What's A Conservative To Do? Undercurrents' Emily Jashinsky on Trump, DOGE, and how worried we should be
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I really don't see Silicon Valley changing at all. I mean, I think we've seen good signs on their speech policies, but the bigger problem with these platforms to me has always been, I think the biggest problem in American politics, which is that they are addictive. They are basically gamifying our politics. It's like if we were litigating important political issues through a digital casino, and that's so horrifying.

Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Daum. I'm here in my makeshift studio. I'm still kind of finding my way back to life after losing my home in the wildfires here in Los Angeles, as I've been talking about. This is a conversation with journalist and political commentator, Emily Jasinski. But before we get to that, just a few very brief notes of housekeeping. If you want to become a

paying subscriber to this podcast and find out more about what we're doing. You can go to Substack. You can get there directly by going to theunspeakablepodcast.com. You can also find out about The Unspeakeasy, my community for free thinking women and sometimes men. We have a thriving online forum as well as in-person retreats all over the country. We're doing several this year. So go to theunspeakeasy.com to find out about that.

And now here's my conversation with Emily Jasinski. Enjoy. Emily Jasinski, welcome to The Unspeakable. Thank you for having me. It's an honor.

You are a journalist and the host of Undercurrents, which is a podcast YouTube program produced by UnHerd, which is, I think, a favorite magazine media platform of a lot of listeners of this podcast, certainly mine. You're also the co-host with Ryan Grimm of CounterPoints. I've been really excited to talk with you because...

I think you are a notably sober and circumspect voice among the current crop of political commentators. So first of all, thank you for being that way. No, thank you. I feel that way about you. So that's especially kind coming from you. Okay. Well, I guess it takes one to know one. We're fighting the good fight. So I want to talk with you about a lot of things. But I mean, maybe first and foremost, what is it that you're doing?

What you are thinking about the future of the Republican Party and of conservatism more generally? I mean, I guess this is an obvious question, but it's obvious for a reason. And I'll start by asking you to to self ID for a second here. Do you identify as a conservative?

I do. And I think a lot of people have gotten uncomfortable with that label. But from my vantage point, it's the only honest way to sort of describe myself. You know, I'm sort of evangelical Christian. I believe that government should be limited to the extent that it's possible. But it's hard right now because I'm also sort of.

fiercely populist on economics. And, you know, I don't think it's super conservative to let trusts run amok and to, you know, abide by, you know, the economic policies just of the 1980s. So it's hard for me when you have the, the,

tech bros, as people have come to call them, come in and sort of hijack the Republican Party. Not that I've ever put much faith or stock in the Republican Party. I don't consider myself a Republican, but as the best vehicle for conservative ideas, it's hard to see what's happening. It's hard to know where it ends. So whatever that is, that's not my version of conservatism. Okay. So that's interesting. You're a conservative, but you're not a Republican. Okay.

So can you tell us a little bit about your background? I know you're from Wisconsin. I know you're very young. I'm not quite sure how old you are, but can you kind of just tell us your origin story? Sure. Yeah. No, I'm 31. I was born in 1993 and grew up in the same little corner of the woods in Wisconsin that I was born in. And my parents still live there now. And it's a beautiful little patch of wilderness. But it's about 40 minutes outside of Milwaukee. So a beautiful little small town. And I grew up in Wisconsin.

and I ended up going to George Washington University for college. So I've been here in DC since the first Obama term, actually 2011, I moved here and never left.

you know, started as a, in the sort of conservative movement, working at a group called the young America's foundation, which was sending a bunch of speakers to college campuses at the time who were getting canceled and shouted down. I interned for Christina Hoff Summers for a couple of years in college and got to see some of that from her vantage point. And, and,

Ended up at the Washington Examiner, then at the Federalist, and now at UnHerd. Did a show with Ryan Grimm over at The Hill. Then we brought it over to Breaking Boys with Crystal and Sagar. So it's been about a decade of journalism. And the reason that I'm in journalism is the same reason that I don't think of myself as a Republican. Like a lot of Americans, I just have a really hard time taking teams in the sort of...

Yeah. I, a lot of my friends don't have a problem with that. Let's just say like, like some, Oh, unlike a lot of Americans. Yeah. I think it's just like a lot of people don't want to like put on a Jersey right now. Uh,

And a lot of people never did. But the two party system putting on a jersey for it, it's like you're really always choosing between the lesser of two evils is kind of how I see it. And I feel like there are a lot of people who see it the same way. So I wouldn't want to be in government. I wouldn't want to be like working as an advocate for anything anymore because just, you know, I've been here.

since, yeah, 2011. And just like the corruption is rampant. The sense of oligarchical control is rampant. And I've spent a lot of time in conservative circles and I saw it before Trump and I see it kind of creeping back into the picture, second Trump administration. So that's sort of where I come from. But it's all fun, at least, if you can laugh. Yeah.

I think you have to. I think this is really important to lay out because I have noticed that older people, they have a hard time sort of understanding what a new, younger conservative movement looks like. They associate the Republicans or the conservatives. Obviously, you're not a Republican. You're not identifying as such. But they're sort of, you know, they associate that whole ethos with kind of older, fustier, kind of like Reagan era into George W. Bush era.

