Speaker 1: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Kylie Cast. I'm Kylie Griswold,
Managing editor at The Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever
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you can do so at radio at the Federalist dot com.
I would love to hear from you. I am so
excited that today I am interviewing Jennifer Golardi. Jennifer has
written for The Federalist for quite some time now and
now she is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
But she has had quite a story and she tells
it all here on the Kylie Cast. From being a
member of a yoga cult to becoming a Christian, from
being a radical feminist in Los Angeles to being a
conservative woman who advocates for policies that make America healthy.
Jennifer has done it all, and she's here to tell
us all about it. You will not want to miss it. Jennifer,
thanks so much for joining me on the Kylie Cast today.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to
talk to you back at you. Yes, it's so great
to actually see your face. We've talked so much over
email and some over the phone, so it's just great
to actually see your face. I have been so curious
to talk to you more about your story ever since
I read the very first piece that you wrote for
us at The Federalist. It's called Hell Hath No Fury?
Like a single Liberal Woman? And I remember the first
time I read it and I just knew, I'm like
this girl. You have such a great story to tell,
and I knew I wanted to dive deeper into it.
So now is finally the time, years later, and I'm
so excited. So everybody should go read that article, by
the way, but can you just start us off by
giving us a bit of your background, like where did
you grow up, grow up, what were your biggest influences,
How did you turn into the person that you were
maybe a decade ago?
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: I will try to give the short version of that story.
I grew up in Joe Biden Territory near Scranton, Pennsylvania.
My grandfather was a coal miner. I often say that
Joe Biden wouldn't know blue collar if it came up
and smacked him in the face. He was there, I
think maybe until his you know, first decade of life,
and then.
Speaker 3: Moved to Delaware, but he often used that as.
Speaker 4: Kind of his I'm a man of the people, right,
So it's either that or the office is how people
know Scranton. But it's where I grew up, and it's
what I where I called home for the first eighteen
years of my life. I grew up in a somewhat
not somewhat a very conservative family, but I didn't know why.
Speaker 3: I never had like a rationale for the.
Speaker 4: Conservative upbringing I had, and I was always that annoying
child that wanted to.
Speaker 3: Know why but why, but why but why?
Speaker 4: And fairly just kind of middle class, run of the
mill public education, good American kind of upbringing. I was
a dancer, I was a tennis player. I was always active,
very into sports, very athletic. My dad was a football
player at penn State, so I always say I'm the
son he always wanted. I kind of got the athletic genes,
which I would later transform into a career. But very
you know, kind of a normal childhood. Spent summers on
lakes and Pennsylvania with my family, but it was conservative
and I didn't have the underpinning of faith to understand,
you know why. I was kind of being raised pretty
strictly and with boundaries, and I think, like a lot
of kids, you rebel against anything your parents teach you.
And I had that kind of rebellious streak because I
didn't have good answers to why I was being punished
or why I was being grounded for the fifth time months.
And I had friends that would often joke like, can
Jennifer go out this weekend?
Speaker 3: Know she's grounded. But you know, I did very well
in school.
Speaker 4: I excelled, you know, I was kind of a master,
a jack of all trades, master of nine. I excelled
at a lot of things, but was never like top
top top, So got into a very good school. I
went to Washington and Lee for my undergraduate I kind
of wanted to go far away from home. I didn't
want to be stuck in Scranton. My grandmother actually lived
in Manhattan, in New York City, and I loved going
to visit her. She took me to the Ballet, she
took me to the US Open, so she kind of
exposed me to city life and all the opportunities that
were out there. She was in the travel industry, so
I kind of looked at her life style is very glamorous.
She would go away on trips and things like that.
So I had that exposure as well, and I think
I always just felt like I.
Speaker 3: Meant for something bigger than Scranton and Lo and Behold.
Speaker 4: I went to a very small conservative school in the
South in Virginia, Washington and Lee University, so I got
more kind of conservatism there and got a great education,
an amazing education. Took a class with CBS icon Roger Mudd.
I don't know if you remember Roger Mudd, the journalist.
He was amazing and he was a W and lgrad.
So I got really amazing experiences there. And then the
first job I got out of college, was in Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker 3: Here's me like, wanting to rebel, and I end up
in all of these very conservative places, and.
Speaker 4: I think eventually my free spirit broke loose and said,
I'm moving to California.
Speaker 3: I have enough of this.
Speaker 4: So two years after Birmingham, after my job there, I
just picked up. I moved to California in nineteen ninety eight,
and like many people that moved to California, I think
I was seeking.
Speaker 3: I wanted to.
Speaker 4: Know what life was like outside the boundaries of this
very strict upbringing I had and these very conservative principles.
And it's very easy to get lost in California, and
I did. I kind of got sucked into the progressive ideology.
And what I tell people is it's not obvious. If
you're out there long enough, you just adapt and adopt
to whatever will get you accepted into circles. Kind of
start believing in things, and you don't ask why. You
just think you're being a good person, you know when
it comes. It's kind of a very well known tactic
of the left is to tell people, well, you're a
good person if you believe in this, and particularly.
Speaker 3: Women want to feel accepted. Was in my twenties. There
was a lot of social pressures.
Speaker 4: I got back involved into dance and which kind of
led to the fitness world and being on camera.
Speaker 3: So I had a lot of like these pressures to
look a.
Speaker 4: Certain way, so body image things came up, and I
wanted to be accepted and loved and all these things.
So these were all of my shortcomings that kind of
led me down that progressive path. And then you have
kind of feminist ideology. You're a boss bitch and you're.
Speaker 3: Going to be you know, you can make it on
your own and all.
Speaker 4: These kinds of things, and I thought I had to
achieve a certain amount of success before I was even.
Speaker 3: Worthy of a partner or boyfriend.
Speaker 4: So there's all those things that happen in California that
are true.
Speaker 3: There's all the tropes of the starlet.
Speaker 4: I got into acting classes, I waited tables, you know,
much to my father's chagrin, I was doing all these
odd jobs without really a sense of stability, and then
kind of found my niche in the fitness industry.
Speaker 3: But even then I wasn't you know.
Speaker 4: A lot of it was job to job, a lot
like the acting industry, I had the stability of teaching classes,
but no one goes into teaching fitness for the money
unless you know you could be anomaly like a Gillian
Michaels or a Bob Harper and a loser and become
something bigger than just an instructor. But auditioned for all
of those shows, I mean, it was kind of commonplace
that they were looking for people. I think the reason
I never made it on those shows is because I'd
never really liked the drama. I never wanted to magnify
my personality into something some exaggerated thing that it wasn't.
It was kind of a nobs person even back then,
but I just didn't want to be seen in that.
I wouldn't ham it up just for the camera. I'm
too practical for that. So all of those things, you know,
kind of happened out in California. I had the Futures
female stickers on my computer.
Speaker 3: Trying to thank you. You know what are some of
the other tropes that you associate with with kind of
that feminist perspective.
Speaker 4: Dated a lot, but never really had a long term boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Was really just my career, the boss babe career, you know,
the abortion type culture, the feminist you know, we don't
need no man type thing. I would associate all of
that with that. It's also so interesting to me that
you talk about, you know, growing up in Scranton and
wanting to know why, why, why for these conservative values.
But then when you said, you know, you move out
to California and you don't really ask why. You just
kind of are doing these things, and you're surrounded in
this culture where this is just normal, and you just
kind of the drift just takes you because there is
no no asking why we're doing this. And I wonder,
I mean, is it just because you think this is
what it looks like to be a good person, or like,
where did that why impulse go for that stage of
your life.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question. I do say I had
a brain.
Speaker 4: I've always you know, I did well in school and
I had a brain. I just stopped using it in California.
And I do think it's part of the culture. Girls
are expected to be pretty and really, you know, you're auditioning.
They don't care about your brain. They just want they
want you to be who who they want you to be.
And even though I wasn't, you know, I was auditioning
for commercials and acting things.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 4: You know, it is kind of I remember guys would
say to me, like, oh, you're really smart. I'm like really,
like I just strung a sentence together. It's not that hard.
I think you learn to dumb yourself down. I really
do to kind of fit in. And I wasn't exercising
my brain. I wasn't doing things necessarily. You know, even
in fitness, I did always seek out, like continuing educations.
