Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/23/25: Ryan CONFRONTS Emily On College Campus CANCELLATION

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Ryan interviews Emily on her political views and life story!   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, this is a special holiday edition of Breaking Points. We're coming to you from the past. We have no idea what is going on in the world in which you are currently living. We are recording this way back in the middle to early month of December. The Year of Our Lord, 2025. Hope everything is going well for you. Today, we're going to be joined by journalist Emily Jashinsky. Emily, thank you for joining us.

To be clear, this is part one of a series we're doing where Ryan is going to interview me, and then I'm going to turn it back over to Ryan, and we're going to interview Ryan. Ryan appears to have Googled me in preparation for this. And I did not do him the same courtesy because I've probably Googled you before. I don't know. I'm sure when we first started hosting,

I'm sure I was like, isn't that the guy who beat up Jesse Waters? Actually, right around the time that I was fighting with Jesse Waters is when you were fighting with, the big LGBTQ lobby, which is what we're going to get into first. And then I do want to hear about more of like what got you into this world. But I think this is actually a good place to start. So we do have an actual element that I Googled.

There's a whole bunch, but I just grabbed one from Raw Story. So the headline here, and this is the year 2015, love the photo that adorns this. This headline's so funny. If you're only listing to this, you need to go find the video because there is a picture of two women making out next to the headline college group hosting rick santorum demands quote sensitivity training to teach gays quote respect uh and so this came from a gw hatchet article while emily was the in at the at george washington university and was the head is that right of young americans found with y a f right yeah this is the

Buckley organization, right? William Buckley created this like youth organization young Americans' future or something like that? Yeah, it's confusing. I can get into it if you want. Yeah, so yeah, that's what I want to do. And so then

GW mandated that they were going to do like DEI stuff, like sensitivity trading particularly I think this one, correct me wrong, particularly around trans issues. Pronouns. Pronouns.

And you were quoted as saying, forget it. We don't want to do this. And interesting, in the Rawstory article, they have the college Republican throwing you under the bus. Oh, of course.

That's what always happens. So the head of the college Republican says, look, it's just a little, just a little, just a little sensitivity training. That's how it used to be. Don't be so sensitive. That's how it used to be.

All right, so. I've been vindicated. So you're a, so when did you graduate high school? So 2011. So 2011. So you start GW. It's my senior year. So this is your senior year of college.

Yeah. So what is, what is this Buckley group? And then we're going to get into the controversy. Because it became like a little national thing. You became like a punching bag for the kind of left wing, raw story, Huff Post. I wonder if Huff Post did anything on you. That would be funny. If I remember quickly, I think HuffPost.

I think Huff Post did, but, you know, it was, it's actually very interesting and I think telling story. It's a little thing, but like the dust up kind of, it brings in a lot of different, I don't know, it does bring in a lot of different trends that started to pop up, especially after 2015, but basically in college, I was the president of the Yaff chapter. That's Young America's Foundation, which had just merged in 2012 with Young Americans for Freedom, which is the Buckley Group. That was created with the Sharon Statement in 1960 at the Buckley Estate, and Ronald Reagan kind of comes out of young Americans for Freedom circles.

It was not a young American, of course, but that was part of the Reagan Revolution, guys like Roger Stone, affiliated with Gaff and all of that. But when I got to college, you know, that was the conservative group on campus that I got involved with. This is a, the, the LGBT sensitivity training story is a funny one because it was, I don't know, like a snow day, if I'm remembering correctly. And I got a call from the student newspaper, the hatchet. And they-hatch a job incoming. Yeah. And they asked, does G.W. Yaff oppose this bill that the student association passed, like last night, that mandate sensitivity training. and it was such a trap

because I hadn't given any thought to the question of the student association sensitivity training bill and I think actually what they asked is if we would be requesting a religious exemption to the thing and I think the quote that I have in the hatchet is like well I'm sure we would be because it doesn't sound very tolerant of other people's religious beliefs

because the sensitivity training was going to for leaders of student groups It wasn't a huge deal, but it did mandate that you go to preferred pronoun sensitivity training. We have the receipts right here. You said mandated training is not really being very tolerant of all religious beliefs. The way that people who are deeply Christian behave is for a reason. And if you're training them to change that behavior, there's obviously a problem with that. So they were going to have every student.