And then, you know, you sort of start talking about like how younger people are seeing things. And there's, you know, there's a kind of the Venn diagram between the Bernie bros and the sort of new young conservatives as you're describing them. I mean, it's there's some interesting overlaps there. And so, I mean, I'm wondering, like, what was it like for you, say, going to college? You came from you came from Wisconsin, you know, you're evangelical Christian. Were you like young?

hanging out with conservatives when you got to George Washington University or were you an outcast or what was it like? Yeah, I didn't go to college intending to hang out with conservatives, but it did just end up that way, which is probably an interesting lesson. I think that happened to people, especially young people who are younger than me, who ended up getting pulled into like actual politics on the right because of what they saw from the left on campus. So I got involved pretty quickly after getting to campus was like,

active at the YAF chapter at GW. And it's sort of unpopular at GW to be ideological rather than political. So the college Republicans chapter, the college Democrats chapter, they're very popular, but the sort of ideological groups are less

are less popular. So it was though, oddly a good time because it was the, uh, probably as you remember the, uh, rape culture, what I would say moral panic of the early 2010s. And that really gave way to cancel culture, or it was, I think maybe the canary in the coal mine, uh, for cancel culture, like

like Gamergate days, all of that stuff. And then the month that I graduated, Trump descended from the golden elevator. So it was a, it was very much like, for me, I grew up in like the Tea Party era. And the reason that I was attracted to the Tea Party was it's not because of any, like, I thought it had some great, you know, economic proposals, but

Because it was a sort of a sentiment against elites. It was what I think a lot of people came to realize as the precursor to Trumpism. And I'm not like a big Trump backer, but I am like attracted to a movement that says, you're being screwed over after the recession, like you're getting screwed, whether it's Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party. And so it was...

An interesting time, because at that moment, it was manifesting in what was described as like the libertarian moment, I think, on the cover of Time magazine, Rand Paul was on it. And I really liked that, because to me, it was against crony capitalism. And that's still where I find myself. And that's kind of potentially the middle of the Venn diagram between capitalism.

the libertarian tech bros and the Trump Bannon populists is against crony capitalism. But if Elon Musk is, I guess the, uh, intellectual figurehead of, uh, of that marriage, it's probably more complicated. Yeah. We'll, we'll get to him in a minute. So you came to college in 2011. Okay. That's amazing because that's right around the time when we started seeing the online feminism really change its tune. I've written about this a lot. Uh,

You saw the Me Too. Well, it wasn't quite the Me Too movement yet, but it was the campus rape culture. Suddenly the idea you had the statistics floating around one in five women will be assaulted on a college campus. It came from David Lissack and he ended up retracting that statement famously or actually not famously because nobody noticed.

And then sometimes it was one in four. Were you seeing that on campus? Was it one of these things where you're like, oh, I'm being told that things are the way it is, but things are the way they are supposedly. But then like what I'm seeing with my own eyes doesn't reflect this.

So I probably talk about this too much, but I actually worked for Christina for two years at the American Enterprise Institute. I just kept coming back like I was the intern they couldn't get rid of. But it was it was so much fun. There was three of us, her research assistant, me and Christina. We had a blast. And to some extent, I was like, Christina has always had her finger on the pulse of what was happening in academia. But it was changing like in front of me. And I remember having all of these conversations.

about what was happening at GW at that time and about the pronoun charts that were starting to take off at that time. Even at that time? Oh, yeah. It was interesting. And to the extent, like I'm not interesting enough to have an origin story, but to the extent that I do,

So Christina would fact check every year, basically. She would write for like Time or The Atlantic about the pay gap statistics. And so I would go because the American Association of University Women, I think it was them, put out a report every August, I believe. And every August, you would flip to the back of it and you would see them reporting.

Just in tiny, small print at the back of the report talking about how if you control for all factors, this pay gap that they have been hysterically crying about for the entire report. Oh, it shrinks to like 93% or like 95%, whatever it was. And I was just looking at the media coverage of the pay gap and then looking at the back of the report that they're covering. I'm like 19, 20 years old. What the hell is going on? This is outright...

Like this is not true. All you had to do was go to the back. Are you intentionally not reading the report? Is this like just bad journalism? Is it narrative? I mean, it was just such a, such a wake up call. And then you would see it repeated all the time. Like professors, you know, paying a stupid amount of money to go to the school and the professors would say the same thing. And if you didn't agree, you were a bigot. I remember we brought Phyllis Schlafly to campus and this was 2012 and

And it was, she was 89 at the time being escorted down this tiny hallway at GW and the leftist protesters lined the hallway and were so close to her face. I mean, just like physically intimidating her. It was bizarre. She was cheerful through the whole thing, but I just, for me, it was shocking to see how cruel and like just insane she

I mean, it just seemed like cruel isn't a great word. It was it was unhinged, I think is probably the best word. There was something emotionally unhinged about the response. Yeah. And such a lost opportunity to I mean, those campus incidents where they, you know, especially back then when there was less sort of social media component and they weren't necessarily doing it for the Instagram likes, they were like, you know.

shouting down and canceling really amazing speakers. Like I remember Rutgers, I think Condoleezza Rice, I think was the commencement speaker at Rutgers. And I don't know if she ended up, I think she ended up canceling. I could be wrong on this, but I remember. And, you know, I think, uh, was it like, um, uh,

the woman who was the head of the IMF for a long time was the speaker, I think, at Smith College, and they didn't like her. And I'm thinking, like, you've got these... This is like a real get, like, whoever booked these speakers. And what a lost...

opportunity there. So yeah, you worked with Christina Hoff Summers. I believe it was on the re-release of The War Against Boys. So you were the fact checker. So that book originally came out in 2000. I think the re-release came out in 2013, somewhere around there. And that's a book that was really ahead of its time because it was about what we now call the masculinity crisis, this data showing that boys...

have a harder time doing the things that are necessary to succeed in academic environments as they now exist, sitting still, sitting in front of, you know, compute. Well, they're pretty good at sitting in front of screens, but just, you know, less time for physical activity. All of these things, though, you know, are pretty familiar things.

Data points now were pretty novel back then. So as you were working with her, was this new to you or did it seem like common sense? Yeah, it seems like common sense. And that's what's sort of funny about I think, you know, this will be very, very true of Gen Z people.

I think millennials were maybe the first generation because of social media where the rate of change became almost unmanageable. So to me, all of this was like really obvious because you saw it all around you. But I think to a lot of people outside millennial, the millennial generation, it was obvious.

I don't know. I mean, unless you'd read Christina's book in 2000, you may not have realized how it had actually gotten worse. And I remember I was going through, my job was to look at some of the studies from when the book originally came out. So late nineties and make sure that, you know, there were, they weren't being misrepresented, that there wasn't anything that had changed since then. And a lot of it really had gotten worse and that was sort of eyeopening. But to me, it was just like reading the research that it,

or explained what I had always seen around me. And I think probably a lot of people my age would have the exact same experience if they were in my position, because it was just like, yeah, this is totally true. A hundred percent. So that was...

