2017's

tick you. There are examples of this for corporations to invest in particular parts of the country, underprivileged parts of the country that were passed in this bill. Now, you may think retroactively, that's bad. We shouldn't have done it. You may have even said something offhand at the time. My point here is that if you're mad about this particular proposal, it might have something to do with your feelings about a bigger question that this question is not necessarily representative of. Is this particular question representative of conservative socialism? I'm old enough to remember when conservatives had this debate

about the child tax credit in 2017. Marco Rubio had to fight tooth and nail to get the tax credit and his staff to get the tax credit where it was when Tickcha passed in 2017 because they faced a lot of internal opposition. But that internal opposition wasn't necessarily from people who were consistent across the board and not wanting credits at all. So if there's a lot of outrage for this one, the specific proposal, not just for the people who are supporting the proposal or the fringe people who are, I guess, conservative socialists who want welfare for stay-at-home moms and to demonize working mothers, as some support or some opponents of this have pointed out, work outside the home. Mary Harrington wrote a great part in feminism against progress on this.

Work outside the home is an industrial construct. Yes, it's a historic anomaly that you have the Don Draper commute on a train from Connecticut into Manhattan. You work your 9 to 5 or your 12 to 8, whatever Draper did, and come back home after your commute. And then you have the separate sphere of home life and work life. It was more like a homesteading model, model, a trial. model throughout human history. It's an industrial construct. That's all true. It's all true. But again, this is just saying we are already, our tax code is already rewarding or allowing people, let's put it this way, is already saying we have this program, we passed it, it will allow you to

spend money and child care of your choice. But not if that child care allows your the baby's biological mom to stay at home and raise the baby. That must be treated differently than giving money to an aunt or a church program. The debate between both sides of this is not a debate about socialism or demonizing working women. It's a debate about a technocratic policy. And some of it is a debate about accepting or agitating against the current tax regime, which I'm more than fine with doing for what it's worth. But if your energy against the existing tax regime of carve-outs and credits is suddenly popping up because J.D. Vance has this proposal. I don't know that I trust it. Let's go through more tweets. Eric Erickson.

It is sort of odd to hear people call those opposed to turning married moms into welfare queens the establishment. The GOP establishment gave the country no child left behind a Medicare Part D and now wants to put married households with a stay-at-home mom on welfare. I'm not necessarily calling Eric Erickson the establishment. Eric Erickson's kind of a tea party guy. Probably doesn't want a complicated tax code. Referring to this as welfare queens, but not referring to the adopted parents who get credits as welfare queens, I question your consistency.

I have another Eric Erickson tweet. Didn't realize how many conservatives want to be or want their wives to be welfare queens dependent on a government handout. Welfare queens dependent on a government handout. Now, this is only for people who qualify under the income threshold. First of all, it's only for people whose wives or, I suppose, husbands stay home with the child. I don't think it's a perfect policy proposal. I think it's insane to refer to that as welfare queens when we have similar programs. for hiring veterans, for companies that hire veterans or felons, for companies who hire, or I'm sorry, for people who, as we were just talking about, adopt children. Are they welfare queens? It seems like we're doing a little definition inflation to make a political point here. It's not ideal for me that anybody has.

a regular entitlement source of income. But if you're putting into the taxation pool, as we all should be, if you're putting in the taxation pool and the government's saying, here's a little bit of your money back, but you can't use it if you stay at home, seems kind of reasonable to just knock that part of the fence down. Doesn't sound like socialism, really. It sounds like saying we value

stay-at-home, the work of stay-at-home moms as work, as labor, doesn't mean that it's not more valuable than the work you do outside of the home. Of course, it's more valuable than the work you do outside of the home. But we have this weird separation of the domestic and the corporate sphere or the careers, the professional sphere, that is a historical anomaly. And it sort of prevents us from accepting that this is not just a stay-at-home lifestyle. This is just a human lifestyle. And it is, if you look at polls, it's been consistent over time. Most mothers preference is to either work part-time or not at all. So it's bottom up. It's not the government telling you top-down. What's better or not? The government

still gives you money, according to this proposal, if you're a single person working, a single-parent working. So it's not exactly that either. And what so many of these debates come down to is a proxy war over J.D. Vance, particularly. A lot of this is Vance versus Rubio as stand-ins for Old Wright versus New Right, or it's probably better because in Eric Erickson, I don't know that I would necessarily call him Old Right, but populist versus anti-populist. And I don't even know how fair it is to say that's a clean distinction.

