The response from all of y’all was overwhelming. You didn’t just agree (or disagree, for that matter) with the advice. You told us what it actually feels like out there right now.

The playing field was never level

One of the most-liked comments in the thread came from Kelsey, who grew up in a blue collar family and eventually became a lawyer. She pushed back on the networking advice that feels so natural to some.

“In my experience, the culture in blue collar communities views interpersonal relationships as relationships. Either you enjoy another person's company or you don't and avoid them! You don't think about how someone can help you. (But you sure as hell offer help, whether labor or money, when you have a relationship with someone who is struggling but not asking for help.)”

Beth replied that Kelsey had given her words for her own experience. Dozens of you agreed. The thread that followed was a masterclass in how class shapes career — from not understanding internships (”I didn’t understand working for free”), to missing the unspoken social codes that some people absorb from birth.

If you’ve ever felt like everyone else got a manual you didn’t receive, you’re not imagining it. The manual exists. It just wasn’t distributed equally.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Babbel

Learn a new Language and get up to 60% off your subscription at Babbel.com/PANTSUITNEWSLETTER

The “safe” paths aren’t safe anymore

If the networking conversation revealed old inequities, the job search stories revealed new ones. And they weren’t just about entry-level workers.

One person shared that a family member with a “safe” degree cannot get an interview. Another wrote that their spouse’s position was eliminated and they have applied across completely different fields. Most applications, she said, feel like they disappear into a hole.

A member described her son graduating with a master’s in data science from a prestigious university — someone who, by any traditional measure, “did everything right” — who can’t get past an AI screening call.

Which brings us to the robots.

Multiple members flagged what might be the most disorienting development in an already disorienting market: AI is now the first gatekeeper for most applications, and it doesn’t reward qualifications. It rewards keywords. One member shared a study showing that AI screeners actually show a preference for resumes written with the same large language model the employer is using — but applicants have no way of knowing which one that is.

But here’s what Kim wants you to know

When Kim Miller — our guest — saw the thread filling up with these stories, she showed up in the comments.

“I just don’t think we need more fear right now,” she wrote. “I teach undergraduate students, and so many of them have already secured jobs. It is possible.”

Kim’s point throughout the episode — and in the thread — wasn’t that the market is fine. It’s that the skills which have always mattered most are the ones hardest to automate and hardest to screen out: genuine relationships, broad problem-solving ability, a track record of showing up and contributing. The students she sees succeeding aren’t necessarily the ones with the most prestigious degrees. They’re the ones who collected experiences, built real relationships with professors and mentors, and learned how to communicate their value to another human being.

That’s cold comfort if you’re currently staring at a rejection folder, or if you’re a kid who just got turned down for a summer job that used to go to anyone with a pulse. We hear you. The market is strange right now in ways that don’t show up in the unemployment rate..

We’re going to keep this conversation flowing, because - whatever the next job report might show - this issue isn’t going anywhere.

This framework has, at times, been buried or obscured by the barrage of Trump-related headlines, by the complexities of responding to a pandemic, and by attacks on the foundational components of our democratic republic. But today’s episode shows that it’s still there. We’re both worried about the government (about its slowness, its ineffectiveness, its tendency toward corruption) and the private sector (massive companies concentrating power and wealth in the hands of very few people at the expense of everyone while building tools that they don’t even entirely understand). So, Sarah is attracted to the government as the problem-solver and is with Bernie Sanders. Give the public a 50% stake in AI companies and see where we go from there. I’m more inclined toward transparency and public sentiment. As people know more about AI, they like it less. Let that discontent play out.

Outside of politics, we size up the first 6 months of 2026 by reflecting on our words for the year, which we had to look up (and that probably says it all!).

If you know someone who’s been side-eyeing the SpaceX IPO or wondering how AI ended up in their retirement account, text them this episode and tell them it’s the version where their eyes won’t glaze over. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• The SpaceX IPO and its red flags

• What going public is supposed to mean — and what it means here

• How index funds could put SpaceX in your retirement account whether you choose it or not

• President Trump's June 2 executive order on AI and cybersecurity

• Senator Sanders' proposal for a 50% public stake in AI companies

• The EU's risk-based approach to AI regulation

• Outside of Politics: words of the year, half-time report

Episode Resources

• How OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are doing ahead of their public debuts (CNN)

• The SpaceX IPO, explained (CNBC)

• How Musk’s SpaceX IPO could reach your 401(k) (LA Times)

• The EU AI Act’s risk-based framework (IBM)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:23] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:25] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, SpaceX’s initial public offering is expected to begin trading. It is one of three companies betting big on artificial intelligence and the stock market right now. Now, if those sentences make your eyes roll back in your head, we’re here to help.

[00:00:49] Sarah: Stay with us.

[00:00:50] Beth: We can do this, you guys. We’re going to talk about what it means for AI companies to go public, and really what does it mean for these companies to be accountable to anyone for their actions? And then Outside of Politics, we’re about halfway through 2026 somehow, so we’re going to do a little check-in on the year so far. Sarah asked me how my word was going this year, and I said, “I don’t remember what my word was.” So we’re going to dive into that.

[00:01:14] Sarah: Before we get started, we want to be sure you know about a very special gift Beth has created for families to celebrate America 250. Maybe your family members have seen the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, but do they know why we were, in fact, crossing the Delaware? Do they know that he and his worn-out, hungry, cold... They’re always cold. I’ve been reading books on the Revolutionary War. They are either sweltering or cold. There is no in between. In this particular instance, they were so cold they were ready to give up. They crossed on Christmas night in the snow as a Hail Mary, hoping that a victory against Hessian troops fighting for the British might put some pep in the patriotic step. She has written a short family play to help people of all ages remember and retell the story using props that you have around your house. It’s one of six stories in what we’re calling The Founders Trunk. As you tell these stories, everyone in the family signs a copy of the Declaration of Independence and receives a founder certificate because we’re still writing America’s story together. You can download the stories for free as a premium member of our Substack community. The link is in the show notes.

[00:02:22] Beth: Next up, let’s talk about artificial intelligence and the markets.

[00:02:36] Sarah: Beth, I followed this reporting lightly. I have sensed some red flags. Is that instinct good?

[00:02:43] Beth: It’s a good instinct. It’s a good instinct that you have with the red flags.

[00:02:47] Sarah: Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

[00:02:48] Beth: You know how for a long time the conservative mantra for problems in society has been, “Well, the market will regulate.” That we don’t need the government to regulate, the market will regulate. I myself have advocated for the market as the best regulator of most issues in society.

[00:03:08] Sarah: Okay, where are you at on that now?

[00:03:10] Beth: Well, I’m struggling to believe that we have a real market anymore.

[00:03:15] Sarah: Okay.

[00:03:16] Beth: And the SpaceX IPO in particular is challenging my belief in a real market.

[00:03:23] Sarah: Okay.

[00:03:24] Beth: Because as with so many things, there are increasingly wealthy-- and wealthy is not even the right word anymore

[00:03:33] Sarah: We need another word.

[00:03:35] Beth: We need another word. I’ll just use mega-wealthy for today. There are increasingly mega-wealthy people who think, “You know what? I know it’s usually done this way, but that is not my way.” So why don’t we just start there with SpaceX.

[00:03:48] Sarah: Okay.

[00:03:49] Beth: You said you’ve seen some red flags. What has grabbed your attention so far?

[00:03:53] Sarah: Well, it just feels like there’s a lot of I don’t want to follow this. I don’t want to tell you this part of the IPO. The prospectus doesn’t need this section. Also I’m just going to shove a bunch of businesses together and hope you don’t notice. Am I getting the high points right?

[00:04:11] Beth: You are, but wait, there’s more. So one thing to know is that Elon Musk has used 23 different banks in putting this together.

[00:04:21] Sarah: That’s a red flag.

[00:04:21] Beth: Now, why do you do that? You do that because you want to conflict everybody out of acting in any way that’s hostile to you, right? So that limits the number of independent research and analysis that would usually be out there about this kind of IPO because the banks are all in the deal somewhere. Also, instead of the market setting a price, which is what the market exists to do, Elon has just said it’s $135 per share, take it or leave it.

[00:04:50] Sarah: Okay.

[00:04:50] Beth: I’ve set the valuation. He’s looking for a $1.77 trillion market cap.

[00:04:56] Sarah: Why do we even need the prospectus? Should it just be his picture?

[00:04:59] Beth: I think that’s right. And honestly, if any other company tried this I think most of the world would laugh and move on. And I’m really curious to see what happens here. I think that there is this mythology around Elon Musk now where people just don’t want to bet against him.

[00:05:19] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:05:21] Beth: And he feeds into that mythology. So if you just ask yourself, what is a SpaceX? What is happening here? The prospectus is written like science fiction. It says, “SpaceX’s mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

[00:05:47] Sarah: Okay. Can we level set here? Just for all of us who aren’t exploring IPOs on a regular basis. A perspective should be like privately this is how our company has been investing, and this is how much money we’ve made. Project that out. This is the plan. This is the data to back up the plan. Correct? Am I wrong about that?

[00:06:13] Beth: This is what it costs us to do our business and this is what we make when we do it, and here’s where we’re going and why we think we can keep growing. Because that’s really what happens when you go public. When you go public, you have added all of these shareholders who now expect growth every single quarter. When you’re operating in private, you can have objectives like understanding the true nature of the universe, and you can say, “We’re going to take a big swing and we’re going to lose on that for quite some time.” But going public means I think I’ve built this thing at a way where it is just going to keep making more money for shareholders. And SpaceX today is not making that much money. There’s a lot of money involved, but the revenue in engine of SpaceX is Starlink, those internet satellites that we’ve talked about in connection with the war in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. That was SpaceX’s only profitable business last year. Those Starlink satellites have a useful life of five years. So you’ve got a really expensive cycle of having to replace equipment here.

[00:07:21] Sarah: I did not know that. Because I do believe in the business model of Starlink. Starlink is huge. Yes. It’s important. I know people who use Starlink. It’s been, like, so made him more influential than I prefer with regards to Ukraine and around the world. If this was a Starlink prospectus, I don’t think I’d get to a trillion market cap, but there would be some there.

[00:07:44] Beth: It is also a controversial business because it adds to a lot of stuff in space and countries around the world get annoyed about that. And while it is adding subscribers, its revenue per subscriber is actually down. So that’s the best part of what’s going on at SpaceX.

[00:08:02] Sarah: The best part is the part where revenue is down.

[00:08:05] Beth: Where revenue per subscriber is down.

[00:08:07] Sarah: Okay, just want to make them know.

[00:08:08] Beth: Okay. And where you know you’ve got expensive replacement costs that are going to be ongoing. It’s not like we built the thing and now the thing just runs.

[00:08:16] Sarah: Right.

[00:08:16] Beth: The thing has a shelf life, for sure. So you have that piece going on. That makes you know that a lot of this trillion-dollar valuation is in the AI side, which is just not making money. The AI side is not making money. And the multi-planetary part is if NASA is any indicator, always going to be we take big swings and sometimes they work, and a lot of times they don’t because this is all experimental.

[00:08:48] Sarah: Well, and to the artificial intelligence side because this is the first IPO, but now we have Anthropic, OpenAI getting closer and closer to filing as well. And to me this is it. The thing is, not all these big dogs are going to rise to the top. So with their filings, we see a similar pattern to me which is, first of all, they’re investing in all these data centers and stuff that don’t have an internal shelf life, right? Like they’re not going to live forever. They’re going to have to be replaced. Now, I think OpenAI and Anthropic have much better proof as far as earning money. They’re still not earning enough, but I think Anthropic’s becoming like the business choice. But they’re not only limited by the data centers and the energy, there’s all this chatter about just computing capacity. And these two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are way further down the road than Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence. And this is a market. I think it is a behemoth of a market, but everybody’s not going to survive, right? There are going to be some winners and losers in this AI race, not just between nations, but between companies. And I think we’re all just supposed to trust that because it’s Elon Musk’s name on it, it’s going to be him. Even the stuff that he has been a big winner at, like Tesla, ain’t doing so great. It’s not like he’s still the winner when it comes to electric cars. So I don’t get it. I’m just going to be honest. I don’t get it.