I was always a learner in that way. I always
wanted to expand. But I wasn't doing any really philosophical
deep thinking. I wasn't getting to have the conversations. They
say you become like the five closest people you hang
around with. And I wasn't hanging around with intellectuals. I
wasn't hanging around with the Jordan Peterson's of the world,
you know, or the deep thinkers of the world and
questioning these things. I was just kind of going along
to get along. And I was adapting to the culture
I was in, and it is vapid. It is an
extremely vapid culture.
Speaker 2: I didn't take.
Speaker 3: More concerned about the slogans than I did.
Speaker 1: The why yes, and was it completely monolithic in your
pocket and your community? I mean, were there any conservatives
at all around you? Or was it completely monolithic?
Speaker 4: Actually, one of my very first friends and remains my
best friend to this day, I call her my Catholic friend.
She was very Catholic, but she left fairly early on.
She left LA fairly early, and you know, nothing was
outwardly political. It wasn't like it is now where everything's political.
I probably grew up in like the heyday of LA
where it was fun.
Speaker 3: Had I been in.
Speaker 4: Different circles, there was probably like the Kai cocaine days.
Speaker 3: You know, I didn't. I never saw that, but I
knew it was around. It wasn't so political.
Speaker 4: I mean, Trump really changed things in twenty sixteen. It
really leans the landscape I think of everything. So I
would I would buy into these ideas without knowing I
was being political, right.
Speaker 2: I didn't vote.
Speaker 4: I certainly didn't vote. I didn't I wasn't involved in
kind of politics. I was obsessed with getting the next
job or being you know, Shakira's tour, being in a
music video or whatever it was.
Speaker 3: In addition to teaching. I mean I definitely hustled.
Speaker 4: I definitely worked really hard to make ends meet, But
it wasn't overtly political.
Speaker 1: Right, So it wasn't fueling activism so much as just
a lifestyle or a mindset shift.
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly you nailed it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I wasn't protesting, and even in my like
most progressive kind of thinking, it never occurred to me
to go out into the streets and to go to
a BLM and like that kind of woke me up.
Speaker 3: I'm like, this is ridiculous. What are you going to accomplish?
This is dumb.
Speaker 4: And so that it happened around COVID was like a
big wake up call for me as to what was
I'm like. And by the time COVID hit, I had
spent about eight years very deep into I do call
it a yoga cult. Now there's various definitions of cult,
say what you will, but I do think it was
this monolithic thinking with a guy at the center of
it that we all followed around. I mean, I did
trips to India. I went down the psychedelic route for
a little bit. I mean I went I was down
deep in that kind of vague spirituality and again, to
bring it back to the seeking, I was always seeking God,
and I just kind of took every detour to find
God except for Christ. And eventually I did find Christ
right around the time of Covidkay.
Speaker 3: COVID was a huge catalyst for me.
Speaker 4: First just the practical because I'm looking around having been
someone who were in the health and wellness fields for
decades by this time, two decades at least, and I'm
going it really exposed people because all the people that
talked about alternative health and we never go to the
doctor when we go see the chiropractor and the rist
and we do our raveda and we talk about all
these natural healing things.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden we're like, get a shot.
Speaker 1: You're a grandma killing yes, yes, So is that what
really opened your eyes to this movement? I mean, was
it just the mindlessness of it, just the following blindly
or yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: I was like, wait a second, what are people? What
do you actually believe?
Speaker 4: You've said this for years, and now when the rubber
meets the road, it's gone.
Speaker 3: All you talk.
Speaker 4: About inner light and peace and something beyond the material world.
All of a sudden you are freaking out because you
don't think are going to get toilet paper like that.
That part of it in LA was really true. I
was like, you're rushing to get toilet paper, like, this
is not a disease that affects.
Speaker 3: Your bowel movements. I don't understand what's going Like.
Speaker 1: What a crazy time. It's still wild to me that
we lived through that. What a just people lost their
ever loving minds.
Speaker 3: That's exactly the phrase, you lost your ever loving minds.
Speaker 4: You would be like jumping to the others. I lived
into Pega Canyon, which is like the hippiest of hippie
kind of commune places you can live, and people were.
Speaker 3: Were locking their door. I was like, you can go
out for a hike.
Speaker 4: This is where right around where the surfer was was
arrested for surfing, was right, yeah, yes.
Speaker 1: That was one of the one of the many reasons
why I ended up leaving DC was during COVID. I
went out for a run and people on a run
would cross the street. They're wearing a mask. They would
cross the street to stay you know, streets distance away
from you rather than you're in the wide open air.
I mean the sidewalks are wide there. It's not like
you're on a mini you know, town sidewalk. This is
DC sidewalks, and they would cross the streets so as
not to be within, you know, ten feet of you
as they're wearing a mask outside.
Speaker 2: Like the psychosis was crazy. It was deep.
Speaker 3: And I had a friend.
Speaker 4: Who had actually been in a very serious cult, Like
it's a crazy story.
Speaker 3: I've done a podcast with him. You can go and
listen to it.
Speaker 4: But we kind of it's not that we reconnected, but
we started connecting a lot more during COVID and we
both am like and me having just kind of started
to come out of this like yoga cult, I'm like,
this is a cult. I know, cult behavior. This is
the cult of public safety. This is the cult of
public health.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 4: That kind of I started going down the rabbit hole.
Like I said, I lived into Panga Canyon. I did
go on very long walks through the canyon wherever I could,
some of it which has burned down since the Palisades,
because that was in Rustic Canyon.
Speaker 3: It was so beautiful.
Speaker 4: But I took these long, long walks and listened to
a lot of Jordan Peterson and a lot of Joe Rogan,
and I realized my life had become very narcissistic, and
it had become very isolated from the real world.
Speaker 3: I had isolated myself from my family. I had I
you know, was cruel to my family in some ways.
Speaker 4: And and this is I do say one of the
tactics of the left, whether people know it or not.
And we see this when kids go to university, is
they try to disconnect you from your family, from any
sense of the past that you belonged to your heritage.
And I think that's part of it with some of
these kids, is like, oh, my parents like traumatize me emotions,
you know, and right, like join the club, yeah, money, right, right.
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Speaker 1: Stella Moribido wrote a book about it, and she called
it the weaponization of loneliness, and I think that's a
great way, great way to term what the left does.
There's so many threads here I want to pull out.
I want to come back to the yoga cult thing
because I would love to hear more about your faith
in general and how that has completely transformed away from
yoga cult to christ. I'd love to hear more about
how you say again.
Speaker 3: That's a good title from the book for a book.
Speaker 2: I think it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you know what your next book is. Yeah,
that's great, Okay, I would love to talk. I also
want to get into therapy stuff because I would love
to pick your brain about that. But I'm curious how
did your parents respond to your foray and to liberal
feminist politics into you moving to California? Like, what did
that fracturing look like?
Speaker 3: You know, it's weird.
Speaker 4: I never really talked to them about it as it
was happening, but talking to my mother about it in
particular looking back, I mean it hurt her.
Speaker 3: It was hard for her to what she said. It
was hard for me to watch but you were sorry.
You know, you were out in California. What was I
going to do? You know, you had to make your
own choices.
Speaker 4: And I guess she trusted the way she raised me,
with the values that she did, would would keep me tethered.
Speaker 3: And they did. You know, eventually, I understand it.
Speaker 4: I wish I had a better understanding or maybe a
better relationship with her to understand why she did the
things she did or why she tried to teach me
the things she did. But it was hard for her
and that's still kind of heartbreaking for me.
Speaker 1: And I do think your story gives a lot of
hope to parents who are maybe currently walking through having
a child who you know, is seemingly disregarding the things
that they the values that have been instilled in them.
Just to say, you know, stories are long and going
your own path and there's a lot, there's a lot
of redemption that's possible, even if you are on a
different path for a time.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I think I can be really encouraging too to people, and.
Speaker 4: I do talk to I have talked to a lot
of parents who have heard my story and they say
that gives me hope. I feel like I've lost my
child to this progressive ideology. The unfortunate part is now,
at least what I was growing up, it wasn't It
wasn't fed to me in college. It wasn't fed to
me as a pseudo education. It wasn't fed to me,
you know what I mean. There wasn't that indoctrination. From
a very early age. I kind of rebelled, which is
normal for a child to kind of rebel against their
parents and what they've been taught in some way. But
it wasn't it wasn't fed to me in college. You know,
I had a great liberal arts, strong liberal arts.
Speaker 3: Education.
Speaker 4: Washington and Lee is one of the best institutions in
the country. Even that they have fallen a little bit
to the to the to the pressure to change the
name of the institution Washington and Lee, but they've they've.
