You know, this might be so simple, but people pick up on the way you speak.

I'm not talking about, you know, if you sound smart or whatever.

I'm saying they will pick up if you curse.

They will pick up if you're speaking life over someone.

Men hate when women are gossiping.

Literally the fire behind your lips is so powerful and and if you can find a way to harness your tongue in a way that's biblical and you dress appropriately, you if you don't have everything hanging out you, you will attract a different type of guy.

Welcome back to posting through it.

I'm Jared.

And I'm Mike.

I'm Madeline.

Got to start out with some Patreon shout outs to our newest executive club and platinum tier members, we've got Pavel Oaken, Daniel Reed Miller, and Renata Lisowski.

It's like a Polish last name.

I don't know how to say that, but like always, if we mispronounce your name, send us a message and we'll say it again correctly.

But thanks for signing up.

It's a it's a huge help.

We're still just blown away by how many people have signed up for the Patreon.

If you want to join that elite class of posting through it listeners and get an extra episode every week, we'll have a link to that down in the description.

Patreon.com/posting through it.

Yes.

And and I should say Madeline listens to our premium episodes, Jared.

And so she heard we got a lot of engagement for our last one, which was all about the election and and and to some extent.

Jesse singles blocked and reported turf podcast And Madeline I want to ask you so New York City as a Jewish woman, are you scared to come to New York now that mom Donnie has seized power all over the city.

Oy vey.

I'm terrified.

I'm absolutely beside myself.

And you know what I heard about Mom Donnie's policy?

He's going to replace all copies of Portnoy's complaint with the Holy Quran.

Jeez.

I knew it.

I knew it.

I knew.

It thankfully the ADL has the Mom Donnie Monitor project launching now.

I'm excited to see what they put out in terms of just if you know, whatever it is, it's going to be unhinged.

I have no idea what to even expect at this point.

It seems like they can't go any lower on this stuff, but they just keep doing it.

It's hard to believe that people are still still working there that aren't Jonathan Greenblatt, but maybe they're getting more people to work there that are kind of like down with the current program.

I'm not sure.

I don't know, but anti-Semitism is roughly in some feathers right now.

It is kind of hit the forefront of conversation, a lot of it centering on the Heritage Foundation's response to Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes.

Quite friendly at that.

Madeline, what's going on?

I mean, can you help us catch up here?

I, I know that Kevin Roberts came out, he's the president of Heritage, came out and made this big defense of Tucker Carlson saying we don't cancel.

You know our friends, we don't punch right?

Basically.

Why don't tell other Christians how to live their lives, basically?

And it has just been like a disaster.

I he's since subsequently apologized in various forms of like like 3 or 4 times and it just doesn't seem to be sticking.

Yeah, I covered the Heritage Foundation and followed Kevin Roberts's media appearances through basically all of 2024 as I was doing an in depth project on Project 2025.

And this is one of the most charmless heads of a nonprofit that I've seen on the conservative right.

And that really, really says something.

He was picked from like a state based coke funded pro oil lobby essentially to have perhaps the most high profile job in the mainstream conservative movement.

And he has really fumble at every possible test of the job.

Obviously, Project 2025 wasn't a determinate, you know, it didn't prohibit Trump from becoming president.

But.

No, no.

It was the one piece of opposition research that stuck for, you know, it's almost 10 years into the Trump era that we're in.

Like, Project 2025 was a genuine liability for the conservative movement, and Kevin Roberts just mishandled it and made it worse at every step of the way.

And so it doesn't surprise me to see him stepping in it again with this Fuentes situation.

My first question when I saw the video was like, why is this a public video?

And what he said in the leaked all staff meeting in which he repeatedly apologized and said he was willing to but would not be stepping down from his role, is that he was hearing from donors about Tucker because they had a paid partnership like Tucker was doing ad reads for Heritage on his show.

And so that's I guess what created this internal conflict initially, but then he took it to Twitter.

Like if you're having problems with your donors, why is that something the entire world?

It's that's something that the entire organization doesn't know about South.

Like why the public needs to know about it is beyond me.

But basically what happened is at Heritage, they have this thing called the One Voice Policy, which is different from the other major conservative think tank in DC, the American Enterprise Institute.

The One Voice policy means that Heritage speaks with one voice.

No staff members go against the official Heritage policy in and Roberts totally unforced error on Fuentes created a historically unprecedented violation across the organization of the one voice policy.

People were back fighting each other on Twitter.

There was a huge internal uproar.

The Heritage Task Force on anti-Semitism that was established after October 7th totally severed ties with the organization.

And there was this.

The chief of staff of for Heritage under under Kevin Roberts was thrown under the bus, which is a pathetic excuse.

You know, Kevin Roberts tried to say I don't know who Nick Fuentes is, which is not a good endorsement for his awareness of the space that he is a thought leader in.

That's like Trump.

Trump's offensive Like hanging out with Nick Fuentes.

And, well, that's also Mike Johnson's defense of everything Trump does.

It's just like, hey, listen, I know I'm one of the most powerful people in conservative politics, but yeah, I don't really know know what's going on here.

I, I, I don't know anything.

I'm, I'm just a small, small little, you know, God knows how much money this man makes to, you know, have his finger on the polls of politics.

And he's like, come on, you can't expect me to Google things.

Yeah, the for years this, I don't know who Nick Fuentes thing is, has been the refrain of power players in the conservative movement because none of them want to admit they're getting routed by a 27 year old who lives in Berwyn.

Like in that's just the fig leaf on that has completely fallen off.

It's a totally laughable excuse at this point.

So I don't see how Kevin Roberts continues on at Heritage.

He's brought nothing but scandal to the organization and this really just, he's a really, really strange dude.

You also like having a like a task force on anti-Semitism that's, you know, superficially focused on Arabs, Muslims and leftists, right?

And then as soon as, as soon, as, as soon as Nick Fuentes shows up with Tucker Carlson, it's like, I don't know, it's fine with me.

I don't know.

Yeah, Yeah, I I have heard and this was years, you know, like when Kevin Roberts kind of initially came into Heritage.

I, I do know through the Grapevine that not everybody was happy about it, mostly because Kevin Roberts is addicted to media.

He wants to go on every podcast, he wants to tweet, he wants to just be online famous.

And you can see that.

I mean, the Heritage Foundation has a bunch of accounts on X now that try to make stuff go viral, but that comes with a cost, right?

Because the Heritage Foundation, for the policies they're pushing are not popular.

They don't really help a whole lot of people besides maybe the oil money that like, pays them, right?

So for the Heritage Foundation to work, for something like Project 2025 to work, it kind of has to be like, you know, not secret, but subtle.

And Kevin Roberts is not subtle and he craves the spotlight so much that he is just without thinking will impale himself and the rest of the organization in in this quest for for attention or this this quest for personal relevance.

And this seems to kind of track with that.

Again, I heard that like a while ago, but I was kind of thinking about that again, seeing all this fall out.

Project 2025 is like the name of a secret evil project from the despicable.

It's like, yeah, yeah, it's not serious.

I mean, now it's it is serious.

But I mean, it's like, if that's the premise you're starting from, I think it betrays exactly your point, which is that or it it illustrates exactly your point, this addiction to right wing media attention.

Last thing I want to bring up on this topic before we go to our main thing everybody, which is girl boss, the girl bosses of the right is is there was a little article in New York Post that mentioned that, you know, some of the people that were horrified by what happened around Kevin Roberts also were horrified to learn that some of their staffers were were gripers, right, which is like gripers now just a stand in for the young right.

Basically, as far as I'm concerned, like they're all, they're all, they're all basically pro Hitler.

Like, what room is there for someone who's not?

Yeah.

They're all based, they're all red pilled.

Yeah, it's just, I mean, no, not much to say.

There are bottom texts.

There's a lot of Nazis under the age of 30.

That's also my experience, yes.

Shall we talk about the girls?

Madeline?

That is your wheelhouse.

You got a book coming out later next year about this kind of stuff.

So you're the perfect person to tap for this.

A lot of prominent right wing media figures that I think, you know, if you just ask somebody to name some off the top of your head, they would start naming a bunch of men, right?

Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, whatever, like, but there's a whole ecosystem of right wing media content made by women for women.

And I think it often goes totally like under appreciated, under scrutinized.

Can you just, you know, very quickly we'll unpack a lot of this through the episode, But what's that landscape of influencers look like?

I mean, I mean, what, what are they selling to their audiences?

I think a lot of this girl boss patriotism or like right wing girl bosses, whatever you want to call it.

I've heard it called the Woman's Fear, which I hate because it's so clunky.

But a lot of it started, really started taking off in 2022.

And that was the same time that the Dobbs decision came down from the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe V Wade.