So I think there are a lot of people who aren't exactly populists who are sympathetic to proposals like this one, even if they don't support this particular one, Carney would be in that category, probably also Patrick Brown in that category. But it's so frustrating that these conversations, the burrito conversation, the stay-at-home mom conversation, are really proxies, whether people realize it or not for their sentiments about Vance, and they're not conversations about the very specific proposal at hand. Because people's judgment is being clouded by their anger at or their love for J.D. Vance and Markerupio. It's so stupid. What a stupid time to be alive. On that note, I'm going to take a quick break. We'll be back with a modicum of good news.

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That's 25% off when you use code afterparty at cowboy colostrum.com slash after party. Well, tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary since the tragic assassination of Charlie. Kirk. And Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, just released its free speech college rankings, or its free speech rankings, which also found some data that I think marks a little bit of good news, a little bit of good news. So Fire found that acceptance of violence among college students falls at 30% of students saying, say, using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases. That number is that 30% of 30% way too high, unacceptably high.

It is, though, down four points from last year. And over the last year, of course, Charlie Kirk's assassination has been front and center. And so it feels like there's a lot of bad news right now. It feels like with all of the videos where people celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination on campuses and off campuses, a four point decree. is one that I'll take. It's not an increase and it's not a plateau. It's a decrease. And I think that is actually a testament. I think we would be doing ourselves a disservice on the right to gloss over that change, even if it feels small. To gloss over that change, I think would be doing a disservice to,

you know, as crazy as the social media conversation is, some of the substantive discussions that have emerged in the year since Charlie was assassinating. So I did want to pause on that. It is up 10 points from four years ago. That's bad news. The good news is that it's going in a downward direction. Now, actually, they found when it comes to acceptance of shouting down speakers, that was down three points, self-censoring with fellow students. That was down one point. Self-censoring in the classroom, that was also down one point. And low trust in school administration. That was down three points from last year. Now, the question on school administration, is students who say it is not likely their school administration would defend a speaker's right to express their views. That went down, meaning fewer students say it is not likely. Or fewer students let's just put it this way. I don't want to get it to double negatives, which I was just about to do. 24% of students say it is not likely their school administration would defend a speaker's right to express the views. That was 27% last year. So a positive decrease on that point. Now, Fire did, over

find that there are and has found that there continue to be problems across the university system, some of which are new to the Trump administration, but some of which are actually good developments from the Trump administration. And I'd been meaning to mention on the show or to do a segment on the show about this fire report from last month for weeks, because it's getting totally drowned in the conversation, but it's very interesting. So the Washington Times reported on August 3rd, colleges are purging restrictive speech codes under the Trump administration and removing bias reporting policies that solicited anonymous complaints about microaggressions according to fire.

The group flagged a record low 66 schools or 13.2% of all institutions with a red light rating for written policies stifling campus protests, speaking events, and online discussions. That's down 1.5 percentage points from last year and reverses two consecutive years of increases under the Biden administration. So again, to be clear, a lot of work to go. But Fires 20th annual report awarded a Greenlight, the Times reports, to 76 schools for placing no limits on First Amendment rights. That's up from 73 last year and marks the second consecutive year of greenlights outnumbering reds. That's 10 percent. Reds overall. So second consecutive year. Now, this year, 9.8% of public school surveyed earned red lights.