Just if you were the leader of a student group. So if you're the head of a yeah chapter or even, you know, the, the, Muslim student group like you all would have had to do it right um let me see if I can find the Republican one he said regardless of yeah this was Alex Pollock what's he up to now he's the head of the college Republicans at GW he's got to be like lobbyists or something by now I think he works in publishing and wow flamed out after double track but you you know you know college Democrats and college Republicans like college Democrats less so now it's they're more activity college Republicans certainly to this

day. Like those are people who are just gunning for internships on the hill and trying to figure out a way to run for Congress. Right. And, and, and, and yeahf gets, by the way, in disclosure, I'm actually on the board of directors at yeahf because that was my first job out of college. I was the spokesperson there and, you know, owe a lot to them because as a nonprofit group, you know, I got a lot of like experience, you know, went to conferences, and they were the group that paid for Rick Santorum to come to our campus. And it was a very, very, very interesting experience having Rick Santorum come. But it was the reason that groups like Yaf are different from college Republicans

is because there's that kind of sort of populist element to it. And that's the forgotten part of the Reagan revolution. It's the forgotten part of Buckleyism because it was a revolution against the establishment Republican Party of the time against Gerald Ford. That's what it was against. And so that's what I've always liked about like, like, yeah, as a conservative student group. So anyway, yes, they were trying to mandate sensitivity training.

I was like, hmm. So Alex Pollock said, quote, regardless of the college Republicans head, regardless of reviews on LGBT people, LGBT people exist. He said it should be mandatory from a sensitivity perspective, which is definitely not the Republican position anymore. elephant in the zoom and so so how did this so that how did how did that experience of becoming a momentary kind of national figure in the sense that you're it's got to you know it's not as if like you were a household name or anything but like if you were a college senior and all of a sudden

your name is in like national publications yeah with people hating on you yeah um uh but What was that like and how did that shape who you are now? Is this origin story stuff or were you, this was just like you were on the same trajectory either way? No, this is absolutely origin story stuff. I had a job already lined up for when I was graduating at a Republican consulting firm that was going to be doing like oppo research. And I ended up working at Yaff instead because after this happened, they were like, whoa, things on campus are actually even crazier than we had quite realized.

come work for us and do some PR stuff. So that was my first job. And I took it because I was very interested in media. I always wanted to be a writer. And this job would let me write columns and do that sort of thing. But it was horrible. Truly, it was horrible. I, you know, they wanted me to go on Fox News.

I said no. And, of course, after that, like, ended up you're doing a decent amount of Fox News until about five years ago when we started hosting together. It tapered off. But it was truly horrible. I had people yell at me from across the street. I went on spring break. Like students or like?

A student, yeah. I went on with my friends, by the way. I have many gay friends at GW who were like, whoa, what the hell? The Allied and Pride group on campus, I would have to go look this up, but they put out a statement, if I remember correctly, that said we had committed an act of violence against the transgender community. Yeah, I think they called you a hate group or something. as a hatred, they tried to get his pushed off campus, literally tried to get us pushed off campus. I think people were agitating for us to get suspended. And this is, again, not because we said anything other than we think that mandatory sensitivity training

on preferred pronouns is not tolerant. That's the statement. So, yeah, they tried to push off campus for that. And it was very like proto-woke, I guess you would say. But it was horrible. It was genuinely horrible. And a lot of people, I'm sure there are a lot of people on the right who would love that. But for me, I hated it. And I don't have, like, literal PTSD from it, but thinking about it feels still really... Still raw.

I still feel kind of panicky, yeah, because it was an early experience with a pile on, and I've never been comfortable. You know, when you're a journalist, even when you do a show like this, you know, it's... Every once in a while something you say gets clipped and it's horrible every time.