That was a very interesting time. By the time I was leaving the AEI internship, Gamergate was starting up. And that was another thing that Christina saw before a lot of other people. And I think some people were frustrated. Like, I think some people, because Christina is such a serious and sophisticated scholar, some people were like, why are you getting involved in this? It was, I think, fairly obvious. It was like, because this is like, if we don't deal with this, men are going to get worse. Yeah.

Okay, I am one of the, I think, majority of people that could never understand what Gamergate was about. And we don't need to derail this whole conversation, but can you like in very concisely and quickly give us the thumbnail on Gamergate? Basically, video games were starting to go woke before woke was the way we described it.

sort of maybe like excessive leftism or radical cultural leftism. And the male video gamers had a total culture war. Like they waged pickets charge in the culture war, basically against the, you know, vocification of video games. How were they woke though? What did that look like? It wasn't like,

I mean, to my memory, it was there were gaming journalists, like female gaming journalists who were complaining that the games were like toxic, toxically masculine and were trying to change them. And they had a certain amount of pull.

in the video game community. And so it was, they just sort of felt like it was being forced on these men felt like something was being forced on something they love. The media was taking the side of course of the feminists. So it was like a very, it is, I do agree with people that it is a sort of early dust up in the Trump culture war that you know, I probably wouldn't have paid attention to it either if I didn't have to at the time. But if you look back on it, it's like, wow, all of the elements were right here.

Okay. Okay. And Brianna Wu, who's now very vocal in the political scene was a key player in Gamergate. Early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, that's a separate conversation, but did you have friends in college? Like, were you considered an outcast? Were you, were they taking back the night against your presence? How, what was your kind of positioning on campus?

No, that's a... It's funny. Yeah, I did have friends in college. And most of my friends actually were definitely not conservative. Although some of... One of my friends in college is still my best friend. She was one of the few conservative friends that I had. But most of my friends were not conservative. And...

That was what made it really hard when, as I was graduating, this was like how I ended up working at Young America's Foundation. Basically, the school student administration, which I would never have paid attention to for any reason, passed some type of bill mandating pronoun trading as part of a diversity training for if you were the head of a student group. Like, yeah, so...

The student newspaper called me up and asked if YAF would want a religious exemption to that. And I was like, sure. It doesn't sound very tolerant of my beliefs or whatever. So that blew up into a national news story. And it was insane, right?

But that was like the hardest point. It was right as I was graduating because all of my friends, the LGBT student group on campus said that we had committed an act of violence against the transgender community, that we were bigots. They suggested we'd be pushed off campus. I think in the statement they put out, they were mentioning like comparisons to ISIS. Like it was just the stupidest, like most 2015 like campus story ever.

But that was the hardest part of it was everyone suddenly turning like friends you'd had forever who were like LGBT and then being like, whoa, hey, I didn't know I was friends with this like secret bigot the whole time. And that pressure was really, really tough. It was like emotionally really, really tough. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, had you been in a very conservative environment like in your childhood and adolescence and high school? I mean, my parents weren't super political. You know, my dad is like a union independent. He'll vote.

I don't know if he votes more Republican or Democrat, to be honest with you. My mom's a normal Wisconsin Christian Republican, but it wasn't super political or anything. I didn't grow up evangelical. I grew up Lutheran, normal Wisconsin stuff.

Oh, okay. Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to, for some reason I feel like I read that you were evangelical. No, I, I, yeah, I go to evangelical non-denominational like rock band church now. But my parents are like more, a little bit more conservative. So it wasn't mainline. Okay. Yeah. But it wasn't like, you know, nothing like I wasn't homeschooled.

what do you think it is about you that made you able to stand up to that? I think this is such a, such an important thing to think about, you know, when we do our, our unspeak easy retreats and you're going to be a zoom speaker, you're going to be an unspeaker in our online forum coming up soon here. You know, one of the things that we talk about at the end of each retreat is this question of like,

why we are the way we are. Like, why is it that some people, and especially women, because I really think women, it's hard to go against the tribe. Like there are all kinds of evolutionary reasons not to go against your tribe, just as a matter of survival. And there's a certain kind of personality profile that really rubs against that. And I think we who have that personality profile over index for this kind of intellectual space are

What do you think it is about you that allowed you to get past, you know, the kind of pushback that you got back then and really forge a path here?

I'm so curious what answers you get to this question. I think that's a really good question to ask. For me, I think it's similar to a lot of people who go into politics and journalism is I'm sort of obsessive about making sure that everything I say is right or everything I believe is right. So if someone tells me I'm wrong, I'm kind of obsessively trying to prove to myself that I'm right or that I am wrong. Like, I don't want to ever say something wrong and I don't want to ever believe something based on

uh, things aren't that aren't true. So I'm sort of just always because of that skeptical and curious. And so when that came to me, like people were saying, Oh, you're so horrible, whatever. Like I've really thought about it. And I tried to prove the alternative. I tried to prove like work backwards, prove that I was a bigot and a bad person. And when I couldn't get to that point, cause I obviously don't think it's true. Um, that's what really, you know, I, I,

I can't stand being misunderstood. And I think that's one of those things that drives a lot of people. For me, that's one of the most frustrating things in the world. And you've probably had this experience too. It's the most frustrating thing about social media in particular, because so many people are not... If you were across the table with somebody who's calling you stupid on social media or whatever, you'd have a good conversation, but that's not how they use social media.

And it may be how you wish they use social media, but it's not. So that really fuels me is, you know, getting to the actual truth. And I'm just sort of obsessed with truth and not for any, I'm sure that's for some psychological reason. I'm sure it's because I have like have some type of like personal, you know, psychological attachment to it for whatever reason, but that is definitely the like fuel. Yeah.

