August 06, 2012 06:35 PM UTC

Internet podcaster "Mad Jen" stays calm in interview with Colorado State Senate candidate

• 0 Comments
• by: Jason Salzman

If you’ve ever listened to “Mad Jen’s” internet radio podcast, you know she doesn’t interview many political candidates or politicians. Among other things, she’s too mad.

“I put my faith in ‘We the People,’ not so much in elected officials,” she emailed me recently when I asked why. “My favorite elected officials are long dead and were mostly from Virginia.”

So it was a bit of a surprise recently to find Colorado Senate District 28 candidate John Lyons on Mad Jen’s show.

Given Mad Jen’s feelings about politicians, it was kind of funny that Lyons, right off the bat, had no answer to Mad Jen’s first question, about whether there is “ever a time” when “abortion should be allowed.” Lyons offered pieces of his thoughts to Mad Jen, but he never put them together to form an opinion.

In cases of rape and incest, he told Mad Jen, “I struggle with this issue.”

“I would hope a woman would choose to bring the child to term,” he said, “but I don’t know.”

In the end, he had no answer.

“And so, I wrestle with this, in what instances does abortion, you know, make sense?” Lyons told Mad Jenn. “You understand what I’m saying? And I struggle with that, and I haven’t quite got it.”

Mad Jen definitely understood what Lyons was saying, but she elected not to try to help him do any soul-searching on her radio show.

“It’s not my place to help you along with that,” she said, as if she were scolding a neighborhood kid who lost his baseball mitt, as my own son did yesterday.

“It’s just my place to get your views,” she told Lyons. “But I do encourage you to sit down with some of your supporters and talk this through. Because I think if you sit down and have a good, long conversation with some of them, the issue would become a lot more clear to you and it would be easier for you to stand out and talk pretty solidly about it.”

In an email, I asked Mad Jen, who said she interviewed Lyons at the suggestion of a friend who works for him, if she’d followed up with Lyons, to find out if he’d chatted with pro-life supporters as she suggested.

“I have not checked back with him,” she emailed me. “I would be interested to find out if he’s continued to search for and refine his personal stance on abortion.”

“It’s nearly impossible to tell who real conservatives are until they make it into office and start working,” she wrote. “The [Lyons] interview was for the sake of my audience, and I will leave it for them to decide whether or not he’s a true conservative.”

Mad Jen’s email was signed “WarHawk,” and I asked her if this was her real name. Would she tell me her real name for my article?

“I’m just a regular person,” she answered. “Mother, Wife, daughter, sister who wishes to leave our great nation to my children in better shape than it was when I received it.”

Why does she go by Mad Jen?

“My brand is ‘MADASHECC,” she wrote. “Therefore, I’m ‘Mad Jen.’ But MADASHECC started because I was mad as heck at what’s happening in our nation, and I felt I had to do something about it, so…I started MADASHECC. (Moms’ and Dads’ Associated Society Helping to Educate Conservative Constitutionalists)”

“I don’t necessarily operate as a news source. My goal is education and brining something educational to the discussion,” she wrote. “Often times, what I talk about on the show, I was interested in learning about myself, so I researched the topic and published my findings into a show. I never claim to be the authority on the various subjects that I speak about, though I make great attempts to learn as much as I can, and have everything I talk about be as factual as I can determine it to be.”

Mad Jen promotes her views on her podcast, which airs live on the internet on Saturdays, and social media. Her website contains an extensive archive of her internet podcasts.