That is the first time that share has dropped below 10% in 20 years. It even dropped among private schools. 24.6% of private schools earned red lights, roughly 1 and 4. Or at least, I should say, let's stick with the public school numbers because I think the private school numbers went down, but I'm not absolutely, I don't have that data from the report in front of me at the moment. hilariously, the Washington Times reached out to Penn America, the free speech group, nominally, free speech group, Penn America, about fires report. And the Penn folks said, we remain concerned that the shuttering of DEI offices on campuses across the country and mounting attacks on programs, including women's and gender studies, American studies, and other ethnic and area studies programs, chill the climate for free expression. You're worried that getting rid of the DEI departments is chilling free expression, but you didn't have a lot of concern about the DEI departments themselves,

chilling free expression. Now, I have not agreed with 100% of the Trump administration's policies on higher education. You've heard me cover here. Genuine free speech controversies. We had Greg on the show not long ago to talk about what the Trump administration is doing wrong and what the Trump administration is doing right about all of this. but the pressure on these schools, institutionally from alumni and then additionally from the administration, to actually, fire, by the way, is good across the board on this.

So they're not just, they've been affiliated with conservatives for a long time, but a lot of conservative groups absolutely detest fire for defending people like Mahmoud Khalil. They're as close to the old school ACLU as you can possibly get to the spirit of the ethos of the old school ACLU as you can possibly get. They're a very reliable source on this. So it's very good news that some pressure is creating a better speech climate. On the other hand, we're starting to see more students, according to Fires report, be targeted. We have seen faculty be targeted. A lot of this goes back to the administration's belief that certain positions on Israel are tantamount to hate speech

that are beyond the pale of acceptable speech. And I think some of that is problematic, obviously. But I also don't want to pretend. For example, one of you wrote in a couple of weeks ago to Happy Hour after Tucker interviewed Greg Bovino and said, you know, the interview was interesting. I listened to Tucker, but Bovino was talking about how the administration, you know, has a target on his back, doesn't like him.

but they just did a record number of deportations in July. And I actually don't know if that number had come out by the time they recorded it. But the point of the email was basically about context. They always want to have the wins and losses, the progress or devolution in the context of the whole picture. And I think that's totally fair. And so the whole picture here is complicated, but the speech policies that the schools had, I mean, I've dealt with them firsthand. They're extremely restrictive.

They did foster a top-down, a top-down ideological indoctrination and ideological conditioning about what constituted hate speech, what constituted violence. And some of that is still there, obviously, but it's less formalized in their speech code. Some of it, I'm sure, comes informally. I know it comes informally from professors and administrators. But DEI departments are being cut. DEI departments were a bastion for this type of censorship. This is good news.

And I think the small win, the decrease from 34 to 30% of people who think it's appropriate to use violence to stop a speaker is a small win as well. And was worth noting because Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck while he was speaking on a college campus asking people who disagreed with him, as he often did to come to the front the line. And he wanted his quote, best libs. He wanted the school's best libs so that he could debate them in a crowd. It's kind of a proud American tradition. It didn't have to be the picture of calm. It got rowdy. And the cacophony is often a good thing when it comes to speech, when it comes to argument and debate, theatricality and cacophony are two different things.

Cacophony is good. Theatricality can be bad. But he was shot in the neck while he was answering a question about gun violence in a debate. And I think it is entirely appropriate to acknowledge that over the course of the past year, it appears students have become less supportive of using violence to shut down a speaker on their campuses. and that in the big picture, a lot of these toxic speech policies, which were then, in some cases, mirrored by the Trump administration, language-wise, to shut down anti-Israel speech and what I was uncomfortable with.

A lot of those policies are going away. I don't think it's good if they're being replaced by other bad policies. But overall, what fire is measuring is the policies of the school. And so that's a good thing. And it's well worth mentioning. By the way, before we run on tonight's show, I wanted to mention I got into debates with some of you in the comment section of the Hassan Piker video that pissed everyone off the other day, as I knew it would, going through most of the main criticisms of Hassan Piker. And I got into arguments with some of you on X. And one of you, I think, made a good point that the apology I referred to from Hassan Piker the next day after he made his.

comments about America deserving 9-11, there's actually room for some debate about whether it constitutes a formal, quote-unquote, apology. And other correction, it was two days later, not the next day, two days later. But he said in the conversation with his uncle, Jink Uger, I should have used more precise and better use of the language there. He said, it's messed up that I would even give the opportunity to the right to try to morally grant stand on an issue like this when they are 100% responsible for all the bloodshed that's been caused. So deflecting in that case. Jank asked him if it was satirical.