Yeah. I think for me, you know, I've said this before, I just cannot stand bullshit. I cannot stand. Um, I mean, it goes beyond just lying, just kind of talking for the sake of talking, trying to fill the space. Um,

Reading the room. I mean, that's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot now. And, you know, it is actually working. Now that, you know, now that we're in the Doge Elon era, perhaps reading the room has more going for it than we previously thought. But, you know, before all this, I couldn't stand when, you know, people are like, oh, well, this, you know, commentator didn't read the room. Well, you're not supposed to read the room. Right. Like you're supposed to like say what's in the room regardless. Right.

And so I really hate that approach to life. Well, OK, so you you came into into politics and journalism. You graduate what, in 2013 or 2015? OK, wow. That was the moment for the beginning of the craziness. That was absolutely the I think the.

that was like the, when things really took off. So, so what, what happened for you? Like, what were you, how were you thinking about politics? What did you think about your, your future just as a person in the world, a woman in the world, a non, a truth teller in the world? Yeah. I mean, I, I always wanted to be a writer and so I was, I was very happy. That's what I ended up doing. That's still what I love doing. You know, the media has really shifted to audio and podcasting and video. So that's totally fine. I'm

my favorite thing is writing. So I still love, love, love getting the opportunity to do that at UnHerd. So I was just like ready to, you know, kind of live the like urban writer lifestyle. But of course I started Young America's Foundation in 2015. And I always say that every journalist kind of has a Forrest Gump story. They've sort of been through these interesting historical moments for me.

That was, you probably remember the BLM dust up at the University of Missouri. And that took off in the fall. We need some muscle here. Melissa Click. Yeah. And when that was happening, I was at the Reagan Ranch, which YAF owns and operates. I'm still on the board of YAF and with a group of students from Mizzou. And we were thinking like, what would be a way to like just build

show other students how silly and ridiculous this protest is. They had some crazy list of demands that was actually really funny, if I'm remembering correctly. And so we were trying to just point out how insane it was that the school was indulging this. And it came up with the idea at the time of sending Ben Shapiro on an emergency campus lecture. And that

I snowballed into Ben becoming... He had been doing some campus lectures, but we then in 2015 and 16 started realizing that we could clip these little bits of Ben's exchanges with students. And this is not to... Everyone figured this out at once. It wasn't any one person's genius, other than I think Ben being really good in those back and forths. We started to realize that

People loved those people on the left love those like students on the left loved watching them. Students in the middle loved watching them because it was whether you agreed with him or not, a viewpoint that you were not getting in school. And you weren't really getting from the media at the time because things hadn't fully splintered like they are now. So I was working on that.

And it was really wild at the time to have this front row seat to how people in the early Trump era, when he was just running in the primary and people didn't think he was going to become president. And then after he did become president, like seeing the reactions of college students to that from the front row of the culture war was incredible. And it was a very, for me, I still worry. Like people think, you know, there has clearly been a vibe shift.

For me, though, I feel like it's a vibe shift into like maybe the sleeper cell era of wokeness, which is I can't imagine some of these kids have truly been deprogrammed from thinking that it's an act of violence to disagree with someone on pronouns. Like to me, that's where I could be wrong. To me, that's just really hard to believe because I saw so much of it. I had to deal with so many of those students who are coming after other kids for just the silliest stuff.

That's interesting. So you think that they've just kind of gone underground for a while? Not intentionally, like not as a strategic thing, but just, you know, it's less empowering right now to kind of virtue signal about that.

whatever it is, race, gender, sexuality. And so it's not as much of a force in our culture. But I can see sort of the permission structure changing to the point where that becomes empowering and a real badge of sort of virtue signaling again at some point. And then the institutions like are back in the throes of this ideology. I don't know. It's just so hard for me to believe that all of these millennials my age in middle management now

don't believe in this stuff anymore. Because they were true believers. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So let's fast forward to five minutes ago and we're

Where to start? Again, I really admire the way you you parse what's going on. You're pretty clear about your own opinions, but you do not tolerate this foolishness and this trolling and the absolute chaos that we're seeing. OK, let me just ask you this. Like, how worried are you about where we're at?

I'm extremely worried. And I don't know what you think of this. I mean, I'm surrounded by people on the right who are so bullish right now, have been celebrating, popping champagne, partying in tuxedos here in DC for the last couple of months. And for me, I'm looking at social media and it's

Like social media to me has always been not just social media, but also just like sort of American health and all of these issues that are so deep.

And don't get solved with the change of a political party. Like for me, this conservative movement is rooted in or for voters is rooted in this reckoning with failure of our institutions. And I'm not actually seeing, from my perspective, at least a real effort to correct institutions outside of the federal government.

I think it's important to correct the federal government and to do it responsibly, which is a huge caveat, as it turns out. But I think it's, you know, I don't see...

like academia, like K through 12 education. I don't see that significantly changing. I really don't see Silicon Valley changing at all. I mean, I think we've seen good signs on their speech policies, but the bigger problem with these platforms to me has always been, I think the biggest problem in American politics, which is that they are addictive. They are basically gamifying our politics. It's like if we were litigating...

important political issues through a digital casino. And that's so horrifying. And now,

conservatives are completely in bed with Silicon Valley. You don't hear any peep about... There's no criticism of Elon Musk for X being extremely addictive, for completely disrupting our politics. And I'm young but old enough to remember what it was like before Twitter. And it was like the conversations were better. There's been some really good stuff that's come out of social media. And I think there's a way that we can have both worlds. But for me, I just think...

normal life is better without, you know, exporting so much of our, so much of our life into these digital platforms. Like I think it's,

I don't know, somewhere like five years ago, I started to think long and hard in ways I hadn't before about how social media on smartphones really changed everything for people my age. It was just such a disruptor. Total pivot, like an absolute pivot in the course of life. And I just remember there was a time when

You didn't have... The way I started thinking of my cell phone is that it was always the best news of your life or the worst news of your life could be in your pocket at any given moment. So it's sort of rational to constantly be checking your phone in a weird way. We've been rewired to constantly be online because there's no escape from possibility and from that connectivity. So I'm like, I can't believe that we're just like...

