No slouch on the couch

I work on the weekends, so during the week I’m at home with my kids. I try to use that time to catch up on family time and housework. On Saturday I wake up for Fox & Friends around 2:45 a.m., I’m in my car by around 3:15, I’m at the studio by 4:15, I’m in hair and makeup till around 5:15. I’m prepping in the car and in the studio, reading all the stories, and then I have about forty-five minutes to gather my thoughts, write some notes, get dressed and get onto the set. It’s a pretty intense, but really fun four-hour live show, and it flies by.

We have nine kids, aged from twenty-two to two years old. The older two don’t live with us, though one of them is visiting right now, but all the others are still in the house. It’s really busy. On the weekends, my teenagers are just starting to get up when I come home from work. It’s hard cause I don’t want to be tired. I feel guilty, I want to be with them, I don’t want to take naps. What I love about my job is that for most of the time while I am working, they’re sleeping. As a mom, I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

Fox is very transparent about what’s hard news, which are opinion shows and which are hybrid shows. Everyone knows that Fox & Friends is a hybrid of opinion and hard news. We report the news, we comment on it and we debate back and forth. Bret Baier gives you the straight news. At Fox, we don’t pretend that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are hard news: they use elements of the news, they definitely do some reporting, but they’re very transparent that they’re giving an opinion about it. The difference with the New York Times and some of these other outlets is, they’re editorializing, but they’re doing it in a way that they want you to think they’re not. I believe transparency is key to what viewers want and expect. I like that Fox is not being duplicitous about that.

The First Lady’s office was upset at me when I said that Jill Biden knows her husband is in mental decline. I said what I thought. First of all, there’s no way a married woman wouldn’t know if her husband was in decline, so there’s no way Jill doesn’t know. And then, as a former political spouse — my husband, Sean Duffy, was a Wisconsin congressman from 2011 to 2019 — I’m the only person who loves and cares about my husband with absolutely no angle other than I want what’s best for him. If I saw my husband in mental decline of the sort that Joe Biden showed during the 2020 campaign — the media didn’t want to talk about it, but everyone could see what was happening — well, she surely knew. She let him do that, and he’s made some very embarrassing mistakes. Secondly, if my husband was in decline, I’d want to spend that time with him. I wouldn’t want to share him or put him in a stressful situation where he could decline even more rapidly because it’s just too much. It’s very clear he’s not able to handle the rigors of his job.

You learn a lot as a political spouse. The spouse usually lives in the district and can see things coming three weeks before the member of staff in DC see them. There is a bubble effect, and you have to say, “Hey, you guys aren’t seeing that this is what’s happening in the district and this is what people are saying at the grocery store and the hair salon.” And you learn so much just by having a spouse who comes home and tells you what’s happening on the ground with your constituents. When there’s a government shutdown, spouses are calling their husbands and saying, “Get home! It’s Christmas!” These are human beings who have families. The wives are saying, “Get home, I’m tired, I’ve been with the kids for five weeks while you’re sitting in Washington trying to get this deal done!”

Macho men get a lot of play in people’s thinking about Hispanics, but Hispanic households are very matriarchal. Hispanics in general start businesses at three times the rate of any other Americans, and Hispanic women are the fastest-growing entrepreneurs in America right now. The pandemic has deeply and disproportionately hurt Hispanics. It was very frustrating for them to watch the big guys — the Walmarts, the Home Depots — all those people could stay open, but their little restaurant, their little shop closed.

There’s also the inequity in so many of the mandates. A lot of Hispanics are in service industries. There’s this weird thing that we have in our country, where the “servant class” wears masks at the restaurant and everybody else somehow can’t spread Covid because they have more money or they’re more sophisticated. I’ve lived in Latin America, and I’ve never seen more classist societies than those. Hispanics came to America to avoid that kind of class division. In America, we’re supposed to be equal.

Hispanics care about education and school choice. They are absolutely horrified at what they’re seeing, whether it’s critical race theory or the low standards of good education in public schools. These are big issues to Hispanics. They see themselves very much as part of the working class, and as liberals and Democrats continue to focus on issues that matter to upper-class elites such as climate change, you’re seeing a real chasm open up. Republicans have an opportunity, thanks to Donald Trump and other forces, to really be the champions of the working class.

Rachel Campos-Duffy cohosts Fox & Friends Weekend, hosts Moms on Fox Nation, cohosts From the Kitchen Table on Fox News Radio and is the co-author with her husband of All American Christmas. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2022 World edition.