After Party with Emily Jashinsky - The Amnesty Divide, and "Toxic Empathy" Clash, with Rachel and Inez, Plus Bieber's Deep Nostalgia at Coachella

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show with breaking news of a Trump Cabinet shake-up. U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving amid misconduct allegations. Then Emily is joined by her friends, Rachel Bovard, Vice President at the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Inez Stepman, Legal analyst for Independent Women. They open the discussion with a look at the House extending temporary immigration protections for some 350,000 Haitians living in the country and the proposed DIGNIDAD Act which would provide legal status to illegal immigrants. The news comes amid reports that about 9% of U.S. births in 2023 were to unauthorized or temporary legal immigrant mothers. Then the panel dives into the recent David French and Allie Beth Stuckey debate on “toxic empathy.” Emily, Rachel, and Inez also have fun discussing Madonna’s appearance at Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter…complete with matching corsets. Emily rounds out the show with a look at Justin Bieber’s moving performance and how his career embodies a dramatic change in our culture, and more…   PreBorn: Help save a baby go to https://PreBorn.com/Emily or call 855-601-2229.   Unplugged: Switching is simple, Visit https://Unplugged.com/EMILY and order your UP phone today!   Cozy Earth: Visit https://www.CozyEarth.com/EMILY & Use code EMILY for up to 20% off 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. As a reminder, please do go ahead and subscribe. It helps us so much on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. My guest tonight are Rachel Beauvard and Annes Stepman, which you know I'm excited about because they're my friends. And it's good to talk with your friends. We've got a lot on tonight's show. We're going to talk about amnesty. Is there momentum for amnesty? Maybe Rachel will know. It kind of seems like there's a little bit of momentum for amnesty. We have a wild clip of Mike Lawler, right? Republican Congressman Mike Lawler brawling with Tommy Lerrin and some shocking new data from the Pew Research Center. A crazy New York Times piece framing this issue in a very particular way. I think you can probably guess which way. We're also going to talk about the Allie Beth Stuckey versus David French. Obviously, David French, evangelical Christian conservative columns. So you probably know when I say evangelical Christian conservative columnist at the New York Times that I mean a liberal. but if you followed David French's work, like I have over many, many years, and Alibeth as well,

this was, I mean, this was must-see TV for the loser community. And it did not disappoint. It was incredible. So we have some big clips that I think are very revealing about where the media is, where David French is, and actually where the evangelical movement, how it's being torn in different directions. So we're going to go through Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter set at Coachella. Madonna is 67 years old. That's all I'll say.

For now. For now, that's all I'll say. And I'm going to go through some of my thoughts on Beaverchella, which I tried really hard to ignore. And then producer Steve Crackauer with great MKMea team just couldn't, he couldn't be stopped. He was, what's the line in Mean Girls? I'm a pusher, Katie. I push people, push my husband into law school. I pushed you into, and now I'm pushing you.

If I just got that off the top of my head, well done. But Steve is a Bieber pusher, and that's where we find ourselves. Now, please do subscribe. It helps us a lot, keeping the lights on, the show going. We're having fun. Hope you're having fun as well. We appreciate everyone for being with us. But I wanted to start with some breaking news.

One of the cool things about having a show that's live at 9 p.m. is that you can go through breaking news. And we got a late day news story, significant late day news story. Somebody asked on Happy Hour, which is the Friday audio-only episodes we do over on the podcast feed, who I thought would be the next cabinet secretary to leave. I didn't really have a good answer to that. But one of the possibilities I suggested was Lori Chavez-Daremer. And as it turns out, Lori Chavez-Daremer resigned this evening.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Daramer, who was picked because she was a supporter of the Pro Act. This was a bill favored by Big Labor. So some brief thoughts on this because she was a very significant cabinet pick. Former Democrat from a swing district in Oregon, like I said, sponsored Big Labor's big, what's say even best was, signature piece of legislation probably just over the last 10 plus years. that was really a signature piece of labor's legislation. And that's part of the reason she was selected for this job. She was seen as somebody who could be a bridge between the old Republican Party and the Trump Republican Party.

Somebody who wouldn't upset the new right kind of inclination to be more pro-labor wouldn't upset people in that camp, but would also be in offensive enough to people in the business community. And actually, I did some reporting on this last year. And this was February of 2025 as this confirmation was happening. And a senior source in the labor movement told me then, quote, I think the fate of the labor secretary will be a huge test of this question. So if we pause on that now, having learned, Chavez de Riemer spent about a year in the job and had to resign. We have this post from Stephen Chung over at the White House who announced it basically.

I think notice got the story first and Stephen Chung then. weighed in pretty quickly to say she was taking a role in the private sector, quote, a position in the private sector, lauded her. So, quote, she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers and acting fair labor practices and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives. Now, if that's true, that, quote, senior source of the labor movement saw this as a huge test of the question over the Trump realignment. This is what the said, is this real or not? And would those years of work from Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance in the Senate, the coalition building between folks in Maga World and the labor movement,

would it all matter at the end of the day if, you know, libertarian Rand Paul, who's been on the show, of course, he tried to kill the Chavez de Riemer nomination in committee. But Bernie Sanders, Tammy Baldwin, Democrats were thinking long and hard about what to do with this question of Chavez-Duramer. She was suspected, she worked at a Planned Parenthood Clinic years ago. I mean, like 37 years ago, she was suspected of being a leftist, like genuinely a progressive, a cultural progressive. But that's where this fight became really interesting. It was like, Does that matter for the labor secretary? Or was the abortion question, really a proxy question for how loyal to the president Chavez-Dreamer would be?

She was mired in controversy for months. In fact, Chavez-Dreamer resigned as there was an inspector general investigation that was expected to close, according to the New York Post, was expected to conclude in the weeks ahead. there was also a Senate judiciary probe of Chavez-Dur-Reymer, actually of some of these allegations that made their way into the New York Post and other outlets that Chuck Grassley was leading. And we could toss the headline up the screen. But basically, I mean, it's kind of hard to even run down the full breadth of the investigations that just weren't even just Chavez-Daramer. There were also Chavez-Duriemer's husband, a staffer accused her husband of sexual assault. the police declined, law enforcement declined to bring charges in that case recently, but AIDS have resigned.

Chavez Reamer was accused, as you saw in that New York Post story, of having inappropriate relationships with staffers who allegedly went to an Oregon strip club with the secretary, who brought her staff to an Oregon strip club, also took a trip to Las Vegas for someone in the staff's family member's birthday during the government shutdown. last fall, basically was accused of gross mismanagement of resources. There was a whistleblower complaint that the IG was investigating. She was accused of drinking in the office. Now, that, like, I don't know how serious that actually is. The tabloids tend to play that stuff up and make it seem. I was kind of happy to Cash Patel at this second, although he was also caught chugging a

beer on camera, so it was maybe a little bit different. But, you know, that can get played up by the tabloids if someone is just, you know, having a staff meeting or something. So I don't know how serious that was, but this is a where there's, this is a weather smoke. There's clearly fire situation because nobody, I mean, Chavez de Riemer is a target as soon as she steps into this role. Because big business, libertarians, like the Rand Pauls of the world, but particularly big business, does not want to have somebody who is big labor friendly, pro act supporting like Lori Chavez de Riemer in this role. So they want to get a scalp.

They want her out. She is a target for them. If you go into this role knowing that and then are taking your staff to strip clubs, how long do you expect to last in this role exactly? What do you expect to get done in this position? So the Trump administration's relationship with labor has genuinely been interesting. The same is true of the Republican Party. And Chavez-Ramer is going to be very difficult to replace.

This is one of things I said on Happy Hour that made me think she might be safe amidst all of this controversy because she's a unique figure who comes to the table with this background that a lot of other Republicans don't have. Who can stand up for the sort of pro or. worker vibes, and I say vibes, because they've yet to translate into a ton of policy that you would see out of like the labor department, for example. Maybe that was Chavester Ramers' fault. But who can, who can be on board with that while also being on board with, you know, the Trump coalition, I mean, the donor coalition? Who keeps all of those pieces in place in the way that JD Vance, Josh Holly, Marco Rubio were doing in the Senate. And it was tough when they were doing it in the Senate. They were taking fire, still Josh Hawley, certainly, taking fire from all directions.