And I think that that really kicked off a bit of a psychosis among not only women in this country who are grieving, you know, the reality that one of their basic human rights could just be taken away at the snap of a finger.

But also, I think that, right, women have the ability to and need to get an abortion.

Even if you are aligned with the right wing movement, that's a potential need at any point in your reproductive years.

And I think that what from my observations, there was a big panic about, OK, like, what the hell do we do?

Just like everybody else, women, people who can get pregnant, were panicked by the possibility that they were losing the right to.

And I think what use an effort by the right who saw a major backlash in the 2022 midterms and also just generally culturally against the right in the wake of Dobbs, was this effort to say, actually, this is fine.

It's fine that you can't get an abortion.

It's fine that we're clearly coming for your civil rights.

And here's a whole media infrastructure to support that message.

So you see these young women really start taking off, backed by institutions like Turning Point USA and The Daily Wire, to reach young women in a way that was historically unprecedented in the conservative movement.

And that really accelerated through the 2024 election, especially through the Make America Healthy Again movement.

And it continues to Crest.

So I think, you know, young women, Gen.

Z women are majority progressive, but I don't think that electoral outcomes or even polling is the right metric by which to measure the conservative movements impact on young women.

And I think you can learn a lot from it by looking at by looking at this universe of female targeted influencers in digital right wing media.

And that's a big focus of my forthcoming book.

So how would you measure the impact if it's not polling or elections?

Like what's a better way to think about measuring or or or thinking about the effects of that media ecosystem?

I think taking a look at delayed family formation, at delayed childbearing and also at women as workers like women.

This is it's so funny that the right wing media says that women are primarily wives and mothers.

Because in my reporting for this book, I have found that when you speak to young women, young conservative women, they know that they're not going to, if they graduate college or go to college, come out of it with a financially stable husband who can support them and, you know, a young family.

That is just not the expectation since the 70s, you know, and for poor people before that, it has always been an expectation that both parents are working.

And that only becomes more pressing in this economy especially.

And so I think that the decisions that women are making around work, motherhood and family formation.

And also like culture, I think you see a lot of conservative themes, a lot of conformity around messaging in the culture about like, what is a woman, what isn't acceptable, to quote Matt Walsh?

Like, it is actually such a pression question and like, not to quote Judith Butler, but Judith Butler has a quote to the effect of if you are repeatedly asking the question, what is a woman?

It's an acknowledgement that this is an open question.

And I think that there is so much anxiety around that question.

And a lot of popular culture is bending to the will of the conservative movement at this time.

Some some of that has to do just probably.

I mean, this is my interpretation, which is Trump being the dominant force in our culture, right?

I mean some of it to some degree that has to be because I feel like it opened the door for for some of this that didn't exist before.

Absolutely.

I mean, what does it mean that we have a government that is led by sexual predators after the Me Too movement, after backlash against Gamergate, all of these moments in contemporary feminism of the last few years, after this whole rise and fall of the so-called girl boss which we can get into.

At the end of the day, we now have a government led by Donald Trump, led by Pete Hagseth, led by people who are unapologetic misogynist.

And so again, I think that this cultural conservatism you're seeing among young women is shaped by a closed, you know, the walls closing in a little bit and figuring out how do you become an agent in your own subjugation, essentially.

Yeah.

And and and also let's not forget RFK Junior, the FaceTime partner of Olivia Nuzzi.

I just wanted to get that in because we do it basically one set of every three shows.

The so you know, just a few figures we're going to talk about on this.

I just want to throw people the names because some people may not know who these influencers are, but they're influencers, right?

They influence something, I guess.

You know, I, you know, I think a lot of people that listen to this show go through their entire lives and not have to know who like Alex Clark is.

You're going to talk about is it Brett Cooper or Brett Cooper or is it Brett Mason?

I put Brett Mason, who is a session guitar player in Nashville that I'm a fan of because that's my brain.

But it's Brett Cooper who worked, who worked at the Daily Wire until fairly recently, right?

That's correct.

Yeah, and then other ones we had Candace Owens.

We probably won't spend too much time on Candace.

Like for people who haven't already heard, who the hell is Candace Owens?

Madeline was the guest on that one.

Is it EV magazine?

Yeah.

EV magazine, OK.

And then and of course, Riley Gaines, who I wrote her last name with AZ you.

Know.

Just check out.

Extra Riz.

Yeah, well, we've been talking about these folks on and off little bits of what the one the main person who's been who's been coming up on posting through it, of course, is is Erica Kirk, who is now the, she's like the queen mommy of this scene right now because of just her fame.

Yeah, Charlie Kirk, after he was killed, you know, people were wondering who's going to take over Turning Point USA.

And the board voted her as the president of the organization.

I believe it's the title.

Point is, she's running the show now.

She is the face of the organization.

Every major Turning Point USA event features Erica Kirk going up to the podium.

Just tripped out in like the best televangelist.

But you know, you know, giving this speech about how sad she is, Charlie's gone while wearing like $800,000 worth of clothing, dotting her tears away with wads of cash.

And as we've talked about on the show, I mean, not everybody on the right, certainly, but but even broader than that, like as time goes on, they're not really liking what they're seeing.

They're like, aren't you supposed to be grieving your husband?

Because you you actually seem to be quite excited by all this attention and notoriety that you have now.

For a, for an endorsement of Madeline here.

When we did this on our, we did a little bit about Erica Kirk on our premium on one of our premiums a couple months in a month.

I don't even I've lost track of time and we're, we're headed towards the end of the year.

But Madeline helped us out, which is some of the notes there because she knew a lot about Erica.

So I'm just going to go through this.

What we have, what we've covered already for people who haven't heard the premium episode, but she's a few years older than Charlie, like five years or something like that.

She's very much a blonde bombshell type, right?

I mean, she's a very like that is her her archetype.

And she was a Miss America competitor, I believe.

And but she was like Miss Arizona at one point.

Those are those go together.

She competed.

Those go together.

OK.

I don't know how it works.

OK.

Yeah, thanks.

And she was also a student athlete.

I believe she played volleyball, something like that.

Basketball.

And basketball, OK.

And then she did some reality TV and I believe you added to the dock here, Summer House, which, yeah, that's the one, you know.

I remember when we covered that, like Mike and I didn't really know anything about what that show was.

It seems like a dating show.

Do you know about Summer House Madeline?

Yeah, I do.

I have.

Why, why, why is that, Madeline?

Let's let's interrogate that.

I mean, my career is about slop.

And then when I'm done with the daytime slop, I go to my nighttime slop.

It's that meme about like, oh, spent all day at the bad screen, gotta go, gonna gotta drill and by looking at the good screen.

But I believe Madeline has an interest in Is it 90 day for Beyoncé?

So oh dude, my wife's obsessed with that show.

Yeah.

So like, here's The thing is, you know, there's two main competitors in the reality TV space pretty much, which is Bravo, which is like the Real Housewives franchise, and then TLC, which is the.

Learning Channel.

Yeah, the Learning Channel, which is, I mean, if you want me to go off on a tangent, I mean, it should if I'm going to be censored, Like it's the things they put on the Learning Channel are so unethical, in some cases racist.

Like it is unbelievable that there's not a bigger cultural discourse, but I digress.

Yeah, Summer House is a Bravo show.

It is actually not one that I watch because I'd rather be watching CLC, but basically like people in their like 20s and 30s go to, you know, the Hamptons essentially.

And they all rent a house and then they all like sleep with each other and have drama.

And I guess Erica in her pre Charlie days was one of these cast members dates.

So that is that is my understanding of of summer house.

But yeah, I actually, I, I, I actually, I do draw boundaries in the in the Bravo universe.

Yeah, I just remember it may have been something you shared with us, but when she was on Summer House, one of the contestants or participants, whatever you would call them, was just like, yeah, she seems to like Jesus a bunch.

I don't know about that, But she does reality TV.

She's living in New York.

I don't know, maybe it's like a modeling thing or something.

Who knows?

People moved to New York for all kinds of reasons.

But at some point, she interviews for a job with Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk.

According to the way they tell it, they're at a burger restaurant, some burger joint.

They talk for a couple hours and Charlie says, OK, well, you're not going to get the job, but I'm going to date you.

And that is it's.

Like every topic.

You could imagine that is close to Charlie Kirk's heart is what we discussed and went through.

When it was, it was like 3 1/2 hours and they were starting to close up and he was finished with his burger.

Just sat there and I'm like looking around like, OK, did I get the job?

Like what's going on?

I don't need the job, but did I get it?

What's going on?

And he goes, you know, I'm not going to hire you.

I was like, I OK, well, thank goodness I didn't need the job because I'm already doing stuff here in Manhattan.

