Fox News Podcasts launched a new show called “the Girls” this week, with its debut episode tackling the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, the political activism of children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel, and one host’s personal account of grief.
The podcast features a rotating group of women from news, politics, sports, comedy and culture. Thursday’s first episode brought together Fox News personalities Harris Faulkner, Rachel Campos-Duffy and Kat Timpf, along with Melissa DeRosa, who served as secretary to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Samantha Ponder, a former ESPN host.
Much of the conversation centered on Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman charged with murdering her three young children. Her trial ended in a mistrial last month.
“If I’m a mom and this has been done to my kids, I want this woman put away forever,” Ponder said in a preview clip. “You can say things were hard, [but] you still gotta be in prison.”
The hosts also disagreed over whether Ms. Rachel, the popular children’s entertainer, is a problematic figure for young viewers because of her political views. Timpf defended her, while Faulkner raised concerns about how much parents actually know about the politics of entertainers their children watch.
“Is Ms. Rachel bad for kids? I don’t think it’s that deep,” Timpf said. “She just sings songs… I still listen to Michael Jackson. Where do you draw the line? I grew up listening to Nirvana. I love Kurt Cobain. I wore flannel. I’ve yet to shoot up heroin.”
Faulkner pushed back, arguing that parents should be aware of the positions entertainers take publicly.
“When she says she wants to do away with ICE, when she says that she’s more for letting those people come across our border illegally, when she says those things — why do I know that about her?” Faulkner said.
A personal turn
The episode also shifted to a more somber topic when Timpf spoke about losing her father shortly before she became pregnant with her second child.
“Not to make it weird, but I think about death pretty much all the time because my dad died,” Timpf said.
Timpf said she had talked to her father the morning he died, and later learned from a doctor she had never met that he suffered an aortic dissection after going to the hospital for what he thought was a stomach ache. She described him as someone intensely focused on his own health, which made the loss harder to make sense of.
“He was very fit. He would not drink out of a plastic water bottle,” Timpf said. “When he died, he was going up north for a day of sailing.”
Timpf also noted that her mother died before turning 60, and that she herself battled cancer during her first pregnancy. The combination of losses, she said, left her uncertain about how much control people really have over their health or fate.
“I almost learned the wrong lesson of like, ‘What can you do?'” she said. “Do I want to live forever? I’m scared so much to die.”
“the Girls” is available on Fox News Digital, Apple, Spotify, YouTube and other podcast platforms.