Speaker 3: Maintained it, so that's good.
Speaker 4: But but yeah, you know, I think my mom was
very happy when I kind of came back.
Speaker 3: Around, and she feels like she has her daughter back
a little bit.
Speaker 4: And I think, you know, I'm just more sane I was,
and I struggled with depression, like you said, it was.
They take advantage of this epidemical loniness. And this isn't
the first time I'm probably you or your audience has
heard this, but LA can be very lonely. You got
a lot of people out there, You've got a lot
of so called friends, but it can be a very
lonely place to be because everything does feel very phony
and transactional, and so you you particularly, I think young
women do fall very easily into these, uh, these kind
of cults of yoga, right, this spirituality, the sense of
looking for something outside of themselves to make sense of
the world. So I think the intentions are good.
Speaker 3: I think the speaking is good.
Speaker 4: I just think some of these paths can lead to
very dangerous places if they're not used judiciously.
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about therapy a little bit, and you
talk in that piece that I referenced earlier about like
the Dangers of life coaches, Can you talk about that
whole culture and maybe ways that you were swept into
it and how that influenced your thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's the seeking.
Speaker 4: It's again seeking forever a solution outside of yourself or
somebody else's grow. And what I started to notice is,
like all the people you are looking at advice from
are not like where you want to be giving me
a relationship advice, and you're not in a stable marriage
with a family. You're some single woman that's an influencer
on Instagram or selling essential oils right like on your
third marriage and moving to Santa fe like this is
this is like you look to people that actually don't
have real life experience, right, they sound good and they
sound like they know what they're talking about. And I think, again,
everybody's path is different. You learn from all of these mistakes.
I certainly did, and I learned to rely not on myself,
but really to rely on Christ, and to let Christ
tell me who I who I was and who I
was not. And when I when I found that identity,
that my identity was not in these other things, that
my my true identity resided in Christ, it just turned
my whole life life around. I didn't care what other
people thought about me. I relentlessly wanted to know the truth.
I relentlessly pursued what was good for me as opposed
to what I wanted or what I thought I wanted.
I thought it was going to be like some big.
Speaker 3: La like host on like entertainment. You know, I thought
it was going to be like a hot thing.
Speaker 4: And when I started to kind of listen to more
Christ centered teachings as opposed to kind of the self centeredism.
I don't know if you're familiar with Abraham Hicks and
this whole it's she speaks as if she's channeling like
God or this, you know, and it's interesting and I'm
trying to it's like the manifestation that it's all the truth.
It's the self manifestation, right, just change your thoughts and
change your way you think things will come to you
if you believe it, it will happen if you put
on it vision board and you were.
Speaker 1: Just kind of speak it into existence. It's a very
god complex way of thinking because that's what God does.
That's not what we do. But yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 4: God is the Word, and you know he spoke, He
spoke the world into existence. But correct it is. It
is very and it's very self centered. If I can
just change my thinking, and you know, it's almost like
fake it till you make it, it's just never happens.
And so once I felt like I was more aligned
with what God was actually asking of me than what
I wanted things kind of fell into place, and I
still can't believe that I am, like speaking with you
here today.
Speaker 3: This is not where I expected my life to go.
Speaker 4: I still have, you know, my moments of looking back
on my life and realizing it was actually really great
and fun. But for my own mental blocks, I couldn't
see it. I didn't appreciate what I had when I
had it, the life I had, and how how amazing
it's been. And I do look back and I see
Christ was in every one of those moments, moments probably
saving me a lot of the times from situations where
other people would have gone down a really dark hole.
He kind of pulled me out of it without me knowing,
particularly when I was doing some of the psychedelic stuff,
because that's some dark, dark stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And.
Speaker 4: I think that the idea was that I just kept
seeking and my kind of Christ moment, I mean, it
was a very particular moment that happened when I was
in meditation. So I actually did learn a very positive
skill through all the yogas.
Speaker 3: I could sit and be quiet for an hour or two.
I didn't have to be doing.
Speaker 4: Something I could, you know now, I call it praying
and contemplation.
Speaker 3: But meditation is fine to me. I don't mind that word.
Speaker 4: I think it's good to meditate on life as long
as you're meditating on the right things.
Speaker 3: And I was meditating and.
Speaker 4: Just Christ, it was it's like clear as days, like
you're speaking to me. I heard Christ say to me,
welcome home, and I just was there was a literal
physical weight that lifted off my shoulders in that moment.
Speaker 1: Wow, was it something where I mean, did you already
know the gospel at that point or did you need
to basically start learning all of that after that moment?
Speaker 4: I mean I had heard kind of the basic stories
of the gospel, you know, but I did not know
it at all. Again, God brought people into my life.
One of them was my Catholic friend that I had
known from la.
Speaker 3: I was having a.
Speaker 4: Challenging moment actually with my mother, and I called my
friend and I said, I don't know what to do,
and she said, give it, give it to Christ, Give
it to Christ. And you know, I think, again, you
hear this all the time. People will hear when they're
ready to hear he who has ears on them here.
You know, you have to be ready for these things
and that same day I turned on The Chosen, Okay.
Speaker 3: The same day that she had been giving me that.
And this was May of twenty twenty, I think, so.
Speaker 4: Twenty twenty one. It's all a blur now, No, I
think it was twenty twenty. I'd gone to my mother's
to help her with the procedure she had done, and
you know, we were having our struggles, we were having
our mother daughter's struggles, and I called Molly.
Speaker 3: She said, give it to Christ.
Speaker 4: And then somehow I was at home and I turned
on The Chosen in that first episode where Mary where
he comes to Mary Magdalene and he I think, he says,
you're mine. I just it felt like someone drew a
knife out of my heart. And so the Christ moment
I was telling you about meditation happened several months after that.
Speaker 3: But that moment of watching.
Speaker 4: The Chosen and having my friend tell me to give
it to Christ, that's when I became christ curious. I
call it Christ's curious. And then God actually brought another
man into my life that was very faithful, that was
also working kind of this very hippie dippy liberal company,
but a Christian, and we would have these long talks
at night, and he would, you know, introduce me to
the Gospel.
Speaker 3: And then I think I started listening to the hallow
app okay, and again it's just.
Speaker 4: These kind of these breadcrumbs of moments. And then eventually,
I think when I was open to hearing Christ come
to me, he came. And the interesting thing about this
all is that I was actually baptized Greek Orthodox okay,
was baptized when I was six months old, and I
just but I wasn't raised with religion. My mom didn't
take me to church. My dad didn't take me to church,
so we were culturally I was, like I said, I
was culturally Greek and Italian without the religiosity of it.
So we did kind of the holiday traditions, but I
maybe went to midnight Mass for Pasca, which is Greek Easter.
My grandmother was very very Greek. And but you know,
it wasn't the foundation. So back to the kind of
conservatism without the understanding why.
Speaker 3: Without the foundation of it made.
Speaker 4: Me question and I wonder if I had had that
teaching as a young child of Christianity, if I wouldn't
have been so curious about the other side, right, and
it against it. But again God put me in the
moments he put me in so and I actually now
really appreciate it because it actually I'm not very good
at doing what I'm told, Like if you tell me
to do something, I will actually do the opposite sometimes,
you know, I don't. I'm not a very good, do
what you're told type of person. And so I think
God knew what I needed, which was to let me
seek it on my own and then come back to him.
So the way I see it as I was promised
to Christ when I was six months old, and it
took me forty some years to find him again or
for him.
Speaker 1: Well, and he just he has a way of weaving
stories together in a way that just brings brings all
glory to him. So you know, you have you have
a really awesome redemptive story to tell, and that would
be different if you had been following it your whole life,
you know. So yeah, let's see here. I'm curious how
your la friends responded when you started to wake up
to the mind virus and just see kind of how
crazy things were during COVID. Let's see if you became
Christ curious in twenty twenty, that would have been early COVID.
So this is all kind of happening simultaneously. How do
they respond to your to your tipping point?
Speaker 3: Not well?
Speaker 4: I mean some silently just kind of stopped talking to me.
You know, there was there was never any big blow ups.
It was it was definitely a lonely period. I did have,
like I said, some people that I could talk to, uh,
but it definitely was an internal like probably meant for
many people in COVID. And you know, I didn't have
a partner, I didn't have a family, So it was
definitely a looking inward type process and realizing, Okay, where
do I want to go?