He goes, I'm going to date you.

And I kind of just, I just, I froze.

I mean, wouldn't you?

I literally, I was just like, OK, was not just not expecting this at all.

And he was, I was like, do you want to just how would we just be friends first?

Like see where it goes?

And I told her I had enough friends and that I didn't want to be friends with her.

So that was kind of a non starter.

But if she wanted to date that would be great.

I had enough friends and I think she still finds that to be very funny, but I meant it.

And without hesitation and.

They get married shortly after and she becomes part of the Turning Point USA universe.

They're trotting her out at the Young Women's Leadership Summit events.

Maybe we should hit pause.

What are these?

Offense Madeline.

The conservative movement has a very strong culture of conferences that does not exist on the left.

It's in a tremendously effective networking tool.

And when Turning Point was growing, it became a juggernaut of these conferences, putting them on as many people saw.

And we're we're sort of very surprised by these sparklers at the memorial for for.

Yeah.

Like that's standard turning Point fare.

Yeah, yeah, because, because there's a lot of conferences on the right, like, like you mentioned, Madeline, I've gone to a bunch of them and reported on a bunch of them in my reporter years.

But the Turning Point USA ones are slick.

I mean, these are high production.

There's graphics.

Mike and I have joked several times on this show, you know, it'll be like coming to the stage meme Lord Benny Johnson.

And they did that for Kyle Rittenhouse, which was a lot of people found distasteful.

But but you're saying there's one of there?

There's a version of this that's specifically tailored towards women.

Yes, there's one This past summer, 2025 was the 10 year anniversary of the Young Women's Leadership Summit.

So it's been around for a while.

Yeah.

I mean, it's you know, it's been around for quite a while and they have really transformed it into a one-of-a-kind outreach to young women.

The pre production that goes into these events, networking, reaching out, you know, Turning Point has just a huge what they call a field staff and they will put a, you know, a recent college graduate in an area and that person will do outreach to local college Republican clubs or turning Point USA chapters and say, you know, we will pay for you to come to this conference in Dallas, the Young Women's Leadership Summit.

I had AI have a source for the book who told me that a Turning point USA field representative went through all of the followings.

You know, like the on the College Republicans Instagram page went through the following the the followers list and message on Instagram.

Every single young woman who is following this College Republicans club to say if you establish a Turning Point chapter on this campus, because there wasn't one at that point, we will pay for you to come to Dallas for this conference.

And that is how she became involved in Turning Point in the 1st place.

So yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

Like it's, it's really, it's crazy.

Wait, what type of what type of you you were there covering this YWWLS thing?

What type of women are there?

Like what, what type of women are these women?

Are they like, you know, you can't get a liberal, you know, an activist liberal woman to go, I assume, but you get somebody who's just sort of non political.

I think.

I don't I don't understand like who goes to this?

Young women, I went in 2025 and 2023 and in 2025, you know, I was having difficulty.

Like I would approach women, young girls, and say like, I'm looking to interview people for my book.

Would you be interested in speaking with me?

And I found that many of them were under 18.

Like it was a little bit shocking.

So we're talking high school age girls and college age girls, many of whom probably have some familiarity with these female influencers we're talking about, or none at all, and are just like, sure, I'll go to Dallas.

I was at a Turning Point conference and went to a panel of high school chapter leaders in which one of them said that Turning Point USA paid for a mechanical bull to come to their school.

So it's like, you know, you would never get a liberal funder.

That's insane.

Insane.

You would never get a liberal funder because they're looking for deliverables and metrics and impact assessment.

And Turning Point has this very wise approach, which is like, you know, you send a mechanical bull to the high school and down the line that kid may be like, hey, what was that all about?

They Google it.

It brings them back to Turning Point, like, and that's very much the attitude around these conferences.

And the Young Women's Leaders Summit has really become a lightning rod, including in the mainstream press, for it's really a growing momentum with young women, you know, in this country, many of whom I spoke to would not have otherwise been able to afford to go to Dallas for this event.

If you're listening George Soros, one of these days we'll do the posting through it live show.

I want a bouncy slide.

That is how we get the youth here.

But so Erica marries Charlie Kirk, she starts to become a figure in this scene.

She had been kind of trying to break into the scene a little bit before then, you know, interviewing, you know, faith.

What would you even call them?

Faith leaders just like pastors and stuff about about Jesus.

I mean it.

Her whole thing is just like die hard Christian Jesus freak kind of stuff.

What was she doing at these conferences?

I I mean, she's a featured speaker, sure, but what's your read on like what her function was as Charlie Kirk's wife?

Like, like what?

What was the utility they were trying to get in her presentation or the persona that they cultivated for her?

Well, it really transformed in 2025 prior to the assassination.

She, it seemed to me from my perspective that they were looking to make her a much more prominent person in the Turning Point universe.

They she spoke to the conference always opens with Alex Clark's because she's the face of this event and the face of outreach to young women from Turning Point USA.

And for the first time, that was followed by Erica Kirk and she gave this speech about with biblical womanhood and women in the Bible that you can look to as a young girl, as a young woman that can role model again, this question, what is a woman?

So after that, Charlie joined her on stage and they sat down and did essentially like a marital counseling session.

I actually have a clip from that that I would like us all to listen to where they talk about the pressures of, of hookup culture, because, you know, this is very biblical, right?

Abstinence is, is a theme here.

But when I was, you know, looking around pulling audio for this episode, I, I just this kind of stood out to me.

So let's take a listen.

It's good.

God is good.

You'll find you're human.

I found mine.

So how do you tell young ladies to navigate the pressures of hookup culture on a college campus where they feel pressured that if they don't get into, let's just say, sexual situations with a male counterpart, then they will not be able to find a boyfriend or a husband?

He's not meant to be with you like on.

He needs to honor your purity.

Save it for your husband.

That's simple.

Save it for your husband.

Talk more about how they should go about doing that cause the pressures are so enormous.

One thing that was interesting is just, you'll find you're human at the beginning, which I thought was interesting, which is like, oh, really?

Not a man.

I I like that.

I was like, oh, maybe a woman too.

Yeah.

Like, I, I just wonder if these you're sort of kind of providing bait to get these women to come to this event, Right.

In various ways you're trying to lure them in and they're supposed to leave and not have sex.

Like now that they've they've been indoctrinated into this, like this is a really, you're asking a lot of them, right?

I mean.

It's it's also like on that note, a lot of money to spend to just convince young women not to have sex, which which seems I don't know.

Well, it's very strange, like it's a political conference where the main message is go home and do nothing.

Like in the public life.

It's a very strange and you hear from the audience, sometimes they'll get up and ask Charlie, like, why is this called the Leadership Summit?

Well, let's keep listening.

From free contraceptives to the podcast they listen to, how many of you feel as if it's very difficult to maintain your purity on a college campus?

Raise your hand.

OK, not actually.

It's less than I thought.

So it's easy.

Good.

No, I guess it's fine.

How many?

Because they, because they don't want to admit in public that they get horny, like in an environment like this.

I mean, I, I assume either that or they're just, you know, the most repressed young women that you could possibly find in America.

How many How many people would you what percentage of young ladies by the time they graduate college, do you think still are virgins?

What, less than 25%?

Imagine you're a parent and you send your 141516 year old to this event, possibly by themselves, and this grown 30 something year old man is talking to them like this.

It's incredibly creepy.

It's like, I mean, I would be furious if someone was talking to my daughter like this.

Yeah, I I can't imagine it'd be like, why is this man so concerned with the sexuality of my daughter?

I'm telling her not what to do sexually, which is pretty creepy.

So it's not that easy.

OK, that's interesting.

No, I just think I'm just trying to process it because I, I don't think the church talks enough about purity.

I think it's it's incredibly important and we should tell young men and.

Todd, have you been to church?

It's like I grew up going to church.

It's all they talk about.

It's like the only thing they talk to like 14 year old boys about is just like don't do it.

Don't do it.

I know you really want to do it, but don't do it.

And and young ladies to save themselves for marriage.

It's a beautiful thing.

Right.

No, I agree because a lot of people will say, well how do I know that I'm compatible with that person unless I test drive the car before I buy it?

That's not a real thing.

Don't listen to that lie.

That that is a real thing.

Others say that's terrible advice.

Yeah.

It's just horrible advice.

It's like.

I mean, if you sincerely, whatever you have beliefs, you want to save yourself for marriage or whatever, go right ahead.

But I think, you know, if you're going to make a lifelong commitment to somebody, it's probably not a bad idea to see if you're sexually compatible or not.

Take the car for a drive or whatever metaphor they use.

Madeline, I have a question and you may not know the answer to this.

Does Erica stress that she herself save herself for Charlie?