I hate it. Yeah, the headline... Here's another headline. conservative club labeled, quote, cancer, quote, hate group for requesting to opt out of LGBT training. Come on. Interestingly, I just noticed that the original Hatchet article has a list of corrections that is almost as long as the article itself. Oh, it doesn't actually? Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. And one of them, and I wonder if this played into the pile on, it says the Hatchet incorrectly reported that the sensitivity trainings would include information about sexual assault. The focus of the trainings would be LGBT issues. We regret these errors. And so it may have initially been reported that you also wanted to opt out of sensitivity trainings around sexual assault, which would, I mean, clearly it was originally reported that way. Like, that's why they had to correct it. That would be even more egregious probably to the public, say, like, how dare you? How could you not? So I wonder if that, like, played a role in the pile on. What really started it was the Allied and Pride at GW statement, and that started going viral on our campus circles.

Like Facebook was big back then, and I think they, yeah, they put out the statement on Facebook. And when that happened, it was just everything from their national media picked up on it. So like raw story, whoever else picked up on it. And it became just a total nightmare. We got like hauled into a meeting with the student association. It was, it's origin story stuff just for the fact that. that this was, you know, I would say, the point of this being mandatory, and then having like a pretty, I think, reasonable request to not have to go to a mandatory, like, reprogramming training. I feel like that was kind of reasonable.

Then you have the college Republicans throwing us under the bus, and you have the Allied and Pride Group freaking out. And this is about like three months before Bruce Jenner became Caitlin Jenner. And it's just all of the stuff was happening in the spring of 2015. That was pretty interesting because Trump was literally about to come down the golden escalator like a few months later. Right. Right. Yes. This is this is definitely an interesting time. I could imagine some people coming out of this with more of an axe to grind. Like you have a, you know, you're pretty firm in your culturally conservative policy.

politics, but I haven't noticed you with any kind of hardcore, like, vendetta, and probably much more tolerant rhetoric than a lot of people who have your same politics. How did that come about? Yeah, it's kind of for me is the opposite, because one of the things that, one of the reasons that it came to D.C. is I grew up, like, in the woods in Wisconsin, not a super rural area, kind of the excerpts of Milwaukee but um you know my my family definitely was like in the woods um and like could you see your neighbor or like what was your situation no yeah no um you can shoot on our property all that good stuff um and we hopefully that means your neighbors were really far away

yes uh well it's also just that even they have a lot of woods so they have a bunch of property um and And anyway, so all those say, the, you can see them now because all the trees are down. But anyway, going on, going forward, I grew up like... Why are the trees down? What happened? It's the cycle of the forest. They're old. And also, my dad has just been, like, deforesting, taking him down for various. Well, because they're dead. And, yeah, anyway, also. Good excuse to use the chains off. But grew up, like, hunting, fishing. My mom is from a very rural area. does from a very blue-collar background and going to church every Sunday.

And it was just like one of the reasons I came here is that I was so frustrated by what I was seeing on TV and in movies, just the way that culture talked down to people. I always felt like I just wanted to prove the point to elites that these are decent people. I just am so annoyed by this assumption that you are bad if you come from a culturally conservative background for whatever reason that has just always really really really gotten under my skin and that's why I came here and so I hate feeling misunderstood like it just drives me insane and so I like having conversations and that's where I think I don't have an axe to grind I just genuinely have a point to prove and I like having those those conversations like I want people to

see that you know I might disagree and really disagree on difficult stuff but I don't hate anyone like it's really the opposite and that's just frustrating were your parents conservative when did you get a political awakening so my mom

definitely is conservative my dad votes for both parties he's a he worked for the state he was an engineer for the state of Wisconsin his whole career is retired now but he was a public employee union

and so went through the the kind of Scott Walker era. I was funny because Scott Walker's president of Yaff now, but, you know, they would... Oh, really? Yeah, my mom was in HR for years at some, some big corporations like Johnson Controls, and they would argue about Walker and unions. She was in HR and had to deal with a lot of that. So a little bit of both. My dad's Catholic, my mom's Lutheran. So it was a little bit of both, but for me it was just kind of this cultural, It wasn't always, like, hardcore conservative, and I don't think I'm, you know, I'm not like MAGA or Republican now. I just am kind of a limited government, cultural conservative type person.