Speaker 3: What are my next steps?
Speaker 4: Now that I had this identity in Christ that gave
me all the self confidence that I had been missing
my whole life. I mean I kind of spent my
career based in insecurity. I mean your own camera, like
with fitness clothes on. Was It's like, I'm just trying
to prove I'm good enough to be in this position.
You know that, especially at that at that in that
moment in California, you had the jilling, you had like
all these reality shows based on fitness and everybody's trying
to get into that world So you had that kind
of fierce competition and and that that comes at a
cost to your self confidence.
Speaker 2: A lot of rejection, striving.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah. Once I kind of had this new
identity in Christ, I didn't really care. I just wanted
to I just wanted truth. I really wanted to know
the truth about but I want I knew it, I
knew they were live, And I think that that part
of me God put in me is like.
Speaker 3: What's roder Ayer's book, Live not by Lies.
Speaker 4: I could do a lot of things, but I cannot
live by a lie.
Speaker 3: I cannot live in a lie.
Speaker 4: Now I may have been doing that earlier, but I
wasn't aware of it. Once I became aware of it,
I couldn't tolerate it anymore.
Speaker 1: Right, So identifying the COVID lies, I mean, did that
just completely start the domino effect? Like what did it
look like to come to terms with all of these things?
Because you're holding you know, it's not just COVID, it's
you're living in this culture of girl bossary and you know,
feminism and all of these other things. Like I don't
know if you were like affirming of LGBT things or
like how many of these things you were buying into.
But like, did that all just immediately start dominoing the
second COVID the lights came on.
Speaker 4: So COVID happened. And then, if you remember, a few
short months later, the George.
Speaker 3: Floyd thing happened.
Speaker 4: And I do have to credit Candas Owens with being
part of my awakening because at the time I was
in an acting class and we moved to classes online
and the George Floyd thing happened I think on a Wednesday,
because class was on a Thursday, and we were all
there self flagellating about how awful white people we were,
and it felt a little weird at the time, and
I was like, oh, but I'll go along with it
because I'm a terrible person. I should know I'm a
terrible person, and I really need to look at my
inner bias and how I've contributed.
Speaker 3: To the death of George Floyd.
Speaker 4: I'm as far away from Minneapolis as you can, like you.
Speaker 3: Know, write as New York is from China. This has
nothing to do with me, and so I kind of
I participated.
Speaker 4: And then I saw a video that evening of Candace
on Facebook. Like I said, I was not politically involved.
I had this ideology, but was it hadn't turned political
at all. It was kind of just me being a
good person, a way of life, right that, and you.
Speaker 3: Speak kind of to the to the LGBTQ stuff. I
had a lot of.
Speaker 4: Gay friends, most of my most of my male friends
were gay. They were dancers, the history. My best friends
were gay, and so I did see a lot of
that rhetoric as like anti gay and you don't care
about gay people.
Speaker 3: And you're gay phobic or whatever.
Speaker 4: It was Okay, So I watched this video from Candice
and she very pointedly points out this is a tragedy,
this shouldn't have happened, which we now know is actually
not the truth either. I mean, I think you watch
I think it's called Minneapolis burning. You see what the
tactics of what that what?
Speaker 3: Who's the cop can't remember his name now.
Speaker 2: Derek Chauvin.
Speaker 3: Derek Chauvin, like he.
Speaker 4: Was trained, that was a technique he was trained to do.
And the way George Floyd died of an overdose, you
know he didn't even die because of the nianis nay, okay, whatever,
I'm going to get a lot of hate for that.
Speaker 1: No, But I mean, you can look at that. You
can look at the medical examiner's report. I mean, yeah,
and how could disagree with that? But there's there's at
least as much evidence pointing in the other direction.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, so whatever.
Speaker 4: Okay, But she says, you know, this is a tragedy,
but let's not get it twisted. This man is no saint.
He's a criminal. He's a proven criminal. He's a drug
dealer and a drug addict. He's not a martyr. And
I think again, my brain turned on and I was like, oh,
sister's got a point.
Speaker 2: That's a really good point.
Speaker 4: So I, in my naivete email my entire acting class
with the link to her my word you know on Facebook,
had no idea who she is, okay, none, never heard
of candae owns in my life crickets.
Speaker 3: I had no response except for, woman, it's.
Speaker 4: Kind of your typical California liberal, lives in Venice, has
a second home in OHI, and acting class is.
Speaker 3: A little older than me.
Speaker 4: And she says, she responds, and she says, Jennifer, this
is a like an interesting perspective from an obviously intelligent
young black woman.
Speaker 3: Thank you for sharing it. I should have pulled it
up because I knew this was going to come up.
Speaker 4: But I still have it though it's in there if
you want documentation.
Speaker 2: I still can't believe that you emailed this link to your.
Speaker 7: Acting but I didn't know it wasn't believing this yoga
cave for eight years, like just getting my life away
and teaching fitness with that that I know, So I yeah,
I did that, and.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, okay, I'm not crazy. I'm not
the only one.
Speaker 4: And then a half hour later, I am not kidding you.
In my inbox, like all caps, Jennifer, this is Candice
O and she's on Fox News. How dare you blue?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 3: I get my ass reamed out and I'm like, huh.
Speaker 4: Twenty minutes ago, she was an intelligent, young black woman
and now she has actually she has no authority, no
standing whatsoever. And by their standard, she's black, so you
should have to listen to her.
Speaker 1: Right right right the identity politics regime, she should be
the one speaking on this, not you white people in
this acting class.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, And I again, that was another light bulb moment.
Speaker 3: I'm like, what is going on here?
Speaker 4: And I also a couple months prior, a friend of
mine had given me a book I think we all
know and love called White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, The
one yea oh, the Classic, the Great Books, the Pillar,
the Great Books Program.
Speaker 2: Yeah required reading.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. So he had given me that.
Speaker 4: I was like, okay, And I remember having a conversation
with him about the pronoun thing and.
Speaker 3: It wasn't as big of a deal as it was now.
Speaker 4: And again I had these little light bulb moments and
he's like, well, I like to think I was ahead
of the curve with than Megan Kelly on this because
I remember I don't know if you remember her telling
her her story. She says, you know, I thought it
was it was good just to be nice and to
go along. I never thought that I was like, why
am I calling somebody a They them?
Speaker 3: They're not even she that they are what they.
Speaker 4: Are, Like, this is ridiculous, I'm not going right a
long this. But that it wasn't as big of a
deal as it is now caused so much strife. And
then that that same friend gave me the book White Fragility.
Speaker 1: Okay, And it wasn't everyone and their mother announcing their
pronouns right out of the gate either. I mean, this
was an isolated thing.
Speaker 2: It wasn't.
Speaker 1: Oh, in corporate America, everybody has their pronouns after their name,
whether they're the most obviously man or obviously woman you've
ever seen in your life. You know, there wasn't the
ritual rehearsing of your pronouns the way there is now.
Speaker 4: Yes, it wasn't the seeking absolution via your email signature.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4: So he gave me that book and I remember it,
and this is I always tell this story too, because
of kind of the insidious nature of the left or
the progressive left or progress, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3: It's hard sometimes they're not clear terms.
Speaker 1: But yes, well, and you know the words we tend
to use are liberal, progressive, or leftist. Well, liberal, classical
liberals are not like liberal now, and progressive implies that
they're actually advocating or you know, advancing towards progress, which
we all know.
Speaker 2: Is not true.
Speaker 1: So I think leftist is probably the best word. But
they're all just completely poisoned at this point. So yeah,
who knows.
Speaker 4: But so I'm reading that book and I'm thinking, so wait,
if I'm if I don't express racism, I'm still a racist,
Like I'm it doesn't matter what I say, or how
I act or how I behave, I'm racist because of
the color of my skin. I'm like, that seems pretty racist.
By the end of the book, I was like, you
know what, she's right, I really need to look at
my internal bias. I bought into it because there is
a self censorship program that kicks in when you are
in this world long enough and says, you know, you're
kind of the logic that I had been taught, the reasoning,
the rationale, it crept up and I.
Speaker 3: Shut it down.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like the line test, you know, where you're
in a room of people and you're supposed to point
to the longest line, and everybody else is in on
the experiment, but you're not, and everyone else raises their
hand for the shorter line, and so you raise your
hand for the shorter line too. You know, I forget
what the experiment is called, but it's that mass formation
thing where you just go along with go along to
get along.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: So I had that book and then the CANDICEO when
things happened and I was like, okay, no, not anymore.
