The Karol Markowicz Show: Brittany Hughes: The Disturbing Culture Behind the Lindsay Clancy Reaction

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Why are you dealing with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. How about something about a comedic tone? What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi. Welcome back to the Carol Marco with Show on I Heart Radio. My guest today is Brittany Hughes, conservative commentator and podcaster. Hi, Brittany. So nice to have you on. Hi, Carol. Thanks for having me. So I only recently started following you. And I thought you were super interesting. And I was like, I have to have her on my show.

1:00But I have to admit, I don't know that much about you. So tell me about yourself. How did you get into this thing of ours? Oh, my goodness. That is more of a God story than a me story, honestly. So I got my start really in college as a journalist. Just kind of fell in love with it. Writing for the student newspaper was something that I just had time to do. And thought it was interesting. And it immediately knew that I wanted to do something in that space. And so a couple years out of college, I ended up landing a job at a newspaper. If you can believe it, I know we like don't even know what those things are anymore. But it was actually a problem in the post. But yeah, I mean, I don't think we'll do something like those are newspapers are. It was printed up and delivered to people's doors. It was a whole big crazy thing. And it was in this small little town in some of the places where you can see the little town in southern Virginia. And I was the business and politics reporter. And I also covered uranium. If you can believe it, there's like a uranium deposit.

2:00There is very interesting. Okay. And just absolutely fell in love with it. You would not believe the kind of mess and corruption that can actually go down in a small town of 50,000 people. Where was the small town? It was Danville, Virginia. Right on the border of North Carolina. Like you went 15 minutes south and you were in North Carolina. Wow. And it was it was so much fun. And I absolutely loved it. And after about a year there, I knew I wanted to make my way to DC because that's like. Sure. That's like the whole house to go. Yeah. You know, and so I ended up coming across a job posting for the Media Research Center, which I currently am still. And I thought there's absolutely no way that these people are going to ever pick my resume out of a lineup. But I'll just apply, see what happens. It was for an investigative reporter covering Capitol Hill, which. As a small town newspaper reporter, that's like that's not the jump that you make.

3:01Right. Right. Yes. And so I just threw it out there and a couple days later I got a call and ended up coming up for an interview and landing that job. And I mean, just completely out of nowhere. And after about a year in that position, I made the shift to multimedia. Social media was just kind of becoming a thing. Video platforms were becoming a thing. And I thought, well, hey, instead of just writing things, maybe I can say it. Right. And that's where we started doing videos. And it just kind of took off from there. So what kind of topics do you feel like are your beat? Do you have something in specific that you like to cover? So that's actually kind of changed over the years. So the first, the first things that I covered were primarily strictly political, you know, lots of immigration. I spent time at the border as an investigative journalist. And so I felt like I had a lot of things to say in that space. Very strongly pro life. That's always been a topic and a passion of mine.

4:02But then as I've kind of grown and as I became a wife and I became a mother, cultural topics really started to become of even more interest to me, especially how they intersect with parenting and raising kids in this absolutely insane world. And so I think that if you kind of look, I've gravitated more in that direction over the past few years. Because I think that's incredibly important. And is your audience responsive to that change? Do they expect more like Capitol Hill coverage from you? Or are they happy with your cultural shift? No, I think they're absolutely happy. I mean, the growth that I have seen over my social media pages, over even just the last year has been really quite astronomical. I think people care about political topics. It's not that they're not important. They absolutely are. People care about the economy. They care about immigration. They care about it deeply. They do. But a lot of the cultural things, particularly with this push on the left towards just more and more radical positions,

5:04they're starting to see the effects of those things in their own lives in the stories that they go to, and the things that their kids are watching. That's a war that is currently being waged in people's homes. And so people definitely want to hear about that. Do you have something specific in the cultural wars that you like to target? That kind of depends on the week and sort of what the hot button issue is. There's not a whole lot of things that I'm not going to have an opinion on honestly. Obviously, the push to erase womanhood and the push to just make these insane space out of gender and confusing children is incredibly deeply impactful. I have a son. I have a daughter and trying to navigate that as a parent. I mean, we've already come up against just in my own personal life having to talk to my four-year-old in preschool because there was a child in class who seemed to be exploring whether he was a different gender.

6:07How do you explain that to your four-year-old? If I don't understand it, how in the world is she going to understand it? Right. So, you know, those kinds of things again, as they start to impact you personally and you start to realize, look, we need to have these conversations. I think that's kind of where I've been going over the past couple years. Did you always want to be in journalism like when you were a child or a teenager? When I was a child, I wanted to be a pop star. I mean, not so much time. I mean, not so much time. I knew you knew. Nobody needs that. I'll just put it that way. Nobody's asking for that. I think I've definitely found my bent in another direction. So, I think that after I started writing in college is where I really decided that that's what I wanted to do. I originally went to college to study pre-law and for an abundance of reasons, just decided that that was not the track. And I graduated with a degree in English and I remember thinking, you know, I loved journalism.

