12/23/25: Ryan CONFRONTS Emily On College Campus CANCELLATION

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Black history lives in our stories our culture and the conversations we still have in today I didn't know This Black History Month the podcast I didn't know maybe you didn't either digs into the moments perspectives and experiences that don't always make the textbook Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan Bruh had to pretend he didn't even exist just to sell his own invention Listen to I didn't know maybe you didn't either from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or simply wherever you get your podcasts.

0:411969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

1:15Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.

1:59This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. All right, this is a special holiday edition of Breaking Points. We're coming to you from the past. We have no idea what is going on in the world in which you are currently living.

2:35We are recording this way back in the middle to early month of December, year of our Lord, 2025. Hope everything is going well for you. Today, we're going to be joined by journalist Emily Jashinsky. Emily, thank you for joining us. To be clear, this is part one of a series we're doing where Ryan is going to interview me, and then I'm going to turn it back over to Ryan, and we're going to interview Ryan. Ryan appears to have Googled me in preparation for this, and I did not do him the same courtesy because I've probably Googled you before. I don't know. I'm sure when we first started hosting, I'm sure I was like, isn't that the guy who beat up Jesse Waters?

3:20actually right around the time that i was fighting with jesse waters um is when you were fighting with uh the big lgbtq lobby um which is what we're going to get into first and then i do want to um you know hear about more of like what what got you into this world but i think this is actually a good place to start so we do have an actual element um that i googled there's a whole bunch but I just grabbed one from Raw Story. So the headline here, and this is the year 2015. Love the photo that adorns this. This headline's so funny. If you're only listening to this, you need to go find the video because there is a picture of two women making out.

4:02Next to the headline, college group hosting Rick Santorum demands, quote, sensitivity training to teach gays, quote, respect. And so this came from a GW Hatchet article while Emily was at George Washington University and was the head, is that right, of Young Americans Found? Y-A-F, right? Yeah. This is the Buckley organization, right? William Buckley created this youth organization, Young Americans Future or something like that? Yeah, it's confusing. I can get a note if you want. Yeah, so, yeah, that's what I want to do. And so then GW mandated that they were going to do, like, you know, DEI stuff, like sensitivity trading, particularly, I think this one, correct me if I'm wrong, particularly around trans issues.

5:01Yes, pronouns. pronouns and you were quoted as saying forget it um we don't we don't want to do this and interesting in in the raw story article um they have the college republican throwing you under the bus oh of course that's what always happens so the head of the college republican says look it's just a little just a little train a little sensitivity training that's how it used to be don't be so sensitive that's how it used to be um all right so i've been vindicated so you're a so that so when'd you graduate high school so 2011 so 2011 so you start GW senior year um so this is your senior year of college yeah um so what is what is this buckley group and then we're going to get into the controversy because it became like a little national thing you came like a punching bag for the kind of uh left-wing raw story huff post i wonder if huff post did anything on you.

5:56If I remember correctly, I think HuffPost did. But, you know, it was it's actually very interesting. And I think telling story, it's a little thing, but like the desktop kind of here, it brings in a lot of different. I don't know. It does bring in a lot of different trends that started to pop up, especially after 2015. But basically, in college, I was the president of the YAF chapter. That's Young America's Foundation, which had just merged in 2012 with Young Americans for Freedom, which is the Buckley Group that was created with the Sharon Statement in 1960 at the Buckley Estate. And Ronald Reagan kind of comes out of Young Americans for Freedom circles.

6:36He was not a young American, of course, but that was part of the Reagan revolution. Guys like Roger Stone affiliated with Gaff and all of that. But when I got to college, you know that was the the conservative group on campus that I got involved with and this is a the the LGBT sensitivity training story is a funny one because it was I don't know like a snow day if I'm remembering correctly and I got a call from the student newspaper uh the hatchet and And that's a job incoming. Yeah. And they asked, does GW YAF oppose this bill that the Student Association passed like last night that mandates sensitivity training?