not talking about any of that anymore. And conservatives were talking about it all the time before Silicon Valley went all in for Trump. So I still think that is the biggest problem in our politics. And I'm now probably more worried than ever because nobody's talking about it anymore. When you say that there were really good conversations going on, what do you mean? For example, do you mean still online, just not on Twitter? Honestly, I think the

I think the days when it was like Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, and all kinds of people who had these blogs where they were still Jonah Goldberg, they were still interacting with each other immediately, but taking more time because it wasn't like literally gamified to where the notification colors are triggered, are read to trigger certain reactions neurologically. I just think that pushed us to be more thoughtful about,

to be more decent. You know, the algorithm now rewards extremism. I shouldn't say extremism, but like emotional extremism. Yeah. It rewards like anger or whatever, outrage.

or intense than sort of intensity of opinion gets rewarded when we don't always have to be intense about certain things because they don't always demand intensity. But social media does. So just because we're checking it, we're incentivized to weigh in. And if we're going to weigh in, then we're incentivized to weigh in with intensity. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I think we interacted better in person, but I also think our digital interactions were healthier, too.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the analogy I think of is if you're on YouTube, as I'm sure you know, there's like it is it is literally against the law not to have a thumbnail, you know, a screaming thumbnail with.

some kind of extreme facial expression and hands waving around and, you know, you own the libs or own whoever it is. And just like some incredibly incendiary, really cartoonish tacky, in my opinion, graphic, um,

And everybody says, oh, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. But if I don't do it, literally nobody will watch my video. And I guess it's true. And that's in the hands of one company. And this is another thing the right was talking about. And I always said, like, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference a few years ago about how so many of the problems that the right is upset about are downstream of consolidation in the tech industry. And

I was like, everyone, it was, you know, we published it at Federalist and I got a lot of feedback on it and there was a lot of agreement with it. And now I'm looking around and I'm like, so nobody's upset that like Google is as powerful as it is. Nobody's upset that Elon Musk is as powerful as he is. I mean, I have come to see the world through the lens of like, I mean, I guess digital technology being the, um,

I used to see it as like postmodernism. I used to think postmodernism was the, what's the best way to put it? Like the poison pill. It was the well from which all of the, all of the problems that we were facing had evolved. It sort of came from that, that seed. And now I'm starting to think we actually could overcome the problem of postmodernism if we were having these conversations on like,

Like in normal human spaces, if it wasn't this like extra human technology that's allowing us to communicate with people who are thousands of miles away, who we will never meet, whose life stories we don't know. And so as I started to see things that way, I just I never have been able to unsee it.

And what do you think the incentive structure is? Because I'm a little skeptical when I hear people say, well, Elon Musk just wants to enrich himself. This is all about money. I mean, he's already the richest man in the world. Like, you know, Jeff Bezos, is he really out to enrich himself? Like, or, you know, maybe he is, but let's take Elon, for example. Mm-hmm.

I think he has like really big ideas about changing the world. I mean, this is a guy who wants to go to Mars. I don't think it's about like making more money at this point. What do you think? No, I agree with that completely. Like there's a lot of,

talk right now about Starlink and the FAA and, you know, these like small conversations about whether it's going to get a government contract. And, but I think, you know, the conflicts of interest aren't fair. Probably other people don't get that type of advantage, all of that. Sure.

But I think what he wants is his companies to be successful because I think he's set up his companies in a way to sort of advance his ideological vision for the world. And I think it's entirely sincere. I don't think it's BS at all. I think he really does believe that humanity will be better served by Neuralink, by occupying Mars. I mean, I

I think it would be crazy to think it wasn't sincere. This is like, this man has put his whole life into it. He puts every breath into it. He's, I think he's very clearly a genius. So in a way to me, I think that's actually better.

than being fully profit motivated because that means you can like actually try to convince him of something. You can't convince someone out of, you know, if they're, if it's all avarice, you're not going to convince someone unless it's like you have a Dickensian intervention with Ebenezer Scrooge that comes from, you know, God almighty, you're not going to convince someone that they would be better off if they made less money. But because it's ideological, I think he's a little bit more malleable.

So but what do you think is going on with him right now? Like just in terms of his role in the government and Doge and everything that's going on? Is he just like asleep, deprived? Is he in like a prolonged, protracted manic state? What's up?

This is what actually kind of concerns me because even for Elon Musk, I mean, many things concern me, but even for him, this is, I can't imagine that he's ever had anything this stressful, demanding and serious in his life on his plate. I can't imagine that any human has ever had the task of managing Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, like X, all of these insane SpaceX projects.

all of these insanely powerful companies, in addition to a quote revolution, as he puts it in the federal government in the United States. I mean, I think it's,

That in and of itself is terrifying. The fact that he has, what, two babies in the last, with two different women in the last six months. Yeah, I feel like such a sloth. I don't know about you. Right? I don't get anything done. The women are publicly feuding and it's affecting the politics. Like it's a mess. And that is concerning in and of itself, even if you grant that he's a genius, even if you grant that he is genuinely like ideologically committed to

what he sees as bettering humanity, from everything we can tell from the outside, there's no sort of like he's he's got to be drained. He's got to be like in some ways irrational. I just. Well, he's clearly irrational. I mean, that's not I don't think this is up for debate. Yeah. I mean, and what do you what's your interpretation of the relationship between Musk and Trump?