When Ted Cruz tried to push back against a bill that Labor really liked from J.D. Vance after the East Palestine disaster in Ohio, it became a brawl behind the scenes, all out brawl behind the scenes. And J.D. Vance had to push and push and push over and over again. And it was really, really difficult uphill battle. And there aren't a lot of people who have the experience in both camps. And it seems like maybe that's what would keep Derrimer safe. But it's possible also they got wind that the IG report was going to be very bad for Chavez-Durremer. So I'll just end there.

I think this is an interesting story for that exact reason. Not just a proxy battle for Trump's relationship with big labor. That in and of itself is an interesting question. Obviously, a bunch of these unions have been so. far to the left against the wishes, if you look at polling of many of their own members. So does that mean it's an opening for the right? It should mean it's an opening for the right. But what do you actually get out of that?

Are you able to really steer them in different directions? Sean O'Brien, obviously the Teamsters has tried to have good relationships, better relationships with people on the right. We'll see what comes of it. But she'll be a hard one to replace. That's for sure. Okay, I'm going to move on to the great Rachel Beauvard and Inez Stepman in just one moment. But first, over the years, I've been clear about this.

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Live it. Help save babies and support mothers today. Go to preborn.com slash Emily. Or call 855-601-2229. That's pre-born.com slash Emily. All right. I'm happy to be joined now once again by Rachel Bowen. our vice president of the Conservative Partnership Institute and a Nes Stepman, a legal analyst with

independent women. Welcome back, guys. Happy to be here, Emily. You look great. Oh, so true. Thank you. Oh, I have a lot of things. I'm eager to get your takes on. I want to start with immigration, actually, because Mike Lawler, obviously, congressman from New York went on Fox News and brawled with Tommy Laren over the Dignad Act. We've seen some of these flare-ups, particularly with Lawler, who seems to be happy to go and defend this bill. But it's starting to cause a real rift, depending on how serious it is. And you two may have interesting insights into that. Is this just something that's circulating or is this seriously on the table for Donald Trump? I've heard competing points on that. So let's watch the clip. This is, again, Mike Lawler Sunday on Fox News, S-4.

I have always said I am against illegal immigration. I have always said I want secure borders. I want people to come here legally and lawfully. TPS is intended to be temporary, primarily related to humanitarian relief. And in the case of Haiti, it has been significant. They've had multiple earthquakes and hurricanes. They've had political unrest. You have gangs in charge of the entire country. But correct me if I'm wrong, it sort of sounds like you're saying that we must keep the world's people protected in this country until the world's problems are solved or until we go and solve the problems of other countries. That's not what I said. You said that we need to manage the hemisphere. We need to fix Haiti before the Haitians go back? No. President Trump is saying we need to address the problems in our own hemisphere. The State Department itself is saying it is unsafe on the ground in Haiti. have over 100,000 people working in our health care system to support Americans. This is not like they're just sitting here doing nothing.

Okay. So that was actually about the TPS that was extended for Haitians by the House of Representatives. Now, Lawler has also been brawing, I think it was most recently with Laura Ingraham, over Dignad, which is technically a separate bill. Daniel McCarthy wrote it, quote, makes a joke out of Trump's efforts to report anyone who's in this country illegally beyond the illegal populations that get amnesty this time, it sends a message that anyone who wants to break the law to come here in the future will probably get amnesty sooner or later too. And I just want to say that's exactly what we heard in his clip defending TPS for

Haitian migrants. Little bugaboo, a lot of the Haitian migrants, if not most of the Haitian migrants, that came over during the Biden surge, had not lived in Haiti since the earthquake in 2010. They were living middle class lives, fairly decent middle class lives in Argentina, Brazil, and other places, Mexico, Tijuana, some of the Haitians that I spoke with. And they literally just wanted to come to the United States. They were willing to sleep on the streets and give up those middle class comfortable lives in other countries because they wanted to come to the U.S. that badly. But they were not in Haiti.

They were not in like war-torn, war-ravaged Haiti. So, Rachel, let me start with you, giving your Capitol Hill experience in York on Capitol Hill. Is this? Is Dignad-Sirious? What were they doing? Is the TPS vote a sign that Dignad is serious and there could be amnesty coming down the pike soon? I always take it seriously because this has always been the bottom line divide in the Republican Party. And it's why, you know, the power of Donald Trump and his rhetoric and his mass appeal got us to this point where we could do a significant number of deportations. We could encourage self-deportations.

We could do all these things. But at some point there was going to be part of the Republican Party that was going to say, And it was always going to be big business, which you've seen them at the White House. You've seen them lobbying across the government for expansions of work visas. And it was always going to be kind of these sort of sob story elements, which TPS is a huge one. Right. And the joke of TPS, you know, even though it's a serious program, is it's not temporary. People know this.

You know, Trump, to his credit, has ended it. He's ended it for Venezuela, for a number of countries. But there's always been this belief that if you can get a TPS, TPS classification, temporary protected status, which comes with a work permit, that you are in the end going to be either be given some sort of legal status or TPS will just last forever. And some of these programs that Trump ended did last for decades. But this has always been the fundamental divide in the Republican Party. And it honestly, it is probably the biggest issue in which the elected Republicans diverge from their base. Because for 30 years, more than that at this point, base Republicans.

Republican voters have been voting for what Donald Trump ran on in 2024 and in 2016, which is enough, enough on federally illegal immigration, maybe even tamping down on legal immigration, get, you know, these work visas under control. All of these things are what Republican voters have been asking for, not amnesty. And yet, every single time the Republican, the elected class of Republicans says, hey guys, what about amnesty? What about that? And every time, like, we have to take it seriously because it's so predictable. And so I don't think it's something you can turn your nose up at because every election cycle, every midterm, this is a discussion Republicans always have.

Yeah. And as the suspicion is actually that Trump endorsed Maria Alvara Salazar after she advanced dignidad, which people are saying, well, is that a signal that Trump has been positive about this, that Trump wants to make some sort of deal on this. In his first term, he was open to making a deal on DACA with Nancy Pelosi. He said that they were openly negotiating over that. It never actually happened if that's comfort to anyone. But do you think that, I mean, the House passed this on Thursday. They passed the TPS for Haitians extension for three years.

Obviously, that means a lot of Republicans voted for it. So do you agree with Rachel that it would be foolish to rule out something like this happening? I'd be very surprised that Donald Trump reneges on the central premise of really all of his presidential campaigns. Rachel's right that this is a long-term issue for the Republican base, but she's, I don't want to say wrong

because I'm sure she... Say it! Say it! Say it! It'll feel good. Really, I'm sure she agrees with the extension I'm about to make, which is it's not just the Republican base.

Immigration restrictionism is very popular and has been very popular with the American people, at least restrictionism on the restrictionist side of the policy that we have had for the last 30 years, for the last 40 years. It's incredibly popular even with independence. It's more popular with Democrats than you might imagine. There are plenty of Democrats who also believe that we need to restore some kind of rule of law, that even legal immigration has gone too far in recent years,

and we need to have some kind of slow down and let the Republic digest culturally. some of these issues. Look, if we're going to have TPS visas for Haitians for as long as Haiti is a, sorry to quote Donald Trump here, an asshole country, right? We're going to have it forever. Haiti has never basically since independence been able to govern itself without mass bloodshed and serious political turmoil. So, I mean, this is just another, I can't believe the Republicans, honestly, I mean, I can, but I can't believe that Republicans would fail to read the room in this way that they would think that advancing amnesty at this point when the the Republican base has been Lucy in the football for 40 years on immigration plans. And let's not forget, the Republican base,