Because I feel like that you're if if not, you're asking a lot of these people, you know, and also in a very hypocritical way.

And I'm not saying that like she, I, I it's not my business what she did or didn't do.

But she's in reality TV and beauty pageants and she was getting tons of attention in New York, I'm sure.

Right.

And maybe she did save herself until she met the person that was right.

But she would have been pretty old.

So she would have been like 30 or something by that point.

She really was a virgin her whole life.

I mean, I, I find it kind of crazy that someone, that someone that old would be telling people, yeah, you have to save yourself.

It's not something I've heard her speak about, but, you know, she certainly used her sexuality to build a profile in the pageant world.

And now she, you know, is on the stage talking about domination and submission, talking about, you know, purity, virginity, talking about sexuality and, and adolescent sexuality.

So it's a very sexually charged environment at this conference.

You have a lot of curious young women in one room talking about sex.

What could go wrong?

Yeah.

You know, that's that she's at these conferences starting to dress up more and more as we as we try.

I, I, I saw a sort of progression as I looked at Erica Kirk videos and it seemed like everything was getting more and more doll like and, you know, and performative in her appearance as time went on.

This is leading up to Kirk's assassination.

They also start to peddle her and Charlie as kind of an influencer couple, right?

Where they were kind of they would do these videos together, if I recall, where it just sort of be like, you know, the typical things that couples do in private very quietly, but they would be doing it in front of a camera at all times.

So they'd be walking be like, I love you so much.

I love you too.

And then the clip ends.

It seemed like that that's where they were sort of positioning them.

I think you use the phrase that we stole on our premium episode, which is like a Tammy, Tammy Faye Baker and you know, kind of couple dynamic.

Yeah, yeah.

Because something we talked about on the premium is that Erica Kirk's like increased prominence, like her coming into the picture alongside Charlie is also happening around the same time that Charlie is doing a lot more.

And Turning Point USA is always sort of, you know, interfaced with the evangelical conservative movement, but Charlie starts going to them and getting massive amounts of money, massive amounts of support and really trying to deepen those connections.

He's talking at churches and stuff like that.

And yeah, it's, it's Jim Baker, David Faye, it's an evangelical couple.

And I, I feel like you could even just see that in the way that Erica Kirk styles herself and, and the positioning or the, the messaging she's using, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of threads in that.

I'll start with talking about the way that Erica Kirk presents herself.

It is, I mean, missing from that clip that we just listened to is what she is wearing, which was a, in my opinion, huge statement.

She was wearing a absurdly fluffy chiffon blouse with layers and layers of ruffles.

It was a floral print with bell sleeves, like lavender.

It had all of these rhinestone jewels all the way up to her neck, like it had sort of like a clown collar and a matching skirt.

Like she looked like the love child of a cotton candy machine and Kate Middleton.

And it's, I mean, it's it, it, it, it was a it's a huge part of this like shift that she was doing at the time.

So there's the presentation, her and her appearance, you know, since she has become so prominent in the wake of the assassination, is heavily scrutinized.

And she's clearly aware of that.

The other thing I want to say about, unlike the Tammy Fey and Jim Bakker thing, like they this the televangelism is really the roots of the right wing media.

It really was like the proto right wing media that we see now.

And so this notion of a politically influential and religiously pure heterosexual couple that were also like media, you know, broadcasters is a familiar trope to right wing media audiences.

And you also in terms of like the historical lineage of this, this talk about like gossiping and swearing and purity.

It's very like 2004 Bush era conservatism.

Like it's very Harry Potter panic.

Like it's very much a lot of what they were doing was like reaching back into the old playbook.

So I found that very, very fascinating, very calculated, and I thought that it portended a shift for her as a more prompt, not only as a more prominent feature of Turning Point USA, but by in the public fleshing out This notion of Charlie's family was likely the beginning of a political campaign for office.

But then he gets shot.

Tyler Robinson shoots him, allegedly.

He's got to go, legend.

That's right.

Actually, yes.

We don't know, right?

We don't know.

We just, we just know.

They have to prove it.

They got to prove it.

So he dies, Charlie dies and now we're at the stage.

Now we've let's talk about the time after we first introduced her.

And now she has become, I would argue and someone can feel free to disagree 10 times, maybe 20 times the celebrity that she was before he was shot, right.

She's become ubiquitous on XI mean, pro, negative, whatever.

There's just been tons and tons of memes and things about her.

She's becoming arguably one of the most famous people on the right now.

I think just in terms of the amount of conversation that is centered around her.

So, Madeline, tell us a little bit about the backlash against Erica Kirk, because there's been quite a bit of backlash and it's come from a lot of different people on the right, certainly some a lot of people on the left as well.

I mean, people who resented Charlie Kirk and TPUSA before Charlie was shot who have held that over for some legitimate reasons, as we've covered in in The Who the hell is Charlie?

Who the hell was Charlie Kirk episode?

Yeah.

Just tell us, tell us a little bit about the backlash that is going on around Erica now.

I mean, top line is that people on the right do not want to see a woman in a position of leadership.

And you know, that's top line.

So like you said, there's been a tremendous amount of backlash from the Nick Fuentes of it all and from a number of sort of very X heavy right wing influencers.

You also have these somewhat bewildering missteps by Turning Point USA in their branding and marketing of of Erica Kirk.

It just so clearly immediately became a branding and marketing campaign.

And quickly, right.

I mean, it was like overnight it seemed like that's that was my impression.

To me, like, I mean, reading the tea leaves a little bit, this is the influence of of Tyler Boyer, who was the, you know, who started Turning Point you and was, I think he was the first hired employee at Turning Point with Charlie.

They were best friends.

And Tyler has a background in the Arizona Republican Party and party politics and elections.

And so you've seen this milieu of a grieving widow, which is a very powerful, you know, and tragic figure turned into a tool for fundraising for Turning Point.

USAI have a friend in Denver who got a Mailer that was, you know, direct mail, old school campaign tactic saying like this is a letter from Erica Kirk.

Like please support me and my family and Turning Point USA.

In this terrible time and in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's assassination, Turning Point obviously received a tremendous amount of attention.

They received 10s of thousands of new chapter applications and people were donating, you know, pledging $1,000,000 donation.

Erica Kirk.

There was a crowdfunding.

There was a crowdfunding effort that raised, I think, nearly $3,000,000 just for Erica Kirk.

And it's like, I would be speaking about her and this very differently if she wasn't immediately making herself into the face of this whole notion of a trad wife, which is a like highly commercial archetype in our culture at this point.

But she has opened herself, her appearance up to up for scrutiny.

And for that reason, you know, I think she's a public figure that's deserving of criticism because she has advanced a gender essentialist, Christian nationalist view of womanhood that I think is extremely harmful to young women.

So, yeah.

And, you know, and like, just my impression of Erica Kerr, 'cause she's just really not that bright of a person.

Like she is not qualified to run this complex organization.

When when Kirk was assassinated, I was struck by how many roles he was filling in his life that.

It's his project.

It's his project.

I mean, there is no vision for Turning Point without Charlie Kirk and certainly not Erica Kirk.

And she didn't sign up to be the face of.

She signed up to be the trophy wife.

So she didn't sign up to run the organization.

That's a pretty ridiculous notion.

And like when Kirk was assassinated, I was struck by how many projects he was concurrently leading.

That is not that, you know, replicated by others of his contemporaries.

Like he was doing 3 hours of radio, 5 hours, five days a week.

He was running Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action.

He was doing, you know, all of these campus debates in addition to a monthly event at a church in Arizona.

That was a very high production thing.

All of these conferences.

Like, that is a schedule that is is, you know, not paralleled by people who are not holding elected office on the right.

So that's not fill shoes that anyone can fill.

And certainly Erica Kirk is not qualified to fill those shoes.

Yeah, and something that was also important about Charlie Kirk 1.

He was relentless and hardworking.

As despicable as I feel like his life's work was to the well-being of other people.

He was relentless, but he was also very tight.

I mean, he was like a donor whisperer.

His organization was able to grow to a just gigantic multi $1,000,000 international project quite quickly because he knew how to charm old rich money.

He knew how to get people to sign the checks and add an extra 0 on there.

And Erica can do that as a grieving widow.

Pick that up.

People will feel bad for her because they, you know, I'm sure in the eyes of the donor, it's like you're writing another check to Charlie's memory, right?

Embodied by Erica Kirk.

But that's not going to last forever.

You can't just keep going back to that well, forever.

So I yeah, I am just very how does she do this?

I have no idea.

I mean, I think long term for fundraising strategy, a better approach would be to pull her back from the spotlight to create a little bit of mystery around her and the notion of, you know, that you were protecting her.