[00:10:19] Beth: He’s going first, and that gives him an opportunity to set the terms of the competition going forward. So in addition to setting the share price as just take it or leave it, this is the share price, he is personally going to retain eighty-five point one percent of shareholder votes. So there is a lot of I want the benefit of being public without the burden of being public here. And he has collaborators in changing the rules. So let’s take Fidelity as an example.

[00:10:50] Sarah: Okay.

[00:10:50] Beth: Fidelity has a longtime rule against putting shares of stock into small retail client portfolios during the IPO because they’re just trying to guard against the hype. Is this thing for real or is it a flash in the pan kind of situation?

[00:11:04] Sarah: Okay.

[00:11:05] Beth: So usually Fidelity would allow IPO investments only for clients who have at least $500,000 in their brokerage accounts. We’re protecting the people who have put their life savings with us, don’t know the market. We want to hedge against the risk of the IPO hype. For SpaceX, they have cut that threshold to $2,000.

[00:11:25] Sarah: Whoa.

[00:11:26] Beth: From $500,000 to $2,000 to get invested here. And the LA Times did a really excellent piece about this that we’ll link in the notes where they said this is just one example of how Wall Street has been moving the investment goalpost, in part because Elon has put everybody in the deal, so they’re all working to make sure that they get a piece of this and that this is as big as possible. And this means that a lot of us are going to end up with SpaceX in our portfolios whether we ask for it or not because managers of stock index funds have to add a stock to their holdings once it’s added to the index that they track. So SpaceX’s fortunes here could massively impact retirement accounts for ordinary people. You can think to yourself, SpaceX IPO, blah, blah, blah, don’t care, but this is reshaping how the market works in general and also will reshape some of our portfolios without our knowledge.

[00:12:24] Sarah: Well, and this is a trend that they’ve been wanting to get their hands on ordinary investors for a long time because it opens up a lot of money. It just opens up a lot. You get your hands on index funds and retirement funds that opens up a lot of money, but it also puts a lot of risk on people who can’t afford that much risk. We have a bunch of our retirement in index funds. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to be a part of this, man, but it’s hard to... the index funds have freaked me out for a long time because companies are supposed to run under the direction, and interest of the stockholders. Well, what does it mean when the stockholders or this index fund like so many layers removed from any real person or really... I think that’s why you see the increasing role of activist investors because there is a place for somebody, any kind of real human with a voice to step up and go, “This is not what we want,” and Elon’s run into this six ways to Sundays over at Tesla. So this sort of movement to get their hands into retirement accounts and pensions and funds and it’s very concerning to me, especially when there are so many red flags with this particular IPO

[00:13:33] Beth: That’s why I think it’s worth talking about. You have a sense that the rules are changing for people at the top. When you dig into those rules changing around the stability of markets, which for better and worse we have decided is the grading system for our public policy in so many ways, you just realize that it’s all getting more and more opaque and farther away from accountability. If a company can be public and one guy still has 85% of shareholder votes, what’s happening? If he can set the price like this, what’s happening? Now, OpenAI and Anthropic have done confidential filings, which means that right now they’re just soliciting feedback from regulators. They do not have to show investors all their cards. What cards will they show investors, though? If SpaceX does this really successfully, do we think that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to say, “Never mind, I’m just going to go back to the old way”?

[00:14:37] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:14:38] Beth: I don’t think so. What’s the incentive for any company to go back to the old way if they see that you can access all this new capital and retain this level of control over the thing?

[00:14:47] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:14:49] Beth: That is why I am questioning whether the market can actually regulate here. So if it’s not the market, let’s talk about some other paths to potential accountability for these companies.

[00:14:53] Sarah: Please, let’s do.

[00:14:59] Beth: From the executive branch, we get the sense that they’re still buying the market as the regulator. So the president signed an executive order on June 2nd, where he brags about slashing bureaucratic constraints and refusing to stifle innovation with overly burdensome regulation, and talks about how AI dominance for America is necessary to our security. And then he says, “Hey, guys, would you please show us your new stuff 30 days in advance so we could just chat about it?”

[00:15:43] Sarah: Yeah, not to do anything. If you show us these new models and there’s problems, I don’t know what happens next. Because all they’ve asked politely, self-regulation- I would not even call this just self-regulation. I would barely call this regulation. Just please show us, and we’re not going to say there’s any consequences if you show us something that’s concerning.

[00:16:02] Beth: I think voluntary self-regulation is the best case scenario of this order because running throughout the order is this sense that AI companies will be collaborators and partners with the government as it relates to cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is very important to me, and I can see the positive side of that sort of collaboration, but I also see a very dark side for civil liberties, for information collection, for government interference with the private market, for criminal justice. A long list of horribles parades through my mind as I think about that sort of partnership if that is where we’re headed.

[00:16:47] Sarah: Well, I hope that’s not where we’re headed, and I can’t believe that is where we’re headed when the companies themselves are like, “I don’t think self-regulation’s going to get it done.” OpenAI and Sam Altman have released several statements and policy objectives and ideas about, like, how to do this, and none of them include we’ll just try our best.

[00:17:06] Beth: It’s difficult for me to read those statements and take them at face value though because especially Sam Altman has shifted over time in the way he discusses this, and it seems like he’s surfing public opinion as he does. I think the AI companies know that they are in deep with the public right now. Public sentiment is really turning against them, and especially against the data centers. And so sometimes I read those pleas as “Don’t blame us. Blame your members of Congress who aren’t doing anything. We’re just over here trying to build the best businesses we can to benefit everyone and make life better. If the government’s not doing its job, that’s not on us.”

[00:17:50] Sarah: What are the members of Congress up to, Beth?

[00:17:54] Beth: Well, let’s begin with Senator Sanders, who you will not be surprised to hear has a problem with the bigness of these companies and their control over society and the amount of wealth being concentrated here.

[00:18:06] Sarah:  Hey, you know what? Same, Bernie. Same

[00:18:09] Beth: So Bernie’s proposal is that because these companies have been built on the back of publicly funded research and trained on the creative work of millions of people who didn’t consent to having their creative work fed to these machines--

[00:18:25] Sarah:  Including us.

[00:18:27] Beth: That the public should get a piece. That if these companies go public, then they should pay a one-time tax consisting of 50% of their stock, and that would go into a sovereign wealth fund intended to distribute gains to the public.

[00:18:47] Sarah: I got to be honest, Beth, I like it. I like it. I think it’s a good idea. And I understand that we’ve never done anything like this before, but I think this is a technology unlike any we’ve ever seen, and I think it gets in front of the anything else we try will be too slow as it adapts. And I don’t know, I kind of dig it.

[00:19:06] Beth: I see those points. I do not dig it.

[00:19:10] Sarah: I knew you weren’t going to like it.

[00:19:13] Beth: I’m sorry. I don’t like it. I think that, again, I have real concerns about collaboration between the government and AI companies. I have real distrust that money that went into a sovereign wealth fund would actually make its way back to the public. When we have members of Congress right now talking about how they’re going to cut away at Medicaid fraud to pay for the war, I don’t feel rosy about the possibility that a sovereign wealth fund from AI profit will end up in the hands of individual people. I also think that when the government starts to take stakes in businesses, it just changes industries. I haven’t been supportive of Trump wanting to take a stake in Spirit Airlines. I don’t like the rare earth mining companies conversations that are going on, the chips. I just think that’s beyond the scope of what the federal government exists to do. So while I agree with some of the instincts that led Bernie Sanders to this conclusion feels wrong to me.

[00:20:22] Sarah: Okay. Here’s the thing. I hear your concerns. I get it. I think literally any other industry, I get it. I do. I just think we have to acknowledge this is a different beast entirely. And so previous regulatory frameworks are going to be too slow too clunky I just don’t think they’re going to meet the moment, and I think to the sovereign wealth fund of it all, yeah, we haven’t tried something like that before. I think it would have to be written into legislation in a way that’s real tight. It’s not like we’ve never done anything like this before. Like we have a big fund that pays out. We have some experience with Social Security, like which we invented and which was hard but works pretty damn well, to say “We’re going to put this money in a pot, and we’re going to get it back to Americans.” I believe in us. I think we could do it because I think it’s going to have to be something big and innovative to meet the moment, and so this is the only thing I’ve heard that gets close. I understand there’s state proposals, which I don’t think are going to last because I think the federal government’s going to come in and occupy the field. I understand that the EU is going to do stuff, but they also don’t have a good track record when it comes to trying to regulate technology in a way that actually improves it, gets to the stated goal without just making everything clunky. They’re the reason we have to click that stupid accept cookies thing every damn time. So I don’t know. I think it’s going to have to be big and very different. This is a whiteboard moment. Now, do I trust the likes of the Trump administration in this whiteboard moment? No, but I do trust Bernie Sanders, for what it’s worth.

[00:22:17] Beth: Bernie Sanders as the creator of this legislation, though, would have almost nothing to do with how it’s executed well into the future. If AI is as revolutionary as AI companies tell us it will be, won’t we be making this argument about every industry? Won’t every industry be so different that something totally new and innovative has to happen to meet the moment? And yes, we have some experience with these funds. Alaska’s sovereign wealth fund, I think, is the best example, the most direct example, right? Because Alaska is so abundant in natural resources. Some of the money makes its way back to citizens and actually does. Social Security is a tough example, though, because we took that pot of money and we steal from it constantly to pay for other things to the point that we risk insolvency around Social Security and are having lots of conversations about how to make sure that we have stability around that system. Putting all of that aside, let’s assume we could create a sovereign wealth fund, that the legislation around it could be crafted intelligently and with an eye toward the common person, which I do believe is Senator Sanders’ goal. Let’s assume that all happens well. I don’t know that this gets us to any meaningful regulation of the industry. If the public has a 50% stake, how does the public exercise that stake? What does that mean in terms of how these companies are governed? And doesn’t that make the goal of the government to maximize the profitability of these companies? I don’t see a path here toward constraint, and what I’m looking for is some constraint.

[00:23:56] Sarah: Well, to your first point about it’s going to change every industry, yeah, that’s why it’s different, because it’s going to have its footprint everywhere. That to me is like to the bigness and the innovation and the transformative capacity of it all. I think despite my well-established overall optimism, I think constraint has left the barn. I think that when you have Anthropic coming out with Mythos and saying, “We have built something unlike any of us have ever seen. It improves itself,” you read people’s reporting of using Mythos, and it’s transformative. And then what? Two weeks later, after saying, “It’s so big and powerful, we’re only going to let a couple people use it,” they’re like, “Here you go.” I don’t think constraint is the name of the game. I think the best case scenario is we say we’ve unleashed this thing. It’s going to change everything. At least you’re going to get a cut to help lessen the fallout. Whatever it will be inevitably in your own life, you’re going to get a share of this new future. Because the government was a piece, a part and parcel of so many other transformative in-industries in the past because they were fundamentally a part of the research and the ground building. That’s not the case here. So if we don’t hurry and get a piece of this ground floor, then I’m really worried. I guess there is an example that you can look to as far as the government getting involved and stepping all over it and regulating it and constraining it. But the best example I see is China, and I don’t ever see that version of constraint rolling out in the United States. The level of control you’d have to have over the inner workings of the government to regulate it at this point that we are already at in the process to me, it’s not something I see coming in 2026 or 2028 or 2030

[00:26:21] Beth: I don’t think that we can put the horse back in the barn. I agree with you about that. I do think where government could still step in as a meaningful player is requiring some transparency. Requiring some transparency if you apply to our company and we’re using AI to screen your resumes, it says that in the job posting. If you make a campaign commercial with AI, it says it in the commercial. You have to tell us when these systems are being integrated into things because then I think there can be some kind of market reaction. It is unpopular. This is a wild conversation, right? Because on the one hand, people don’t like this. They don’t want the data centers built in their communities. They don’t want to watch AI slop on their phones. They don’t want their employer forcing them to use AI and feeling like they exist to serve the AI now instead of the AI serving them. There is this massive backlash, and we’re simultaneously saying it’s just inevitable, it’s just going to change everything and there’s nothing we can do about it but take a piece of it. It seems to me that if government cannot keep up with the technology itself, and I think it can’t, and I think it probably shouldn’t be able to. I don’t think we want government to say, “Ooh, there’s an emerging product that I don’t like. Let’s squish it before it gets off the ground.” I don’t think we want that. But now that it’s out here, I think being able to tell us and make it, like just turn all the lights on, is something that government could do. Just put a floodlight on it and then we can push back. We can see what happens. We can still test this against public sentiment.