7:13At the same time, I wasn't quite sure exactly where I wanted to take that because thinking ahead, I remember thinking, I don't really want to start a career that if I end up having a family later, I mean, they're going to have to put it all aside or I'm going to have to go whole hog into it and never see my family. And so, really, the amazing thing about the track that my life has taken is the ability to do it from home, which was always a really important thing to me. Yeah, I did a fellowship at Hillsdale like two years ago and I taught a class of college kids and all the women were asking, how do you find a job that lets you balance family and work? Yeah. I think conservatives need to be ready with some answers to that because it is very much also like the women were asking that, like men were not like, hey, how do I find a job to work at home? It's just different. But women want to be home with their kids, but they also want careers and it's a time in our history where that's very possible.

8:17I wish conservatives would kind of talked about that more to young women. Do you be like that? Absolutely. And I definitely think that where there's a will, there's a way. What I always tell women, because I've had multiple women ask me, how in the world is it that you have a career, but you get to work from home? That has to, first of all, it has to be intentional. You have to know that that's what you want and you have to make intentional moves in that direction. Now, you know, the way that it has worked in my life is there's definitely things that God has brought about in my life that I can take no credit or responsibility for, but I did set my feet on a path for a reason. My husband and I, we made a decision very early on. This is what we wanted life to look like at the same time. If you do want a career, if you do want to do something with a degree that I know you worked very hard for and don't necessarily just want to leave it in a pile of dust in a room somewhere, you can absolutely find that. The other thing I tell women though is you can't have it all, but you might not be able

9:17to have it all at once. What a career may look like in the space when your kids are younger, maybe part time, it may be flexible hours. It might not be quite the money that you would want to make. There may be elements of it that are not just a whole hog, 100 percent, you know, petal to the metal career, but you can have that. You just have to make choices on where your priorities are and where you're going to put your eggs, so to say. What would you be doing if this hadn't worked out? If MRC hadn't picked your resume out of the pile, what would have been a plan B? That's kind of a harder question because really, I've never spent a whole lot of time thinking about that. My life follows a plan that was definitely written by somebody much bigger than me. I know that I was supposed to get that job. I know that I was supposed to meet my husband. I know that I was supposed to have the children that I had. I don't think I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would have done.

10:19I did spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, if I can't work from home, if this doesn't work out, or if I have to make a choice between family and career, I can tell you what I would probably be doing is I would be a state-home mom, at least in this stage of my life. I'm very blessed that I get to do what I do though and to do both. It's very cool. I love that you phrase it like that. It was the path you were supposed to be on and that God put you here and that's just the way it is. It's a very interesting answer because I mean, people had they have plan Bs. They're like, oh, I've this hadn't worked out. I would have done this. This hadn't worked out. I would have done this. But you're like, this was the way it was supposed to be and I really love the way you phrase that. You know, I'm not sure how else I would even look at it because thinking back, I'm not sure I had a plan B. I think I just had whatever the next step was going to be.

11:19What are you most proud of in your life? My kids 100%. That's not even close. My kids are the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. I think that's what's made a lot of the discourse over the past week or two. So incredibly different or difficult. The internet for as much time as I spend on it because of what I do. As obviously you know, because you're you're in much the same space. It can be a very dark and discouraging place. Right. I mean, the Clancy trial, right? The Clancy trial, but also really not not even the Clancy trial. It's where it went on social media. I think that you can absolutely have questions concerning that case concerning, you know, the legality of, you know, what is insanity? How do you go about determining that? What is the jury being asked to do? All of those things. But where it went on social media was so many women just actively disparaging motherhood and making it seem like this total nightmare that you get dragged into and that you have

12:22to like gut your way out throughout the day. And it's so sad for me to watch that. And I wish that I could reach out to women like that. And, and you know, what is going on in your life that makes you feel that way? Because yeah, there's some hard days like I'm not going to lie. My person went through a heck of a sleep regression around month five. And I mean, I don't know. I don't know. It's seeing pink unicorns or whatever. Like you can go through that. But I mean, my kids are the greatest joy and the greatest joy to their dad and they are hands down. If they do, if they do something that makes my life absolutely pale in comparison, that is the proudest I will ever be. You're so right where the internet and just the general grotesque behavior around this trial has been surprising to even, you know, I've been around for a while. I've seen some really terrible things. And this was really something unique in its awfulness because it also comes on the heels

13:23of like, you know, the shooting of Brian Thompson and, and, and, and, this killer becoming a celebrity and, and all of that. And it's like, what is going on with our society, especially with women that his women are standing outside of Luigi's courthouse, mengy on his courthouse and, or, or outside, plant his courthouse and saying that they're on the murderer side, like something deep and dark is going on. And look, I, again, like you said, did I have three kids? Was it hard when they were little? Like, do my husband and I have a joke where I would text him and be like, come get your children. And, and I think we've all texted that at some point or another. Right. But it's like I, I still would never, I'm forget about me harming them. I would never celebrate or even understand somebody harming their own children. Like, you can't handle your kids. Give them a for adoption, you know, give them to a family member. Like, the idea that like, oh, she had no choice but to kill murder her own children.