Like, and she keeps saying, like in all these public events, she's like, I will carry on Charlie's message.

I will.

And it's like, what is the message?

Because all I hear you saying is I will carry on Charlie's message.

And that refrain is sort of getting a little bit, you know, wrung out and it's starting to run dry well.

As we can see from the lack of repeatable clips from Charlie Kirk, nobody really knows what his message was other than to just accrue power for the Republican Party.

I want to get, I want because we have a lot of other stuff we want to get to.

I just want to quickly mention that there have been a lot of memes mocking her as a grieving widow that have come up and a lot of obsession with her outfits and, and things like that recently.

And I don't think we can sort of talk about it without actually, you know, we can't, we can't really talk about her without mentioning these things because it really is driving the conversation around her.

So there's been a lot of stuff suggesting that she's kind of faking it, that she's not really, she doesn't really have a lot of concern for her husband.

And then she appeared with JD Vance at an event and the two of them were on stage together.

And then she kind of gave him this hug and she touched his face.

And people perceive that as the that the two of them were fucking.

I, I don't know how else to put it, but that is literally the way it's portrayed online.

I think that says something about JD Vance.

It says something about Erica Kirk, right?

That's why it came together.

These are two figures with a lot of baggage.

Well, these are these are two people that like can't step out in public and try to do anything without becoming like the butt of the joke at at this point.

And and she was, and and again, I don't want to like harp too much on her outfits, but she was, she was wearing like the the Charlie Kirk freedom shirt talked into a pair of leather pants, which, you know, had especially for conservative women.

They were supposed, but you know, supposed to be conservative.

It looked, it did.

The optics were weird.

Well, I mean, when all you're doing is talking about purity and saving yourself and telling underage girls how important their virginity is, you are opening yourself up for scrutiny for how that actually manifests in your own life and for women in public life, your public appearances, whether you like it or not or not.

A tremendous statement and a statement of political values.

It's not something you can avoid.

You can say that that's wrong and it is too.

You know, it is obviously, but like, especially for a movement that is so obsessed with gender conformity, for what she wears and does in the way that she lived is, you know, is subject to scrutiny and she knows that.

Well, she's being judged exactly the way that she advocates that women should be judged, right?

So I don't feel too bad bringing it up, even if I I'm not going to engage necessarily in the same kind of thing.

I joked that there should be a Halloween costume with like the leather pants and the freedom style shirt but it said it says femdom on it.

OK, that's you know, thank you the.

Posting.

Through do you should we do the the femdom shirt as as posting through a merch?

We'll see We'll see how many people message us and tell us to do it.

Yeah, the next she just appeared on stage at I don't know which event this was, but she was wearing like a gown, like a like a very like it's like a, a green, like an Evergreen gown and just like rings on like every single finger.

It was like almost like a fetishistic like presentation of rings, just like rings and jewelry everywhere.

And I guess this is sort of the evangelical thing, but it it did look over the top, look like you did an AI generated image of a blonde conservative diva.

Yeah, I, I hate to quote this guy of all people on the show, but Richard Spencer, folks will remember him as the the darling face of the alt right back in the day.

He saw this and commented, how many Super Bowls did this bitch win?

Which I I really hate to hand it to him, but that's pretty good.

So, yeah, so she's winning Super Bowls and but not necessarily fans on the right.

You know, As for the JD Vance rumors and stuff, I have no reason to believe that that's actually a kind of a real thing.

And or maybe it's just wish fulfillment from on the part of of some of his fans that wanted to be with a white woman instead of an Indian woman.

But I, I, I'm telling you this, I can promise you that if this guy runs in 2028, all this stuff is going to keep going forever.

And it was like one of the memes I thought was like, really, really harsh, which is like, she's you can do almost anything with AI now, as everybody knows.

And it's Erica Kirk's standing on a on Charlie Kirk's coffin while she's like holding JD Vance to her breasts.

And like, yeah.

And this was like circle circulated heavily on the right, not just like leftist being like shit posting and stuff like that.

So it is a big thing.

So in terms of TPUSAS potential mismanagement under Erica Kirk or not, maybe not under Erica Kirk, something happened Jared in Arizona.

Yeah, I just want to talk about this briefly just cuz I, I think it shows like where the organization is at.

They got some headlines for this and I think can be a good picture on what, what, what's going on there, you know, with Charlie out of the picture.

So this happened last week, a turning point USA spokesperson Andrew Colvitt, who actually texted me because I had some unkind things to say about this.

And I, I think he, he wanted me to cut him a little bit of a break.

And I told him I wasn't going to be doing that.

But there was a photo of some how Halloween costumes that teachers at the Vail School District in Arizona wore that said problem solved.

And the shirts are made to look like they're covered in blood stains, right?

This is, if you Google this, you will find similar Halloween costumes.

I, I guess this has been a, a math teacher thing or, or, you know, people have worn this costume before.

These were I, I don't think these were homemade.

But what Andrew Colvitt does is he says these teachers are mocking Charlie Kirk's assassination.

They think problem solved, Charlie Kirk was killed and proceeds to light them up on X accusing them of this and that The Superintendent of the school district clarifies that yes, you can buy these shirts all over the place and they actually wore these last year too before Kirk was died.

And behind the scenes, the school district was like, OK, listen, we're not going to wear these costumes again.

Sorry to all the parents who now have to like deal with this or or are watching this happen to their kids, teachers, conservatives still did not give up the gun.

I saw it just like dog shit Osent whatever style analysis of like, well, the photo of them from last year is actually AI generated, but this photo is like 100 pixels by 100 pixels.

It compresses.

That's not big enough to like tell anything about anything.

But these teachers got a ton of death threats for this because of course that's just how this works anytime, whether it's loops of TikTok or the turning point USA mil you.

I mean when fright wing media in his culture war arena is like look at these people.

Look at these violent, terrible, horrific people.

The audience responds by threatening them and harassing them and trying to torture them and make them pay for their alleged crimes.

And when asked about this, Andrew Colfitt said that he was acting in good faith, which is more or less like what he trying to argue to me over text message that I told him no, he was not.

I don't believe you.

And he said, you know, I wasn't aware of of them getting death threats, but, you know, I I detest that.

No violence, no threats.

We don't like that.

But then he told Wired, who did a story about the death threats the teachers got.

Call me a cynic, but I do think some of them knew how it would be perceived.

So it's not really an apology.

So, yeah, for what that says about turning point USAI mean they've been doing this to people for years.

But they just really, I think so many people at that organization, whether it's Jack Prosobic or Andrew Colvid or Benny Johnson or whatever, they are still just trying to shake engagement, shake attention, shake outrage out of Charlie Kirk's death to the point where I think they're just getting really sloppy with it.

And I, I do wonder if the goodwill, that brief moment of goodwill they had with the public where people felt bad for them, you can overplay the hand and it will swing back the other direction.

And people be like, these are disgusting people.

Wait, can I just pause?

Cher, did you say before Kirk was died?

Oh, maybe.

Oh, that was good.

I love that.

Yeah, we'll keep it in.

Yeah, it happens.

It happens.

We do, We do, We do.

We do like 17 hours of podcasts a week.

Poor, poor Charlie Kirk.

Here he lies.

He was shot to died.

Can you please stitch that back in so everybody can have that?

So yeah, I mean, this seems like mismanagement.

I want to point out for this organization.

Obviously no one who's, Well, I didn't say that most people who are listening to this are not rooting for Tube USA success.

But if you imagine this one guy running almost everything and then all of a sudden he dies or he died or whatever.

Like they consider that they don't like, you know, what is Plan B?

It's probably Andrew Colvitt is probably ghost run, you know, running most of this organization right now.

And he was the press person.

So before we leave the TPUSA universe, I want to talk about some other people who are TPUSA related.

It's Alex Clark you mentioned, but I know you have a particular thing for Alex Clark, so I need you to tell us who Alex Clark is.

For this, I I subjected myself to actually watching some Alex Alex Clark instead of merely listening to Madeline tell me who she is.

And I saw it and I said, Oh my God, who other than Madeline is watching Alex Clark?

Yeah.

Well, first I think we should start with this clip of Alex Clark saying who Alex Clark is.

If you don't know me, my name is Alex Clark and the Guardian recently accused me of running a psyop to turn American Win women thin, fertile and conservative.

I'm here to publicly say the accusations are true.

How many years turned somebody fertile?

Usually go fuck yourself like that's what you you are.

I was there when she said that and I look around at and by the way, I think 2025 was like quite diverse for turning point.

USAI saw a lot of different kinds of women.

I saw women older.

I saw fat, thin women and I will say, like, how does that make you feel as a young girl in the audience?

Like go fuck yourself.

Like the pressures that teenage girls are under to be those things is unstated throughout our popular culture.