So I've heard an interesting conspiracy theory that I actually think is compelling, but I will preface this by saying it is a conspiracy theory that Trump's meme coin is held by a few whales and we don't know who they are. And it's possible that Elon Musk is one of those whales or is, you know, sort of

adjacent to one of those whales and everyone's kind of aware of what's going on. And that's why Donald Trump is much more lenient with Musk than we saw him be with, for example, Steve Bannon. When Steve Bannon got that, I think it was a Time magazine cover and started getting a lot of attention, Donald Trump was clearly irked by it. And that led to Bannon's ouster. People around Trump have long been sensitive. They really believe that's true, that he doesn't want to

have it look like anybody else is the mind behind Donald Trump or is the brains of the operation or is the indispensable person. He's the indispensable person. So I do think that's very, very interesting. I also think Elon Musk poured a truly insane amount of money into the presidential election, like money that is unbelievable. And he mobilized the state of Pennsylvania, basically helped seal the deal for Trump. And so to some extent,

the nakedly transactional Donald Trump is behaving exactly as you would expect him to be, which is he is in a transaction with Elon Musk. Elon Musk is enormously popular, enormously powerful is what I meant to say. Starlink has affected the wars in Israel, in Ukraine. It's part of the war effort in both cases. Musk is just such a powerful guy that even as president of the United States,

Donald Trump has to play nice with him even beyond the transaction. So I don't think you even need a conspiratorial explanation, even though maybe there's something to that. But it's just he's so, so powerful that even the president United States can't really afford to, you know, push him aside. But for how long? Because Donald Trump does not like this kind of competition. I mean, I don't see this lasting the year, to be honest with you. Mm hmm.

I know. And I also wonder if Donald Trump seriously considers when some people like Steve Bannon or guys at CPAC are suggesting that he run for a third term, if he

wants to keep Elon Musk around in order to basically secure a third term if Elon Musk can pour a bunch of money into the race again. You know, maybe that's partially why Donald Trump has been so lenient towards Elon Musk. It seems to me inevitable. And I think to all of us, it's like on paper, this seems impossible. Like, how is this relationship still going even now when Elon Musk has fired and rehired veterans? Not sure.

Parks are, I mean, like there's, yeah, everyone sort of expected, even on the right, everyone in this project was like, this is going to be a mess. We know it's going to be a mess. They're sort of like, ends justify the means. You know, this is such an important project that you have to do it rapidly. And you have to, it's going to be kind of a mess. Otherwise, you're never going to get it done.

But even then, I mean, it's like the VA stuff, that has just been a mess. And I think it's only going to get worse. So it does seem to me untenable. But at the same time, they both have so much on the line that I wonder if maybe they can defy our expectations.

do you believe Elon Musk when he, for instance, I don't know if apology is the right word, but when he says, okay, well, we did make a mistake here. You know, for example, I think with the U S A I D. Okay. We didn't mean, you know, we did take a sledgehammer to this and we meant to use a sledgehammer, but we didn't mean to cut the Ebola funding. Oops. Okay. We'll put it back. Like how genuine do you think that sort of thing is?

I actually think part of his genius is a media genius. And I think it's just because he's so online. And if you've been so online for the past 10 years, you probably saw this coming, which is that people value transparency now more than they value neutrality. So they don't need or like the sort of or bona fides, like they don't need you to be the best person to do any given task.

Or they I mean, maybe they would prefer you to. Well, I don't like experts, I guess, as much as I don't like experts. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. Don't like experts. And what they value even more than expertise is people who are like owning up to their mistakes because people feel like they've been lied to so much. And I think he think he understands that. And I feel like he's on his X feed. I can. This is another thing that concerns me at this band.

Nobody should post as much on social media as he does. Like absolutely nobody. It's completely insane, psychotic and unhinged. I mean, it makes Donald Trump look like very, very ginger in his. Yes. Yes. Extremely.

It's truly insane, let alone somebody who's in charge of so many important things at any given moment in his life. Like, it just seems bananas. But yeah, I think he... I actually think he does understand that he's probably better off... Trump understands this too, I think, in a way. He's better off almost approaching the world or approaching the world of politics as reality television because it puts you ahead of people who are still play acting as West Wing. Like, to just...

own it as Veep puts you ahead of the people who are LARPing as West Wing. Okay. All right. Wow. There was a lot in that last couple of sentences. So we've got like West Wing would be like 1.0. Well, I don't know. Maybe like all the president's men is like 1.0. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. West Wing. So depending on how far back you want to go. So we have West Wing, Veep, um,

reality television. But now we have these meme wars. Everything is a meme. Everything is a vibe. And I'm really wanting to know what you think about this because, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. I'm watching people like Musk, J.D. Vance, you know, people in leadership positions, you know, as close as we have to the quote unquote adults in the room acting like trolls. I mean, just acting completely juvenile, absurd,

You know, they're in the Oval Office, yet they're acting like they're in their parents' basement. And this is just an accepted kind of discourse. And maybe we are shaking our fists at clouds saying, well, this is inappropriate. This is not how we do things. What about our norms? Like, is this just the way things are now? Like, are we really we have we really just sort of replaced substance with vibe?

man, I feel like we're heading in that direction because what concerns me is that I think you're right. Like some of it is, you know, your old man shakes fist at cloud because what

I see among people who are even younger than me is they just want to see things as they are, like primary sources. They want that link. They want to read it. They want to whatever. They want to see the actual interaction. They want to hear the actual audio. They actually kind of expect that.

because they're so used to seeing the world play out as it does. There's cameras everywhere now. So they're just so used to seeing the real story, not the kind of edited nightly news Cronkite version of what happened. They just wanted the raw footage because they're so used to it.

it. And I think where that leads is people who still try to there's, there's a really good, this is what concerns me is there. There's a really good, there's value in the pretense sometimes, right? Like there's there it's, it's even with like the United States, the way the president of the United States comports himself and the way the president of the United States talks to other world leaders. Like I still think there's value in that, right?

But I think younger Americans are less convinced that that's true because all they've seen is people who put on that act being untrustworthy. So they associate the act itself with untrustworthiness, which means you're just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The bathwater is the untrustworthiness, but there was something, there was always something good about that itself because it was aspirational. These are the, this is the aspirational position of the United States of this world leader, whatever, like the Marco Ellis kid who JD Vance brought back in or convinced Joj to bring back in after he had posted like normalized Indian hate and like,

And Vance sort of framed this as just pure cancel culture. And I like JD Vance, by the way, but he framed this as just a pure act of cancel culture. He posted that stuff in September. It wasn't when he was like a 12-year-old fooling around. This was like three months ago. What are you talking about? That to me felt like...

throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Like sometimes there are consequences for trolling and shit posting. Like there's, I get that he's trolling, but it's still not okay to publish. Like maybe say that at a bar with your friends, if you're joking, whatever you published that on social media, it's insane. Okay. Is it because they don't go to a bar with their friends? Because this is the thing I feel like they live together.