even the Republican base, forgetting for a moment about where independence have been headed, even the Republican base was very reasonable about this question for a very long time. There was a Reagan amnesty. It was supposed to be paired with enforcement law and an end to the flood of people. that was supposed to be, that was supposed to be the Lucy and the football deal. And every single time, as Rachel said, right, the deal is, yeah, you'll get some enforcement. It'll come after. But in the meantime, let's allow people to continually come to the United States with very little betting. I have one more point to make about this, which is that overall the Trump administration has been, the reason I'd be surprised if Trump capitulated on this is that the Trump administration has been incredible on immigration and not just on restoring order in the border. They have been denying all kinds of visas from H-1B to State Department visas across the board, it has gotten much, much harder to get into the United States legally and much harder to stay in the United States illegally. And I think that's a very good thing. Overall, he has been delivering on this promise. If he reverses himself and what the administration has doing, I think that would be a very bad move. But I really, I don't, I hope that won't happen. I don't believe that it will happen. So the Center for Immigration Studies, which is obviously a pro-legal immigration. I think that's how they describe themselves, very anti-illegal immigration. conservative research group on this says that basically four percent of the population of Haiti

came to the United States in a two-year period during Biden. I mean, that's how significant these numbers are. Additionally, Dan McCarthy on the Dignity Act says it would grant legal status to as many as 10.5 million illegal immigrants while expanding eligibility for yet more newcomers to receive temporary or permanent visas. And Rachel, one of the things I wanted to ask you about that Lawler clip is generally I tried to read between the lines and here he's as is anyone's job I suppose but he was particularly citing healthcare workers. That sounds to me like he's getting lobbied like they're like calling up his office and be like listen we won't the elderly will be in dire straits if TPS isn't extended. That was the biggest giveaway of the entire clip where I said the

quiet part out loud which was that yeah. I mean like they're that we we can't support that our entire care sector, you know, all of the assistance that we have from them. That's because at the end of the day, that's what this is. It's an economic argument, and it's always been an economic argument. We cloak it in humanitarian language to make ourselves feel better about it, but it's an economic argument. And I think what, you know, I want to take Nez's white pill that the Trump administration is not going to step back on this. But the thing that gives me a little bit of pause is that, you know, we are back to the rhetoric of we're only deporting criminals, right? We're not doing necessarily mass deportations, although I would give them a ton of credit, right? We are far in a way better.

And I think Ryan Gurdoski makes this point. There's been so many deportations and self-deportations that is actually going to impact the census. And that's going to have huge long-term ramifications, which is great. But they are dealmakers. This administration, they're dealmakers. And you've seen employers already at the White House, you've seen big ag at the White House getting expansions of H-2A visas and some of these like, you know, worker category visas. And That's what they want. We also haven't seen a lot of employer enforcement. And ultimately, like, if you want to get rid of the pull of illegal immigration, which is that employment,

you're going to have to start enforcing an employment site. And we saw that at the beginning of the Trump administration, but they've since backed off it a little bit. So I think we're in a sort of liminal phase. I hope we come out at the right end. Trump sometimes does this thing, I think, where he throws out tests, you know, to the ether of see kind of what feedback comes back. And so I hope that he's getting robust feedback that no, no, Donald, that's not what we want. That's so true. That is such a good point, like a trial balloon, to see if there's any way that this could move the needle in a positive deal-making direction for him.

And it's really gotten tough coverage on Fox. Laura Ingram's made a point of giving it tough coverage. Obviously, Tommy Larian, you saw it in that clip, has done the same. And as I'm trying to rage bait you here with this research from Pew that came out late last month, about 9% of U.S. births in 2023. So this actually lags the full Biden surge because that's still in the middle of the Biden surge. So in 2023, our most recent numbers, about 9% of birds were to unauthorized or temporary legal immigrant mothers. So non-citizens, people without permanent legal status. These are not even people with permanent legal status like Greek. These are

temporary legal immigrant mothers or unauthorized. They're illegal documented, however you want to put that one in every 10 babies that's born, essentially, in 2023. I'm sure that number shot up in 2024, maybe 2025. It might dip. I don't know where it's going to go amidst the deportations. Obviously, people have a higher birth rate in some of the countries that come to the U.S. But that is utterly unsustainable. And that is a crisis, the likes of which the media was entirely, entirely ignoring for the better part of the Biden surge. Yeah, I mean, that's national suicide because we're not even talking about the sort of slow cultural change that we have a high level of legal immigration.

We're talking about here. I saw this number circulating in an even crazier way that I was skeptical of initially and had to look into it and show, yes, this includes the huge number of illegal aliens who are here. That's what the bulk of this number is made up of. Because when I first read this number with the headlines around, it was like that 9% of our births or the equivalent of Chinese birth tourism, that would truly be, I mean, anyway. That's hard to believe. That has been, yeah, that has been circulating online.

And that is not true, fortunately. But this is still like a jaw-dropping number. And it's something that's unsustainable. It's the reason that the Trump administration has teed up this case. I don't think they're likely to win, but has like, will maybe make some ground on birthright citizenship. I like birthright citizenship. I think birthright citizenship is a unique feature of mostly new.

America, right? It's mostly America and Latin America, South America. This is something where we are divorced from the old world. We have changed our citizenship rules for good reasons from the European citizenship rules. But this is an abuse of the system. And I'm hoping that there will be at least a decision from the Supreme Court that even if it strikes down what Donald Trump's done specifically on birthright citizenship in terms of executive order, we'll leave open the possibility for Congress to regulate now. We know how, you know, how Congress works and Rachel's rolling her eyes at me right now, but at least, you know, to be able to leave the possibility that this is not a constitutional question, because there's no reason for it to be a constitutional question around

the edges. We have this one-combe, our case from the 19th century on green cardholders. We have a footnote extending it to people who are not legally in the United States have never supposed to be here in the United States. It is crazy to continue. to extend citizenship to people who are never supposed to be here, the children and people who are never supposed to be here. And in addition, people who are here for a week to have a C-section in some island, which apparently is like doing this as its main source of economic, you know, his main economy is having Chinese women fly in, stay in a nice hospital, have a C-section, get American citizenship for their children, and then fly back. These are people who are not

not domiciled here. They have no intention of ever domiciling here. They are merely abusing the birthright citizenship of the United States. And this is obviously something that is untenable long term. Well, and the Chinese birth tourism has gotten some attention in the press recently, but it's obviously not relegated just to Chinese birth tourism. I want to put this Theo Wald post up on the screen. This should be F-13. He's reacting to a truly wild New York Times story. And we're going to get into the story. I want to get into the story. I'm excited to get into the story. But just to tee it up here, what Theo noticed. He says, The New York Times tells us the story of an illegal alien couple from Honduras who were expecting

their first child. After being deported last year due to a, due to a charge for drug possession, they snuck back across the U.S. border, which is a felony when you sneak back across the border after deportation, to ensure their son would be born an American. They were then deported yet again, but their son is now an American citizen with the same rights as you and I. And Theo says this is why the Supreme Court needs to overturn birthright citizens at contra Anez's point, but you don't even have to agree with birthright citizenship to see the obvious abuse here. Let's put the New York Times headline up on the screen. It's she made sure her baby was born in American.

Then federal agents separated them. It reminds me so much of the New York Times' major profile that we covered here on the show in November about how, quote, thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent social security numbers. The headline of that story was two men, one identity. They both paid the price. They both paid the price. So technically true, egregious framing, egregious framing, Rachel, to the story of this Honduran woman, who I'm sure wants the best for her child. Her baby is super cute. This is not any way to run a country. No, and it's like, oh, then they were separated. Well, what did you think? was going to happen. Like you broke the law not once but twice to have a baby in a country that

you illegally entered and then, you know, the law is enforced in a way that you don't like and somehow it's a massive humanitarian crisis for the New York Times. You know, I don't have an educated legal take like Anas does on birthright citizenship, but I think from a philosophical standpoint, it's like, look, what does citizenship mean in America at this point, right? If you have Chinese women who can fly in and transact for it, then it is a privilege that is for sale, which means it is no longer a privilege. It's just for the wealthy.

It's just for people that can transact in it. And, you know, it goes to, like, what is being an American really mean at the end of the day? What are my rights so sacred that people go die for them so some, you know, Chinese birth tourists can also birth a baby with the same rights as they raise them in Beijing.