[00:28:08] Sarah: Well, two things, as I continue to be a Debbie Downer. One, this government? You think this government, this administration? We’re stuck with him till 2028. And so I’m just trying to be realistic about what we’ve got here right now. And even if we get a Democratic Congress in who passes some sort of transparency requirement, I’m skeptical whether he’d sign it. But if he feels like it’s his idea, he will do big crazy things, take 50% of stake in it. He’s already said “Oh, that’s an interesting idea.” I’m just trying to work with what we got because if we wait till he’s gone, it’ll good and truly be too late. And as far as the transparency, the transformative nature of this technology to me, the sort of immediate public facing reality that we’re experiencing is the tip of the iceberg. It’s the very tip of the iceberg. It’s honestly the piece I’m the least worried about. The thing that we’re all heading for is this transformation of entire industries and the job market, and that, if you’re watching AI Slop on Facebook, which some people do-- I know my dad does because he sends them to me all the time-- then at least I don’t care if that’s still going on if you’re getting a cut as entire industries are wiped out. You know what I’m saying? So I don’t trust this administration to even get us there, and that’s not the main thing I’m worried about, I guess is what I would say.

[00:29:41] Beth: Then why would you want the administration to have access to 50% of these companies, this administration? That’s the other thing that confuses me about this. I don’t look at the last 10 years and think, “You know what I want? I want government in more stuff.” That’s just not where I am.

[00:29:55] Sarah: I do. I look at it and say we have stepped away from any attempt to rein in industry, regulate, get a piece. No I get that he’s in charge, but he loves to hand out money. Listen, even if we set this up tomorrow and he gets his greasy little paws on the sovereign wealth fund and wastes it for two years, fine. This shit’s going to make so much money okay, whatever. Then the next person that gets in there can do something better with it.

[00:30:22] Beth: It’s not the money to me, it’s the corruption. More government involvement is an invitation to corruption, period. It’s not that I think, “Oh, I don’t want these companies to be over-regulated.” I’d be delighted for these companies to be over-regulated. I’d be thrilled. The risk to me of having ownership like this is what we see today happening with the collaboration and the closeness of the sort of new oligarchs with this president on steroids. The more he steps in industry by industry, business by business, the more favors he can dole out, the more people whispering in his ear, the more people with access to him to make major military decisions. We saw what happened with Anthropic, right? With Anthropic and the Department of Defense. When these companies dared to say we still think a human should press the button if we’re going to use technology to kill people. If this administration becomes the one that takes a 50% stake in AI or any other, I can’t imagine what the future will be like. Who knows who’ll be in that seat? The opportunities for decisions to be made unethically multiply, and that is where I am most uncomfortable with this proposal

[00:31:50] Sarah: Well, I just feel like that’s a false binary though. There’s already corruption. You still have three dudes making all the calls. To me, this is fun. We’re back into the original Pantsuit Politics framework, which is what are you more concerned with? Are you more concerned with the damage that giant corporations can do, or are you more concerned with the damage that giant federal government can do? With this industry, I’m more concerned with what they can do by themselves.

[00:32:19] Beth: With this proposal, I’m concerned about what a new behemoth that consists of both of those things can do.

[00:32:22] Sarah: I get it. I see that, and I understand it, but at least you have some sort of democratic involvement eventually, even if it’s not under this administ-

[00:32:24] Beth: Do you?

[00:32:26] Sarah: Yeah, even if it’s not him. Yeah, sure, it’s Trump. No, you don’t. Of course, you don’t. No. First of all, we’re not going to get this set up tomorrow, but even if it’s a year of his influence or whatever. And let’s just cross our fingers we get a Democratic Congress who has to actually pass this legislation that’s worth a damn. That’d be fun if we got the Democratic Congress in the midterms, and when we’re passing the sovereign wealth legislation, it actually has some damn teeth to it and doesn’t just hand a blank check to the executive branch. That’d be fun. Even if that’s not true, and he gets his hands in it, it’s not him forever. Then you have a federal government involved somehow because they’re not involved at all now. I would like some sort of democratically involved institution and not just Dario, Sam, and Elon.

[00:33:22] Beth: I just am struggling to picture what that involvement actually looks like. The government is involved in those companies today. It’s an enormous customer of them. What kind of seat at the table would be afforded by a 50% stake in the stock? I don’t know the answer to that.

[00:33:43] Sarah: Well, look at the Anthropic example. Yeah, they pitched a fit, but guess who still has the contracts? Anthropic. So as customers, the power is in pitching a fit for the media? Nothing freaking changed. As far as I can tell from the reporting, I don’t think we know everything yet. It’s not like anybody really moved.

[00:34:03] Beth: That is the market working, right? That is the truth because the Anthropic product is the best product. Anthropic won the competition by making the best product, and so the government as the customer reacts to that. They could still change their minds, but they’re not going to because there’s not a better product right now.

[00:34:21] Sarah: Yeah, but I hate that. I hate that the government is just stuck as a client. That makes me deeply uncomfortable. The government should not just be a client and a piece of the pie of the marketplace.

[00:34:32] Beth: Even when Anthropic is acting more ethically than the government in this scenario?

[00:34:39] Sarah: Yeah, for now. But we have no power to say what they’re going to do moving forward. I don’t trust any real marketplace right now. Look at the conversation we had in the IPO.

[00:34:49] Beth: Agreed. My answer is just not, “Well, let’s just try something new that joins those forces even more, joins these incredibly for powerful forces even more.” Because I don’t see where that gets us to more... I see where that gets us to more democratic sharing of the wealth that could be created, but that’s all I see. That’s as far as it goes for me.

[00:35:09] Sarah: That’s all they’re saying. I don’t think Bernie is saying, “This is the regulatory answer, end of story.” I have not heard that argument from him. I have heard him say “Right now, we want a cut of the wealth, and then maybe we can get to the regulatory part.” I don’t think the 50% ownership is the regulatory answer, for what it’s worth. I think there needs to be much more of that. But I think that it becomes a more interesting question. It becomes more interesting policy examination when the American people have a share. Then you don’t get just sloppy... Some of these state proposals are sloppy, man. They’re just red meat for a populace that’s mad at AI. I don’t want that either. I don’t want that regulatory answer either. So when we’ve got a cut, I wonder how that changes the regulatory examination of what policies really get to the democratic wisdom of the populace concerns without getting populist in a way that’s just squelching the industry.

[00:36:10] Beth: It’s just wild because that is creating a conflict in any other scenario as we think about how you regulate something, who’s independent-minded enough to  regulate something..

[00:36:20] Sarah: But this isn’t every other scenario. This is the government, right? We’re not just a stockholder. This is a totally different beast. So it’s not the sort of regular conflict because it’s not regular. It’s the government holding half of the piece. So, to me, that’s very different.

[00:36:33] Beth: Well, you have poo-poohed the EU, but I do want to take a second and talk about their regulatory framework because I think it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s the answer for us, but I do want people to know about it because I think the way they assess regulation for AI based on risk levels is a useful starting place. So the EU’s framework first says, “What poses an unacceptable level of risk?” So we don’t want AI systems manipulating people into making harmful choices. We have conversations happening about that in court right now, right? When has a system affirmed your choice to shoot yourself or someone else? That’s a risk category. The EU also puts into that category emotion recognition systems at work and in educational institutions, which was really interesting to me because we talked about that in future problem solving this year. What would it look like if at school your face were being scanned constantly for signs that you were in some kind of distress? And then they have different standards for what they consider high-risk uses of AI, and that’s where hiring processes come in, certain medical devices, in judicial systems, in infrastructure management. But they target the level of oversight and the rules and restrictions based on those tiers of risk, and I really like that.

[00:37:52] Sarah: I think this is all very interesting. I also think it is almost in its own category because this is all the way at the other end. They have no artificial industry in the EU to speak of. They don’t have any real successful companies or seat at the table. And so from talking about us having a huge seat at the table and 50% shared, now you’re talking about a regulatory framework where they’re just trying to watch the consequences of other global powerhouse and their industries playing out within their borders. So I get it, but it’s a totally different conversation.

[00:38:30] Beth: Well, and a question that I have is if we go with the vision that you support, does it stay that way? Do you cement these companies as the only players in the global game if the US government has a 50% stake? And is the world better off or worse off if there are more companies in this competition?

[00:38:53] Sarah: Well, you can look at the EU as an example of this. You can look at parts of the United States as an example of this with the car industry. The government gets involved at differing levels depending on whether you’re talking about Germany or Michigan, and it squelches the market. I’ve said it before, I want one of those damn Chinese electric cars. And so I think that’s something to absolutely to consider. If the government’s getting involved in a way that puts its hand on the scale as far as competition, it’s probably why the companies themselves are, like, not setting their hair on fire at the mere idea of this proposal. But it’s like I just kind of feel like, guys, we’re going to have to be up for the challenge. We’re going to have to talk. Okay, well, let’s talk about that. I’m sure there’s a way or at least an idea or a proposal to think through that, to get at that issue. I am excited by Bernie’s proposal because I feel like it’s big enough and innovative enough to meet the moment, and we are going to have that. The old ways we got at railroads or electricity or even the internet, freaking Section 230’s out there still causing problems. Ain’t going to get it done. Not going to get it done.

[00:39:56] Beth: Yeah, I struggle a little bit with characterizing it as innovative because governments taking large pieces of critical industries is an old idea. I’m not sure how this moves the needle for us forward. To your point about the companies not setting their hair on fire, I think they like this as an opening volley so they can come back and go, “Oh, good idea. How about 5% or 4% or 3%?” And what would that mean? Because I think that’s where Trump ends up, right? He’s happy to take a percentage, but he wants it to be a small enough percentage that the oligarchs are still happy with him. And then what? Does that accomplish the goals that you are looking to accomplish through the Sanders proposal or not?

[00:40:39] Sarah: Yeah. I think that’s where the conversation will go next, and it will be interesting to see, particularly in the face of more recent political realities like him saying, “I love inflation” or the price of things going up, if this populous solution in the face of all this opposition will become more appealing to both sides of the aisle.

[00:41:15] Beth: It’s time to talk about things Outside of Politics because we are about halfway through the year and you and I were having a discussion about that. And I said that if I could come up with a characterization of 2026 so far it would be not what I expected or planned for. That’s just how the year’s been going.

[00:41:31] Sarah: Would you like to be reminded of your word of the year?

[00:41:33] Beth: I wouldn’t.

[00:41:34] Sarah: It was swim.

[00:41:37] Beth: Okay. That was a good choice. That was a fine choice. That is what I feel like I’m trying to do.

[00:41:44] Sarah: Okay. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.

[00:41:47] Beth: Did I create this reality with that word?  I’m thinking about that

[00:41:52] Sarah: You said, “ I have experienced a lot of what I would describe as currents. And I think that’s probably going to continue to be true.”

[00:41:59] Beth: Well, I was right. Good job December Beth.

[00:42:04] Sarah: Okay. Mine is hilarious considering what we just talked about and considering... okay, I could go either way on this. My word was analog. Do you remember?

[00:42:17] Beth: Oh, the universe has such a sense of humor.

[00:42:20] Sarah: It does. Well, okay, so at first I was like that’s hilarious, we just did a show on artificial intelligence. I’m using more and more AI in my life, but in fairness, I also just opened a bookstore with actual books. So I feel like that could also be a real argument for analog. So there we go. I’m still doing it.

[00:42:41] Beth: You’re putting some complexity around it, but it’s--

[00:42:44] Sarah: I have not been using my record player as I’d planned to do. Now, I do listen to the radio in the car, which I feel like counts as analog.

[00:42:51] Beth: Is it satellite radio?

[00:42:52] Sarah: No. I hate satellite radio for the record.

[00:42:55] Beth: Are there any other places where you think, “Okay, this is a distinctly analog choice that I’m making even as my digital use increases”

[00:43:03] Sarah: I feel like it’s a little analog, my summer vacation, that we’re taking a road trip in an RV. Doesn’t that feel analog?