Online, this is where they live. If it's, it's either like, you're either to troll is to speak. Okay. Like there is no other space. Copyright that. That's brilliant. Because there really is no other kind of like,

landscape. Like everything is taking place here. I mean, JD Vance, again, I really, I think he's really smart. I want to believe that he's like playing some long game and he has really innovative ideas and he's willing to speak honestly about what the problems are. I think what he says about American families is important and interesting potentially. Um,

useful potentially. But I can't stand the way he kind of just like allows himself to roll over into this really ugly space. And I get that that's sort of part of the vernacular of his, of his social world, but he, he should know better. And I guess I just don't, I don't understand. I, well, I, I worry that like,

What I'm asking for is just irrelevant. Yeah. And, you know, I actually worry about that, too, even as I talk to some of my friends on the right, like people I know who are really hardcore Trump people. Some are absolutely fantastic people. They love the country. They want it to be better for everyone. But they've come up with since the especially Flight 93 election essay by Michael Anton in 2016, shortly before the election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

They've accepted a totally Manichaean framework of politics. So with us or against us. And that's not historically unusual. But I think what's interesting about it is that I just don't believe that's often true. I think that mentality allows this...

It allows something to, what's the best word, metastasize. It prevents you from sort of self-correction. I think there's way too much like the David French posturing against the right. I think there's too much of that. And I get why it angers people in Trump world. It's like, we don't have to hash all of this stuff out in public New York Times op-eds. But also if you're...

pushing everybody out as an enemy and you have total trench warfare mentality, which they defend that they wouldn't deny that that's what it is. They just disagree with me on whether or not it's helpful. I think the problem with that is you end up not having good faith critics inside your circle. You've purged everyone who could be a good faith critic because you're applying these litmus tests of who's on the team and who's against the team.

So that to me is one of the biggest problems here is that I think JD genuinely, like in good faith, believes the best thing for the country is to have for the right to have a trench warfare warfare mentality. Otherwise, it gets infiltrated by people who seek to prevent the project of correcting our institutions. You get the old institutionalists who will corrupt the effort.

And I just disagree with that. I think we see a lot of it. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the experiment is still playing out. Maybe that's their best case scenario. But I just don't agree that it's a good way to go about

Yeah, well, we saw it happen on the left. I mean, nobody who was like a thoughtful, nuanced person wanted to get involved or they were just pushed out. I mean, I've said this a million times. If the smart, thoughtful people don't speak up, the stupid, thoughtless people are going to do the job. And it's almost like the smart people were smart enough to know to keep their mouths shut. I mean, that's what happened with so much of this.

like regressive, you know, cancel culture stuff is because the majority of people actually do have reasonable opinions. But they also there was no point like they were disincentivized from speaking up because the social penalties for doing so were were so great. I just I really worry that, you know, thoughtful conservatives are being completely pushed out of this arena. Yeah.

And I think people sort of on the left need to be careful to associate, to not associate. Like one of the weird things about X is it's not weird. It's totally like logical when you think about how it's designed, but

Since Musk took over, changed the speech regulations and everything, which, by the way, I think is probably for the better. The problem is that people make this mistake of saying because there's a small, tiny minority of literal neo-Nazi stuff that gets published on X, which I have never seen as much of it in my life. But it's always from a small group of people. Oh.

I see. I know. Because I engage with it. That's the problem. Right. No, same. Because I'm like, what are you guys saying? And it's clearly like, it's always from the same people. It's the same small group of people on X. And it's not fair to associate that with the sort of average Trump voter. And the right was making the case, because I remember I was making it in the pages of The Federalist, that it was wrong to associate the insanity on

on Twitter with the average Hillary voter or the average Biden voter. It's the consequences of that rhetoric are real. It was changing corporate behavior. It was changing the culture, but it was only changing it because it was interpreted as representative of some broader group and it's not. And so I think it's dangerous to allow our minds to be infected with the disproportionate

volume of things that we see when we live on X as journalists, as people in media, as people interested in politics, almost all of us. We're a small group of the country still, but it's so easy, even if you're conscious about it, to say like, oh my gosh, the rise of neo-Nazis has begun because they're all over X and that's just going to make the right

dig in deeper and deeper because they have to purge people who are going to accuse them in a couple of months of being literal neo-Nazis. So it's a really vicious cycle. Yeah. I just did an interview with River Page, who wrote a piece for the Free Press about is the online right building a monster? And he was really able to articulate this very phenomenon that you described that I've been observing for a long time, but I could never quite figure out, like, are these real people? Are they bots? Are

Are they teenagers? And, you know, he thought more of them were adults than I wanted to think anyway. But I think that too, I just still think it's a small, like, I think there are too many people

for example, on the left, who were making these arguments that to disagree with the BLM movement means that you're categorically racist. This is an argument we saw a lot, is to vote for Donald Trump means you're categorically perpetuating racism. I think there are too many people in the country who believe that. I just still think they're not the majority, not even a plurality. So it's just unfair to kind of affiliate that with the average.