Or people deported for drug possession. Right. No, this is the thing. It's like, whatever the Supreme Court, whether they overturn it or not, at least clean it up. Like, this is, and as this point, not a way to run a country. You culturally can't coexist with people who haven't bought into the American project if they're going to treat it as such as basically a transaction or something that they can

commit a crime, you know, to have your son here and then, you know, be on the front page in the New York Times about how your rights were somehow, you know, trampled upon. It just makes sense. Can I just, yeah, jump in and say, the same people. who make these arguments also say there's no ideological content of citizenship, right? There was the Shadi Hamid piece, I don't know, two, three weeks back in the Washington Post about how immigrants have no obligation to assimilate or, and he was talking about Muslim immigrants in particular, but these people, when they're talking about birthright citizenship, they say that it's just, you know, about where you

were born and not, you know, and that anybody can become American. And they almost make an ideological argument about it, right? Like, anyone can come here and become American because we're about ideas. But then when you actually push them on the ideas, they say, well, actually, you don't have to agree with any of the ideas. So Rachel's right. At that point, if you've closed off both avenues of what citizenship actually means, either it's about where you were born, or it's about the creed you hold, right? You've closed off both avenues of having any content in what citizenship or the being an American citizen actually means. And so these people are sort of in some sense, they're neither in favor of the creedal nation,

nor are they the blood and soil or the Juselisian nation. By the way, that's how every nation in Europe operates. It's not scary. It's not weird. It's the way that every European nation operates, right? So they sort of close off the meaning of both of those things at the same time, and they hope that you don't listen to them talking about both of them in the same conversation, right? Because what's left is nothing. There is no content to American citizenship whatsoever.

Yeah, that's an important. important point. And it's, none of us is saying these stories are not heartbreaking and awful. What we're saying is that the United States has an incentive system that is making these stories more and more common that is needless. There's absolutely no reason for this to be something that people can do to abuse the system or try because they think they'll have a good chance because the goodwill of the American people is constantly being extended because, Americans are wonderful and know that many of us came from immigrant families. Probably not Rachel.

She's probably like a Mayflower East Coaster. No, no. I still remember our Thanksgiving discussion. Rachel is a- I apostatized on Thanksgiving. It's an Italian invader who has Latvania for Thanksgiving. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, don't cross me.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Okay. Well, this is depressing. And as do you have a prediction about what happens, obviously the Supreme Court is considering birthright citizenship right now. So could get a ruling on that as soon as, what, June. So did you, based on oral arguments, feel they were going in one direction or the other? Well, I think conservative media has sort of downplayed the uphill battle that Trump has, right? Because it's not just about arguing that these obvious abuses need to sort of exist outside of the constitutional understanding of birthright citizenship. He's also doing this by executive order. And so there are two layers to this argument. There's a very easy out for the court to essentially say, well, you can't do this unilaterally.

You can't do this by regulatory means. You have to actually go through Congress and change the law if you want to. Because Congress apparently has ratified, quote, unquote, had actually duplicated the language of the 14th Amendment again in the 1950s in immigration legislation in terms of birthright citizenship. So arguably, Congress has already spoken

and like duplicated the language and didn't change anything, which you could argue, that means that they basically blessed this situation. So what I'm looking for in this decision is not so much that the complete Trump triumph on what he's actually arguing, but one, how many of the justices actually buy into a constitutional view of birthright citizenship

that is a little more narrow than it has been since the 1960s, meaning excluding the children of illegal aliens and excluding the children of birth tourists are things that are on the table for Americans to decide about without a constitutional amendment. That would I would consider that a victory because you have to remember, I went back and listened to Akele Amar who's one of the foremost scholars on the 14th Amendment. He's on the left, but he has worked plenty of times and with federalist society, he's not like some, you know, sort of guy who's out there on a limb. And even he, a mere five years ago, was calling this a

complete crank position that had absolutely no backing in. law. And now we're looking at it getting maybe three justices of the Supreme Court fully signed on and then maybe like I imagine this opinion is going to have concurrences and dissents and like a million different like features to it. So it's not going to be a clean decision. But I think it's a starting place. And what I would like to see is leaving that open, at least that leaving the question open for the American people to decide, hey, do we want birthright citizenship to include Chinese women who fly to an island for C-section tourism? Do we want it to include millions of people? against clear indication from the American people who are let across the border by Joe Biden and just released into the interior of the country who are illegally in the country. Is that what we were thinking about as citizens? Is that what we want our citizenship to mean that somebody can, as in your example, flagrantly violate the law twice in order to abuse that system? I think I would consider it a soft victory in the Supreme Court if we leave that question

to the American people and not constitutionally. it and make it impossible by virtue of requiring a constitutional amendment. So we're left with having a functional Congress? Well, that's dark. Yeah, Rachel's like, uh, bleak. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back, obviously, with Madonna's 67-year-old legs. Why not? Hang in there. If you're listening to this, don't worry. I will describe those legs. So stay tuned. Well, for years, legacy media, government, and big data companies coaxed us into surrendering our digital freedom, giving lip service, of course, to privacy while leaving digital backdoors wide open for their

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so you can be confident in knowing your upphone is the most private smartphone you can buy. Check out upphone from unplugged at unplugged.com slash emily. That's unplugged.com slash emily. Welcome back to AfterParty. I'm joined by my friends Rachel Beauvoir. Vice President over at Conservative Partnership Institute and Innes Stepman Legal Analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, Independent Women, I should say. Now, I know everybody can't sit with their plans on Saturday, Friday, whenever this dropped the Alibeth Stuckey versus David French debate on Relatable with Alibet-Stuckey over at The Blaze. Everyone dropped their weekend plans, am I correct?

Naturally. What else do I have to do? I just love David French's voice, so I want to listen to it. I know that I also have an irritating voice, so I'm not a hypocrite in this. But like, David French's voice is not. He really, he has a voice for TV. Well, you forget about it, too, because, like, you look at him and he's like a relatively like tall has stature and then you just, you're used to the written word and then

you hear him speak. And it's like, it's like, it's a little much. There are better. He is one of those guys whose arguments are, you know, I don't find them convincing in either format, but. It's worse when he says. it out loud. Better in a written format, I think, than,

then there are people who are the verse, by the way. So David has written before on Allie Beth's toxic empathy book, and others have advanced similar theses to Allie Beth, basically, and she's been on the show before, but basically the way that empathy is weaponized to elicit toxic outcomes from people of goodwill, who are trained to rightfully be empathetic to their fellow man. And David, as I think the three of us would all agree, given a very uncharitable version of

Ali Beth's argument when he has argued against it in the pages of the New York Times. Now, if you have no context on who David French is, he worked for, I think he actually worked for fire, right? And as a financial right, and as financial rights expression, I think maybe he also worked with ADF or for ADF at one point, Alliance Defending Freedom. Anyway, he's been sort of a constitutional constitutional lawyer for 20 plus years, probably close to the 30 years at this point,

was with National Review for a long time, kind of a stalwart of the conservative movement, seen as somebody who was a defender of conservative values, very, very anti-abortion. He forgot failed presidential candidate or attempted presidential candidate. I did forget about that. I did forget about that. I forgot about it, too. I'm just realizing. He would have what a get for Allie Beth to have former presidential candidate David French on the show.

Great point, Inez. Now, his, he was getting, it was very anti-Trump, very never-Trump, 2015, 2016. He got lots of hate for it, as did most people who were anti-Trump, never Trump, and people who were pro-Trump, for what it's worth in 2015 and 2016. It seems to have permanently colored his view of the right in a way that's made him, rendered him relatively incapable of open-mindedness and charitableness towards his, alleged former conservatives. He took a job at the New York Times where he now kind of right splains evangelicals for a secular liberal audience. And Sorab Amari, my editor over Unheard, famously had this piece called Against Frenchism that went mega viral in 2018 and

2019. They debated, it's a long story. And if you're outside of the conservative movement, it's really in the weeds. But what you need to know is that David French, I'll put it this way, basically does the bidding of the left for the pages of the New York Times in spending most of his precious ink going after conservatives and in very uncharitable ways. And that's happened with Ali Beth. So in this conversation, Ali Beth called out David French for his writing in the paper of record, if we could still call it that, on her argument. So let's take a listen. In the articles, I'm talking about not just your book, I'm talking about other books. I'm talking about also secular. But you do use the Toxic Empathy, you said, for example, in 2025, you said, for example, if people respond to the

foreign aid shutdown and the stop work orders by talking about how children might suffer and die, then they're exhibiting toxic empathy. That's not what I say toxic empathy is. Well, it's absolutely what I see a lot in the public discussion that this has been a cultural phenomenon, especially in parts of like what I would call Maga Christianity, that if you talk about human suffering that results as a product of politics, that the reference to human suffering is referred to as, well, that's what toxic empathy is. But if someone used for the title of a book or for the name of a concept, toxic love to describe, for example, the overbearing love that a mom has for his son

so that he has a failure to launch, you would understand what they're talking about and you would understand the point that they're trying to make, that they're not saying that all love is bad, that there's actually a healthy way to do it, but that it's turned toxic. I have seen you online talk when people talk. talk about the plight of others, the plight of immigrants, et cetera. I have seen circumstances where you bring up then again this example of, you know, what we were talking about with toxic empathy.