[00:43:10] Beth: Yeah.

[00:43:10] Sarah: Like old school?

[00:43:12] Beth: Yeah, I like that.

[00:43:13] Sarah: Okay. That’s all I got.

[00:43:15] Beth: I’m trying to think of what it would mean to recommit to these words. So I do feel like I am swimming. I also feel like I would like to take a moment where you just float for a second. That might help me swim again. That’s coming in the summer. We’ve planned some break time, and hopefully that’s part of it.

[00:43:33] Sarah: I really feel like I need to do the tech Shabbat. I’ve gotten really good about, as far as stepping away from the tech, I’ve gotten really good. The most successful sort of practice is I brick my phone from-- I had to change the dates because I’m sleeping later in the summer. I brick my phone from 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM, so when I’m laying in bed, I can’t do bullshit on my phone. That’s the most successful thing. I still go black and white, and I still do some other stuff, but I need a more sustained chunk when I’m going analog, a more sustained chunk of time, and that’s really hard. I am becoming more dependent on the tools, but I feel like also I’m not as mad about that. It’s not a distraction. It is a very helpful tool, so much of what I do on my phone now. I’m not scrolling. It really helps me get things done, so I don’t know. It’s tough.

[00:44:26] Beth: It is tough.

[00:44:27] Sarah: It’s hard out here. It’s so hard we forgot our words.

[00:44:31] Beth: It’s really something. Maybe what I need to remember about my word is just a release of control. When you’re swimming, you just go with what the water is. So 2026 can continue to be not what I expected, and I’m sure that will have some beautiful dimensions and some difficult ones, and that’s okay.

[00:44:47] Sarah: Okay. I’ll struggle with that as an Enneagram one, But I’m trying to let you inspire me.

[00:44:53] Beth: We would love to hear from you how your 2026 is going. We started this conversation in the Substack chat, and it has been very fascinating so far, so please continue there. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. We will be back with you next Tuesday with another new episode of Pantsuit Politics. Between now and then, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. It exists because of our Substack subscribers. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into our live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Pantsuit Politics in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

A Harvard oncologist read out a set of numbers in Chicago a…

Read more

Read more

Now, I’ll be honest with you — I’ve got s…

Read more

• Unemployment for recent college grads sits at ~5.7% — elevated, with an underemployment rate of 41.5%.

• More than 40% of employed recent grads are working jobs that don’t require a college degree — the highest share since 2020.

• The economy has added an average of only 68,000 jobs per month so far in 2026, compared to 186,000 in 2024.

• Job openings dropped to 6.5 million at the end of 2025 — the lowest since September 2020.

There are a lot of people of all ages navigating this increasingly unstable job market. We try very hard here at Pantsuit Politics to acknowledge tough situations without giving in to the gloom and doom. So, today, instead of trying to explain a job market no one understands, we brought on Kim Miller to talk about how to navigate it.

PLUS, I have a very, very exciting announcement at the end of the show! -Sarah

title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Topics Discussed

• Why the job market feels so chaotic right now: AI, economic uncertainty, mass layoffs, and even retirees re-entering the workforce
• Negotiation as the skill nobody teaches you — and why it matters more than ever
• Building relationships instead of "networking," and graduating with at least one good mentor
• Getting work experience before you graduate, paid or unpaid
• How to handle a job offer: asking for 48 hours and negotiating beyond base salary
• Outside of Politics: Sarah opens Meander Bookshop in Paducah

Episode Resources

• Etre Empowerment Consulting with Kim Miller — use code PANTSUIT for 15% off any service

• Meander Bookshop

• Meander on Bookshop.org

• Meander Bookshop on Instagram

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:02] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:19] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Last week, we asked in our Substack chat, “What is everyone struggling with?” And we got a resounding answer: the job market. Parents of recent college graduates, tech sector workers, people changing careers, we heard it all. And as luck would have it, we had today’s guest already scheduled to come here and talk through all of this. Kim Miller taught both Beth and I at Transylvania University, but in recent decades, she has developed an expertise in job negotiations. She has two young adults herself navigating job searches and has helped countless people and students find jobs, and she’s here to talk to me today about all of that. Outside of politics, Beth’s going to come back because I have a very exciting announcement to share with all of you.

[00:01:07] Beth: I cannot be part of the Kim Miller conversation because I’m driving my daughter to camp, but I do want to say that Kim Miller taught me about African burial art in a class in college, and I think about that class at least once a month, and have for 20 years. So I think she will be a wonderful person to discuss this with you. Thank you, Kim. Before she starts, I want to tell you about another facet, another dimension of our America 250 celebrations here at Pantsuit Politics. As I was working on the murder mystery party that we’ve been telling you about, I kept thinking about younger kids. It’s a sore spot around here that not all of the kids get to be part of the murder mysteries. But it’s just a certain level of maturity required for that kind of party.

[00:01:48] Sarah: It’s Murder. Murder’s in the title.

[00:01:50] Beth: Correct. America 250 is for everybody, and so I started working on something that I ended up calling the Founders Trunk, and the idea is that there are six stories that are interesting parts of America’s founding for the entire family to explore through living room plays. So I’ve suggested that you grab some wooden spoons to be oars to cross the Delaware. Just simple things that you have around the house to tell these stories. I’ve also tried to put in kid-friendly language where these stories are hard stories, where they’re contradictory, where they don’t include everybody. I start from the very beginning by telling you that the people coming from Europe were not the only people sharing this land. So it’s not heavy-handed or overwrought in any way. I hope that it gives you lots of interesting things to talk about in your house, and have lots of fun. And by the end, everybody gets a certificate that says they’re a founder, because we are all making America a more perfect union together. So the Founders Trunk is available to all of our premium members, along with the Murder Mystery, along with Reimagining Citizenship. We hope you’ll come be part of it.

[00:02:58] Sarah: Yeah. Come join us on Substack. All right. Up next, Kim Miller. Kim Miller, welcome to Pantsuit Politics. Guys, I was so chill in the intro. I was like, “Kim taught Beth and I at Transylvania.” That is not a full and accurate representation of the relationship I have with Kim. She was probably one of the most influential professors I had. She led the women’s studies department at Transy at the time, and changed my life in so many ways, including but not limited to she had her son, Gabe, while I was a student and she set me down the path to natural birth and a version of motherhood that I have-- I’m getting a little verklempt-- tried to institute in my own life. So she’s very important to me and I’m so happy that she’s here. Welcome.

[00:03:57] Kim Miller: Thank you, Sarah. It’s an honor to be here. I have memories of teaching you, or your class when I was nine months pregnant with a massive belly that hit the chalkboard before I did. And in fact, you were the one who told me “Your belly is full of chalk.”

[00:04:14] Sarah: That’s funny. Okay, so I’m so happy you’re here today.

[00:04:21] Kim Miller: Thank you.

[00:04:22] Sarah: We had a lot of people in the chat when we just asked generally about what was on people’s minds a few weeks ago say at the job market. So let’s start real high level. Because the reporting is insane and people’s experiences are very intense, and I know that you spend a lot of time in conversation with particularly young people looking at the job market. So what is your perspective on the weirdness right now going on in the job market?

[00:04:47] Kim Miller: Yes. So I do spend a lot of time talking to young people and their parents about careers and jobs, and there is a heightened level of confusion and panic about that for young people, but also including you. I have a lot of relationships with beloved alumni. And over the past couple years I’ve had a lot more of them coming back and wanting advice on either career changing or they’ve lost their jobs and what do they do next. So there’s definitely an increase in anxiety and confusion about that. And I want to say that it’s a really complicated moment to be a young person or to be the parent or a guardian of a young person. And I think that for a lot of people we just feel like we don’t know what to do. And so I would love to talk about the big picture, but also I do think that there are, like, actionable steps that people can do, young people but also old people like myself and parents. And I think that the support that parents and guardians are giving to young people right now needs to be a little bit different than it was in the past.

[00:05:57] Sarah: That’s interesting. Yeah. So what do you think is the weirdness going on? You’ll read AI’s taking all the entry level jobs. And then you’ll read, “No, they’re just using AI as an excuse to shift things around.” Or you’ll read, “No, this is about return to work and the work from home shift from COVID is going back to the office and that’s affecting entry level positions.” I feel like every day there’s a different story.

[00:06:17] Kim Miller: Yeah. So to be sure, so stepping back, so the headlines are scary. The advice is confusing and seems at times to be very contradictory. That’s why I think it helps to like talk. One of the things that I’m going to be pressing on the whole time is just having conversations with humans, like talking to people about their experiences. If you know somebody who was successful in getting a job, have a conversation with them. So part of this is that the advice is confusing, and we have to be careful about who we’re listening to or what we’re listening to if it’s not a human voice. And the job market is for sure changing. Confusion about AI. and one thing I will say about AI is that we do not yet know how AI is going to impact jobs. So there’s no clear advice or answer on that, but lots of doom and gloom headlines. So I just pulled out some of the language of some recent media coverage about jobs because I think this speaks to why we are reacting the way that we are. Here’s some language: The bleak job market. The grimmest job market in years. Job market panic. The Atlantic had an article, The Entry Level Job Market Is Breaking Down. So first of all even if you’re not looking for a job, that just sounds scary, right? And then I want to say that I think that this picture of uncertainty is intersecting with other big areas of uncertainty that we are also not used to. So one of those areas is political uncertainty. I do not need to tell you or your listeners about that.

[00:07:53] Sarah: Yeah, we’re well-versed on that here.

[00:07:54] Kim Miller: So there’s that. And then there’s also been mass layoffs across other sectors that were previously considered to be stable. Federal workers, look at all of the thousands of federal employees. Even if you look at the national parks alone, those were a lot of entry level jobs. Like that is not being part of this conversation, all of these layoffs. So federal workers, mass layoffs across higher ed, which is unprecedented in this country, mass layoffs across media, Washington Post journalists, even Stephen Colbert lost his job.

[00:08:33] Sarah: Yeah, and the tech sector. They’re doing big layoffs. And so that puts more people into the job market. You read that a lot. Those entry level jobs are highly competitive. Even we had parents in the chat talking about their teenagers couldn’t find summer jobs because even these low income, entry level jobs are getting taken by maybe higher level people that have been a part of these layoffs.

[00:08:54] Kim Miller: Yes, and not just that, but this wasn’t on my little list, but people who are retired are needing to come back. So I will confess that I get the magazine of the AARP sent to my house. And I will tell you that the most recent issue of the AARP magazine was about hourly summer jobs that retired people can pursue in order to boost their [crosstalk] and they’re all the summer jobs that the young people would also be going after. So think about those pressures, and then you have economic instability, which is causing employers to be a little bit gun-shy. Definitely risk-averse. So places that especially like in industries that would have been hiring previously are maybe putting a pause in it, or waiting. That is definitely a factor. And then of course there’s AI, and of course AI is a factor, even if it’s in creating uncertainty.

[00:09:33] Sarah: I hear a lot about AI in the job search process itself.

[00:09:54] Kim Miller: Yes. So the AI is completely I want to say wrecking the job search process itself. It is having a huge impact on the process of job seeking. Now, I do want to say that economists do not think that the struggles that young graduates, like young college grads who are trying to find entry level work, they do not think that those struggles are currently being caused by AI, but are more likely to be caused by sort of economic uncertainty. It’s about sort of a knee-jerk reaction to just blame AI for all of this, but big picture, there are a lot of different vectors that are impacting.

[00:10:35] Sarah: Yeah. There’s just a lot of moving parts here, and I think that’s what everybody’s experiencing. Everybody knows. Even the job report numbers, there’s like unemployment’s rising, but so are the job openings. It’s very confusing numbers and everybody knows something weird is going on. So this is where your skill set becomes very important. How did you get into advising on negotiation skills? How did you develop this skill that now you’ve turned into workshops and consulting and everything?