I pulled up another 2013 article. This is another hatchet article? Another hatchet article. I'll read from this one. It says, sophomore Emily Jashinsky said she grew up in a strict Lutheran household. And is also morally opposed to same-sex marriage. But after honing her political views as a libertarian, she doesn't, and she'll be doing, well, we did the reason debate already. She does not think the government should be taking a stance on the issue at all.

She will not head to the Supreme Court this week, or there was going to be a protest around marriage equality ruling. Republicans do not need to get caught up in social issues, she said. Chesinski, a member of the Young America's Foundation, said she is inspired by new voices in the Republican Party that are more libertarian like father. and son, Ron and Rand Paul. She called them the future of the GOP. Amazing. That seems, so I can... Hopeful future. I can guarantee that was like a six-month phase. I can't toy him with libertarianism. Although, but the limited government that you still espouses...

So this was hardcore libertarianism. You were like... No way, I mean, yeah, kind of. It was becoming that. I mean, the... Sophomore year, that's around when people try on libertarianism. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. It was definitely short-lived, but the reason that I was attracted to libertarians is because I've always been a populist. And at the time, Ron and Rand Paul were populist. The Tea Party movement was populist. And so the thing that I was wrong about, and Charlie Kirk was wrong about this at the time, too, I think I just came around a little earlier, was that the Republican Party did need to get caught up in social issues, not in the way that a lot of people, you know, wanted it to get caught up in social issues.

And Rick Santorum is an interesting figure in this respect. two, on the one hand, was talking about Charles Murray's coming apart and cultural elitism. Then, in the other hand, was talking about a pretty unappealing worldview that Americans were moving away from that wouldn't fit on a populist platform. So anyway, yeah, that was short-lived. I don't think I've ever really considered myself a libertarian. I still really like Rand Paul because I think he is a populist. I like Ron Paul because I think he's a populist. But at the same time, you know, I am kind of an economic populist in a way that they aren't.

Like, I believe in industrial policy and protectionism and all that fun stuff. So Ron Paul ran in 2008 for president when you would have been, what year did you graduate? 11? Yeah, it was in high school. So was that kind of the first campaign you paid serious attention to? or yeah yeah because i was in 2004 it was 12 or i'm sorry it was 11 yeah so that was definitely the first major one um did he do better in 2012 i'm trying to remember yeah so 20 so he runs in 2008 to 2012 he comes out this is post tea party um and yeah he almost you almost win

iowa or win iowa like he he did incredibly well he was shocking the republican establishment yeah And the people who got behind him in 2012, I think, ironically, you could say, many of them became Trump supporters. Like, Ron Paul was the, like, he was the avatar for challenging the Republican establishment. Yeah, exactly. And so it feels like people were more interested in challenging the Republican establishment than whenever that person was saying. So that's why you're like, okay, it's going to be Ron Paul. Then I'm going to learn about libertarianism is going to be Trump. I'm going to do this other thing.

Yeah. And after 2012, Ron and Rand were treated as the future of the Republican Party by the media. There was that Time magazine cover. That was like the libertarian moment, if I remember incorrectly. And it was all the rage in like young conservative circles. Like nobody wanted to be connected to the Santorum in young Republican circles because there was this sense pre-Trump that the culture war was dragging everybody down. And to the extent that the pronoun sensitivity training thing is origin story and lore, it's that for me, that is an early point where I reversed that 2013 hatchet quote where I was like, oh, no, actually, the culture war is where this is like the big tent.

The culture war is the big ten. And I'd always been more interested in the culture war than most people who were like in college Republican circles. But that's, you know, to me, I was like, this is getting so. wild that kids are being chased off a campus for saying like they're being called a hate group for saying they didn't want to do a mandatory pronoun training like this getting a little crazy things are getting weird and so then how long were you at y a f after college almost two years almost two years um and my college job i was i'm probably the longest american enterprise institute intern ever because i worked for uh not in foreign policy

although I would be like standing in the lunchline behind Paul Wolfowitz, wild. Architect of the Iraq War. Yeah, yeah, wild stuff. But I worked for Christina Hoff-Somers, who is, like, she was very favorable to Bernie in 2016, but was at AEI writing about feminism. She wrote that book from in 1994, who stole feminism? And she wrote the war against boys. And my job was to fact check the original war against boys, the footnotes, and make sure the research hadn't changed. And in fact, what I found often

is that some of these trends had gotten worse about young men in schools and all of them. When did the war against boys come out? The original one was 2000. 2000? Yeah. Yeah. The re-release was 2013, I think.