He said, yeah. And then he said, I know that I was inappropriate. And so I think it's entirely fair. I should have used more precise and better use to the language there. I would defend my use of the word apology and say it's like colloquial walkback, that sort of thing. But I actually think it's entirely fair to point out. Is it a technical apology? No.

And so I or maybe not categorically, no, but maybe not. So I think that was entirely fair pushback. And worth noting if you saw that segment, I think it's worth actually reading the exact language of it. Furthermore, one thing that I did point out is when you combine that comment with the dick move of him putting 9-11 towers falling behind him on his set. that's a bad choice. That's like I think makes it fair to question, you know, his sincerity and saying it was inappropriate to say America deserved 9-11. Now, there have been some interesting, this isn't even a planned segment. It's just kind of riffing right now because there have been a lot of reflections on 9-11, one of which came from a

person on X named Fudge Futuristic because someone posted, it'll never happen, but the network should just run their broadcast from 9-11, all day the September 11th. And this guy responded, people born pre-9-11 have such a weird worshipful attitude about it. And that obviously your enormous dropback. If you don't have social media,

you miss the amount of detached zoomer irony about a lot of historic tragedies, but particularly 9-11. People who didn't live through 9-11 didn't experience firsthand. I mean, all of the people who worked in the two trade centers, level in the Pentagon, you add that up. It's thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And so around the country, whether you're in Wisconsin like I was, but especially if you're on the East Coast,

people were, you know, one degree of separation, if that, away from so many loved ones in the towers. And we're in agony that entire day, many of them for weeks afterward, wondering what happened. We're on tenter hooks wondering what happened, pins and needles wondering what happened, in addition to the national trauma

of facing an attack on the homeland like that. And you can see the images, but you can't experience that day and what happened afterwards. obviously. And so I think as Sampuyker's my age, I think he's like a millennial and he was alive on 9-11, but you think it's playing a bit to the Twitch zoomer audience that does have this detached, um, ironic humor, meme culture about 9-11. And it's a, it's just a dick move. And it obviously raises questions, ideological questions that I can't wave off when you do that. So anyway,

some thoughts I wanted to add on that also just wanted to add that if you watch breaking points this morning we went through a new harretz report since we're also coming up on the third anniversary of the butchery of october 7th a harretz report from authors who now say um that nettineahu got a call directly from mbz of the uae days before october 7th uh conveying a message from Yadis Sinwar and Hamas that they were preparing something major. And Charlie Kirk himself had huge questions about whether a stand-down order had been given. Glenn Greenwood was recirculating a clip where Charlie on Patrick Bet David in October of 2023 said he's been in Israel, it's incomprehensible. That security didn't catch it until they did. There have been all kinds of questions about this in the years since October 7th happened. And Haretz now is saying that Netanyahu was warned, also now saying that,

Bill Burns, Biden's CIA director, was warned. So just a quick update since breaking points this morning. I have not. I reached out to the CIA for comments on whether this is true. They have yet to get back to me. I think it will be surprised to learn. But this is another story to stay on top of because Americans were kidnapped and Americans were killed on October 7th viciously. And if our government had advanced warning and did nothing with it, that's another huge question. And did our government do anything with this information to pressure Netanyahu to ask what Netanyahu was aware of? According to the report, he kind of deflected to MBZ and said, well, we're more concerned about the West Bank. Gaza is under control.

It's also a question of American politics, in addition to playing out in the middle of the Israeli election cycle as well. So I just wanted to update everybody. On that point, we'll be continuing to follow these stories. Thank you for tuning in today. Really, really appreciate it. Please subscribe if you hadn't. haven't yet, send your emails to Emily at double-madecaremedia.com. I answer them on our Friday episode of the show, which you have to subscribe to the podcast feed. It's totally free. You just have to go

over to Apple or Spotify and find the podcast. And we have some cool stuff happening on an effort party in the next few weeks. So get ready for that. I'll have a wonderful evening. We'll see you soon.