7:24And it was such a trap because I hadn't given any thought to the question of the Student Association sensitivity training bill. And I think actually what they asked is if we would be requesting a religious exemption to the thing. And I think the quote that I have in the hatchet is like, well, I'm sure we would be because it doesn't sound very tolerant of other people's religious beliefs because the sensitivity training was going to for student leaders of student groups. It wasn't a huge deal, but it did mandate that you go to preferred pronoun sensitivity training. We have the receipts right here.

8:00You said mandated training is not really being very tolerant of all religious beliefs. The way that people who are deeply Christian behave is for a reason. And if you're training them to change that behavior, there's obviously a problem with that. So they were going to have every student. Just if you were the leader of a student group. So if you're the head of a YAF chapter or even, you know, the Muslim student group, like you all would have had to do it. Right. Let me see if I can find the Republican one. He said, regardless of this is Alex Pollack. What's he up to now? He's the head of the college Republicans at GW.

8:35He's got to be like lobbyist or something by now. I think he works in publishing. Wow. Flamed out. I have to double check. You know, it's like college Democrats and college Republicans, like college Democrats, less so now it's they're more activisty. College Republicans, certainly to this day. Like those are those are people who are just gunning for internships on the Hill and trying to figure out a way to run for Congress. Right. And YAF gets, and by the way, in disclosure, I'm actually on the board of directors at YAF because that was my first job out of college. I was the spokesperson there and, you know, owe a lot to them because as a nonprofit group, you know, I got a lot of like experience.

9:21You know, went to conferences and they were the group that paid for Rick Santorum to come to our campus. And it was a very, very, very interesting experience having Rick Santorum come. But it was the reason that that groups like YAF are different from college Republicans is because there's that sort of populist element to it. And that's the forgotten part of the Reagan revolution is the forgotten part of Buckleyism. So it was a revolution against the establishment Republican Party of the time against Gerald Ford. That's what it was against. And so that's what I've always liked about like YAF as a conservative student group.

10:00So anyway, yes, they were trying to mandate sensitivity training. I was like, hmm. So Alex Pollack said, quote, regardless, this is the college Republicans head, regardless of your views on LGBT people, LGBT people exist. He said it should be mandatory from a sensitivity perspective, which is not definitely not the Republican position anymore. Elephant in the Zoom. And so, so how did this, so how did, how did that experience of becoming a momentary kind of national figure in the sense that you're, it's got to, you know, it's not as if like you were a household name or anything, but like if you were a college senior and all of a sudden your name is in like national publications with people hating on you.

10:49Yeah. what was that like and how did that shape your, who you are now? Is this origin story stuff or were you, this was just like you were on the same trajectory either way? No, this is absolutely origin story stuff. I had a job already lined up for when I was graduating at a Republican consulting firm that was going to be doing like oppo research. And I ended up working at YAF instead because after this happened, they were like, whoa, things on campus are, are actually even crazier than we had quite realized, come work for us and do some PR stuff. So that was my first job. And I took it because I was very interested in media.

11:29I always wanted to be a writer. And this job would let me write columns and do that sort of thing. But it was horrible. Truly, it was horrible. They wanted me to go on Fox News. I said no. And of course, after that, I ended up doing a decent amount of Fox News until about five years ago when we started hosting together tapered off. But, um, it was, it was truly horrible. I had people yell at me from across the street. I went on spring break, um, students are like a student. Yeah. Um, I went on with my friends, by the way, I have many, um, gay friends at GW who were like, Whoa, what the hell you're the allied and pride group on campus.

12:12Uh, I would have to go look this up, but they put out a statement if I remember correctly, that said we had committed an act of violence against the transgender community. Yeah, I think they called you a hate group or something. They called us a hate group. They tried to get us pushed off campus, literally tried to get us pushed off campus. I think people were agitating for us to get suspended. And this is, again, not because we said anything other than we think that mandatory sensitivity training on preferred pronouns is not tolerant. That's the statement. So, yeah, they tried to push off campus for that.

12:42And it was very like proto woke, I guess you would say. But it was horrible. It was genuinely horrible. And a lot of people i'm sure there are a lot of people on the right who would love that but for me i i hated it and i don't have like literal ptsd from it but thinking about it feels still really still raw i still i still feel kind of panicky yeah because it was an early experience with a pylon and i've never been comfortable you know when you when you're a journalist even when you do a show like this um you know it's every once in a while something you say gets clipped or what And it's horrible every time.