And then I think the christ thing happened after that
I'm just.
Speaker 3: Trying to get see.
Speaker 4: But you're right, and all kind of happened at once,
I mean, within within a time span of maybe six months.
Speaker 2: Because it's a house of cards.
Speaker 1: The second you say something that's true, that's that you
are forbidden from saying. It's not only so empowering, but
it just it opens you up to all of these
other things, these lies that you've rehearsed over the course
of time. I mean, it all just completely falls apart.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and again to go back to your original question,
I did lose friends at the time that we were
all isolated anyway, and and it just some of them
just naturally fell away.
Speaker 3: Some of them were a little more dramatic.
Speaker 4: And even up until this day, I lost friends when
I started working for heritage. You know, I don't know,
you just kind of I've made new friends and and
I'm okay with you know, I think as it becomes
a function of getting older as well, and now you
have a family and that's what you're focused on. But
for me, it's like I have some good core still
friends that stuck by me. Obviously, my my Catholic friend
from LA were still very good friends and and I
don't need a lot.
Speaker 3: I don't need a lot of friends. I really don't.
Speaker 4: My life is full with my work, with what I
where I believe God has called me to do.
Speaker 3: My life is full with just I don't know.
Speaker 4: Living again instead of and instead of all this kind
of narcissistic naval gazing. To be out in the world
and participatory again is something that I've really appreciated, having
fun again, laughing again, Like my sense of I always
told a sense of.
Speaker 3: Humor came back. I'm not as easily offended.
Speaker 4: Actually, it's really hard to offend me, really hard to
offend me.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you get a thick skin, but it's
it's an honest thick skin. It's not like I'm pretending
to be some right, you know, and like not me
and whatever you bounces off me and sticks to you.
I'm like rubber, You're like clue whatever, right, you know.
I'm still I like to think I've kept my sensitivity,
but I'm very judicious about what we need to be
upset about and what The east wing of the ball
of the White House is not something that's got me
up in arms.
Speaker 3: Okay, Like I don't sleep over that.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone is actually upset about that. They
just have to pretend to be because it's the big
orange man and he's bad and you know. Yeah, So
if you could go back and tell your twenty one
year old self anything, or twenty five year old self,
what would you tell her?
Speaker 4: I think what you're pointing to is and I think
this is a legitimate question. I don't think you're trying
to shroud it. But it's like, do you have regrets?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: Like, what would you look back up and change?
Speaker 3: And I think.
Speaker 4: The biggest thing is if I have a regret, it's
not having a family and very biological, very biological rationalities
a certain age. And I think that's particularly what happens
to a lot of women in LA. It's very hard
to measure seasons in time.
Speaker 3: In La. You don't have seasons.
Speaker 4: You wake up one day and you're forty and you're like,
oh my gosh, I've spent twenty years here.
Speaker 1: This is insane, which I think is probably the case
in a lot of cities. I mean, DC is certainly
one of them. I've seen a lot of my own
friends and people I know face a similar thing there
or in New York or elsewhere.
Speaker 3: I think you're so caught up in a career and.
Speaker 4: Trying to make it on your own and do these
things that you lose sight of the fact of like, oh,
the biological clock is actually ticking, and I've either ignored it.
It was for me weird might actually didn't start going
off until much later in life.
Speaker 3: I did start to realize.
Speaker 4: And by that time, I'm like, oh, I hadn't put
any energy towards dating. Really I did it, but I
actually didn't intentionally date with the idea of having a
marriage and a family. I learned those things, but but
again I could just manifest them whenever I wanted.
Speaker 2: Right, right right, There's no.
Speaker 4: Reason to actually put any energy and effort into dating.
Speaker 3: Right, just manifest or you know, God would just drop
it in my lap.
Speaker 4: So I do wish that I you know, I could
tell myself, Hey, this is something you're going to want
later in life, and you might not be able to
have it.
Speaker 3: I love the quote.
Speaker 4: I'm sure you've heard it, and I'm sure many women
in your audience have heard it.
Speaker 3: Is women can have it.
Speaker 4: All, just not all at the same time. Yes, and
there are sacrifices to be made. Anything worth having requires sacrifice,
and I'm very happy where I am now, so it's
hard to say, you know, maybe I would I got married,
had a terrible marriage and been abused and had to
be divorced with a child.
Speaker 3: I don't know. So God took me down the path.
Speaker 4: I think that he wanted me to go, and the
more I listened to that, the happier I am, or
at least the more content and fulfilled I am. Yes,
like I said, I was speaking with my aunt the
other night, it's like I never expected to be here.
This is not more thought I would be at my age.
But there's an acceptance and a humility that comes with that.
Speaker 3: And a lot of grace. You know, in my life,
I've been given a lot of grace.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, well and yeah, just a lot of
peace and knowing too that the Lord has has done
so much in your life to bring you to where
you are. So yeah, I don't know that I would
frame it as much as regret as just like what
you've learned, you know, along the way, And I think
that's a more helpful way maybe to think about it,
or something that you can pass pass along to other
young women rather than thinking of it as something that
you would tell yourself. You know, here's your story is
still really beautiful, even if it's not what you envisioned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, don't buy into the feminist piece.
Speaker 4: I also think, you know, we probably talk at nauseum
about this issue. I am so tired of everybody, particularly women,
now trying to pit men against women. It's like, there
is no battle of the sexes. We're both needed for
different reasons. As I'm sure you know. Is like we
are complimentary, we're not adversarials, we're not at all, We're
not competing for anything. I think women got into this competition,
like this competition with men. I'm like, what are you
competing for the CEO job?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Well, and now it's kind of come full circle, right
because I completely agree with you. Well, at the same time,
now the battle of the sexes is is women literally
battling men to get out of their spaces. Right, So
it's like at first it was more of an imagined struggle,
and now it's now it's an actual struggle where we
we really do need to reclaim our spaces. So I
don't know, maybe you can speak to that distinction a
little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well.
Speaker 4: All the women are like I posted my piece in
American and the American Conservative on the birth control pill,
and I sometimes I just like to drop the bomb
and walk away. And that happens on my Facebook page
because I still have a lot of friends or sorry,
just a lot of friends on that page that are
from my old life or liberals or whatever.
Speaker 3: I mean. It was just like, whew, you know, you
come up to my control. Came out things like dissertations
in the comments. It was very it was very interesting.
Speaker 4: But but that that idea that I would warn women
against of, like that men are your men or your enemy.
Oh you asked me about like kind of the It's
interesting is that there's a lot of words salad about
the patriarchy. I mean, I can't tell you in those
comments how many times the word patriarchy is used. I go,
that's interesting because men are now dictating to women about being.
Speaker 3: In their in their space.
Speaker 2: The patriarch is winning. You talk about the this is it,
this is what I'm real.
Speaker 4: So I again, they're just there is a like I said,
I had that notion of common sense. I was never
a dumb person. But then I did go back to school.
I did go back and get my grad degree in
public policy, and it was very much we had a.
Speaker 3: Great books course.
Speaker 4: I had to really think about these things, and that
really solidified me becoming kind of an ideological conservative. The
Christianity piece understanding women's place and God's idea for women
and partnership and marriage and family, and then these ideas
of what this country was founded on. I still't think
the women, to be honest, are very well educated about that. Right,
failed women in history, so they're susceptible to thinking so
zoron WNDAMI is going to be a great idea.
Speaker 3: For New York because equality like equality at the lowest
possible bottom.
Speaker 4: Everyone's equal, right, no opportunity for you to And you
keep talking about the the the the inequality, the wealth
inequality right between the top and the between the bottom
and the top. I'm like, you think that's going to
get better under socialism?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: Do not know how these things work?
Speaker 1: Yes, the complete lack of common sense and going back
to the feminist point, just at a most basic level,
it's such a lack of of there's so much cognitive
dissonance because it's women. The power struggle between men and women,
while at the same time, women are doing everything to
be men, you know, not even not in a transgender
type of way, but in a deferring marriage and motherhood,
sterilizing themselves on the pill, or at least just completely changing.
They're suppressing their normal biological function to become more like men,
I mean, in every possible way. And it's like, do
you hate men or do you want to be men?