How did Christina Hoff Summers shape your politics working with her? Yeah, I mean, Christine's amazing. I just wrote in the Washington Post this month about my experience working for her. She's amazing. Like, she's brilliant. And it was, for me,

more of like an awakening along these same lines that I had you know I felt it in my gut but I didn't have the language or the research or the experience to kind of back it up which is this is a person who's eminently reasonable brilliant and had leftist critiques of the feminist movement when she was her courses were cross-listed in the women's studies department at uh clark university I think it was in Massachusetts in the early 90s and she had leftist critiques of the feminist movement got kicked out of the women's studies conferences and everything when she wrote Who Stole Feminism and ended up at AEI making I think a lot of the same like leftist critiques feminist critiques of the feminist movement in ways that aren't easily categorized as like

necessarily leftist or reactionary but she was so misunderstood and that I think I haven't even thought about that until now but like that I think really resonates with me is that these elite distortions of well-intentioned people who are just trying to engage in conversation. Who did steal feminism? Like, what was her? And for what purpose? Like, what's her? I haven't read that.

What's her argument? That's where she goes through some of the statistics that the feminist movement has often relied on that aren't great. Like, so for example, overstating the wage gap, overstating the prevalence of domestic abuse and violence. and in ways that further, like, victimize women. It's like the learned helplessness, but applied to women and the feminist movement. But also, she was very early in saying that erasing sex distinctions was going to hurt women's bases.

It was going to undermine Title IX. It was going to create serious problems. She was very early on Gamergate, which is funny. I think I've told the story before of, like, ending up at a Gamergate meetup while I was a Christina intern at a bar on U Street. here in D.C. that got like a bunch of bomb threats called in. And it was all of these Gamergate people.

Milo was there who came from around the country. And what was Gamergate for people who, like, if you're under 30, that probably doesn't exist to you. Yeah, that's true. It's seen as like Trump lore. It's like 2014-ish. Yeah, 2014. It's sort of seen as like proto-woke.

It was a bunch of men getting mad about the feminization or the feminization. or the feministization of video games and some of them channeling that in really awful ways and some of them channeling it in ways that was just like stop encroaching our spaces like we have to let some stuff be for guys and some of the feminization of the video games was like proto-woke

but anyway, yeah, I was at that Gamer Game meetup and it was like a bunch of, I say this respectfully. And Steve Bannon cites that as his origin story. He like saw the energy around GamerGate so there's a lot of angry young men here. Totally. We could channel this into a publication and a presidential campaign and a political movement. Yeah.

And some of that went to, some of that energy went to Trump. Some of it went, honestly, to things like Charlottesville. And some of it went to, you know, just Jordan Peterson and early Jordan Peterson, like some really good stuff. So, yeah, but I was like, I say this respectfully, like in a party of like sweaty basement dwellers who had traveled. It was the worst smelling party I've ever been to. who had traveled from around the country and were so nervous and they didn't have a lot of money

and they had put everything into getting to this meetup and it was like the highlight of their year and it was in a way there were some of them who were clearly fringy and off but in a way it was like also some of them were well-intentioned

and it was very kind of touching I don't know any of them talk to you or were they all afraid of you? They were afraid of the women that is for sure but yeah they were really excited and then they were really excited

when the leftists called them bomb threats And they had to evacuate three times because it made them feel like they're renegades and right exactly right They're a real threat kind of alive yeah which and so you being at the gamer gate basement party goes to a question I've seen a lot of people ask now I've wondered about like the the how do you square you in the public space you work harder than almost anybody that I know like the day that we're taping this, you're up early in the morning, do breaking points, you're then recording some episodes for the holidays. You'll then have maybe four hours to go do other work. The Series XM show at two.

Series XM show at two. Then you're going to do the reason debate at be there at 5.30. And then you're doing your after-party show on Megan Kelly's network at like 10, which will go till when, like midnight? 11, 11.30. Right, so that's... It's a long day. It's a fun day.