And I think that maybe... Can you give me an example? I don't have your Twitter feed in front of me. Okay, perfect. Mr. New York Times walks into Alibu's studio preparing to cook. Not prepared, by the way. She has her notes in front of them. Presumably he could have had notes of these tweets that he found so egregious in front of him.

He had his iPad. He could have looked it up. Oh, well, there you go. He could have looked it up. So, Rachel, to me, this is so similar. I mean, I've seen this happen to so many people over the years where it's like he clearly had come to Allie Best's work with a closed mind. And his flamboyant denouncements of, quote, toxic empathy, the title of her book where he would invoke her name,

we're clearly about tone policing Christian conservatives in the pages of, broadly secular center-left newspaper, which is if that's how you're using the arrows in your quiver as a writer, as a Christian writer, to do that, and then not even to be charitable to your fellow Christian, your fellow conservative, your fellow countrymen, but to have them act as you're the one with the moral high ground. When you're the one who's lacking the open-mindedness to take seriously somebody. It's sort of like, Rachel, maybe this is the best way to put it. He just finds Alibati icky now

because he is no longer, has to go and lower himself into the conservative movement. He's up in Manhattan working for the New York Times. He lives in Tennessee, but it writes for the New York Times. So he doesn't really have to deal with the icky cultural conservatives. What David Frenchism amounts to now, the David French of the New York Times, is that the left deserves every,

ounce, every benefit of the doubt you can possibly muster. But maga Christians, well, they deserve generalizations and ridicule. And that is how he walked into that podcast studio. And every argument he made was from that position. And I will say, you know, his argument that, you know, compassion and kindness and empathy are, you know, required in political discourse. Like, I don't disagree with that. Exactly. But to David French, they are. But that's. That's in her book. Well, right. And he never gets to the point where these are necessary but not sufficient.

And that's been Ali Beth's entire point. And he never acknowledges that. His end all be all, his entire political purpose has devolved into, well, is this nice enough? And I think you get to it now where he like refuses to even call James Tallerico not a Christian. Right. That's what he said. But that's, and this was another part of their debate. Actually, I wrote it down because I remembered this as I was listening to it.

it. At one point, they are, he basically accuses her of being emotional and not intellectual, which was another one, I'm sure he would call that sexist if someone else was doing it. Which is so funny because it was reversed, but yeah. Yeah. hilarious. Okay. But then he also moved the goalpost from saying that he was like, I'm not going to sit here and claim that James Tolariko is not a Christian. But what Alibeth was arguing is that he had called James Tolariko like a model Christian. Yeah, no, and I think there was that.

And I think it's fascinating because even the atheists, right, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens could look at James Talleyco and be like, yeah, that guy's probably, that guy's not a Christian because, you know, basic things like believing that Jesus is the exclusive way to God, like basic Christian beliefs he doesn't believe in. He's a universalist. Like, he doesn't even believe that, you know, Christianity is, is the exclusive path to heaven. So like the atheists probably have a better bead on James Dalleroa not being a Christian than David French, which is very ironic. But I also found it really interesting that the focus for Ali Beth was much more, it seemed to me, on, you know, natural law issues, like civilization foundational issues like, you know, marriage and gender and biology. The things that you build a society around David French was more focused on, you know, foreign policy. you know, and issues like that. He literally cited Ukraine.

It was his first, it was like when he was talking about why he voted for Kamala Harris. Right. And I think that that's, again, the fundamental divide between where David French sits and where a lot of conservative Christians sit. They just look at the disintegration of what French and the left will dismissively call culture war issues. And they're like, no, these are the foundations of civilization. And if you cannot get human dignity, right, if you cannot get the sanctity of life right,

If you cannot get basic things that the society built itself on, then we're doomed. We are sawing off the limb that we're sitting on. And that's why conservative Christians engage these issues. And David French, again, just resorts to calling them bigoted or hateful. Because again, for him, feelings are the end all be all, where the rest of us are like, yeah, you should be nice about it, but truth is truth and feelings are necessary, but they are not sufficient in these arguments. That's a really good way to put it.

And as I want to roll this Kamala Harris conversation or bit of their conversation and get your reaction to it on the back end. I had two motivations in supporting Kamala Harris. One, she had multiple policies that I felt were much more in line with foreign policy wise. Foreign policy, rule of law, et cetera, much more in line. But you knew from her history what rule of law looks like. It means targeting pro-lifers. The very pro-lifers that you have defended in court, Kamala Harris would go after. She did.

I mean, under the Biden administration, she did. As AG of California, she did, like her history is lawfare against pro-lifers. So when you say the rule of law, are you only talking about J-Sixers? No, I'm talking about, I mean, my goodness. The Trump administration pardon, praise God. Yeah, there were a lot of things about Kamala Harris. In normal circumstances, that is not somebody that I would consider voting for. But against this particular president who had both transformed the Republican Party in a way that I find to be just morally abhorrent.

And then the migration of Democrats to be stronger against Russia than the Republican Party, to be stronger on public corruption than the Republican Party, in my view, they were moving towards me in some pretty important ways. And the Republican Party has been sprinting away from my conservatism, just sprinting away, fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, national security conservatism. My brother in Christ, they covered up Biden's senility for years. But yes, okay. And as, give us your take, please. I'm eager to hear it. David French might be the one exception to what I generally refer to, I guess, as Inez's rule, which is that people always fall down on the side of their cultural commitments in every political split, right? So libertarians so often, even though they center, to use the leftist phrase,

they center limited government and low taxes, they will always come down. on the side of social libertinism because that's actually more important to them. David French made his bones in the conservative movement, not only defending cultural conservatives in court, but also repeatedly writing. I remember encountering David French's writing

for the first time when he wrote against integrating, sex integrating, you know, military units and why that was a bad idea to have men... He's a veteran. Yeah, so, you know, he was a social conservative. And I guess, you know, the caveat to the, you know, has his role about people always ending up on the political divide that happens to align with

their cultural commitments is you can just abandon your cultural commitments because that's what he's done. I mean, somebody really, and people have done this, and side by side of all of the beliefs that he's renounced over the years, because it is, it is that Donald Trump ability to draw out his opponents and just make them sort of humiliate and renounce everything that they've ever stood for. Because Donald Trump has done it. And that's, you know, that's the real problem here. I'll say one other thing about this. And I said something similar about Bill Bristol, which is that this game of being the

conservative who denounces the right. It's not that you are obligated because you're on the right to always and forever agree with everything that any Republican president does. I certainly haven't myself. I've criticized Donald Trump. I've criticized previous Republican presidents. I've certainly criticized Republicans in Congress. it's not that you're obligated forever to sort of tie yourself to the mast at every single one of their beliefs.