Because these two things, there's so much there's so much
dissonance there, it just doesn't even make sense. But then
you see that that way of like, you know, some
wires crossing that shouldn't be in every other area, like
you said, with COVID and with you know, being doing
your own research and all these things, and then until
there's an infectious disease and then all of a sudden,
we're you know, scavenging for toilet paper and wearing a
mask and taking an experimental shot. And it's just this
this unwillingness to face reality and live within the confines
of it, because you're just so much happier when you
do that, when you realize the natural constraints of life
and then just accept them and let them form your
public policy and your political views and all of these things,
and the left has just become so unhinged that like
basic reality is just incomplete denial. We don't even live
in the same world as so many of these people.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a denial of human nature.
Speaker 4: I mean that was the first thing I realized going
through COVID and kind of through my public my master's
in public policies. What it really comes down to right
now is this is not like an agreement on the
goal and we disagree on how to get there, on
tariffs or Texas or economics. This is a disagreement about
the fundamental reality of human nature, right we are as
humans and what it means.
Speaker 3: To be human. They actually think that they can be God.
Speaker 4: Like you said, I can change my reproductive system so
that I don't have babies and I can have sex
like a man yay, And that to them is freedom.
I mean that is that is if I showed you
these comments, that is the thread you want to take
women's rights way in women's freedom, I'm like, since when
is freedom just being able to do whatever you want?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: I don't think that, Like I had a life, I
got to travel whenever I want, I didn't have I
didn't have any responsibilities, but I wasn't happy.
Speaker 3: I wasn't I wasn't fulfilled as a woman.
Speaker 1: And I like true liberty and freedom are duty. It's
a responsibility to something, not just from everything.
Speaker 4: Right, And that's the that's the classic Pope John Paul quote.
You know, freedom is the ability. I don't know if
it's the ability or something to do what you ought,
not what you want.
Speaker 3: And there is some you know.
Speaker 4: Again, like I feel like I'm it's not that I
don't want to do what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I don't want.
Speaker 4: I love my career, I love my job. I love
being at Heritage. This as like has been a dream job.
But again it's not what I wanted initially. I feel
like I'm doing what God wants of me. I feel
like I have a calling and that's it's It comes
with sacrifice, and it comes with fulfillment. But not always
like comfortable, I'm not always comfortable. It's not always again
the life I thought I'm not living in like the
mansion in la and going to Airwan every day and
having my fifty dollars smoothies and and and like you
you put yourself out there in a world that doesn't
really accept this understanding of women and family that's very hostile.
Speaker 3: Towards conservative women. You lose friends.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know about you much about your
story if you've always been in the circle, but obviously
for me, I've I'm on like my fifth life.
Speaker 1: Here doesn't get any easy areas you get old, you know,
you're like a cat. Yeah, So I know you've done
a lot of work in the Make America Healthy against space.
We've published a lot of your MAHA articles also at
the Federalist, and I believe you're doing some of that
work at Heritage, right, that's part of your policy work there.
Speaker 3: That is kind of the policy work.
Speaker 2: Policy work.
Speaker 4: We have started an initiative at Heritage called Restoring American
Wellness because we understood that this moment calls for not
just a flash in the pan movement, but a comprehensive
shift in how we see health policy. It's not just
about insurance and markets and Medicare and medicaid.
Speaker 3: Those are important things.
Speaker 4: We want drug prices reduced, but we also need to
really tackle this chronic disease issue. And that's not going
to come actually for more healthcare exactly, I'm sure you've
heard I feel like, and I said this decades ago.
We don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick
care system. We have a system that once you're in it,
you cannot get out. It is very hard to get
out from under the dependency of pharmaceuticals and doctors and
coding and medicare and Medicaid.
Speaker 3: So I was actually, you.
Speaker 4: Know, going down memory lane on my Facebook pages. I
think it was just last night, and this was like
a post from two thousand and nine where I had
posted my dinner and I said food is medicine, which
is so weird.
Speaker 3: Because that used to be all hippie dippy left.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, so you've always been Maha.
Speaker 1: You were make America healthy again before it was cool
to be make America healthy again.
Speaker 4: I'd like to think that I actually in twenty I
guess was twenty twenty one. My first policy paper was
on how the agricultural system can help change the food
supply to make America healthy again. And I had to
give a presentation, like a slideshow presentation to the class
and I actually did make America healthy again, because at
the time it was just maga.
Speaker 3: It was just make America great again.
Speaker 4: And I was like, no, make America healthy again, and
everyone's like, oh, that's so cute.
Speaker 3: That's really it is so funny. And then again it's funny.
Speaker 4: How maybe that's speaking things into existence in some way
does work? I don't know, but I think maybe God
just told me, like, you're on the right track, keep
going there you go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so.
Speaker 5: We are.
Speaker 4: The Restoring American Wellness Initiative at Heritage is supportive of
a lot of the MAHA initiatives, particularly getting corporate capture
out of our agencies. The Bought and Page for Research
fully support Jabadicharian and Marty McCarey and RFK. And we
don't always have to agree on everything, but I think
one of Heritage's big roles as a serious policy shop
is to bring credibility to this movement. These aren't just
all activists. These aren't just all moms that are angry.
These are legitimate concerns of how are we going to
better spend our healthcare dollars because we're bankrupt.
Speaker 3: We can't go on with this trillion dollar healthcare system. Right.
Speaker 1: Do you think that this movement, this coalition of MAHA
and MAGA and all of that, do you think that
that will long outlive the Trump era, Like, do you
think that COVID was the actual realignment of people who
believe in science and people who don't, or is this
it's just more shorter lived thing where Trump was able
to pull these coalitions together, and then after he's off
the political scene, you know, maybe it'll take a couple
of election cycles, but it'll fracture back to you know,
the lefties being the hippietippes and Maha not really being
a conservative thing.
Speaker 4: Well, my job, I see one of my charges as
making sure it doesn't fizzle and that it doesn't long
outlive Trump and advance because this is going to take
a long time to repair. We're just getting started. This
is not a This is not a three year four
year project. This is a ten twenty. I mean, it
takes a long time for the culture to catch up
with the good science and new sense. Right for years
we were.
Speaker 3: Taught low fat, and how long you.
Speaker 4: Know how many people are still entrenched in that mindset
that eating cholesterol is bad for you, that eating eggs
is bad for you.
Speaker 3: Eggs and make it bad for you.
Speaker 4: And you know it's going to take a while. So
part of my job I see is me making sure
that this isn't a flash in the pan, And I
don't think it will be. I think there's been too
many people that have woken up to the reality of
a bought and paid for research structure when it comes
to science. I mean, you say science, who's doing the
science and who's paying for it? And that's going to
take a long time to undo. And you've got some
stalwarts that are hanging on by a thread. I mean,
I do see what happened to the Republican Party is
you have what we call, I guess the neocons right
that want to hold on to this idea of conservatism
when all they're conserving is the bureaucracy.
Speaker 3: They're conserving the structure.
Speaker 4: They're not actually conserving what conservatives are meant to, which
is the good, the true, and the beautiful. They're just
conserving their power. And there's this new kind of populist conservatives. No,
we're going to give the power back to the people,
not to your structures, not to your government institutions, to
the institutions that actually make a society good, which is
the fang, which is the church, which is maybe schools,
but schools that are run by their local communities and
not by government dictator.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because I think a lot of similar things
to what happened with MAHA have also happened with the
education establishment where you know, COVID Similarly to how people saw, yeah,
trusting the science doesn't really work when you're talking about
people who are bankrolled, but you know it's a racket.
So you know, you can't trust King Anthony Fauci on
this because you know he's his interests are completely skewed here.
And a similar thing happened with parents in education where
they finally got a look behind the curtain that they
a curtain. You know, they probably should have been peeking
behind all along, but it finally was was thrust right
in front of their faces and you can't unsee that.
And I think that's very similar to probably how it
will will continue to progress in the post COVID era
with public health, where once you see some of these
nasty underbelly things of the skewed incentive structure and just
the type of people making calling the shots on your
health and on your education, it's hard to go back
to a pre COVID understanding of those things or or
you know, pre looking behind the curtain understanding of of
those things. So yeah, hopeful that heritage is work and
everybody else's work in this space will will be fruitful
and that will be able to continue this coalition going forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that that's the that's the pitfall
of a of a liberal small l progressive as in
real progress, meaning with roads and freeways and entrepreneurialism and capitalism.
That is the downfall of this culture because we are
now so comfortable that we've just gotten We've become complacent.
Speaker 3: We don't look under the hood. We've we've been almost
vamboozled because we've just said, hey, we have.