I don't want to say that, like, like, the way I always think about it is, it beats working. Yeah, you always say that. It's not real work. It gives me perspective. Because it's fun. But it's a lot.

That's a lot. 6 a.m. to like 11, 12 p.m. We can acknowledge that that's like a long day, even if it's fun stuff. Yeah, it's a long day. On the other hand, from the cultural political perspective, it's like, well, women shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be working or, I don't even know exactly where, obviously, you wouldn't ban them from working. But, like, how do you square that?

That's a good point. No, I, that's gone back to, like, people have asked, you know, Phyllis Schlafly that for years. And actually, another one of my form of experiences was we brought Phyllis Schlaffley to campus. I went to a Bertucci's and sat next to Phyllis Schlafly when I was, like, 20 years old. And, you know, she was 89. at the time. And I just remember, still working. Still working, escorting her down this narrow hallway at GW. And the protesters, she's 89 years old, were like shouting in her face and calling her like the most awful things. And again, I actually do understand where some of that comes from directed to Phil Schlafly because there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of angst from like

the sexual revolution and LGBT stuff, feminist stuff that then comes out. And actually, probably is real stuff too that comes out when you have somebody like Phil Schlafly as an avatar for that movie anyway yeah watching the like hatred and bitriol was quite an experience

I don't I'm not one of those people that you know has ever thought that women should not work my mom worked you know probably 70 hours a week like she was flying to like you know for a lot of my childhood she was flying to like China and Germany

because she worked for, you know, auto manufacturing company. No, no, no, no, no. She wishes, she wishes. But, no, she was in human resources, which would be a horrible CIA cover. Or maybe a great CIA. Maybe, I don't know, no. No, but I've never thought that.

I think we have, Mary Harrington has this really interesting point about how the separation between home and work is actually industrial. It's post-industrial. It's only something that we think about. This idea that when, should stay home and that home is at work is like very much a and Mary comes at this from like a Marxist perspective that like men and women shared the work of the home until industrial society came along so I think some of these are like artificial distinctions I think you know if you look at surveys it's true that most women want to work part-time with their kids and and be home for part of the time with their kids that is the plurality of what women want to do so I think women should should be treated that way and

shouldn't be talked down to for choosing to work part-time or stay home with their kids. But I don't really buy into the artificial distinctions between that anyway. That is an interesting point because the whole like women should be at home is a post-World War II. Like in the 19th century, like, yeah, everybody was working at home, especially because energy production was such a significant part of home life. like going out and like basically getting coal or chopping wood and making sure that you had like enough to heat the house occupied like men men had to do that and we're doing it on top of whatever their job was otherwise the house is cold and that gave them an out then too they're like that they're you know if they're shirking other duties because they're not shirking anything

because they're like, like literally, they got to be out there chopping wood. Yeah, exactly. An enormous amount because it burns so fast. Yeah. And interest, so energy production being taken care of now by just the house has freed men up. Yes. And so men filled that time with not as many as Gamergate. And it's like, right, now it's back to being wildly unbalanced back at home.

It's a good Christmas book recommendation. Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington. She goes into some of this. What's her take? Just what I like it's actually very fascinating. At the time, I don't know if she would still define herself this way, but at the time it's a very Marxist critique of the feminist movement. It's really interesting.

That's interesting because, yeah, it's like, I guess a lot of it, they grew up in the 40s. Yeah. And 50s. Yeah, and it's, right. That was their perspective rather than a long historical one. Yeah, it becomes like corporate academic feminist. So then how do you wind up at the Federalist?

I was at the Washington Examiner working for someone, you know, Tim Carney on the commentary desk for a couple years. A job opened on the commentary desk at the examiner. I jumped at it right away because I really wanted to do writing. And I told, yeah, for that when I started working for them. That's what I ultimately wanted to do. So I jumped at that. But Tim was insistent and rightfully so that if you're a 24-year-old and you have an opinion-writing job, you're actually going to be doing reporting.