And like to just come out and say that to these young impressionable girls who look up to you is so incredibly uncalled for.

Like it's just like, totally.

I just have absolutely no respect for a person like that.

OK, so for people who can't visualize Alex Clark, she's she's a brunette in her early 30s, I guess you would say.

Is that, is that right, Madeline?

Yeah.

She's in her early 30s.

And you told me this is this is the way I learned of who Alex Clark is.

I learned from.

She's always telling people or women you need to go out, you need to have kids, you need to have kids like at age 19 or whatever, whatever it might be.

And she herself doesn't have kids at like 30 or whatever.

Yeah, that's correct.

So like she in 2023 when I was at YWLS, said that you need to start planning for a family before you graduate high school.

She said that.

Whoa, what?

Before high school.

Yeah, she's.

I can pull up the exact quote if you want, but yeah, she said.

Like you need to start planning early and in some cases before you graduate high school.

She's.

Fucking Ghilane Maxwell.

I mean what?

What are you talking about?

Like we're talking about 15 year olds.

No, like again, like, imagine someone talking to your teenage daughter like that.

It does not matter who it is.

Charlie Kirk is was an especially odious face of that message.

But like, Alex Clark is someone that you look at maybe if you're a young conservative teen girl, is your, like, glamorous older sister.

And she is, you know, like, I have followed her for many years at this point.

I find her to be especially fascinating because like, like many millennial women over the course of the time that I have been following her has trotted out several boyfriends to Instagram and, you know, posting her like new man all over social media.

And like, you know, I have spent a lot of my adult life, you know, as a single woman.

And like, over that period of time, it's like you like, it's just like, what is the difference between like me, a feminist who is like, you know, living out my 20s.

You know, I'm not in my 20s anymore.

But like, at the time, like experimenting, learning new things, learning new people.

And you who's telling your audience of teenagers they need to get off birth control, which is a big thing for her, get pregnant, have children.

And like, you've had like 5 boyfriends over that course.

None of them were good enough.

Alex, is that because you're a girl boss like the rest?

Maybe she should be, as Erica Kirk would say, you know, more biblical.

Yeah, I mean like.

And don't don't worry about if you're compatible, you know God will make it work.

It is an extraordinarily strange obsession she has in dictating how to live your life as a wife and mother when that's not something she knows personally anything about.

And it's the same with Charlie.

Like, Charlie became the most prominent voice on, like, liberalism on college campuses and cancel culture and political correctness in the Academy.

And he never went to college.

So Alex Clark, where exactly does she come from?

And also I, I just think of the people we're going to talk about, I probably know the most about Alex Clark, but that is because I edited a piece about her that one of my former colleagues wrote and learned a lot, like while I was editing it.

She also has like, what reality TV background right before she kind of came on to the conservatism scene.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

She's really, yes, she does.

She was on the show that is supposed to be like the IRL reality TV version of Tinder.

So what you do is you like, the way it worked was like there was a bunch of women and one man at a time and it was like set on an island.

So like the men would be like boated up to the shore and then they would sit on the dock and like these women would like walk down the boardwalk and sit there and have like a 5 minute conversation.

And then if they liked them, they would like swipe right.

I'm doing like air quotes.

Like they would swipe right and like walk to the right.

And if they didn't like them, they would swipe left and walk to the left.

And then the man would go to the right and see who picked him and then choose from them.

So yeah, yeah, Alex was on a reality TV dating.

I forgot about that but yeah, it's on YouTube.

Yeah, sounds very biblical, but then, you know, she came into Turning Point USA.

She started doing like a pop culture show, but she's kind of rebranded a few Times Now.

She is one of the faces of the Make America Healthy Again movement, right?

Tell me about like that journey, that evolution and your read on that right of like why?

Why do this?

Yeah.

I mean, again, I think that the popularity of Make America Healthy again among young women is related to the Dobbs decision.

Like, you have these stories in the press about women dying in hospitals because they can't be given reproductive care, because the doctors are worried about being sued, the collapse of maternal care, the lack of doctors.

And, you know, it's a legally risky thing to become a reproductive care doctor in this country.

And so people aren't doing it in medical school because there aren't safe places for them to practice.

Like the Women's Health is very much under assault by the white right wing regime.

And I think that that strain converged with this like anti vax, anti COVID popularity of RFK.

So Alex herself is an interesting intersection of like all of those trends, which is she has an autoimmune disorder that she believes was, you know, made better by changes to her lifestyle, eating last processed food and going off of birth control, which is like very well may be the case.

Likely is the case.

Like it's good to eat healthy foods.

That's not like the the the opposition to make America healthy again isn't like that you should be eating junk food or that it won't have a, you know, that good effect on your health.

So anyway, like that's sort of the origin story of Alex moving into make America healthy again was really this opposition to birth control.

And you know this she says she walked the documentary about ultra processed food that changed her perspective on the, you know, big food industry.

And like anything else on the right wing media Internet that just my rolls into crazy town into conspiracy land and nutritional science is like a it's a science that has a lot of grey area in it.

It's extremely expensive to produce.

Like nutritional science studies, they take place over long time horizons and they draw conclusions that are like, it's possible seed oils like, you know, create inflammation.

Like it's a very sort of dry subject.

What right wing influencers like Clark do is they take that and they turn it into viral conspiracy content that becomes that feeds, creates a it creates a gateway for young women to join with the Trump movement, a population that would otherwise be put off, put off by the fact that Trump, you know, these people are sexual predators who are opposed to abortion.

And Alex had a real star turn in 2024 when she testified at this like Make America Healthy roundtable that Senator Ron Johnson set up with RFK.

And she spoke and her speech went mega super viral again.

She was talking about like she was speaking on behalf of the mothers of America, which she is not one.

And that really rocketed her to another level of of influence.

So the Make America Healthy Again very much is at the cutting edge of this campaign to win young women.

I want to just add that this is a political movement that makes no effort to get poor and working class people healthy food, right?

So it's, it's a very class oriented thing.

They don't do anything to eliminate food deserts, right?

They don't do anything to make high quality food available to the poor, right?

So it's just sort of it's like a lifestyle thing for, you know, wealthy white people.

Yeah, yeah.

They don't care about healthcare.

I mean, they're willing to cut it and make it, you know, try to justify that with the argument that like, well, maybe brown people we don't like are getting it for free.

I'm hope for people getting more broccoli or whatever, you know, good, that's great, but you're not doing actually doing anything to to do that basic thing.

I want to ask about another character who I believe overlaps with the TPUSA world, but wouldn't necessarily have to.

It's more just TPUSA is just picks up people like they're like, you know, this is the star makers I think right these days and that is Riley Gaines.

Riley Gaines.

I don't know.

How would we describe Riley Gaines, folks.

She's.

Collegiate swimmer.

She's a collegiate, was something like 5th ranked in the country I believe, and decided that she would turn her career into just being transphobic and trying to be the face of right wing media propaganda, legislative efforts, etcetera to try to block trans women from participating in women's sports.

Like, yeah, Riley Gaines made her name by, you know, bitching about this race that she lost to a transgender swimmer who became a just punching bag on the right for many years.

This was really going on at the height of the right wing media panic about trans people that then kicked off a full-fledged legislative and executive war and eventually a Supreme Court case, the Scramati case, that has been a full on assault on the civil rights and basic constitutional rights of transgender people.

And yeah, I was there at YWLS when she announced her pregnancy and it just felt so cheap and disgusting that her, you know, she tied her pregnancy to just a crack on an anti trans, you know, an anti trans crack.

She was in the middle of we could we'll listen to the clip.

But she was in the middle of like this online keyboard war with Simone Biles.

I remember this, yeah.

Yeah, who stood up against Rick Gaines is transphobia and then very disappointingly backed down from her defense of transgender athletes.

And yeah, like, I once had a source say to me that I asked her, like, who?

One of her favorite people at YWLS what what her favorite YWLS speaker was and she was like, oh, I love Riley Gaines.

She's an Olympian.

No, she's not.

She's not an Olympian, just like also to paint a picture, she's another blonde, has a big saucer eyes, things like that.

She she looks like a a, you know, a Kirkland.

Erika Kirk, I think is the way kind of the way I would describe her.

And she's she's very intense, particularly when talking about trans people.

Well, here's a clip you mentioned earlier, Madeline.

It's just to, I think it's a perfect example of just how core transphobia is to her persona, where when she is sharing news of her pregnancy, she just can't resist.

Everything is framed this way.

But I think the funniest thing about this to me and her saying bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a man.

How many men do you know that have this?

Having a baby to own the libs.

Literally, I mean, that's like the actual like that is the headline of this whole thing is having a baby to own the libs like that.