14:25It's just, it's so sick and it's scary that this is where we are. Yeah. It is. And I think it's, it's sick when you look at her case in isolation. It's even more sick when you look at the number of women that I can't even say are saying that they relate to her. I mean, you're talking about a defensive postpartum psychosis, right? By polar, over medication, all of this stuff. You know, that's not something that the average woman I don't think can relate to. Can we relate to postpartum struggles? Maybe even postpartum depression? Absolutely. But you're talking about deep psychological issues. If you believe her, right, that she was supposedly struggling with. I think my question is not so much why do you think you can relate to her? It's why do you want to be able to relate to her? Why is this? Why is this a trend? This is the new me too. It's really a baffling phenomenon. And I think what you're seeing with a lot of women, particularly more left-leaning white women, but I think it can happen to pretty much any woman is, you know, you have all of this God designed, very natural, maternal empathy and compassion and the desire to nurture

15:31and the desire to soothe. And I think where that's being misdirected, you see it whether it's, you know, fighting ice in the street in defense of, you know, an illegal alien child predator or the Luigi Mangioni's or, you know, whatever, it's this misdirected mothering instinct that makes them think they have identified a victim of an oppressive system that they now have to go fight for. And it's a natural instinct that's being twisted in a wrong direction. That's absolutely right. Brittany, give us a five-year-old prediction. How do you think things are going to go? It could be about anything art, music, the world, politics, anything you want. You know, I think that generally speaking, particularly with what we've been discussing and the things that I tend to, the things that I tend to do my videos on, I don't mean to be a negative Nancy because I do think there's light at the end of the tunnel. I think that things may have to get worse before they get better. I'm deeply concerned about the rise of socialist sympathies and outright communist sympathies

16:38among many people, particularly the younger generation. I think that a lot of our higher education institutions have become breeding grounds for just really terrible channels of thought. And so I'm very concerned about what I see and the fact that we are so incredibly divided. I mean, as the Bible says, a house divided against itself cannot stand, right? There's no way for people to be going into opposite directions and yet continue together. At the same time, I have been so incredibly encouraged by what I've seen among conservative young people and the passion and the energy they have for their principles and they're willing to put action behind that. And so I definitely think that we are, we are in for a bit of a slog, but if any country can come through it with resilience, it's the United States of America. So is the prediction things get worse before they're better? I think in the next five years, I think that we're going to have to continue to see

17:41flirtations with socialism and watch it fail abysmaly in order for people to recognize what it is. Because right now, if you ask young people what is socialism, what is communism, they're giving a very idyllic answer that really is not at all true at all. And so we're going to have to look at places like New York City and see how it all falls apart and be able to point to that. And I think education there is going to be the key. There was a joke like a woman said socialism is I get to tend my garden and not go to work or something like that. And your garden, comrade, you know, they don't really know what it is. It's not what they think it is. I also sometimes think this about the right though that I think that a lot of the populist stuff, and I, you know, some of it I approve of, but like a lot of the economic stuff doesn't make sense either. It's like I want more of an explanation of what people are trying to say with it.

18:43Yeah. I'll give you a prime example. One of the things that I think doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me is the people on the right who are particularly isolationist. I'm not saying that there is not merit to a conversation about how much money we should be sending overseas or, you know, should we be protecting our interests before we worry about everybody else's or that's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about this idea that we exist unto ourselves to the total exclusion of the rest of the world. It's just simply not how the planet works. And so again, I think that when you have these ideas in your head, but they're not really thought through to a logical exclusion or weighed against history, that's where you start getting in trouble. Absolutely. Brittany, I have loved this conversation and where could people find you? So you can find me over on X. I still call it Twitter half the time, but over on F2 and Real Brute Hughes. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram under Real Brute Hughes and I'm over at mrctv.org.

19:46Love it. Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives. If there was one thing that I, that I could tell you that will vastly improve your life above all else, it is to surrender it to Jesus Christ, 100%. You can try to get through your life just winging it and doing the best you can and hoping that it all works out. But when you turn your life over to the Lord, He is going to do something with it that is so much bigger, so much more impactful, so much more beyond your wildest dreams, you could never do it yourself. So as long as you're following His path for you and not just whatever your instincts are, you know, you hear all the time, follow your own happiness. So happiness is fleeting. Happiness can be attached to all kinds of trivial things. That's not joy. Joy comes from following His purpose for you and it's an eternal purpose that extends just beyond this life.

20:46So that's where you start. Everything else on top of that is going to be great. That's beautiful. She is Brute Hughes. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed this. Thanks for having me. Why are you listening to Armstrong and Ketting on Demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on Demand on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.