[00:11:07] Kim Miller: Yeah. So I like to say negotiation is the most important skill that nobody teaches you. And I was really lucky when I was in graduate school that somebody had a conversation with me about it. It’s not really something that is typically taught in a college classroom. Career services sometimes. Somebody in career services might advise a student or a young person to negotiate, but that’s very different from learning it as a skill, and it is something that can be learned as a skill. It’s critical to people’s economic futures. And also, when I talk or teach about it, I talk about it from a perspective of self-advocacy. Doing something where you are standing up for yourself in the workplace. You can think about negotiation as a conflict, but when I’m talking advising students or I even advise peers about how to negotiate. It’s really problem-solving. If you give me a job offer, you want to hire me, I want to say yes to the job, but we both have to come to a different kind of understanding in order to solve that problem, right? So it doesn’t have to be a source of conflict. It can be problem-solving. It can be a way of relationship building with your future employer. And that’s how it was presented to me when I was in grad school, and I just wound up being lucky to have a group of advisors and faculty who sat me down when I got my first offer, which was from Transy and who insisted that I negotiate. And I have to say one of the reasons why I do this, why I talk about this now, is because if you think about what are all of the things that you wish somebody had told you or taught you about, or told you to do, advice that they would give you when you were younger, this is a thing that I see people missing. So I’ll have alumni come back and say things like, “I wish I had known that I could have done that,” or peers who are other professors at other institutions who say, “I never did that, and if I had negotiated 30 years ago, I’d be able to retire on time.” And so I just think it’s something that falls through the cracks, but it’s a skill, and anybody can learn it and do it. And when I look in my classroom and see all of these promising, young faces and students who are ready to go out and find their purpose and their roles in the world, it’s a skill that I want to empower them with. I started doing it at Transy informally in classrooms, in office hours, and then it developed into really a consulting practice that I do.

[00:13:37] Sarah: I love that. Okay, so let’s go back, though, because I know people are like, yeah, negotiation, I need an offer before I can negotiate it. So when you’re advising young people right now in this super weird job market, or just anyone, what do you tell people about getting the offer to begin with, like navigating applying, navigating finding job listings, all of that part of the process?

[00:14:00] Kim Miller: So one of the things that is new that I’m saying to students and to parents now, and this includes parents of high school students because everything is being planned for earlier now. Parents of students who are younger are thinking about what’s going to happen to their kiddo when they graduate from college, as opposed to just, “Where should I send them and how will they get in?” But I do think that for college-age students and their parents, thinking about employability cannot be left until the last semester. And actually, that is different advice. In the past, I had this mindset of let’s teach them the skills, but also college is such a beautiful, important time for them to explore their social lives, to find out who they are, to figure out who they want to be in the world, maybe to do a semester somewhere else. And so I was holding back a little bit from really talking about thinking about employment, but I think we need to do that earlier now. So you should not wait until the last semester to start thinking about employability.

[00:15:04] Sarah: That’s probably good advice for anybody. If the job market is weird and you’re thinking about changing careers or you’ve gotten laid off, instead of just presenting yourself think about what part of my skillset, maybe not my exact job title says that I have employability in this particular moment or in this particular sector.

[00:15:24] Kim Miller: And so a lot of that is about how do we prepare for uncertainty, right? And so, again, we’re surrounded by uncertainty in all of these realms. We don’t know what the future holds politically. We don’t know what the future holds economically. We don’t know what the future holds in terms of AI and jobs. But there are still things that we can do now in this moment. And when I was a young professor, one of the best pieces of advice that a mentor gave me was, “Kim, you don’t know what the future possibility will be for you, but do whatever you can to make yourself ready for when it comes.” And I think that’s great advice for people of any age. If you’re want to change your career, but you’re not quite sure what direction you want to go in or what might be available for you, you can focus in the here and now on what kinds of skills you can develop, what kind of experience you can get, what kind of people you might need to form relationships with, to set yourself up so that when the interview comes, when the job ad appears, when the phone call comes to offer you the job, that you are ready at that moment.

[00:16:32] Sarah: I think all the time about Cal Newport’s piece he did right before he wrote his book. He was like, “Follow your passion is dumb advice. Build the skills.” Steve Jobs didn’t follow his passion. He built skills that were then applicable. And I tell my own kids that. I’m like, “How exactly was I supposed to follow my passion as a podcaster in 1999 when I started college when podcasting did not exist?” So I think seeing it as like a complex process where you’re building a particular set of skills over time. I think the paradox with the employability conversation is it’s this combination of you want to build skills for a job, but you don’t want to get locked in on the jobs so that you don’t present yourself as a person with skills. How do you balance that combination of, yeah, you want to be employable, you want to think about the careers and the jobs, but you also want to keep this sort of integrated big picture of yourself as a human inside this process?

[00:17:36] Kim Miller: I think that part of it is that, again, we don’t know what the future or the future of work will look like, but we do know that we can help young people prepare for change, right? We can help them prepare; we can help them develop resilience. We can help them prepare for a nuanced professional life. So pulling on what you said earlier I don’t think it serves young people at this moment to prepare them for a specific role or to prepare them for a specific job. Students need to be prepared for work, but not necessarily to be prepared for one. I think the future of work will need people who are good at solving problems, are good at collaborating. Sometimes we call these soft skills. I don’t like that they’re called soft skills because I actually think they’re really hard. And I think that at the moment that we’re in now, post-COVID, still close enough to COVID, with all of our work mediated by devices, the professor-student relationship has changed in many ways since you and I were in the classroom together. It’s mediated heavily through software. When you and I were together at Transy, students didn’t come to classes with their laptops and iPhones. You would’ve walked in and sat down and started talking to people. Now you walk in, and this is what [ crosstalk]. So I think we really need to push back, not necessarily on technology, but we need to help young people develop the kinds of, again, they’re called soft skills, but this is what employers are saying that they need and that they want. And it seems to be the direction to go in if we want to help young people be able to have the ability to pivot between jobs and careers in the future. So we want them to be able to evolve, to be adaptable, and a lot of that comes through the kinds of experiences and skills that you get, especially if you’re in a small college setting, talking to people.

[00:19:27] Sarah: With the dreaded word networking, which I think everybody kind of side-eyes. But that makes sense to me that people are struggling because if your experience is I think you nailed it with the mediated through software, and then you want the job search to just be mediated through software. Yeah. I’ll apply through Indeed, or I’ll apply through the internet. You watch these news items where somebody’s applied 100 times, and I’m like I’ve never gotten a job from cold applying like that. It’s always through relationships. Yeah. I tell people all the time a couple of the jobs I got in DC early, and this is a notoriously hard job market, the job I got at Hillary Clinton’s campaign was through other student who had a great network. And then the first job I got for Congress because one of my fellow classmates at Transy was an intern. You don’t necessarily have to know the boss. Just knowing anyone, even your peers within the organization, just somebody to get can be like, “This person’s not crazy,” goes a long way.

[00:20:23] Kim Miller: Yeah. I’m so glad you said peers because I think that and a lot of people don’t like the networking word. And so you use the word that I use which is relationships, right? When I present it this way, that’s what it is. It’s really about building relationships with people because your peer is going to reach out to you to tell you about a job opportunity, not because they’re in your like network, but because they care about you, or because they know what you’re looking for and then they hear about this opportunity and they think, “Oh, I know Sarah told me she’s looking for something like that.” And so part of the purpose of relationship building is also so people know what to look for you. And so that people care about you. I would say the two most important things that I would advise young people to cultivate when they’re in college or after or before, aside from learning how to negotiate, is cultivate your relationship building and find that among your peers, but also among your faculty and staff, and to have the goal of graduating from college with at least one really good mentor.

[00:21:33] Sarah: Yeah. That’s good.

[00:21:34] Kim Miller: Now that might seem obvious, especially because you went to a place where faculty really engage a lot with students and it’s part of the culture, right? But I recently saw this statistic that nearly half of graduating students now say that they do not have a faculty or staff mentor and they want one. And so students or young people might think, “Oh, a faculty member will reach out to me” but really it’s the young person who often needs to take the initiative. Show up for office hours. If you have a coach, that kind of develops a little bit naturally. Identify someone on campus who is a grown-up who will know you.

[00:22:12] Sarah: Yeah. And again, this is applicable even if you’re not a student.

[00:22:15] Kim Miller: Totally.

[00:22:15] Sarah: Find someone in the situation. This is why I always tell my boys as they read this stuff and they get freaked out, especially Griffin as he’s about to apply to college. I’m like, “Look, I can’t tell you what the job market’s going to be like when you graduate, but I can tell you if you move back to Paducah, I can get you a job.” That’s all I can promise. Absolutely. I know enough people. The town knows you. Your network here is good and strong, and we will figure it out. But I have a lot of empathy for people who are going into a big city and don’t know anybody or is trying to enter an industry without a lot of connections. I think that has to be exceedingly difficult.

[00:22:48] Kim Miller: Yeah. And especially because, again, even our work is so mediated with people doing remote jobs. So that’s one thing. And then the second thing is tied to relationship building or networking, and this is for young people. Get work experience before you graduate. So and I was just reading this study that was done with thousands of employers who were talking about early career work, but specifically like recent college grads, and they said that the number one factor that they are looking for in applicants is some kind of work experience while in college. And now I want to say that this can also sound scary, right? Because college is many things. Students are very busy. They have very fast-paced and fragmented lives. They’re doing their academic work, they’re meeting new friends, maybe they’re on a team, maybe they don’t have time for a job. So I want to say the job does not have to be paid. You can do volunteer work. You can do it one day a week. You don’t have to go overboard and make your life miserable by working while you’re doing all of these other commitments and responsibilities. But getting experience that somebody can write about in like a letter of recommendation. College campuses are amazing places to get work experience. I’ve had former students who worked in the office of the president. And if you think about all of the skills that you get, even like exposure to confidential information, discretion, so this kind of experience. I have students who have great careers in development and fundraising now, and they had a work study job in the advancement office when they were in college. So I think maybe young people don’t really realize how much this counts. Your future employer is not thinking about that as “Oh, that little campus job.” They are thinking about it as work experience that you have now on your resume. And so the work experience that you’re getting leads to relationships. So again, shifting back to maybe older people who are looking for a new job or who got laid off from their job, you can also get experience as a grownup by volunteering for an organization, by serving on a board.

[00:25:09] Sarah: Yeah, that’s true. People forget that it doesn’t matter as long as you’re showing up and being a committed volunteer or just a person who’s not flaking goes a long way these days, I think.

[00:25:22] Kim Miller: It really does. And you’re part of a new network and you’re part of a new community. I was talking to a client recently and made the comment that you have your own network. You’re like a spider with like your own web. And then as soon as you talk to one other person, you become part of their web. And it really it is truly the best thing that you can do. I work with a lot of young people who are getting jobs. I am seeing many young people who are new college grads who are getting jobs, and I think it’s important for us to tell those stories. I’ll know people who are struggling with their jobs or who have been laid off from their jobs or who are miserable with their jobs, but let’s share the success stories as well. Yeah. And all of the success stories that I could share with you, they all have those two things. They all got experience while they were in college, and if they couldn’t find a job after college, they volunteered or they did an unpaid internship, and they got that experience so that it could lead to a job, and they built relationships. And you have to cultivate those relationships.

[00:26:28] Sarah: Like you can’t just show up at an unpaid internship and think I’m going to get a job via Hannah Horvath on the first episode of Girls.

[00:26:34] Kim Miller: Exactly. And that’s also something to learn. Like, how do you cultivate a relationship? When you graduate from college it might feel weird to write to your professor a year later to share information with them. We love that. We love it when you reach out to us and let us know that you valued your time in our class and you would like a little bit of help. Part of our job is to help you long after you have graduated and left our classroom. And so I think that’s also a message that doesn’t get heard, or people think like why would I email my professor? But maintain that relationship because when I know what my alumni are looking for, I can help them.

[00:27:14] Sarah: And I think that’s true, like you said, with the spider and the web. People want to help.

[00:27:18] Kim Miller: Yeah. People want to help and it’s a hard time.

[00:27:35] Sarah: Okay, so let’s say you’ve made it through the process and now you have an offer. What are your top three negotiation either mistakes people make or things you want people to focus on when it comes to negotiating that job offer itself?