13:15I hate it. Yeah. The headline. Here's another headline. Conservative club labeled, quote, cancer, quote, hate group. Yes. For requesting to opt out of LGBT training. Come on. Interestingly, I just noticed that the original Hatchet article has a list of corrections that is almost as long as the article itself. Oh, it doesn't actually? Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Um, and one of them, and I wonder if this played into the pylon, um, it says, uh, the hatchet incorrectly reported that the sensitivity trainings would include information about sexual assault. The focus of the trainings would be LGBT issues.

13:53We regret these errors. Um, and so it may, it may have initially been reported that you also wanted to opt out of, uh, sensitivity trainings around sexual assault, which would, but I mean, clearly it was originally reported that way. Like, that's why they had to correct it. That would be even more egregious, probably to the public say like, how, how dare you? How could you not? So I wonder if that like played a role in the pile on. What really started it was the Allied and Pride at GW statement. And that started going viral on our campus circles. Like Facebook was big back then. And I think they, yeah, they put out the statement on Facebook.

14:31And when that happened, it was just everything from their national media picked up on it. So like raw story, whoever else picked up on it. And it became a just a total nightmare. We got like hauled into a meeting with the Student Association. It was its origin story stuff just for the fact that this was, you know, I would say that the point of this being mandatory and then having like a pretty, I think, reasonable request to not have to go to a mandatory like reprogramming training. I feel like that was kind of reasonable. Then you have the college Republicans throwing us under the bus and you have the Ida and Pride group freaking out.

15:13And this is about like three months before Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner. And it's just all of the stuff was happening in the spring of 2015. That was pretty interesting because Trump was literally about to come down the golden escalator like a few months later. Right. Right. Yes, this is this is definitely in this is definitely an interesting time. I could imagine some people coming out of this. With it with more of a more of an axe to grind, like you have a. You know, you're you're pretty firm in your culturally conservative politics, but I haven't noticed you. with any kind of hardcore like vendetta um and and probably much more tolerant rhetoric than a lot of people who have your same politics it's um how did that come about i would say yeah it's kind of for me it's the opposite because one of the things that one of the reasons that it came to dc is i grew up like in the woods in wisconsin not a super rural area uh kind of the exurbs of Milwaukee, but, um, you know, my, my, my family definitely was like in the woods.

16:24Um, and my dad, could you see your neighbor or like, what was your situation? No. Yeah. No. Um, you can shoot on our property, all that good stuff. Um, and we, hopefully that means your neighbors were really far away. Yes. Uh, well, it's also just that even they have a lot of woods, so they have a bunch of property um and anyway so all that is to say the you can see him now because all the trees are down but anyway going on uh going forward uh i grew up like why are the trees down what happened it was a it's a the cycle of the forest they're old and also my dad has just been like deforesting uh taking him down for various well because they're dead and yeah anyway also good excuse to use the chainsaw, but, uh, grew up like hunting, fishing.

17:13My mom is from a very rural area. My dad's from very blue collar background, um, and going to church every Sunday. Um, and it was just like, one of the reasons I came here is that I was so frustrated by what I was seeing on TV and in movies, just the way that culture talked down to people. I always felt like I just wanted to prove the point to elites that these are decent people. I just am so annoyed by this assumption that you are bad if you come from a culturally conservative background. For whatever reason, that has just always really, really, really gotten under my skin. And that's why I came here.

17:53And so I hate feeling misunderstood. It just drives me insane. And so I like having conversations. And that's where I think I don't have an ax to grind. I just genuinely have a point to prove. And I like having those conversations. I want people to see that I might disagree and really disagree on difficult stuff, but I don't hate anyone. It's really the opposite. And that's just frustrating. Were your parents conservative? When did you get a political awakening? So my mom definitely is conservative. of my dad votes for both parties. He's a, um, he worked for the state. He was an engineer for the state of Wisconsin.