So, like, you can do your blogs, but you need to bring new information to the table. And so that's where I hate reporting. I always say there are a couple types of journalists. There's the journalists who get into the job because they love reporting and talking to people and they hate writing. There's the journalists who get into the job

because they love writing and hate reporting. There's the rare person who likes both and is good of both. But I'm the type of person that I'm in it because I love writing. I don't like reporting. But Tim forced me to do. do it. And that was incredible. So the Federalist plucked me from there to sort of do that, but with more at the time, like considered elegant kind of cultural writing every day. So my job

was to write one piece on culture a day. It was like the dream job, which because the Federalist is very small, quickly turned into a lot of other things. I was doing a lot of editing, read the submissions every day, which was fascinating. The federal submissions from like 2018 to 2024 were very, very interesting. Not bad. Yeah. So and the federalist model was publishing non-professional writers from around the country, which I think any leftist publication is a, that is a model that they should take because we were publishing, most of our staff was in the rest of the country. You know, our politics editor was in Texas, executive editor in Indiana. Like everyone was, it was elsewhere, but most of our writers were non-professional writers, either just like people with

normal jobs, small-town lawyers, safe moms, that type of thing. So that was very, very interesting to see the difference between, like, the D.C. Hive Mind and the submissions every day. So now you went to college with two interesting people, Graham Platner. Yeah, I think so, yeah. Saga and Jetty. Yes. Did you know him in college? And is that how you first started doing, like, how did you first start doing rising appearances before then doing the show. Sagar and I definitely met each other without knowing it in college. It's my theory because he was in a frat that I would occasionally be at the parties that had a friend of a friend who was like in that frat.

You party with Sagar. Yeah, probably. He was a year. Sager was getting high in the upstairs. But Sager used to be a much better time. Much better time. It used to be a much better hang. Yeah.

So Sager was a year ahead of Mianchia. Platner was just going through GW very slowly on the GI Bill and we found out recently that we overlapped with him I don't think either of us knew him but Sager had a really similar circle of friends to me

and so when we met at an event that he was covering he was covering a YAF event we like met in person and you were at YAF at the time yeah this was right it was like the week of the 2016 election and we met in person we were like like oh yeah yeah we have all these friends in common and then our friend circles like became

totally intertwined because one person started like my best friends started dating one of his best friends and there you go there you go and so then he starts asking to do like weekly are you doing weekly rising things you know it's it's funny it's even funnier than that saga um was really interested in starting to do like on camera stuff when he was at the dilly caller and i at the time was doing a decent bit of on camera stuff at fox and so we were talking about like what that's like if it's worth it all that sort of thing and so when he was at the caller we were kind of strategizing on those types of things and then he would come and like i think you too would be on the panel on rising when he got that job yeah i think we had like maybe you had this

too i think it was like tuesday i'll be you'll be on like tuesdays yeah and whatever you want talk about yeah tuesdays something like that um yeah so then so you help saga with the whole fox thing I don't know if you'll admit it, but, yeah, that's true. Well, we'll interview Sager. We were at the Piz on Connecticut Avenue. Yeah, we had a little conversation about that. And I was also on the Daily College softball team, so I was like hanging out with all those guys. The team any good?

Oh, hell yeah. That year we beat the State Department and the championship. Wow. Awesome, yeah. Hillary's State, well, not Hillary's, but Obama's State Department. I played on the House Ways and Means Committee team. Several years. It was the crazy stories.

We had like four, four or five Huff Post people and then weighs them in. So inappropriate. We literally were going to bat for them. So then Saager and Crystal leave, they go do breaking points. Yeah. And you come in for a couple weeks and do Rising and then end up doing it for a very long time. Like how did that fit into your? how you had seen your career going.

I guess then we've got to wrap up pretty soon. Yeah, people probably... Kick us out of here. I know I've said this before. People probably know this. Like, on-camera stuff is not my favorite. I don't love it. I'm happy to do, like, radio stuff,

but I really hate doing on-camera stuff. And so one of the reasons I didn't want... I didn't jump at the chance. Among many other reasons, soccer and Crystal kind of filled us in on what was going on at the Hill. So there were a lot of reasons. I think both of us were skeptical.