[00:27:52] Kim Miller: Okay. The first thing I want to say is I want to underscore again, like, how important negotiation is in this cultural, economic moment because imagine you are, like, a 20-- So this is a real person, a real young man who I was just working with. A 24-year-old who had been unemployed for a year, has a great college degree, got a job right out of college, but it was a one-year role, and then was, like, a dry spell. Applied for jobs every day. Applying. So imagine you’re this person. Then he gets a job. You go through interviews, and also the interviewing process for entry-level people now seems to be tougher. More layers, more people. I think that Zoom plays a role in this because it’s easier for employers to knock off a few Zoom interviews. So, anyway, so he goes through four rounds of interviews and then he gets the job. And if you can imagine, in that moment what do you want to do?

[00:28:55] Sarah: You just want to go, “Yes.”

[00:28:56] Kim Miller: You just want to say, “Yes.” You want to be done with this. You’re so relieved, and you’re so happy. You want to tell your friends. And so the number one piece of advice I would say when you get that call is to say, “Thank you so much.” Be honest and be your true self. “I am so excited about this. I am so happy that you have called. I’m so happy to receive the offer. I would love 48 hours to consider the offer. Is it okay if I call you back in two days?”

[00:29:30] Sarah: That would be so hard if you’ve been applying for a year.

[00:29:35] Kim Miller: It is so hard, and this is true in all times. I have coached so many people who got a great offer, and they’re so happy, and they’re so relieved. You just got to stick it out for two more days, all right? You have to wait for two more days because for a couple reasons, Sarah. One is that the majority of employers in this country are expecting people to negotiate.

[00:29:58] Sarah: Even in a tough job market.

[00:30:01] Kim Miller: Even in a tough job market. So they’re expecting you to negotiate, and the majority of people who are receiving offers do not. So that is a lot of money left on the table, right? And so the one thing I would say is envision yourself in the moment when you finally get the good news and you want to have your appropriate emotional response, and then you want to get to business. If you have not figured out how to negotiate before this moment, this is not your moment. This is something that you want to do earlier.

[00:30:35] Sarah: You need to have called Kim already.

[00:30:36] Kim Miller: You need to work with a negotiation coach. It can be me, it can be anybody, but you have to talk to somebody about the negotiation and be ready for it. And it’s also just like you rehearse before you do a job interview, you want to rehearse for the negotiation. Now, I do not recommend you rehearse with AI. I think AI can be a useful tool in maybe giving you some ideas about things you can negotiate for. I can also do that. One of the things that I think especially young people who haven’t had a salary job yet don’t realize is that there are things beyond salary that you can negotiate for. And also, that’s part of knowing who you are and knowing what your values are. So when I came to Wheaton, where I teach now, from Transylvania where I met you, I had a infant and I had a toddler, and I had a spouse with a career, and I knew that I needed to negotiate on behalf of my family before salary. So that was something that I was really grateful that I had figured that out before I was in the moment of negotiating. So I negotiated for things like housing so that I could be close to my job and support my kids and that sort of thing. Figuring out in advance what you want to negotiate and understanding that you can negotiate more than just base salary; although, the general advice is that base salary is the most important thing to negotiate because that will increase. So if you’re starting your career earning $60,000 and you get a 5% raise at the end of the year, that’s going to look very different if you’re starting with 65,000. That’s important information for a young person to know. I also talk to them about how to understand total compensation. You would be shocked by how many people don’t even know how to read the paperwork about their benefits package, their health insurance. I know employers that are hiring young people now and they’re not even having conversations about retirement like 401ks even though they offer them. Sarah, there’s so much knowledge that is assumed or presumed to be just out there, but again, it falls through the cracks. It is not taught unless you’re maybe hearing it from a parent, or a neighbor or a coach or your minister, somebody else who works with young people who’s sharing it.

[00:32:58] Sarah: And I just think that’s a stressful situation to be in as a parent. I have a listener who we’re working with for college admissions because I just think the processes have gotten so intense to have an expert. And also with your kids, it just becomes very emotional. And often they don’t want to hear your advice. They want to assert their own independence and their own decision-making, and so I think always having someone else there for them to talk to who they feel like is an expert but not mom or dad, I think is just huge. I think it’s been very helpful. I absolutely will be calling you up when Griffin gets closer to this situation. Because I just think it’s really an investment that pays off and giving your children-- and especially, even yourself. Like I said, I don’t think this always has to be young people out of college. I think if you took the first job that was offered to you out of college, and now you’re switching careers, you need a refresher. It’s like everything is different. Having a coach to say “Wait, this is now the process. This is what they’re expecting. Like all of that, it’s just always so overwhelming. And I think to the AI of it all, the more we can find the actual human being who can look at us and treat us like a human being, especially if the job process is getting more and more kind of opaque behind software and technology, the better.

[00:34:14] Kim Miller: Yes. And that’s another great example of why as much as we can lean on our human relationships we need to do that because I agree with what you said earlier, something that you said earlier about adults who are sending out all of these cold applications and hearing nothing. People are being ghosted by recruiters or ghosted by HR offices or ghosted by employers. It might not be possible to lean on a human all the time, but as much as you can cultivate that, I think that is probably one of the strongest things that we can do. And also, parents can talk to each other, right? In ways that maybe they hadn’t done before, about jobs for youth and maybe jobs for themselves, but also about higher ed. The higher ed landscape is shifting rapidly. I mean, never before have we had a federal government that has wanted to destroy us. I also have a lot of clients who are parents of kids the age of your kids who don’t know does it make a difference where I send my child? What kind of college is giving support for careers? What kinds of colleges are eliminating departments right now? Those are the headlines that I wake up to every morning. But it really makes it a very difficult territory for parents to navigate.

[00:35:30] Sarah: Yeah. That’s why we wanted you to come here because we believe in relationships here at Pantsuit Politics. As we always say, all we have is each other. So I know you have a little special offer for our listeners. But tell people the stuff that you do offer if they want to reach out to you after this episode.

[00:35:45] Kim Miller: Thanks. So I have a consulting practice that I have named Etre Empowerment Consulting, and I’ll send you the link for your show notes. But for listeners who might not know, the word Etre is the French verb which means to be. To be. And so part of what I love about being a professor and about being a mom is watching young people figure out who-- No w I’m going to get a little verklempt- - who they want to be in the world. What is their purpose in the world? And those are the conversations that I have through my consulting work. And so on campus we have office hours. I have office hours that I have opened up to anyone, who can come in to. It can be talking about jobs or colleges or just problem-solving for anything. And then specifically for negotiation, I run a negotiation clinic which a lot of people have purchased as gifts for graduation presents. I’ve had parents of high school students interested in it, again, because if you send your kids to college and they know how to negotiate or advocate for themselves, they’re doing that. They’re seeing situations as they become an adult where they can use their voice and speak up for themselves. Again I’m approaching it as problem-solving. Not as “Let’s teach your kid how to have conflict with their boss.” Let’s teach some self-advocacy and problem-solving techniques. And so I have a clinic, and it’s 75 minutes, and it’s on Zoom, so people from all over the world can sign up for it. And I would love to give your listeners 15% discount for anything. Any services, any time, no expiration. The code’s PANTSUIT.

[00:37:19] Sarah: And look, when you were saying that I was just thinking for everyone. Yes, it is an incredibly chaotic time, but chaos is an opportunity. Now, is it expensive and stressful and hard? Absolutely. But I think in those moments where you feel like everything is changing, it can be an opportunity to change yourself, and I think having as much support as possible and leaning on the people around you and talking about that’s what I was happy to see happen in the chat, people sharing, “Yes, that’s what I’ve experienced. Yes, we’re seeing that too.” I think all of that is just key, and I was just so happy that this worked out for you to come and share your expertise and your skills with our audience, and just thank you so much.

[00:38:01] Kim Miller: Thanks for inviting me. Thank you so much.

[00:38:18] Sarah: Beth, I’ve been keeping a secret. Not from you but from-

[00:38:21] Beth: Which means I’ve been keeping a secret, too, and that’s hard .

[00:38:23] Sarah: That’s true. Okay.

[00:38:24] Beth: Actually, it’s not hard. I’m a good secret keeper.

[00:38:26] Sarah: You are. You are a good secret keeper. Okay, here is the secret. Guys, I have opened a bookshop in Paducah, Kentucky inside our local coffee shop, Piper’s Tea and Coffee. It is called Meander Bookshop. Let me tell you how it started. Let me tell you this first. I want to do Pantsuit Politics until I die, Beth. Maybe longer than you. I think you’d like to retire. I’m happy to do it right up until the end. I don’t want to do it from my house forever. You understand what I’m saying?

[00:39:00] Beth: I probably better than anyone understand what you’re saying. I do.

[00:39:05] Sarah: So this is where this all started. I would like to get on a path to maybe having a little storefront with a podcast studio eventually so that I don’t have to hang out in this closet for the second half of my life. You know what I’m saying?

[00:39:21] Beth: I do.

[00:39:22] Sarah: So I’d been thinking about this because we have this incredible executive producer, Lisa, who owns The Bookshelf on Church, and she started as a little bookshelf in a coffee shop, which I thought was phenomenal.

[00:39:35] Beth: So smart.

[00:39:35] Sarah: And so Piper’s, which is this longtime business, I’m very close friends with the owners, they moved into a bigger space, and I thought, man, this place could use a bookshelf. Just a little bookshelf. It’s such a fun idea. Wouldn’t take up all this time. What if I did a bookshelf? So I met with Amber, the co-owner of Piper’s, and I said, “I have this idea.” And she’s “Oh my God, we’ve been wanting to do this.” Alas. They were like, “How about instead of a bookshelf, you take this whole little space right here and just make a little micro bookshop?” And for some God-forsaken reason, Paducah does not have an independent bookstore. We got a Books-A-Million, but not an independent bookstore. And so it just felt like this opportunity that I’d been thinking about really came together in a very lovely way. And so I soft opened over the weekend. I do not have enough books yet, but I’m getting there. And I opened on Friday, and have been selling books from Meander Bookshop inside Piper’s ever since.

[00:40:55] Beth: It’s so exciting. Tell us why Meander? Where’d the name come from?

[00:40:59] Sarah: Because meander is a river term. It’s what a river does. It can meander along the shore. I like the idea of meandering through pages. I also feel like it scoops up a little of my travel that I do, my travel itineraries which have lived under my literary Substack. So Meander Bookshop. And you’re going to love this one, the logo is designed by none other than Pam Huber, who designed our very first Pantsuit Politics logo. She designed my very first parenting blog, Salt and Nectar, one of my favorite logos of all time. So I reached back out to Pam and I was like, “Pam, you’re on deck. It’s time to work your magic as you always do when I start something new.” And so I love the logo. I’ve got it up on the window. I’ve got a little table out front with all the fun summer reads. And the shelves are really stocked with... There’s fiction and nonfiction and memoir are my favorite genre. But it’s either something I’ve read and loved or something someone I know and trust has read and loved. So I reached out to you and said, “What books would you always have on the shelf?” Fun fact, half of those books you picked out have already sold.

[00:42:03] Beth: I’m smart that way.

[00:42:04] Sarah: You are.

[00:42:05] Beth: I was so happy to see a book of poetry in your first customer’s hands. I was like, “Yes, these are my people.”

[00:42:09] Sarah: Yeah. And you picked up The Body: An Owner’s Manual, that sold. So I like the idea of every book is there because a person recommended it, not an algorithm.

[00:42:17] Beth: Yeah, that’s so nice. And, of course, I have a Google Doc going of unsolicited ideas for how to use the space. I love a project. And a physical space is exciting.

[00:42:25] Sarah: It’s very exciting.

[00:42:26] Beth: Physical space is a totally different energy than what we get to do here, and so I can’t wait to come see it.

[00:42:33] Sarah: Yeah, you’re going to have to come see it this summer. I’m not going to be able to wait very long for you to come. 

[00:42:37] Beth: I know. I’m trying to figure out when I can get down there, because I really do want to be there early so I can kind of see how it develops over time.