18:36Uh, his whole career is retired now, but, um, he was a public employee union. Um, and so went through the, the kind of Scott Walker era. I wish funny cause Scott Walker is president of the half now. Uh, but you know, they would, yeah, my mom was an HR for years, um, at some, some big corporations like Johnson controls. And they would argue about, uh, Walker and unions. She was in HR and had to deal with a lot of that. So a little bit of both. My dad's Catholic. My mom's Lutheran. So it was a little bit of both. But for me, it was just kind of this cultural, wasn't always like hardcore conservative.

19:15And I don't think I'm, you know, I'm not like MAGA or Republican now. I just am kind of a limited government, cultural conservative type person. Right. I pulled up another 2013 article. This is another Hatchet article? Another Hatchet article. I'll read from this one. It says, Sophomore Emily Jashinsky said she grew up in a strict Lutheran household and is also morally opposed to same-sex marriage. But after honing her political views as a libertarian, and she'll be doing, well, we did the reason debate already, she does not think the government should be taking a stance on the issue at all. She will not head to the Supreme Court this week where there was going to be a protest around marriage equality ruling.

20:03Republicans do not need to get caught up in social issues, she said. Jashinsky, a member of the Young America's Foundation, said she is inspired by new voices in the Republican Party that are more libertarian like father and son Ron and Rand Paul. She called them the future of the GOP. Amazing. That seems so I can. Hopeful future. I can guarantee that was like a six-month phase in toying with libertarianism. But the limited government that you still espouse is – so this was hardcore libertarianism. You were like – No, I mean, yeah, kind of. It was becoming that. I mean, the – Sophomore year, that's around when people try on libertarianism.

20:41Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, and it was definitely short-lived. But the reason that I was attracted to libertarians is because I've always been a populist. And at the time, Ron and Rand Paul were populists. The Tea Party movement was populist. And so the thing that I was wrong about, and Charlie Kirk was wrong about this at the time, too, I think I just came around a little earlier, was that the Republican Party did need to get caught up in social issues, not in the way that a lot of people wanted it to get caught up in social issues. And Rick Santorum is an interesting figure in this respect, too.

21:12On the one hand, was talking about Charles Murray's coming apart and cultural elitism. Then, on the other hand, was talking about a pretty unappealing worldview that Americans were moving away from that wouldn't fit on a populist platform. So anyway, yeah, that was short-lived. I don't think I've ever really considered myself a libertarian. I still really like Rand Paul because I think he is a populist. I like Ron Paul because I think he's a populist. But at the same time, you know, I am kind of a economic populist in a way that they aren't like I believe in industrial policy and protectionism and all that fun stuff.

21:51So, yeah. So Ron Paul ran in 2008 for president when you would have been what year you're graduating? Eleven? Yeah, I was in high school. So was that kind of the first campaign you paid serious attention to or? Yeah, yeah, because in 2004 it was 12. Or I'm sorry, it was 11. Yeah, so that was definitely the first major one. Did he do better in 2012? I'm trying to remember. So he runs in 2008. 2012 he comes out. This is post-tea party. Kind of mid-tea party. Did he almost win Iowa or win Iowa? He did incredibly well. He was shocking the Republican establishment. Yeah. And the people who got behind him in 2012 I think ironically you could say many of them became Trump supporters like Ron Paul was the like yeah I know some of them he was the avatar for challenging the Republican establishment yeah exactly yes and so it feels like people were more interested in challenging the Republican establishment than whenever that person was saying yeah so that's why you're like okay if it's going to be Ron Paul, then I'm going to learn about libertarianism.

23:06It's going to be Trump. I'm going to do this other thing. Yeah. And after 2012, Ron and Rand were treated as the future of the Republican Party by the media. There was that Time Magazine cover that was like the libertarian moment, if I'm remembering correctly. And it was all the rage and like young conservative circles, like nobody wanted to be connected to the Santorums and young Republican circles, because there was this sense pre-Trump that the culture war was dragging everybody down. And to the extent that the pronoun sensitivity training thing is origin story and lore, it's that for me, that is an early point where I reversed that 2013 Hatchet quote, where I was like, oh no, actually the culture war is where, this is like the big tent.

