Making Friends With Alex Clark
Or: how to have a conversation that upsets everyone.
If you’ve been following the recent upheavals in national discourse about freedom of speech, and the “right” and wrong ways to practice politics, you may have come across the name Alex Clark. Clark is one of the leading voices in Turning Point USA’s network of right-wing podcasts (she calls her listeners “cuteservatives”). And in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, she’s been getting lots of play beyond her normal bubble.
Clark’s show, Culture Apothecary, tends to be less explicitly political than other Turning Point podcasts. As a host, she’s much more focused on what she calls “wellness.” Though she voted for Trump all three times, it was Covid vaccine anxiety and RFK Jr’s MAHA movement that prompted Clark to center her podcast on food and gender issues. Recent episode titles include: Milk, Red Meat, and Real Bread: Are Biblical Foods the Missing Key to Wellness?, Why Coffee Wrecks Your Sex Life, Reverse Cellulite Naturally, & Eat Dinner Earlier, and How to Nag Less & Let Him Lead: Wife School with Tilly Dillehay.
Since Clark partnered with Kirk and Turning Point, the group has positioned her as a right-wing model of female empowerment. Earlier this year, she headlined Turning Point’s Young Women’s Leadership Conference, where she gave a keynote speech entitled “The Top Four Lies of Modern Feminism.” Clark is a bit of a paradox: a charismatic, ambitious, single woman who dedicates much of her work to advocating for women to get married, submit to their husband’s authority, and stay home with their children.
In the last year or so, Clark’s national profile has risen significantly. She was recently anointed one of Kirk’s heirs apparent by the Wall Street Journal. If you’re a regular viewer of Fox News (an admittedly unlikely scenario based on what I know about this email list), you’ve probably seen her popping up a lot as a talking head, offering opinions on everything from the soul of the nation to the essence of womanhood.
But! A few weeks before this recent round of publicity, Clark gave an extensive interview to me.
She wasn’t on a publicity tour or anything - one of our producers at KJZZ’s The Show just happened to notice that Clark lives in Scottsdale, a few miles from the radio station. It’s hardly out of the ordinary for us to invite local influential figures to sit for interviews (though we’ve often found it difficult to convince folks in the Turning Point orbit to agree). So we reached out, assuming Clark would turn us down.
And then…she said yes.
As I began my prep for the interview, I puzzled over how to approach the conversation. Clark’s vaccine skepticism, traditionalist views on sex and gender roles, and MAGA political leanings are pretty well documented, and it didn’t seem productive or interesting to invite her on our show simply to challenge her to defend years of controversial positions. But as I was reading up on her, a comment from a 2024 Vanity Fair interview caught my eye:
The biggest mistake of political media today is that they are not focused on rapport. They’re too focused on data and statistics. We need to learn how to become friends first, because people are going to trust us more when we do share statistics with them.
Given Clark’s aforementioned controversial positions, which tend to frame cultural issues in the framework of “us versus them,” I was intrigued by this notion of building bridges. How, I wondered, did Clark see her podcast serving that goal? So, when we sat down to talk, that’s where I started. And after the conversation aired, I was fascinated by the reaction - both from our audience, and from Clark herself.
A number of KJZZ listeners wrote in to express outrage that we’d had Clark on at all. To them, the segment was of a piece with Morning Edition’s interview with Dave Portnoy back in June, or Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Which is to say: a misguided attempt to seek common ground with conservatives at best, and a groveling attempt to stave off further torment from the Trump administration by making nice with the “other side” at worst. Some listeners felt I gave Clark too much leeway to express her opinions.
Interestingly, in her Instagram posts from the day the segment aired, Clark herself used the exact same “other side” language. She seemed to have concluded that our invitation of an interview was a ruse. She felt we’d instead lured her into a debate in which she didn’t fare well.
For my part, I went in to the conversation feeling, as I mentioned above, like there were core elements of Alex Clark’s persona that didn’t seem to fit together. If nothing else, I came away from this conversation with a clearer understanding of where she’s coming from, and why she’s able to compel a vast audience with her arguments. I think that’s valuable, even if the conversation itself was vexing and occasionally combative. I hope you’ll give it a listen, and tell me what you think…
I’ll admit that I immediately reacted with “whhhhhhhyyyyyy are you doing this??????” Even though I am someone who believes that part of why we lost our way is that we can no longer speak to humans with different views. I’ll return with more thoughts after I listen!