[00:42:48] Sarah: Yeah, it evolves. Definitely stop by if you’re in Paducah. I will be in there. The best part about this is that I don’t have to be in there all the time. If I’m not there, you can just grab a book and pay for it with your coffee. That’s the best part of this whole entire business plan. I don’t have to do staffing. If you’re not going to get to Paducah anytime soon, I have a bookshop.org Meander Bookshop link I’ll put in the show notes, along with a link to the Instagram and the website and all the fun things that you get to set up in this day and age, like the Facebook. And I’m going to post a lot of my recommendations and books that will always be on the shelf at Meander, like When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That’s a book that will always be on the shelf there, and novels. And it’s so fun to finally go through this list of books that have meant so much to me and be like, “Okay, that’s the one. I’m ordering that one. That’s going to be on the shelf always.” Jane Austen’s going to have her own very special shelf featuring the books that influenced her and the books she’s influenced. So it is fun. It’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to think about this. Obviously, I’m a massive reader. It’s something I do all the time. It’s something I think about all the time, so I’m really excited. I’m a child of a librarian. It’s probably my Path always.

[00:44:05] Beth: That’s what I’ve thought this whole time. You’ve been preparing for this your whole life. This just pulls together all the strings of things that you enjoy and are passionate about. I’ve heard you talk about Pipers like you own it for years. So this place that you love in the hometown that you love, with books something you love, it’s all things Sarah coming together in one place. It’s exciting.

[00:44:26] Sarah: I’m getting a little teary. But yeah, I am really excited. And it came together very fast. So if you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how could I not know about this?” It’s because it came together in the last-- I’m not even playing-- month and a half. It came together very quickly once I talked to Amber, and they’re like, “Yes, please, come use this space.” And Lisa has been incredible helping me and helping me navigate this whole entire universe that is brand-new to me. It’s very exciting. And people are very excited to come in and see it’s there and see that there are books that a person has read and can recommend to you. It’s going to be a really great place for me to channel all my mentionitis, Beth. You know I get it real, real bad. I’ve already sold two copies of John and Paul: A Love Story. Got to Order some more because you know how obsessed with that book I was.

[00:45:08] Beth: I know you are.

[00:45:09] Sarah: I got Beth reading it. Totally obsessed with it. So it’s a really good way to finally be like, “Yes, I can get all these people to read these books I’m obsessed with.” I’ve got to figure out how to get them back in to tell me if they like the book. That’s the thing. I’m giving them the book, but I’m like, “But you got to text me or Instagram me because I want to know when you get to this part what you thought, and when you get to this part what you thought.”

[00:45:29] Beth: Okay. As you’re not at all business partner in this venture.

[00:45:33] Sarah: You’re my creative director. My volunteer creative director.

[00:45:36] Beth: I am. I do not want everyone texting you about it, but I am going to put in my Google Doc some ideas about how people could give you their feedback and be part of the whole scene.

[00:45:43] Sarah: I’m, like, so obsessed, because you know I love these books so much. I passed over a copy of Inheritance this morning, and I was like, “You’re going to get to a part, it’s going to involve Jared Kushner’s grandmother. I’m going to need you to tell me when you hit that part because it’s a part of that book I still think about all the time.” She’s like “Okay.” I’m just so into it I want to sit down beside them when they get to the part, I’ll be like, “ wasn’t I right about that part?”

[00:46:08] Beth: Let me watch you read and guess when you’re on page 62.

[00:46:10] Sarah: Yes, a little bit. A little bit. So it’s very exciting. I can’t wait for this community to find out and hopefully come to Paducah and stop by and buy a book. And I know that this community’s going to be crazy supportive and have all kinds of ideas just from the comments. I got to work my way through the comments from Friday on the Time Confetti, because it became a book recommendation list, and I’m like crap, now I got to get all these books for the bookshop,” because I definitely trust everyone in our audience and what they’re reading. So I can’t wait to hear from everybody. The links for, like I said, the website and the bookshop and the Instagram will be in the show notes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Kim Miller for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in your ears on Friday, and until then, keep it nuanced y’all.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

I’ll be honest with y’all — I just couldn’t do the regular news today. So I made us a theme instead, and the theme is winners. As in, people who are actually out there winning things. There are real headlines here, I promise. I just needed a little something to be excited about today, and I’m betting you do too.

Alexander Zverev finally brok…

Read more

Read more

California is still counting, and the results are getting interesting.

Xavier Becerra has made it through to the general in the governor’s race, and it’s looking like Steve Hilton will be the one to face him. Karen Bass advanced in the LA mayor’s race, but we sti…

Read more

Topics Discussed

Topics discussed:
• Primary results in California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Iowa, South Dakota, and Montana
• Republican caucus friction: the anti-weaponization fund, Todd Blanche's AG nomination, and Bill Pulte as acting DNI
• Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark
• New Jersey's lawsuit against the GEO Group and escalating protests
• The civil (not criminal) nature of ICE detention
• Immigration reform proposals
• Outside of Politics: using wait time for fiction

Episode Resources

• Primary results from Tuesday’s elections (U.S. News & World Report)

• Delaney Hall visitation access and protest conditions (America Magazine)

• Delaney Hall protests escalate (CNN)

• Delaney Hall background and protests (BBC)

• Louisiana ICE facility and mistreatment of immigrants (New York Times)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:29] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:31] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we’re going to talk about this week’s primary results and some frustration simmering among Republicans in Congress. We’re also going to talk about Delaney Hall, which is an ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where there are escalating protests, two lawsuits, and a real microcosm of the issues surrounding immigration detention in the country. And then outside of politics, we’re going to take a very necessary exhale and talk about a summer decision that I’ve made that I think is going to revolutionize my life.

[00:01:08] Sarah: One week from today is the deadline to book the hotel in Minneapolis where we are hosting our one and only live show of the year and the SPICE conference. Would you like to stay in a hotel full of just Pantsuit Politics listeners? Basically a big old Pantsuit Politics slumber party with your own quiet space, of course. This is the chance. We really want to book out this hotel. We think it’ll be really fun to have the whole place to ourselves. So much magic happens when listeners are together meeting each other. They set up local groups. They form friendships. They come back to live events with people they met at previous live events. So we really want to have the space. We genuinely want to sell it out and have this community there together. So you can find more information about how to book a room at the hotel in the show notes, and we hope to see you there.

[00:01:57] Beth: We also want to mention that our Be Good Neighbors shirts are still on sale. Probably want to size up. That’s what we’re hearing, that they run a little bit snug. Make sure that you’re ordering the kind that you want, if you want a women’s shirt, if you want a unisex shirt. And now, by popular demand, we have baby and toddler shirts as well. Not required that you send us a photo of that baby and toddler wearing the shirt, but highly encouraged. Yeah. Highly encouraged.

[00:02:20] Sarah: Agreed.

[00:02:21] Beth: Okay, let’s talk about some elections. Sarah, California’s still counting. Womp, womp.

[00:02:36] Sarah: They’re probably still counting from the last time. Bless their sweet hearts. I don’t know why it takes so long. I would just like to say, this is the technology hub of America.

[00:02:47] Beth: Of the country.

[00:02:48] Sarah: And it really does feel like maybe this is a problem they could have cracked wide open by now. But that’s okay.

[00:02:55] Beth: Looking like the most votes went to Republican Steve Hilton. And it looks like Xavier Becerra, Democratic candidate, former Biden administration official, is coming in second. Tom Steyer was in third the last time I checked, but it looks like Hilton and Becerra are going to advance here.

[00:03:14] Sarah: And look, I’m not mad about this. I really feel like people should have a choice. California’s a big state. Yes, it’s a blue state. There are Republicans that live there. I live in a place where I feel like my vote doesn’t count. It’s not a pleasant experience. And I think not having choices and single party rule can lead to bad outcomes. I think it’s a part and parcel of why Karen Bass is out here being challenged by Spencer Pratt, for the record. So I don’t think this is a terrible outcome. I’m not super excited about Xavier Becerra. I don’t live in California, but I do consider myself 30% Californian, because it’s where I spent every summer of my childhood. So I’m invested.

[00:03:51] Beth: Let’s talk about New Jersey. Senator Cory Booker ran unopposed. His Republican opponent is set now. It’s Justin Murphy, a Navy veteran who has run before. Doesn’t have a lot of money. The FEC says that he had negative $24 in his campaign account recently.

[00:04:06] Sarah: That’s not enough for a Senate campaign.

[00:04:08] Beth: Maybe not a contest of ideas can unfold there. Yes. But we’ll see. The race that everybody was really watching in New Jersey, though, was for the House. Former healthcare executive Rebecca Bennett won the Democratic primary to run against Thomas Kean Jr.

[00:04:26] Sarah: The disappearing congressman. Sounds like a novel I would read. I would read something entitled The Disappearing Congressman. I would.

[00:04:33] Beth: He has missed so many votes.

[00:04:36] Sarah: Over 100 votes.

[00:04:38] Beth: Serious newspapers have headlines like, “We started looking for him, and looked and looked.” And people just don’t know where he is, and I cannot for the life of me understand the public relations strategy at play here.

[00:04:49] Sarah: It’s so weird. He’s like, “Okay. It’s a health issue. It’s super normal, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. But when you find out, you’re going to be like, ‘Oh my God, that was no big deal.’” And I’m like, what? I’m sorry. Huh? If it’s super normal, then why not just tell everybody where you’ve been for months?

[00:05:13] Beth: How many times do we have to learn the lesson? Get in front of it. I understand that people in public office want some privacy. I want that for them. It’s 2026, you have to get in front of things. This is not how you handle it. This is not how you get your privacy.

[00:05:28] Sarah:  This is not it.

[00:05:29] Beth: Congratulations Deb Haaland, who won the Democratic primary for governor in New Mexico.

[00:05:33] Sarah:  Yeah, I’m excited about this one.

[00:05:36] Beth: And then Rob Sand is everybody’s favorite in Iowa. He was unopposed. He has the nomination. It’s exciting there.

[00:05:41] Sarah:  People like him. Listen, I feel like Iowa was trying to defend itself as reasonable. This was what it felt like to me. So the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor lost, and then the moderate Democratic... this is the Senate primary I’m going to start talking about, because Joni Ernst got pushed out by Donald Trump. I don’t understand why when one candidate is a multiple gold medal Paralympian, this is just about progressives versus moderates inside the Democratic Party. I’m like, “I don’t know if that’s true,” because this gentleman is a Paralympian, and that is just a winning story. I don’t care where your policy breaks down on. I love the idea that we’re just really locked in on that these are always policy contests. I don’t really think that’s always true. But they did pick the moderate for the Senate Democratic nominee, and they did pick the he’s not moderate, but not the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor Zach Lawn, which our listeners in Iowa are worried that he could really hit as popular as Rob Sand is for the governor because he’s a farmer, and it’s anti-institutionalist kind of situation. But overall, I just feel like Iowa’s “Trust us again, guys. Look. Please.”

[00:06:58] Beth: I think that whole progressive versus moderate situation is overblown too because it feels to me like we’re often talking a lot more about temperament than policy. What words are you using? What aesthetic are you portraying? How mad do you seem?

[00:07:13] Sarah: Yeah. Zach Lawn I think seems real mad. I think that’s why.

[00:07:18] Beth: So could we call him a progressive Republican? Wouldn’t  people love that?

[00:07:21] Sarah: That’s populist, right? That’s not quite getting it.

[00:07:23] Beth: Yeah, but what does populist mean when you look at this administration that was supposed to be populist, and it’s like let’s take the .1 of the 1% and make them even richer.

[00:07:32] Sarah: Yeah, because I think in the Republican Party it becomes MAGA versus establishment, but I don’t quite think that’s it either.

[00:07:39] Beth: No. Look at people’s voting records. It doesn’t break down this way.

[00:07:41] Sarah: We need a different word. I think you’re right. We’ll work on that.

[00:07:44] Beth: I want to say a brief word for Dusty Johnson in South Dakota. He was in the House. And I thought that he was a little sparklet of hope in the Republican caucus. I think he’s a pretty smart guy, does his homework, takes the office seriously. Left the House to run for governor. He didn’t make the runoff. He finished third. And I just think that’s a bummer because I do think he had... I don’t agree with him on everything, but I think he had contributions to make.

[00:08:12] Sarah: It does not surprise me that someone you would feel that way about would not do well in the current Republican election.

[00:08:18] Beth: I don’t know whether to be offended or reassured by that.

[00:08:22] Sarah: Neither. You should be complimented, but it’s not reassuring because it doesn’t say great things about the future of the Republican Party.