So speaking of that, um, the other night, maybe it was even yesterday, you, uh, posted on Twitter that, um, you thought that a conversation between Tim Dillon, the comedian and Steve Bannon was the most important political discussion to, um,

To listen to this this year or something like that. If you listen to any political discussion, make it this one. And I did. I watched it last night. It was it was super interesting. It made me a little scared because it made Steve Bannon seem very reasonable and even charming, which I guess this is not many people already know.

had that had that feeling about him sometimes that he's charming anyway it was not my that that had not been my I did not anticipate feeling that way why do you like that conversation

I think people underestimate, and this is just sort of the nature of the way the media is set up and is very sort of heavily coastal, but I do think people underestimate the extent to which the project of Trumpism has its origins in something that is really political.

noble and virtuous, which might sound funny. But I think if the average person listens to Steve Bannon talk to Tim Dillon, it sounds totally common sense and rational. And like it's rooted if you had no idea who Steve Bannon was and you just listened to what he was talking about in terms of starting with the Great Recession. I think one of the reasons I really love that podcast is they start with the Great Recession and how it affected the left and how it affected the right and how because of the way it was affecting regular people. And you sort of build from that

point. That's sort of like the seed from which the populism grows. And obviously, people will say, you know, there are things that go back even further. And I agree. But like, really, we saw two very direct offshoots of that seed of the recession. We saw Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. The Tea Party keeps growing and becomes a Trump movement. Occupy sort of grows into the Bernie movement. DNC cuts Bernie off. But other than that, I mean, the Republicans couldn't

cut Trump off. So here we are. And I thought that the way I think that the way too many people see the project of Trumpism is that it's, you know, if you separate Trump from Trumpism, is that it's cynical,

And is necessarily racist or it's fully reactionary. And actually, there are people this is what we were talking about earlier, like what drives me. I just get so frustrated when people misunderstand things. And I just know so many people who have extremely different.

intellectual, deeply rooted and virtuous justifications for why they changed the Republican Party, for why they support Donald Trump. And I'm not a big Trump person, but I think

We have to, have to, have to have an accurate understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. And I feel like Tim Dillon was able to really pull back the curtain in a digestible way and sort of see the Wizard of Oz version of Steve Bannon as like there's something highly rational and decent. And even if you don't believe Bannon is sincere, the way he articulates and expresses it, I think is incredible.

exactly what so many people miss about Trumpism. And I just thought that conversation, for whatever reason, maybe Tim's background in finance, but it just captured something that was a much more accurate version of what was going on behind the scenes.

Yeah. And I was remembering how Errol Morris, who's one of our most celebrated documentarians, you know, beloved by elites and the left, was was pretty, pretty well canceled for doing a documentary about Steve Bannon and was like, I think he talked about actually being suicidal as a result of that. Like his career was.

pretty, pretty damaged, pretty profoundly damaged by the fact that he made this documentary. It didn't show up in any film festivals. And I don't think most people have seen it as a result, but you know, Tim Dillon can get away with it on YouTube, but I have a funny story about that.

So I was at a screening of the Errol Morris documentary in DC that was all Beltway journalists, like no conservative journalists. I got it. It's a long story of how I ended up there. But I remember my friend and I, my friend was like a mainstream media journalist at the time, came in and we bought a bottle of wine. And we thought that the things Bannon was saying was like the funniest stuff. Like it was because it was like 2017 and everyone was so self-serious and Bannon was so politically incorrect.

that it was, we were, you know, we'd had a couple of glasses of wine and we were like laughing through the entire documentary when Bannon would say something funny and it was not treated kindly by the other journalists in the room who felt like this was the evil genius and had no interest. I mean, they wanted to watch a movie that,

that slammed him. And I think Errol Morris actually captured not the most positive version of Steve Bannon, but pretty accurate. I think Errol Morris was probably trying to slam him, but just the fact that he platformed him at all was the problem. Right. They didn't want, they didn't want the 3D version of Steve Bannon. They wanted the 1D version of Steve Bannon and Morris captured him in all of his dimensions. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, OK, just to wrap up here, you know, we're recording this on March 3rd. God knows what's going to happen. It's Monday. God knows what's going to happen by Monday afternoon, Monday morning on the West Coast.

What do you think? I want to hear your worst case scenario and best case scenario for what's going on now. Like, what are you afraid is going to happen given the players and what they're executing? Hmm.

Great question. I guess, well, there are a lot of worst case scenarios given that Elon Musk has, you know, there's like nuclear powers. There are many tentacles here. Yeah, there's two kinetic wars and Elon Musk himself is, you know, has all kinds of defense capacity and everything. So I think the worst case scenario is, as per usual, but probably heightened, a nuclear catastrophe event.

spinning out of control. I remember when Trump first tweeted about the size of Kim Jong-un's button, I was at a friend's house in Capitol Hill, and this was pretty early into Trump won. I remember being like, okay, this could be it for us here in DC. And then we all kind of became numb to the way Trump negotiates and operates and probably correctly. But you still, I mean, the world is like incredibly unpredictable and Trump is incredibly unpredictable and Elon Musk is actually pretty unpredictable too. So I think the worst case scenario, honestly, is like a

a hot war, a hot war that involves American troops directly. Obviously, Taiwan is a serious question here. Elon Musk has all kinds of relationships with China.

So who knows what happens? I think it's worst case scenario. I think more in terms of like domestic politics, worst case scenario is that Musk further he doesn't correct the problem of institutional distrust. He exacerbates the problem of institutional distrust by actually worsening the institutions, not bettering the institutions. But I actually think that could potentially be the best case scenario, too, is that.

he genuinely corrects these institutions. And I feel like we're right in the early stages of the experiment. And that maybe there is a streamlining and the institutions respond like academia, there's some signs that they realize that they've they've erred. And they're going to, you know, get better that they've gone too far, you know, they're not going to become Hillsdale and mass, but like, they're going to realize that like, maybe they should stop building lazy rivers and stop

letting people who are like Angela Davis, giving them tens of thousands of dollars in speaking engagements and all that sort of thing. So I think that's also the best case scenario, but I just feel like right now we're in the middle of the experiment. And one of the things I appreciate about you actually is sort of like recognition that we don't have all of the answers right now. That's just also sort of how I feel like these things. Yeah, it's so unpredictable.

Yeah. Well, many things are true, right? That's always the answer. Many things are true and we can never know. But the algorithm does not favor either of those statements. So the people who make them are shouting into the wind. And they're responsive to the algorithm.

So, yeah. Yeah. Well, Emily, I am just a huge admirer. I cannot thank you enough for the way you're going about things and just you're incredibly insightful and informed. And it's just it's a it's a real gift to have you on the scene. So thank you for for talking with me. And I hope we can talk again.

It means a lot that you say that. So I appreciate it. And I really admire and respect you. Very much a mutual feeling. So thank you for having me. Okay. Thanks.

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