But once you start finding those leftist mainstream papers and start the game of essentially selling your voice to condemn conservatism being the conservative against the right, I only have one warning for all the people who do this because there's a lot of examples of it. There was one in New York magazine just a, you know, whatever, like a month or two ago about condemning the women who are leaving the new rights. right or whatever. The first time you open the kimono is the one they pay you for and everything else is of diminishing returns. Okay, your career trajectory is very similar to that of corn stars. All right? It's really the best the first time that you do it. And then you're just repeating yourself and debasing yourself more and more. And you have to like renege on more and more of your form of beliefs just to stay relevant because your entire like purpose. The New York Times doesn't

care about what David French thinks about 90% of politics. They care about the 10% of his politics, right, that has to do with condemning the right. And the second that he finds himself repeating himself in those condemnations, he will become useless to the New York Times. That is actually what they're paying for when they hire him. That's what Anna Navarro's entire career is about. And I think it's a very limiting one. I actually don't think you get a lot of intellectual independence or security or honesty out

of people because once you're paymasters just want you to condemn the right, you're just stuck in your own kind of private, you know, endless hell of future, you know, degenerate acts and denouncements. And I just, it's, it's never the right way to do it. Going to the New York Times is never the right way to deal with your disagreements with the right. Yeah. I mean, you're left with a David French who, you know, supports Kamala Harris because of the money that she wants to send to Ukraine while she's putting pro-life grandmas in jail and suing nuns for not buying birth control. I mean, he was a social conservative. That was his state. That was his identity. He was writing about putting the nuns in jail. And in fact,

he was fighting in the four corners of court, which by the way, I knew that David French's world view, this is before I had deeper disagreements with him. But I just, I always knew that he doesn't understand something outside of the four corners of the courtroom because he was able for the straight face. And this is, you know, I don't know, five years ago, seven years ago at the height of censorship and, and where you have 65. percent of students on campus saying they like they won't speak their views in public, you know, reaching Soviet levels of newspeak and double speak and not being able to like express your opinion. And he had the goal to say that this is a golden age for the First

Amendment. And it's because he had won a few of these court cases, which literally universities would turn around and ignore until they were sued again and settle for 200K, which was worth it for them to continue violating your constitutional rights. and just settle with the one kid who went to fire or whoever and had, you know, David French would call that a W. And in the meantime, it was literally the worst environment for free speech or for the First Amendment, in my view, in American history. And because he had such a blinkered view of what was going on. So I, you know, that's my real big beef with David French, is that he is blind to everything outside of his small bubble. and he just continually demonstrates it

and this is another one another demonstration but I still it still pains me to hear David French say certain things because I used to read him and respect him and it still twinges me to hear him

sort of sell out his previous beliefs like this because he doesn't think he has like he thinks that we're just a bunch of whatever it is the opposite of positive empathy we have no empathy at all we've just decided that we don't care about babies halfway across the world. Like, that's how he now orders his thinking. Yeah, I think that's right. And just to like kind of say the quiet part out loud is that it becomes, I think we all suspect,

that the more plotts you get from elites as a conservative who's often been ostracized by those very elites, the more tempting it becomes for the David French of the world to give in to those plaudits. And even as somebody who should have, as most conservatives do, sort of steal themselves from the possibility that that may happen one day. It's interesting that Trump was kind of the breaking point for him, but that's exactly how this goes. Just final thought from me, the against Frenchism column from Sorob, which he's, he has mixed feelings he's written about. He has mixed feelings on that now. But it was essentially, David French became this proxy battle over Smell-L liberalism between liberal and post-liberal. And French was raised up as this

example of liberalism, conservative liberalism, that was content to fail gradually because it was principled. And Sorab at the time and the post-liberals were really inspired by the against David Frenchism column because, or they were galvanized by that column because they said that's exactly the perfect illustration of what we've been talking about. He's also a good proxy for struggles in evangelical Protestant world that have really, they predate Trump, but they have really fallen around along Trump lines and French is with the kind of Russell Moore camp on on those questions. So he's not, you know, an insignificant random New York Times columnist. And I think he, he really got cooked by Allie Beth, which was to see her level of preparation and her ability

to just absolutely take apart his arguments gracefully was a wonderful thing. Now, Anas mentioned open kimonos and pornography, so we are going to talk about the Sabrina Carpenter Madonna set at Coachella on Saturday, which was good. We had already canceled their plans to watch Alibeth and David so that we could segue right into the Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter, Coachella set. Let's take a look here at a little bit of the video from the set. I think this is when they were performing like a prayer. Now, Madonna has been really excited because she put out a statement saying, quote,

that was such a thrill for me. So you can imagine what the thrill is for me to be back 20 years later in the same boots, the same corset, the jacket I had on earlier, the same Gucci jacket. So it's like a full circle moment, moment very meaningful to me. You can see that they're basically wearing the same outfit. If you're in the listening audience, they're basically wearing the same outfit. Sabrina Carpenter is, who I think is in her 20s, is also in. in the like corset situation and Madonna, we should mention, is 67 years old.

So first of all, let me say, good on Madonna for looking like that at 67 body wise. Our face looks a little, it looks rough. And I just say that in reference to the amount of work in surgery that's needlessly been done on a very beautiful woman. Why? Why? I mean, I've seen the media celebrating this all day. I don't think anybody wants to see Madonna. Am I wrong? Does anybody want to see 67-year-old? We do this every time Madonna comes out in a skimpy outfit, but here she's like intentionally talking about replicating her outfit from 20 years ago at Coachella, intentionally on stage looking like Sabrina Carpenter. Who wants that? Who is this for? I'm not really sure, but like... Not you, I guess. No, not me, but I know, to your point, like, clearly to the point. Clearly, it's just. doesn't skip leg day at the gym, so like props. But she's unrecognizable, right?

Completely. And I think we've talked about this, I think, the three of us before, but there's this fear of looking like your age or aging into sort of the modern sort of older woman. And Madonna is peak this. I mean, at 67, wanting to look identical to, how old is Sabrina Carpenter? Like 26, 27?

Yeah, let me look it up. I mean, that's like a, it's pathological at this point. And, and her face is just, I can't. It's whoever did that. Yeah, she was born in 1999. Okay. Well, that, you didn't have to say that out loud. I was saying.

Speaking of women aging. Well, and as it strikes me as Rachel says that actually, that Madonna is very intentionally trying to draw this comparison based on her statement between herself and Sabrina Carpenter. Like that is sort of the point of the schick, right? You asked who this is for. I think it's for Madonna, right? Yeah. I mean, isn't that obvious conclusion here?

We have a real issue moving in the different stages of life. It's a little bit cliche at this point, but moving from maiden to mother to matriarch, right? We don't have... Shout out Louise Perry? Yes, exactly. We don't have... a script for moving beyond the sexual power of a woman at the peak of her sexual appeal, which is, I'm sorry to tell you, 25 or 23, and it's not 67, and you have to, I think that all

becomes much less scary, at least in some ways. I mean, look, the scary thing about aging is that we're all like decaying and dying and we'll be in the ground. That's, that's, you know, They're really just you and me and as. You should be afraid of. Emily is a youthful flower. I'll be at your funerals, toasting. But in terms of moving through those stages in your life, I think they become, not that it's pleasant to say goodbye to certain things.

And sure, it's sweet to be in your 20s, no matter what. But, you know, you lose the fear of those things because you replace it with the responsibility and with wisdom. And what we've seen is especially, I have to say it, I know that bashing boomers is once again a cliche, but especially with the boomer generation, we've seen the inability to let go of being it. And by the way, millennials are going to be just as bad. We're going to be awful. It's going to be just a toddler tantrum about how 60 is actually the new 25.

It's going to be this. But it's something deep on it. Yeah, there is something deeper about it. The inability, nobody likes it. likes to age, but the total inability to accept getting older and that your sort of satisfaction and meaning and joy in life should come from other roles other than the maiden, the sex pot, whatever, is, yeah, it's not pleasant. And I frankly, I think it terrifies younger women, too, about getting old when they see older women trying to cling by the skin of their, you know,

teeth and by like their claws, right? They're well-manicured. clause to the vestiges of a youth that has clearly passed them by. It's desperate and pathetic instead of what it should be, which is you should see contentment and wisdom in exchange for getting those wrinkles. And we just don't see that anymore. And that makes it very terrifying more than even it should be. Well, and Rachel, I think the big challenge of the next century of human life is going to be accepting limits where they're necessary, determining the limits of humanity that make us better, even if they involve some measure of suffering, right? Isn't that what we're, I mean, this is silly. It's like it's Madonna wearing a corset at Coachella, but that's the transhumanist,

you know, that's hyper-novelty, that's transhumanism. And that's basically what every new technology right now is it moves fast. The rate of change gets faster and faster. That's what's, it's demanding that we confront. Yeah. I mean, it's all, you know, it is at the end, transhumanism, but it comes in the form of biohacking and, you know, optimizing and everything, every element of your aging process can be optimized so that if you, you know, do look your age, if you do have wrinkles and gray hair and that you've done it wrong because there are a million ways that you don't have to look like that. And I think that, you know, and I think that's a little bit of what Madonna is doing, right? When Annes says it's for her, well, it's for her to flaunt it

too in front of every other 67-year-old who doesn't look like that to say, like, you know, look at me, I've done it. Right? And there's a little bit of that, like, I don't know, in your face vibe about it. But it is. Like, from a philosophical standpoint, it is about how do you, you know, accept the process of moving into these different phases of your life without excessive implementation, excessive, you know, again, optimization.