Speaker 4: A good life here in the suburbs, we have a house,
and and everybody stopped kind of fighting for freedom. Like
Reagan said, you're only one generation from losing it, because
when you become complacent about freedom, and when you become
complacent about your government, they'll just continue to grow without
you even realizing it and more from you until we
have a government that my goodness, like the shutdown is
probably needed, Like you realize how many of these are.
Speaker 3: Actually not essential jobs.
Speaker 4: Yes, so much was just re engineering society with DEI
and how many people that were hired for those purposes.
Is like, these aren't real jobs.
Speaker 1: Yes, the bloat is unreal, unreal. Is Heritage working on
anything as far as like MiFi pristone goes. I know,
there's been a lot of talk of you know, or
pushing for Marty McCarey and and RFK Junior to do
something about this. Specifically the study that came out about
the dangers of MEPhI pristone that it is way worse
than the fd label, the FDA label. What have you
believe risks associated with the abortion pill regime or regiment
I should say, is Heritage working on anything policy wise
to to kind of get this to be a front
and center issue for them or not? Because I think
there's some conservatives who feel very strung along by this
that we keep getting kind of empty promises about that
this is something that the FDA is going to look into,
that this is something that RFK is going to look into,
and that they'd be willing to change their position on
mifipristone if the right evidence came to light. Well, you know,
we have this evidence now, and instead we're greenlighting you know,
generic versions of these drugs and so I'm just curious,
you know, if this is something that what the players
in the health space are doing to push this forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting because the Maha, as you pointed out,
does have this this kind of broad tent base of
Christian homeschool moms and hippie conservatives like me or you know,
used to be liberals and then got politically homeless, and
RFK joined Trump and and so it is. It is
weird because I think you still have a lot of
women who see this as women's reproductive health. Although the
more I talk to people within the Mud, we haven't.
We haven't, at least I haven't. The thing with mahas,
there's so many issues to cover that as far as
I'm concerned, I don't know if somebody else is. We
do have somebody actually, Oh my gosh, I can see
her face. Melanie Israel works a lot on this, so
that is of her domain. I'm a little bit more
of a generalist when it comes to the mode. I
have my own passions are like nutrition, agriculture kinds of stuff,
maybe v scenes, but Melanie Israel really works on that stuff.
Speaker 3: So she's the person talking about what we're doing.
Speaker 4: And I know we came out with a statement, I
trust this administration when they say the reason they greenlit
the generic version is because the actual drug is the problem,
it's not just this generic version of it. So it
is I think we kind of have to because this
the methhapristone, is already greenlit, So it's not really it's actually,
if that's already greenlit, they kind of have to with this.
Speaker 1: It's just like they need to pull back the original.
They can't just not accept the off brand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they it's.
Speaker 4: What happens is is they accept the generic and then
they go back to the actual original, and then they
find that's dangerous, then that generic is automatically taken up
with that as dangerous. If they said these two were different,
if they treated the generic differently than they did the
brand name, then when they go to the research of
the mephypristone, they're going to say, well, this is the generic,
you know what I mean? So now at least in
the same category when you when you do testing on mephipristone,
the generic drug will be swept into it and under
the same authority or regulation that the person will be under.
So I think that may have been more a tactical decision,
although of course we're never kind of praising the messaging
of like, oh great, here's a generic version of an abortion.
Speaker 1: Film, right right, Well, and I think that's part of
the problem is it just feels like kind of an
apathetic response, like, oh, well, we have to do this
because the other one's screenlighter, and it's like, well, then
maybe we should work a little harder to get the
get to get metapristone not greenlit, let's red light that
you know asap And you know, I feel similarly, of
course about birth control. I know you wrote that article.
I wrote a piece probably a year or so ago,
really going after the pill. But you know, in this
very multi front war to make America healthy again, because
you're right, I mean, you could come at this from
every possible angle.
Speaker 2: It's there.
Speaker 1: It's not an easy thing. But I think, you know,
if we are actually concerned about women's health, the pill
and chemical abortion drugs are two huge areas where we
should be focusing because holy cow, like these are endangering
women left and right, and we don't even know the
extent of it. But what we do know is not
pretty like that's that's bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's sacred cow.
Speaker 4: Women's reproductive freedom is the sacred cow. You You've been
enslaved to men and now you're free and you can't
touch I mean again, the clause came out when I
posted that article, and I was just like, oh, I
disagree with you. It was like a full blown essay
with a lot of anger behind it about the patriarchy
and do you want.
Speaker 3: Women to go back to day right?
Speaker 4: And I was like, there's plenty of ways not to
get pregnant, and this is this is the point I'm
very passionate about, because women's empowerment is not the ability
to have sex like a man without any consequences. That's
not empowerment, that's not freedom. Freedom is knowing your body,
knowing your cycles. And this is maybe where conservatives kind
of dropped the ball in this kind of puritanical like
we can't talk about women period now. It's like no, no, no,
They run our lives, our hormones run our lives as
at any point during the month, and I will tell
you where I am in my cycle, what's happening to
my body, what's happening to my mental state. I tell
my boyfriend, you need to know this because if you're
going to plan a trip, you need to know the
weekends that it's going to be okay, and the weekends
that I'm not going to be actually up for anything,
you know what I like?
Speaker 1: Yes, And this is such a substantial part of the
population that experiences this, like this is not a few people,
this is women broadly. Joy you know, yes, And I guarantee.
Speaker 4: You most women and don't know the four stages of
their cycle. They don't know what happens each stage. They
don't know what progesterone does. They don't know what the
testosterone does, they don't know what estrogen does. They don't
actually understand their own bodies and the mechanisms and the
beauty that God has created within our systems and.
Speaker 3: How we function.
Speaker 8: So when anything pops up that seems out of the ordinary,
just give them the pill, right instead of saying, no,
something's out of balance, Like I'm adamant about telling women,
like your menstrual cycle is a vital sign.
Speaker 4: It is like the fifth vital sign for you. And
if it is off, if you have endometriosis, if you
have PCOS, I'm not saying you should sit and suffer.
If the pills is a temporary remedy. That's fine, but
it is not the cure. Something else is going on.
And I'm sure you've heard this. You see a lot
of women who are who are experiencing infertility. A lot
of them say that basically if they quit their job.
Once they quit their job, they get pregnant. Stress is
such an impactful factor on our hormones. This is why
acupuncture has a great, great success rate when it comes
to infertility. It's I think one of acupuncture's strongest suits
is that it restores the balance to the nervous system
and the energetic systems of the body, so that women
can relax and be in their feminine and take a breath.
And they have to. I mean, I just even see
the way I'm talking, I get held up. But they can,
they can not be so adamant about taking control and
taking charge of everything. I think that mindset has really
set women back in being women.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Well, and it doesn't help that healthcare practitioners largely fuel.
Speaker 2: That as well.
Speaker 1: It's not normal to go into or it's not common
to go into the doctor and be met with somebody
who's actually trying to help you find the root cause
of your issue, like you will be prescribed birth control
like candy to tackle any number of of completely like
things that aren't even really interfering with your life or
I shouldn't say that, but just like birth getule with
the band aid for ACME, for like all kinds of
things where it's like you and you know if you
need it for something, Okay, Like I'm not going to
tell every woman what she should do with her whether
she should be on the pill or what.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think like there's so many different opinions about it,
but you at least need to have informed consent, and
there is none of that because it's just prescribed to
anyone and everyone who walks in with a minor ailment
into their female doctor. And you know, if your doctor
is telling you the pill is the cure, then probably
find a different doctor.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and it's two points on this.
Speaker 4: The one thing I would love doctors to tell women
when they go in you're twenty one, you're going in
for a pill or now at the age of what fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,
whatever it is they're putting them on the pill. I
want the doctor to say, this is medicated menopause. Do
you agree, Yeah, we are putting your body into menopause.
Speaker 3: That is what the pill does.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: And then it introduces a synthetic form of progesterone, which
is progestine. And you know it's like you said, there's
no informed consent because they're not informing and consent as
well as long as it takes away my symptoms. The
other point I will say, what's interesting is two conservative
women talking to each other and in media. I've had
a couple requests for conversations from Politico, very liberal media
about women's health, women's reproduct this article I wrote. And
maybe they're just posturing or maybe they're lying to get
to get me to say what they want to say,
and then they'll turn it around and spin it to
make me seem like the evil woman who wants to
bow to men and become part of the patriarch whatever,
like I have Stockholm syndrome or something. But there does
seem to be particularly with the younger writers, when I
talk about this story about the pill, and they're like, yeah,
they just decided I should.