23:54The culture war is the big tent. And I'd always been more interested in the culture war than most people who were like in college Republican circles. Um, but that's, you know, to me, I was like, this is getting so wild that kids are being chased off a campus for saying like they're being called a hate group for saying they didn't want to do a mandatory pronoun training. Like it was getting a little crazy. Things are getting weird. And so then how long were you at YAF after college? Almost two years, almost two years. Um, and my college job, I was, I'm probably the longest American Enterprise Institute intern ever because I worked for, uh, not in foreign policy, although I would be like standing in the lunch line behind Paul Wolfowitz, uh, wild.

24:37Architect of the Iraq war. Yeah. Yeah. Wild stuff. But I worked for Christina Hoff Summers, who is, um, like she was very favorable to Bernie in 2016, but was at AEI writing about feminism. Um, she wrote that book from in 1994 Who Stole Feminism? And she wrote The War Against Boys. And my job was to fact check the original War Against Boys, the footnotes, and make sure the research hadn't changed. And in fact, what I found often is that some of these trends had gotten worse about young men in schools and all of them. When did The War Against Boys come out? The original one was 2000. 2000. Yeah.

25:13Yeah, the re-release was 2013, I think. How did Christina Hoff Summers shape your politics, working with her? Yeah, I mean, I just wrote in the Washington Post this month about my experience working for her. She's amazing. She's brilliant. And it was, for me, more of like an awakening along these same lines that I had, I felt it in my gut, but I didn't have the language or the research or the experience to kind of back it up, which is this is a person who's eminently reasonable, brilliant, and had leftist critiques of the feminist movement when she was, her courses were cross-listed in the women's studies department at Clark University, I think it was in Massachusetts in the early 90s.

25:55And she had leftist critiques of the feminist movement, got kicked out of the women's studies conferences and everything when she wrote Who Stole Feminism and ended up at AEI making, I think, a lot of the same leftist critiques, feminist critiques of the feminist movement in ways that aren't easily categorized as necessarily leftist or reactionary. But she was so misunderstood and that i think i haven't even thought about that until now but like that i think really resonates with me is that this these elite distortions of well-intentioned people who are just trying to engage in conversation who did steal feminism like what was the feminist and and for what purpose like what's her what's i haven't read that what's her that's where she uh that's where she goes through some of the statistics that the feminist movement has often relied on that aren't great.

26:48So for example, overstating the wage gap, overstating the prevalence of domestic abuse and violence, and in ways that further victimize women. It's like the learned helplessness, but applied to women in the feminist movement. But also, she was very early in saying that erasing sex distinctions was going to hurt women's spaces. It was going to undermine Title IX. It was going to create serious problems. She was very early on Gamergate, which is funny. I think I've told the story before of like ending up at a Gamergate meetup while I was a Christina intern at a bar on U Street here in D.C. that got like a bunch of bomb threats called in.

27:29And it was all of these Gamergate people. Milo was there who came from around the country. And what was Gamergate for people who like if you're under 30, that probably doesn't exist to you. Yeah, that's true. um it's seen as like trump lore as 2014 woke lore yeah 2014 it's seen it's sort of seen as like proto woke um it was a bunch of men getting mad about the feminization or the feministization of video games uh and some of them channeling that in really awful ways and some of them channeling it in ways that was just like stop encroaching on our spaces like we have to let some stuff be for guys um and some of the feminization feministization of the video games was like proto woke um but anyway yeah i was at that gamer game meetup and it was like uh i say this respectfully steve bannon cites that as his origin story he like saw the energy around gamer gate right so there's a lot of angry young men here we could we could channel this into a publication and a presidential campaign yes and a political movement yeah and some of that went to uh some of that energy went to trump some of it went honestly to things like charlottesville And some of it went to, you know, just Jordan Peterson and early Jordan Peterson, like some really good stuff.

28:46So, yeah, but I was like I say this respectfully, like in a party of like sweaty basement dwellers who had traveled. It was the worst smelling party I've ever been to who had traveled from around the country and were so nervous and they didn't have a lot of money. And they put everything into getting to this meetup. And it was like the highlight of their year. And it was in a way, you know, there's some of them who are clearly fringy and off. But in a way, it was like also some of them were well-intentioned and it was very kind of touching. I don't know. Any of them talk to you or were they all afraid of you?