Are we a species to be optimized or what is, you know, being a human mean at the end of the day? And that's the question that the transhumanists are forcing us to grapple with, which, again, is a little bleak. Just to pick up on what both Rachel and Emily, you said, look, Madonna just doesn't want to get older. We can all understand that. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley, and I think Brian Johnson's where you grew up. They don't want to die. And they believe that they're going to accomplish this by whatever, some stack of vitamins. They're not just not going to get wrinkles, right?

They're not going to die. And I, I really do inform everyone, I'm sorry. You're going to be disappointed if that's your goal in life. Yep. You're setting yourself up for that one. How are you talking up or failure on that one? Don't want to spoil it. But yeah, that's, no, I think that's right.

Like the, they're trying to make transhumanists out of all of us, but without getting people even to identify with the name transhumanism. They're trying to just normalize transhumanism as part of our culture. And I think they're doing a really. good job. Now, some of it is understandable. People can put wrinkle-reducing face cream on, whatever. But obviously, that's where the challenge comes is where to draw the line. I want to give a shot to you guys, because some of our viewers may not know. You all have study hall in the morning at like 8 a.m. They're 14. Because I know you're like maybe they're like, what are they,

like 20, but they're actually 14. And they took time to stay up late. I guess you guys, probably already finished your homework. Yeah, we're really wise teenagers. You're on to us. Oh, well, thanks guys. Well, I pick on to all the other shows where you call us old repeatedly. Yeah, you know, that's, I thought tonight

I should try something different. Rachel Beauvard is vice president over at the Conservative Partnership Institute. Andes is a legal analyst with independent women. It was so great to have you guys back. Come back again. Soon, you're obviously the most frequent guests at this point, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Always have to be with my favorites.

We'll always answer the call, Emily. Yes, Queens. All right, you guys go get some rest. Go get some rest. I'll go be back with more just one second. Oh, I can't take myself seriously sometimes. All right. One of the best ways to just relax at home, especially after a late show like this, you're wired. You want to go to bed. For me, at least, it's cozyer.

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At least it seemed like I'm obsessed with Coachella, I should mention I don't really care about Coachella. I've never been to Coachella. But what Justin Bieber's been doing, Steve Cracker is correct. Producer Steve Cracker is correct. It's fascinating. Steve is one of Megan's amazing producers

and is one of the best in business. he pushed Bieber and here we're going to talk about Bieber and I'm happy to do it because I'm not a believer but obviously Bieber's like roughly my age he might be it's like I was realizing today that Zoron Justin Bieber Charlie Kirk actually they're all roughly my age there's something right now where people born in like 92 93 94 like peaking coming into their power, I'm sorry to announce, including me. Obviously, here I am peeking and coming into my power. But Justin Bieber was at Coachella Week 2 doing these really interesting sets where he's basically

on his laptop. He's bringing up guests as well and doing different kinds of performances. But he's also going through his own music alone on stage, at a table with his laptop in front of the Coachella crowd. super interesting. He brought Big Sean up on Saturday. I think of Bieber, I always have thought of Bieber as kind of a tragic figure because you could tell immediately after he got really, really famous being discovered on YouTube, by the way, that it was going to be difficult. That, you know, even in the best of family situations, it would be enormously difficult.

We still don't exactly know what Justin Bieberhood's youth was like, which is interesting because we saw so much of it. We gawked at so much of it. But obviously there are things that were happening behind closed doors that we don't know about. Obviously, he also denies what people suspect about Diddy potentially abusing him? He says that didn't happen. That is a mystery that we may never solve. But just one piece of this puzzle that we don't have in front of us, right? now of what was happening behind closed doors just as a person who was experiencing this transition

from monoculture to microculture in real time which is what happened in the last what 15 years as Justin Bieber rose to fame and stated just about as famous as he's always been so he's now a father and a husband let's take a look he's 32 let's take a look at how Big Sean addressed him on stage at Coachella on Saturday. You know God has his hands on you. I think I speak everyone and I just got to say, thank you, bro. Because indirectly or indirectly, I think you taught all of us to believe in ourselves. You taught us all showed us what purpose was.

I'm not trying to name your album. It's just a coincidence. But when you look at your family, you know, I've seen your beautiful child. your wife who loves and supports you so much your family, you know, you're blind behind the miracles you've seen, you're like me and you live in faith, bro. And I just got to say I'm so proud because I've seen a lot of the things you've gone through. I have. You know, I've seen you at times where it wasn't always beautiful, but you fought through it.

And in a world where everyone's trying to take over the world, you give over the world, bro. People are taking advantage of you. taken and taken and never once have you turned into them. That was beautiful, bro. Thank you so much for saying those words, man. That means a lot to me. Now, what you saw behind Bieber, if you were listening to this, what you saw behind him was a pause YouTube video

on the giant, surely multi, multi-million dollar Coachella screen in front of thousands of people. It was something as simple as literally Justin Bieber, having paused himself. He was screen sharing his laptop with the YouTube still behind him. as Big Sean addressed him. Now, Beaver, the particular significance of him going through, like, he's just looking up himself on YouTube and going through his own videos, the significance of him particularly doing that. He was discovered in the early days of YouTube in the period

of democratization that led to the microculture, right? He is somebody who bypassed the traditional gatekeeping system. And I think it was right. Scooter Braun himself was trawling YouTube for new talent and found Bieber. The point is that Bieber himself was discovered one of these new mechanisms where people could go around the usual pathways to success, you know, going through the farm team system, basically, and playing all these particular clubs, meeting all of these people. He really was just a little kid on YouTube who had a really sweet voice. And from there, it was history. This image stuck out to me. I want to put this one up on the screen. This is, I paused the screen at one point while I was watching the Bieber cella set, and I saw this picture.

Now, again, if you're listening to this, what I'm looking at is an ocean. This is Bieber at a table, performing at Coachella with his laptop in front of him and a camera woman in front of the laptop. Kind of looks like he's on a Zoom video. He's singing, and you see in front of him a sea of hundreds of iPhones. So they're at Coachella. Now you have. It's almost like giving me chills to think about. I don't know why, but it is.

People experiencing Bieber through their screens, recording for posterity. And Bieber himself is looking at his own screen. I think he's watching the Beauty and a Beat music video here, which obviously had Nikki Minaj in it, from like 13, probably 13 years ago, somewhere around there, 2012, 2013. And he's watching himself on a YouTube video as people take videos either for YouTube for their own consumption all through iPhones.

And now actually some people are filming music videos on iPhones. Now, when Bieber became ultra-famous, the entertainment industry looked very, very different. The Hollywood Reporter had a big TikTok piece on the process. that changed everything since 2014. They wrote a piece basically surmising that 2014 was the year that monoculture died. And I want to put this up on the screen a chart from that article. This is the award show audiences since 2014. If you look at the Oscars, they were in 2014 at 43.7 million, roughly 44 million people.

They're now at 17.86 million. That's still a good number for the Oscars, by the way. That's how far the entire linear television industry has plummeted. Grammys are down from 28.5 million to 14 million. That audience has been cut in half since 2014. And interestingly, the Hollywood Reporter wrote this piece, as you can see now on the screen, around this hook of the selfie Ellen DeGeneres. You may or not remember this.

Took at the Oscars in 2014 with Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Kevin Costner, I'm just realized. I'm sorry, Kevin Spacey, not Kevin Costner, apologies, Kevin Costner. But Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Merrill Streep, all squeezed into, maybe Channing Tatum, all squeezed into this selfie.