Speaker 3: Be on the ped and they don't. They don't seem
to go along with it either.
Speaker 4: They don't want this one girl said like, yeah, I
was prescribed for acne and I really didn't want it,
but he kept insisting that I go on the pill.
Speaker 3: And I said, did you you know? Did you object?
And she goes, yeah, I didn't do it, but he
was really just wanting me to go on the pill.
And I think there is a common thread through women.
If women could see that, that's our common thread, the
reality of being a woman. This is why this might
be a way into the left. This might be although
again I see it on my Facebook page and it's
just like, oh my gosh, I'm not trying to harm you.
I really am not. But there are some readers you
should know about.
Speaker 4: I'm not saying, you know, but there has to be
a recognition of humanity and what it's like to be
a woman.
Speaker 3: And if you can speak to other women on either
side of the.
Speaker 4: Aisle about those challenges and about our health in a
in a non crazy way, if you can get out
of the crazy and get to the reality of these
struggles that we all face as women, young and old,
there has to be some bonding around that, like, yeah,
against because we're against men, but because we're ourselves.
Speaker 2: Right, right.
Speaker 1: I just think there's two totally different ideas of what
a woman.
Speaker 2: Is or should be. And I think that's the problem.
Speaker 1: You know, whether you want to lean into your god
given design as a woman and understand your cycle better
and understand your body better and do you know, do
the things that you as a woman were designed to do,
but you know, be more in tune with your body
and understand it, or whether you want to suppress all
of those things and basically functionally live as a man.
And I think, you know, I agree with you in theory,
but I think you know, you look at the last
election and we definitely have a work cut out for
us because you have you have one major political party.
You know, look at Kamala Heir Versus campaign. Her entire
campaign pitch was I'm not Donald Trump and abortion rights
and like that was it. Those were her only two
things that she was effectively campaigning on. And it's like,
you know, she got almost half the vote, you know,
not quite like it was a pretty not that type
of an election. But but you have this many people
who are willing to say, yes, that is the camp.
You know, that is the message that I that I
co sign, And so you know, that's a very different
picture of womanhood than what I believe in, you know,
And so that's that's a tough, a tough chasm to overcome.
But we have to help women understand the beauty of
a real femininity, not feminism, but femininity.
Speaker 2: This is very different.
Speaker 4: And that's why when you ask, it's like that is
that is my warning is like feminism will destroy civilization.
Speaker 3: I think as we. I mean it could if women.
Speaker 4: Don't understand their role and their place and not in
a demeaning way, not like know your place, but know
who you are and know what you were designed to do.
And no, and if you choose not to have a child,
or if life doesn't bring you that, that's that's fine.
I mean that that's my story, you know. But I
still understand what's best for society and what's best for
civilization is for me to to.
Speaker 3: Kind of understand my womanhood.
Speaker 4: And as much as I am kind of what you
would think like to be a liberal woman, single and
independent and have a job and a house and all
these things, it's like, yeah, but I also, you know,
want to lean into being being a servant and being
you know, what's the submissive, you know, submitting. I think
that that really triggers women and that word submission. But
when you understand it the way Christ means it and
the way you submit to Christ and be submissive to Christ,
it puts in a whole new light.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 4: I think they're right to be triggered by that word
without the understanding of what that kind of love does
to somebody and how it transforms you to be submissive
to that kind of love, and without that Christian understanding
of submission.
Speaker 3: I get it. You know, you're submitting to another human,
you're submitting to a man.
Speaker 4: But the way, the way I started to change my
thinking of relationship as it, you know, within Christ's boundaries
and within a Christian construct, it really made me see
my whole life differently.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Amen, honestly because it's not just submitting, you know. Culture
has really given that a negative connotation even though it's not.
But it's surrender and there's so much freedom and surrender.
Speaker 3: Or thank you.
Speaker 4: I keep thinking, there's a wonderful article that I'd love
for you to read, and she actually does an audio
interview with Rusty Reno from First Things.
Speaker 3: I haven't read the book yet, but.
Speaker 4: Her essay in First Things is called Declaration of Dependence. Okay,
the Dignity of dependence a feminist manifesto, okay, and I
think I started listening to it, and it's exactly like,
it's this weird because America has this pick yourself up
by your bootstraps independence, but that's not how we're meant
to live. And I don't think that's what they actually meant.
It was independence from tyranny, it was independence.
Speaker 3: From the government.
Speaker 4: It wasn't independence from each other. It wasn't independence from men,
it wasn't independence from family. These are not restrictions on
your life. These are what you were born for, and
that dependence on family, on your community, on your churches.
The more we move away from that, the more dystopian
we get. And I really appreciate her framing of it.
She's a Catholic, so within that construct and like you said,
that surrender, that trust of each other, I think we've
lost that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: I'll definitely read that or listen to it, whichever way
it's whichever format. So, Jennifer, I realize that we're like
at a time here, So before I let you go,
I'm just gonna hit you with rapid fire. A couple
of like personal questions. So this will this will take
us out. What is one health and beauty product you
can't live without.
Speaker 3: Oil of any kind?
Speaker 4: Castor oil, Jehovah oil, almond oil oil, okay, oil.
Speaker 1: Oil, just beef tallow count as oil the Greek and
me says no, okay, okay, fair enough. What's your favorite
restaurant in Washington.
Speaker 3: D c oh?
Speaker 2: I think Alma, Okay, what is that?
Speaker 4: It's an Italian restaurant. I don't know the name. I
am not familiar with. I'm not very because I live
kind of.
Speaker 2: Far parachute in you parachute in parashoot In.
Speaker 4: But it's an Italian restaurant, like an author I took Italian.
But she uses no seed oils. It's very Maha friendly.
Even they're Kompari. I'm a big I love Kompari. I
love bits and yeah, their kampari is like not made
with red dye whatever. I was like, okay, that's that's
that might be a bridge too far, but it's fine.
Speaker 3: I'll take it.
Speaker 4: So so I do like my Negroni's and they're excellent.
Speaker 3: It's really good food.
Speaker 4: I don't you might have to I don't know about
DC restaurants. I lived in New York for four years too.
It's like, eh, compared to New York, it's like, nothing's
that good.
Speaker 2: Well, if you can find Amaha Friendly restaurant, I mean
that's a that's a the rough.
Speaker 3: I think it's near. Gosh, there's a Whole Foods nearby.
I don't know the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if anybody's in DC, you can look it up
and find it. And Okay, you're a fitness group guru.
What is your current favorite way to exercise?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Gosh, I hate to say it, but the peloton. It's
just so convenient and I just keep up with my
pilates routines.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: What is your guilty pleasure show or food? Either one
show like a television show like television, guilty pleasure television
or food? You can take it either route. I'm a lot.
Speaker 3: I don't watch TV. So diet Doctor Pepper.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, don't tell them. You had to admit that
on the Kylie, I just lost my guard. What are
you reading right now?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I'm reading multiple things.
Speaker 2: It's your favorite thing you're reading right now?
Speaker 3: I can't even remember.
Speaker 4: Gosh, it's a Victor Davis Hanson book.
Speaker 3: It's on citizenship.
Speaker 4: The Dying Say the dying say Yes, Victor Davis Hanson.
It's taken me a while to get through it because
I'm simultaneously reading a fiction book. I need good ideas,
So someone please send me ideas for good fiction book.
Speaker 3: I read too much like Maha health stuff. It's not good.
Speaker 2: It gets you in that spiral. Yeah, you gotta get
out of that, and.
Speaker 4: Then you really dart to do. Start thinking like everything
I do is bad for me.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna die tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Yes, not a good place to be. Yeah, that's when
you crack a diet, doctor Pepper and just take a.
Speaker 3: Deep less and take a breath.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, Well everybody else should be reading
Jennifer Galardi's work everywhere, but she's got a lot of
stuff published at The Federalist. Definitely check it out. Jennifer,
thank you so much for your time today. It was
really awesome sitting down with you and just picking your
brain and hearing more of your story. Truly a pleasure,
and I hope to have you back again.
Speaker 3: I would love it. Kylie, this was so much fun,
so easy to talk to.
Speaker 1: You always always, thank you so much. For tuning into
this week's episode of The Kylie Cast. I will be
right back here next week with more so until then,
just remember the truths.
Speaker 2: But it won't kiel Y