I mean, it ties into like the great replacement, right?

Like having a baby to own the libs.

I was there when she did.

It was so gross.

I felt so skeeved out.

Like she was wearing this like very feminine white baby doll dress that was actually really cute.

I love baby doll dresses, but like, it was so gross the way she like used this pregnancy as an opportunity to advance her career to.

And she also said this to AOC recently.

She was like, maybe if you were a mother, you would understand like something it was something to that effect.

So yeah, it's like, really she's really, really gross and hateful and angry and like, not again, not an Olympian.

Yes.

I think take employee.

Let's talk about Evie.

I remember when I was editing that that piece that a colleague wrote that mentioned Alex Clark and I was looking for, you know, sources we could cite.

I remember they're just like not being a whole lot of good profiles of her except in a website called Evie.

And I was like, what, what is this?

Because I got the ick.

I was like, we can't cite it.

Something is very off here, but tell me about EVII mean it's kind of big, right?

No, actually, I mean.

No, no, I I mean the well.

Well.

It seems like money is being spent on it.

Maybe I'll say that because the website was felt very sleek, the photography was high quality, that sort of thing.

Well, here's my like kind of vibes based analysis about EV is that it's mostly like fodder for like liberal feminists sub stack bloggers to dunk on.

Like it's I really don't get the sense it has much of an audience.

Their content is like really terrible.

A lot of it is behind a paywall and you know, they call it the conservative Cosmo.

It is a right wing woman's magazine and they give a pop culture take on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show or Kim Kardashian's latest outfit.

A lot of stuff about a lot of like workout routine content and it's all branded as being for like the trad wife.

They sell like a what they call a milk maid dress and they really lean into the like Maha thing.

But they have gotten what I think is like an outsized amount of mainstream media attention.

There was a very splashy profile in the New York Times of EV magazine and its founder, Brittany Hugo Boom, who I believe is in business with her husband.

The Hugo Booms also founded a menstrual cycle tracking app that is by Peter.

I remember, I remember this too.

One of the creepiest things I've really memory.

Hold up.

One of the creepiest things I've ever heard of.

A menstrual cycle tracking app.

Yeah, I mean, for a lot of women, it's like very, you know, that's the way that they track their cycle for whatever reason, you know, like for what?

For you, maybe you're trying to get pregnant, maybe you're.

Giving your data to Peter Thiel.

Exactly.

And like they're after Dobbs was a big panic about like where your menstrual cycle data could go and whether that would be used as evidence in, you know, a criminal case for having an abortion or performing an abortion or even just trying to access, you know, like reproductive care that some right wing politicians might misinterpret as being an abortive procedure.

So yeah, I mean, and when Peter teals the one lording over, I mean, it's just like really disgusting on multiple levels.

But yeah, like my point about Evie is really just that I think, I think it's like mostly just I think it's kind of an OP.

It's like an OP for liberal like feminists sub stackers.

Honestly, back in the day, Jared, like when we had to like crank out pieces like every day, like we should have conspired to come up with like a white nationalist blog that was just like fetus the dumbest takes, right?

And just like take turns writing and then the other person would just be like unbelievable, take the easiest content.

Oh, I just, I it's so fascinating to be that there is this effort to generate a media ecosystem for women that seems to have the ultimate point of, as you put it earlier, Madeline do nothing.

So like, what if it is Cosmo?

But it's like that shell in SpongeBob where the magic conch and they keep pulling the string and it's just like nothing, do nothing, do nothing.

And it's like, oh, let's talk about Kim Kardashian's stress.

We don't like it.

Let's talk about working out.

That's good.

Yeah.

There's, I mean, like, what is there actually to say?

You know what Alex Clark said?

It's like, Oh yeah, I admit it, I'm a psyop to make, you know, more sexy fertile virgins for right wing guys to fuck.

But that's that's an insane thing.

To just say to be like, yeah, that's what we're doing.

Like most people don't have children to build a political project.

They do it because, like, it's a fulfillment of their family life.

And when you speak to even young mothers, young conservative mothers that I've spoken to, they tell you exactly that.

And what I've found is that whether you're speaking to a conservative or a liberal young woman, they want some balance between work and life.

That's a pretty common thing.

I'm not like breaking any news here that that is something that people want is a work life balance.

And what the conservative movement is saying is that you don't actually want that.

And if you're a single woman, you're miserable.

And I think it's an effort in part to push women out of the workplace.

It's a way to help cope with the loss of abortion rights.

But it's just a very it's the imposition of a political agenda on the decision to like, get married and have children.

So all the people we have talked about and the institution EV are all in the ballpark of this trad wife idea, right?

This this thing that they're selling, which is really the main thing that we're talking about now.

And so before we ask you some like rapid fire questions at the end, what is a trad wife?

Actually?

What are they?

What are they selling to people?

Is it role play?

Are there real trad wives?

Like I, I, I think it's like a trope people understand that it feels sometimes when you see trad wife influencers that it feels like a, sort of like, like a like almost has a fetishistic role play to it sometimes.

I mean, what's going on?

Like what does the trad wife actually do?

Yeah, I mean, trad wife is really first of all, it's a term that comes out of 4 Chan.

And what it has become is like a marketing ploy, which is you're selling this identity to Instagram users essentially, and telling them, like, if you buy this organic beef tallow supplement or, you know, you, you invest, make your children sourdough using our sourdough starter kit.

Like it is a sales tactic.

There are I've never met anyone who's like, yeah, I'm a trad wife.

I've spoken to young women who have conservative religious values, who are in traditional marriages, who see their husbands as the head of household in one way or another.

Although like, that could mean different things to different people.

Like for a lot of people, that means like, you know, he is the one who's working.

But maybe a conservative movement leader means like your head husband as the head of household such that like you're not allowed to spend time with your friends or you're not allowed to, you know, spend money without without asking.

There is a tremendous dismount between what the conservative movement says a godly wife is and what actual religious young women E as their role as a wife and mother.

But yeah, I mean, it's it's really like a sales and marketing.

So is make America healthy again.

It's just a new panic, a new health panic that it tells you to buy things.

And yeah, it's a costume.

It is definitely a role play.

And there are very fetishistic elements to this notion of a trad wife.

I mean, who in our political movement or culture is stepping up and talking about domination and submission or teenage virgins or, you know, gender non conforming children?

That's all coming from the right.

That's all a right wing fantasy.

I will share one quick story about trad wives.

The only person I've ever met that described themselves that way to me was at a Phyllis Schlafly Eagle.

I forget if it was like the Eagle Forum or Eagle conference because the group split after Phyllis died between the brothers who disagreed.

It was at one of those was in DCI.

Think this was like circa 2018-2019.

And I was the youngest person there by a couple decades, except there was one other young person.

Her name was Lacey.

I remember we befriended each other quite a bit.

I didn't tell her that I was writing an article.

I was just cheered.

And we went to the dinner at that conference and listened to the Michele Bachmann talk.

But, you know, I was trying to get to know her a little bit.

I was like, what are you doing here?

What are you?

What are you, you know, trying to get?

And she was like, well, you know, I'm just trying to kind of meet a man because I want to be a trad wife.

Like, like I, I want the trad wife lifestyle.

And I, I remember thinking that was kind of weird.

I kind of let it go because this is just a random person I don't need to report on, just like random people that go to conferences.

But I saw her a year later appearing on the IT feels archaic now, but red Ice TV.

You know what that is, Mike, but.

Yes, I do know what red Ice TV it is.

It is a white nationalists.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, she was.

It turns out she was based in Red Pilled and she did become a trap wife.

Actually, I checked in on her a couple times in the years that followed and she did get married and have kids and as far as I can tell is mostly offline.

I find it interesting.

So, you know, just sell people on this trad wife image and it's so it is really an extreme way to live because there is no middle ground.

There is no trad girlfriend, right?

It's like, oh, my trad girlfriend cooks for me and does that and then has her own life or whatever.

It's like it's either or it's get married, have kids, worship your husband, rub his feet, what?

I don't know, whatever they have in mind in this thing.

But there isn't with no middle ground with no trad girlfriend, right?

No trad girlfriend in training.

You're not even like you're not even paying heed to the need to like kiss and go to the movies and do stuff before you get married.

It's, it's literally, you know, you start, you meet the man, and then he owns you.

And I think it's weird that none of the influencers that we've talked about who preach this kind of thing are trad wives.

You know, they maybe they get married and they have kids and try to make themselves a role model for that, but they're ultra career focused.

I I mean, how much time to those kids spend with a nanny?

You know, it while while mommy's off speaking at conferences or whatever.