And it was a really, Like, dumb joke. If I'm remembering correctly at the time, it was, like, extremely cheesy. And, like, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. But it's not crazy, then, to look back at 2014 in particular, which is about halfway into Justin Bieber's career as a time when YouTube itself just changed everything forever, forever. And Bieber's career is cut in half by that.

So he also reminds me a little bit of Lena Dunham, and hear me out. Her new book is called FamSick. We talked about this last week. Famicic is a really good way to describe what happens to celebrities. I don't know if it's an original Donum or not, but it's actually a really good way to describe what happens to celebrities who are never, ever normal again. Because they have been irreversibly thrust into the upper echelon of recognizability and cultural influence. they've put their stamp on history. And obviously we know some celebrities kind of fade into the background and, you know, become

D-listers, if anything, like Z-listers, really, who nobody recognizes 30 years down the road. And nobody may know Justin Bieber's name 100 years for now. I don't know. Maybe 10 people who are like super into music history will know the name Justin Bieber a hundred years from now. Or maybe many, maybe he'll be like Mozart. Maybe Lena Dunham will be like Shakespeare. I don't know.

I mean, I think I do. But the point remains that their power will obviously fade, but not in their lifetime significantly, right? They will always be celebritous in their own lifetimes. And they can never get away from what's been done to them, which has included both riches and all of the many problems that come with them. Beaver obviously seeks consolation or consternation. comfort in Christianity and in his faith. Also, I'm sure in his music and Lena Dunham does it in her writing. But you have millennials whose lives just were whose lives in the public eye were cut in half by the transition from a time when a good Oscars rating was around 50 million people in the country watching to a time when it's like 20 million. And the first time I noticed this, I wonder if I can pull this article up, was with Billy Elish. It's funny because Elish was a believer. Bieber brought Eilish up onto the stage in this really kind of sweet moment on Saturday. But yeah, here it is.

Okay, oh, my gosh, I just found this article. I have a very vivid memory of writing this article. This is from April of 2019, that Pop-A-Bad, by the way, that just showed Molly Hemingway. She's on the show Wednesday, so that's a good reminder to tease. I wrote this in April 2019. In the era of niches, pop culture is starting to feel more mysterious than ever, specifically because I was looking at what was going on with Billy Eilish, and at the time I wrote Old Town Road is the top song in the country right now.

Billy Eilish has the top album. We still have decent metrics for measuring the popularity of music, but the waning importance of radio means listeners can scatter and the gatekeepers have left control. Does Elish, for instance, enjoy the same level of celebrity, someone of equal accomplishment would have had 15 years ago. I don't know. There are SoundCloud stars, Instagram stars, YouTube stars, Twitter stars, TikTok stars. Some artists like Elish and Lil Nasaks transition from success on a platform like SoundCloud

to broader reach. Bieber is also a really good example of that with YouTube. And this is when TikTok is new. I wrote TikTok has its own celebrities. So do YouTube and Instagram? We'll always have George Clooney and Lady Gaga, but it almost feels like we might be lurching toward a future with fewer superstars and more stars. And the monoculture still has a sort of pulse.

A lot of people know who Sabrina Carpenter is, but I think the point stands that it's a little, like Sabrina Carpenter, just as much as people in Gen Z know Sabrina Carpenter. The whole country knew who the pop stars were in the 80s and 90s, right? Like Madonna being a really good example of standing there next to Sabrina Carpenter. And now in the influencer economy and with total democratization, you can just see those are a war show, Wordshow ratings are just such proxies for the entire industry and how those numbers are down. Success now comes at a much, much lower level. This is even at the box office. I'm putting this up on the screen.

You can see box office numbers are down. So this is the domestic box office by year. Last year was like around $9 billion. But it was reliably higher than that in the years leading up to COVID. No huge surprise on that front. But the numbers are just down across the board. basically. Most watch TV series. This is a really good window. Big Bang Theory, 2013 to 2014. 23 million for seven-day viewers. Right now, it's tracker. 14 million.

14 million. Again, we're talking about almost a 50% decrease here. Even when Roseanne was doing really well, 2017, 2018, that was 20 million. So already declined of like 3 million from, you know, five plus years ago with Big Bang Theory and now it's down, the biggest shows today are down so much lower. So we don't share a culture anymore. Bieber is, Sabrina Carpenter will never be as famous as Justin Bieber was, and probably will continue to be, just because he's recognizable to people across so many demographics given where he came from. And I said to say Sabrina Carpenter isn't popular kind of across the board with many different demographics, but not in the way that recognizability of Justin Bieber was and will continue to be. And I just think that's true.

I don't think that we will – I don't know that we will ever see a Justin Bieber again. And I don't know if – he was in this time period where you could kind of have the old guard gatekeeping you a little bit like publicists and agents, but also when social. media was becoming really popular and people had smartphones and could take pictures of him with his when he was speeding in his car or whatever it was. I mean, we've all seen, didn't he like piss in a mop bucket and say F. Bill Clinton at one point in L.A.? I'm pretty sure that happened. Unless it's a dream I had, which is even more concerning, but I'm pretty sure TMZ got video of that, like around like 2012, somewhere in there. But you know the point. When you're a celebrity, the Panopticon is more aggressively conspicuous.

And it's really, I think Beaver right now, what we're watching is him try to come out on the other side of that. And we've seen this happen with celebrities before social media. Obviously, there are tragic instances like Marilyn Monroe. And at the time, you know, film and television, even radio, were fairly new. Basically happened in the lifetimes of the people who made Marilyn Monroe famous. So there was a grappling with it then. And now it's just constant exposure. and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

And I think what we're seeing is Beaver actually inspire other celebrities to deal with that. I feel like part of what Big Sean was saying was rooted in that. There's so our digital footprints, and if you're somebody like Justin Bieber, you've just been on camera basically constantly in a way that even Marilyn Monroe wasn't because of smartphones. Because video is our medium now. The print-based epistemology is Neil Postman, that is faded into the background. We're now in the algorithmic social media,

algorithmic social media-based epistemology, which means that most people's encounters with Justin Bieber are now through social media and have been for many years. And that's a really unhealthy place to be. And I think what we're seeing with him is somebody who was like a guinea pig in the experiment. And other people really respect him for going through that. And I don't know that everything's great.

He seems like, he seems like, He's in a nice marriage and has a wonderful baby and is doing okay. I don't know. Hope for the best for him. But obviously he, and when you look back on it, it's like he was the guinea pig in an experiment that just put him as the frog in the boiling pot of water. And we can look back at it now and be like,

hmm, that must have been incredibly difficult. And it seemed difficult at the time, but not in the ways I think we're starting to fully understand, which is that camera phones and algorithms, and the sharing that happens on social media, I mean, if I'm remembering correctly, if I'm remembering correctly,

there were at the time, social media posts about his relationship with Selena Gomez for people who were involved, like all of that. It's just a thing that people now post to the public. It's part of the culture. He's really been through the, through the ringer. And I think to see him, it was a really smart move for him to, it was

controversial at first. Like people were disappointed in the set. We're like, he's not putting in enough ever. But to see him, uh, kind of replicating what probably he does, uh, sometimes in quiet moments alone, which is go back and, and look at himself and look at his own growth because so many of our own lives are on camera, especially if you're a celebrity, uh, to see that like he is, to see that, to experience that, and to do it on stage in front of so many people, it's basically what he's been doing forever. But now these people were like right in front of him and in person and they were there with him for those moments. So really interesting stuff from Bieber. Really interesting stuff from Bieber. Very mature moment from Justin Bieber this weekend.

I hope we see more. I mean, it's kind of meta, right? But I hope we see more along these lines. All right, that's going to do it for me this evening. Thank you so much for tuning into After Party. We'll be back on Wednesday with a great Molly Hemingway here live at 9 p.m. Eastern. Please do subscribe if you haven't yet. It does really help us keep our independent journalism going. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We're grateful to all of you for watching.

Emily at double-maycaremedia.com is my actual email address. You can reach me there if you have any comments or questions for happy hour. We'll see you back here soon with more.