It was great money, though. At the time, it was great money. And so, yeah, just, like, you know, was also kind of trying to help them out. And was, like, trying to, at the time, I was trying to do less on camera stuff, to be honest, because Fox had, again, tapered off for various reasons. But it started to become really fun. And I think you and I both experienced the obvious reaction. that audiences had to Crystal and Sager,

which was awesome. It was so cool. It's cool to see how that's blossomed. But, yeah, that's, I didn't really... And around that time, reading has, like, been steadily declining. Mm-hmm. And, like, audiences are moving here. Mm-hmm.

So if you want to share the news... It was so cool. Kind of go where they are. Here we are. Well, yeah, and I don't know. I mean... I don't know that I would want to co-hosts anyone else. I mean, there's obviously also Crystal Sager that's great.

But yeah, that would be no fun. But I just mean if, like, we had initially been paired up together. Yeah, I don't think, I don't know if I would be here because I feel like that was really crucial. Yeah. It's, it's, that's the limiting factor in a lot, and I think in these shows, actually, is that it's, I think that's right.

There's an, there's an audience for much more of this type of, news that is produced but people can't produce it because they can't get along and they can't right um or they don't and not or but and they don't know what they're talking about so it's it's hard to find people who like like know what they're talking about and also like the other person they don't uh and agree with them on on everything right it was really hard i mean i mean the fact that we got through peak woke that crystal soccer and all of us got through peak woke and like Should make t-shirts. Yeah, we should.

We survive for the cancel culture wave. I actually think it is an amazing achievement. And the last thing I'll say is just... It's going to be downhill from here. It's going to be downhill. And also, yeah, I mean, the... We certainly have disagreed on Israel stuff and probably definitely still do. But that has been an interesting journey for me, too.

But it's... The last thing I would say is, I think, algorithms are reprogramming our brains, especially in media. So, and this is just also... audience directed, you guys have probably see just the amount of people that react to Ryan and me and Crystal and Saugger with total, sometimes extreme, like, you can't talk to that person, you can't talk to this person. People would probably be surprised at how much that we get constantly. Like, this is disqualifying.

You should never talk to this person again. How can you host a show with this person? How can you host a show with this person, given what this person that this person is friends with thinks? Like, it's just crazy. Um, and so I think one of the reasons there's a demand for this type of show that doesn't get done is because the algorithms are like reprogramming so many people to give in to those pressures and, uh, to fight or to dig in their heels and not continue to learn from each other and whatever. So that's one thing I think we do well. Yeah. And I think if you push past those people like, like we're winning. Yeah, I think that's true. Because there are more people who are like, no, actually you should talk to each other. Yeah. And I want to hear, like, a lot of people will watch both Fox and CNN. It's like, why are we making people do that?

Yeah, exactly. Just give it to them. Just give it to them right here. And it also creates more honest news because it fights audience capture. Yeah. Like, you know, if you just have one perspective, and then you build an audience that wants to hear that perspective. And if you want to change direction, or if you have a, position that differs from what they think which you have to because times change right we move on

like we get new information totally you can't or you lose your audience whereas our audience very much expects to hear things they don't agree with yeah that's so true and I hope people see that we like learn from each other um I think journalists should have more questions than answers you know and that's where I get a lot of times people being like well what do you actually think about this. It's like because we're used to having people in media who have a rock solid opinion on every single thing because that's how you were taught. I mean, I always talk about how when I did media training before I went on Fox the first time, I answered, I don't know, to a question in the media training. And the woman was like,

just don't ever say that. Don't ever say that again. Yeah, right. And now it's like a lot of times they're just asking questions because you don't have to have a prefab ideological conclusion for every question that comes up. And shows that are in the habit of giving you that are bad. And I think people are getting sick of them. Well, Emily Jachinsky, co-host of Breaking Points, a co-host of the Emily Joczynski Late Night Hour on The Megan Kelly Show, still ongoing writer on her? Yeah, columnist. And Ryan Grimm's biggest fan. And host of the show, Ryan. I'm Ryan Grimm's biggest fan. I swear. Other than maybe I was in. There you go.

So thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Ryan. I hope everybody's having a wonderful holiday. Now it's my turn to turn the camera on Ryan. Uh-oh. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes gentlemen. The gentleman's cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.

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He said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories on my 13th season of Family Secrets.

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