It's like if Eric if Erica Kirk was a trad wife in in the caricature of what a trad wife is, we wouldn't know who the fuck Erica Kirk is because she'd be at home scrubbing the floors and taking care of the kids.

She wouldn't even own a pair of leather pants.

When you have someone doubling down on these gender roles, not only to young women, but telling young men you have to be a breadwinner, you have to support a family on a single income.

And then you get out there and it's like, OK, I'm a door dasher.

I'm a, you know, you're scrambling to pay the bills.

Like it creates A tremendous alienation and nihilism.

And you just have them going harder and harder on these cultural notions of gender when, like, the very foundations that make an approximation of those roles possible are crumbling around the beginning of young people's adult lives.

And the biggest, most hostile faction to families in this country is the Republican Party, which is cutting food stamps, the most effective anti poverty program in the history.

You wrote about that on your sub stack in reference to people cutting Snap and you mentioned about like this sort of bringing Martha Stewart back etcetera.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like a totally ridiculous contrast.

Like, on the one hand, you have this milieu of the trad wife who's, like, embroidering napkins and making homemade bread and milling her own flour.

And then you have the reality of being a mother in this country, which is struggling to pay for a dozen eggs or struggling to pay off your high, you know, your student debt for a job that never materialized.

These are the realities for young parents in this country.

Three.

And the Republicans are only doubling down on making it more difficult.

And the Democrats don't have a good track record of being serious about fighting for economic policies that are going to help young people start their lives.

And it creates tremendous alienation.

It creates hostility to authority among young people, and it pushes people down these rabbit holes on social media that just politically radicalize them.

Yeah, I mean that that's just like a a nerve break waiting to happen in this group of young people.

They're racing.

So before we go, I have some rapid fire questions here just for people's entertainment.

Madeline is a very lovely person to talk to and we like to hear some more about yourself.

So why do you watch so much Doctor Phil?

Doctor Phil my always says she knows I'm depressed when I'm watching Doctor Phil, which is like, I don't know, like now that I'm finishing up the book, I to be watching a lot of Doctor Phil.

Why do I like it?

Because he's really good on camera and he is extremely his guests are always testing his like boundaries and authorities and he never yields and I'm like never not entertained by the ways that he like exploits and like smacks down his guess.

Why am I always, I don't know, I mean, he's really late.

And actually the core of that question I I have to think more about.

But yeah, I do watch.

I do watch.

I do really like doctors.

This is your ultimate guilty pleasure, I think.

What do we think about Doctor Phil appearing alongside ice raids?

That is that happened.

Like Doctor Phil has since become like not only a full-fledged fascist, but also like a bankrupt fascist.

He like tried to start his own streaming company that like fell on its face almost immediately and he partnered with ice for a number of different pieces.

So like I, I, I think, I guess one of the reasons why I watch it is to see how like the sort of fascistic themes of like this, like authoritarian father figure and like, you know, pseudo Dr.

He's not, you know, his medical license lapsed a long time ago.

How that like just drifted into like actual like policy based like fascism?

So basically you wash down your work of with fascists and then you come and you you take another low dose of poison to round out the day.

Yeah, it's just like the rising tide of fascism is just like the the sort of blanket over my era of popular culture.

So I just.

You just lean in so, so so the next question is why does Tim Robinson of I think you should leave stress you out Madeline, because he, this is a regular he he he is, he has filled in audio clips on at least like 5 episodes so far.

I mean like Mike will just quote him, right?

Like he's he'll just start like saying nonsense and I'm like, I don't know what the fuck you're saying.

These words don't make sense.

It's like it's from I think you should leave.

I don't know that, like I don't, I just don't.

That's not why does it trust?

He's like he's just so upset all of the time.

He's I just like don't get it.

It seems like a thing for boys.

All right, how would you describe the plot of the 1976 film by David Cronenberg?

Shivers.

If you believe you've seen everything, then prepare yourself for a motion picture that takes you beyond fear.

Well, first to understand the plot of the 1976 debut Shivers by Canadas David Cronenberg is that it takes place in an all inclusive housing development.

So there's like a doctor's office and a dry cleaner and a grocery store and there's just no reason to leave.

And you don't get the sense that any of the characters who the residents of the building or the characters and their interactions happen in apartments and hallways.

Like they don't really leave the housing complex, which is like kind of captures my imagination to begin with.

But then like basically a a puppet parasite crawls up the vagina of one of the women in the bath and she becomes like a sex crazed zombie.

And then like basically just like gets complete control.

It's a it's a real, it's a it's a real, real camp classic.

I enjoyed watching it.

All right.

I'm going to give you another one here.

Madeline is a Chicago, Chicago girl, and she lives in DC.

So I just want to know emotionally, how are you doing?

What's it been like in 2025?

These are like the cities.

Actually.

Jared is the flip in many ways, right?

Yeah, I lived in DC for seven or eight years and then moved to Chicago.

So I guess you, you can, you can weigh in too.

Jared, What's it, what's it like?

These are like the heart of the occupation.

I guess LA had its had its had its turn as well.

But like it really is, those two cities have been the the highlight.

Yeah, I mean, DC when they like announced the occupation in DC, like AI stopped going outside and then eventually I did go outside, but only to go to the train station and leave the city.

I was like scared and and it just created like a terrible psychological pressure.

But like, Chicago is my heart and soul.

And some of the stuff that I've seen coming out of Chicago, this is like less funny than talking about like the 1976 film Shippers.

But like, there was this one video of a WGN producer, which is local news in Chicago, being tackled and kidnapped by an ICE agent.

And she had the same name as my mom.

And it was right in the neighborhood that I grew up in.

And it's just like a really haunting, like at the same time, like it's, you know, also it's like it's a real punk rock time to be a Chicagoan, the Pope, you know, a real icon, the Pope.

And he's a White Sox fan, which is the the shitty team in Chicago.

He also subtweeted Red Scare.

He did.

No, I mean, people just said he's he basically made a comment that was just like, you know, using, using your faith for like social media, like, you know what I'm presenting online.

So it's just like some people said that they was talking about Dasha.

I think Hannah, Hannah went minorly in a limited degree viral because she she made fun of Dasha.

But yeah, basically, you know, you like Dasha from Red Scare would be like, here's my picture in the church.

And like she's in the church.

Like looking at the camera like this, you can see it.

And like her phone is very obviously visible and it just doesn't look very religious.

And that's kind of what the Pope was talking about.

Anyway, continue about the cities.

No, I mean, just Chicago doesn't fuck around.

And I've seen, you know, just absolutely horrifying footage of it.

There's this clip of, I mean, it's hard for me to even repeat this.

There was a preschool teacher who was violently dragged out of her job at a preschool in front.

Of that happened just down the road from me, I don't like that at all.

I mean, one day I hope to see the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity held responsible and we could see.

Let's see the trials in Chicago.

North side of Chicago.

Fuck ICE.

All right, I'm I'm with that.

And then how are the bears doing this year?

The bears.

I know Madeline likes her, her her crew neck sweatshirt with all over print Chicago Bears.

How do you like I think they're five and three.

What's going to happen?

What?

How's this going to play out?

Basically last season, OK, I didn't know what I I still can't claim to know a lot about football, but last season I went to a game, a commanders bears game that was like one of the most exciting, like the commanders won on the Hail Mary and it was like very heavily talked about game that was like my first football game.

But like just to be clear about my level of knowledge, when they caught the Hail Mary, I thought it meant they were going to overtime.

So I didn't like, and I still don't know very much.

Like when I watched the first game of the season, my sister Facetimed me and she was like, I was like all talking about football.

And she was like, I thought this was a bit like, I didn't think you were going to like pick this back up.

But no, like, I'm, you know, I'm a huge, huge Bears fan.

Go Bears.

I find football to be like very, very exciting.

So I mean, they're going to win the Super Bowl.

I don't see any other syndic situation playing out.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

I appreciate the open, objective.

Look at the NFL, everybody.

Bears are going to win as a as a as a Jets fan.

I'm done.

So I'm just I'll root for the Bears too, guys.

So that's so, you know, for, for, for posting through it.

Yeah, I don't have much more, Jared.

Yeah, let's get out of here.

Madeline, thanks so much for joining us.

We'll put a a link to your sub stack.

We'll put a link to your social media profiles.

Folks, go say hi to Madeline.

She's great and we've loved having her and Mike, you've got to put coming out.

We've got to, we've got to plug it because you've got a discount code for our listeners.

Tell us about it.

I do, I do.

Would you like to read it?

Pre-order, pre-order pre-order, pre-order posting listeners posting through our listeners.

Strange people on the hill.

OK, yeah, Strange People on the Hill coming out April 7th.

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Bye.

Bye, guys.

How I get so lucky?

Get so lucky?

How I get so lucky?