[00:08:29] Beth: It does not.

[00:08:30] Sarah: Which we’re going to get to. Put a pin in that. It got pretty nasty in Montana, too, because the way that Steve Daines coronated his chief of staff was shitty to both the Democrats and, oh, I don’t know, the people of Montana. And so you have Alani Bankhead as a Democrat, but I think really people want to center around this independent candidate, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar. And look, I’m not mad at this strategy. In Nebraska, in South Dakota, in these deeply red states, if we got to go independent first, fine. Who cares? Let’s just do that. So Bankhead says she’s not dropping out, but we’ll see how bad the pressure gets.

[00:09:11] Beth: He definitely outraised everyone else.

[00:09:15] Sarah: Oh yeah, the University of Montana president?

[00:09:17] Beth: Yes, the independent candidate, which is usually the rub with independent candidates. You know what? Let’s try some things. I’m here for trying things.

[00:09:24] Sarah: That’s a good transition to the current Republican caucus.

[00:09:28] Beth: Is it just getting a little chippy finally at long last? A little  chippiness.

[00:09:32] Sarah: I see it, and I like it. It was even the headline of The New York Times today. The headline was like, “They are slightly resisting.” I like both want to feel giddy, and then I’m also like, “This is what I feel giddy about?” Look, okay let me just say this. The death of the 1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund is absolutely reason to feel giddy. Now, do I wish it had never seen the light of day? That would’ve been a better success, of course, but the fact that they were like, no, is reason to celebrate, guys. It just is.

[00:10:03] Beth: What feels new to me here is that we’ve had moments before where the public has been like, “No,” and so they’ve gone, “Psst, psst, please, Mr. President, let’s change our path on this.” With this, we have reports of people yelling in Todd Blanche’s face.

[00:10:22] Sarah: That sounds like fun.

[00:10:23] Beth: And after Todd Blanche said, “Okay, we’re not going to do it,” they were like, “Don’t believe you. We need to put it in writing. We need to put it in a law.” And so I think we’re maybe getting somewhere. Are we getting somewhere that I’d like to be? Not yet, but I will take the progress in this direction.

[00:10:41] Sarah: No, we are. That’s not true, Beth. We are getting somewhere we want to be because it’s not here. You see what I’m saying?

[00:10:49] Beth: I do.

[00:10:50] Sarah: And that is good and well with my soul. Not here is where I don’t want to be, and so any movement out of the circle that includes here is great. Do you see what I’m saying?

[00:11:06] Beth: In the face of a little chippiness, the president gets chippier, too. So we have reporting that they are yelling at Todd Blanche, raised voices, actual yelling, and Trump goes, “You know what? I’d like him to be the permanent attorney general, not just the acting attorney general, the permanent one.” And I think that’s going to be fascinating. Can he even get out of committee? The way that he’s conducted himself as acting attorney general, the fact that he was the president’s former personal lawyer. Not the only personnel challenge right now either.

[00:11:39] Sarah: Because here’s the thing. I would also like to say it’s not the only raised voices. He apparently also cussed out Benjamin Netanyahu. So the stress is showing, is all I’m saying. The stress is really showing all around. It is so clear to me that no one around the president is telling him the truth. No one is pushing. He has surrounded himself with people, many of which I think sincerely believe his instincts are good, and so we have hit where the instincts are. Not only bad, but harmful. The Senate is pissed because he went after John Cornyn. For why? Cassidy, maybe. Cornyn, why? He was this stalwart, this fundraiser, so now they’re just mad. And they do, thank God, have some power under our constitutional democracy to exercise, and they seem to be doing that.

[00:12:42] Beth: So Trump has nominated Bill Pulte to be the acting director of national intelligence, the position recently vacated by Tulsi Gabbard. And I think it’s helpful to just think for a second about what this job is because this job has not been around forever. It is a post 9/11 creation, born of the idea that we have an enormous, complicated, often competitive intelligence apparatus collecting all kinds of information all over the world and more within these borders than we might prefer and be comfortable with, and that somebody needed to coordinate all of that to ensure that we act on good information in appropriate ways, that we don’t act on bad information, and that we steward that information well. This is one of the most difficult jobs that could exist within the government. It is controversial. There are still people who think this was the wrong answer to a healthy set of questions post 9/11. So it’s a tough gig all around. Tulsi Gabbard was a weird choice, a controversial choice herself because of a lack of experience, and then Trump says, how about we get somebody from housing over here?”

[00:14:05] Sarah: When you make Tulsi Gabbard look like a reasonable nominee, I don’t know what we’re doing. I appreciate Tom Tillis saying, “I’m tired of amateur hour.” You know what, buddy? Same.

[00:14:22] Beth:  So Bill Pulte is currently the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We’re going to start getting Bill Pulte Marco Rubio memes because he’s going to do that job while being the acting DNI.

[00:14:38] Sarah: Oh my God. This is our friend from the Fed harassment. This is our bestie who went after the Fed chairs for their multiple homes.

[00:14:47] Beth: Correct. It seems like the most work Bill Pulte has done in his current post is to scrutinize people’s mortgage filings who have ever disagreed with the president about anything.

[00:14:59] Sarah: Which, listen, it is its own form of intelligence. I’m just saying. I’m just saying it is...

[00:15:05] Beth: Oh my God. Here’s where we are. So he’s behind the Lisa Cook action, the Fed governor. He is behind Letitia James action. He hasn’t really gotten far with these ideas, but boy, Donald Trump likes the way he thinks. And so he’s going to now have access to the most confidential information that we have in these United States.

[00:15:30] Sarah: What could go wrong?

[00:15:31] Beth: What could go wrong? So a little chippiness about old Bill simmering.

[00:15:39] Sarah: And now here is what I think I’ve picked up on over the last few weeks. If they’re chippy to the press, they’re real mad behind the scenes.

[00:15:48] Beth: Yes.

[00:15:49] Sarah: And that makes me feel a little bit better

[00:15:52] Beth: Not limited to the Senate, the chippiness, because we did have four Republicans in the House vote with Democrats about the Iran war saying, “Hey, you need to take troops out of Iran, or you need to get approval from Congress.”

[00:16:07] Sarah: Yep.

[00:16:07] Beth: But this excursion situation that you keep describing is not working for us. Now, good news, Marco Rubio says the war’s over. Wild to see that Marco Rubio says we’re done as everybody keeps firing at each other.

[00:16:21] Sarah: Interesting. Bet it doesn’t feel that way in Kuwait with their airport under attack. Just saying.

[00:16:28] Beth: I bet it doesn’t feel that way if you have a loved one serving in the United States military over there. Doesn’t seem to feel that way in the oil industry, where they’re warning that so much oil is just sitting, waiting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, that we are about to see a price shock on a level that we haven’t yet seen.

[00:16:46] Sarah: I think this has a chance in the Senate. Am I crazy?

[00:16:51] Beth: I don’t know what will happen. This is the kind of move that I have been desperately waiting for, and that while I view it as good news, also makes me incredibly nervous. Because when you think about trust and confidence in our systems, is American democracy up for this moment? If this passed the House and the Senate and the White House kept doing whatever it wants over there, which I think is the likely outcome, that is a precarious situation for us. I don’t know exactly what that means. I don’t know the form that precarity takes. I know that it makes my stomach hurt.

[00:17:33] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:17:34] Beth: And so we need it. We have to do this. This is the way and also it’s a scary way.

[00:17:40] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:17:41] Beth: Thinking about the administration doing whatever it pleases, we will now turn our attention to the Department of Homeland Security. Amateur hour is maybe an excellent description of what’s happening in the Department of Homeland Security. I understood the Mark Wayne Mullen nomination. I do not think he’s up for what’s happening in New Jersey right now.

[00:18:09] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:18:13] Beth: Can I tell you a little bit about Delaney Hall? Have you looked at the situation?

[00:18:16] Sarah: Yes. It’s very disturbing.

[00:18:17] Beth: So Delaney Hall is a two-story facility. It’s over 100,000 square feet. It sits on about five acres of land, and its neighbors are a sewage treatment facility and an animal fat rendering plant. So it gives you a picture of where we’re talking about in Newark. The name comes from a person who did really pivotal work around addiction and recovery, Geraldine O. Delaney. But it has been a detention center before. It closed for a while. It has always been controversial. During the Biden years, there was a request to reopen it, and Cory Booker sent an open letter saying, “Do not. It would be a real affront to people here.” It is the largest detention facility on the East Coast. And in 2025, the Trump administration signed a 15-year $1 billion contract with GEO Group, a corporation, to run it. And GEO Group has facilities in Australia, South Africa and the UK, and it is holding in the United States right now, in total, about 24,000 ICE detainees. The CEO said that on an investor call in February, if that paints a picture. It has the largest revenue of any private detention contractor, and it is the industry’s top contributor to political campaigns. A former executive from the GEO Group was hired by the Trump administration last year to spend more money on ICE facilities. The city of Newark says that GEO Group has not done things right, and they do not have a valid certificate of occupancy. So that lawsuit has been going on for a year. And then last May, there was, like, a fight or outside the facility between law enforcement and some elected officials who came to visit. One of those elected officials, Representative LaMonica McIver, has been charged with assaulting a police officer, but she just decisively won her primary to stay in Congress. And then we had four people escape last June as part of a protest about conditions in the facility. They broke through a sheetrock wall. Then in December, a forty-one-year-old man with no known history of medical issues spent one day there and died, and we still don’t know why. And then that brings us to this month.

[00:20:45] Sarah: So on May 25th, where I first started seeing things about this all over social media was because Senator Kim, who’s been a guest on this show, and protesters were pepper sprayed by federal agents outside the facility because there are people inside the facility who are on hunger strike, protesting just truly unsanitary, disgusting living conditions. And to me, this situation with the treatment of immigrants inside these facilities is coming to a head because there’s been ongoing criticisms and protests around some of the facilities in Texas, particularly some of the facilities holding children. At the same time that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to basically do its level best to discourage and shut down legal immigration as well as illegal immigration. It’s just one more example of Donald Trump saying “I’m going to go after China. JK, they’re my best friend. I’m going to end the Iranians’ nuclear program. Just kidding. We’re just going to try to get out of this as best we can. I’m going to bring down prices. Everything’s more expensive. I’m going to go after the worst of the worst immigration-wise.” And what he is going after is not only People who are here illegally who are criminals, which I think everybody agrees, fine. And not only going after people who maybe came here illegally, he is now going after people who are walking through the immigration process legally and making it difficult, if not impossible, to become citizens. He’s also trying to denaturalize people who have already become citizens. It is just a frontal assault, largely driven by racist and nationalist ideas about who belongs in America in just the most inhumane, cruel way imaginable.

[00:22:51] Beth: They get away with some of this because they talk about it as crime fighting. They say, “This is for the worst of the worst.” And what we know from more than a year now of experience with this Department of Homeland Security is that they can pick you up shopping for diapers for your kids and talk about you as the worst of the worst, even if you have no criminal record, even if they’re not sure that you’re here illegally. They just suspect that you might be.

[00:23:18] Sarah: Even if you are, in fact, a child, which they pick up lots and lots of those as well.

[00:23:23] Beth: This is an administrative process. When ICE detains someone, it’s a civil process, civil the way a driver’s license is civil. It is not criminal. These are people who have not been charged with crimes. So they put them in these facilities. They treat them as though they’ve murdered someone, and then they come to the public and say, “It’s not supposed to be the Holiday Inn. We’re holding them.” Some of these people don’t have court dates set. They struggle to have access to visitors. The facilities put all kinds of constraints in place about when you can visit. They shift that whenever they want to. There is an organization set up outside this facility in New Jersey called Eyes on ICE that maintains a box of clothing so that people who go in wearing shorts can come grab some pants if they’ve been denied entry because they didn’t meet the dress code that day. The dress code is confusing. It’s inconsistent. They do everything they can to make it hard for people to meet with their lawyers and their loved ones, and again, this is a civil process. They have not charged these folks with crimes, and that is so offensive to me. Mark Wayne Mullen told the president in a cabinet meeting that there was no hunger strike. There was a handful of people who wanted access to their correct ethnic food. That’s how he put it, but said that they are getting their needed calorie intake every day. Meanwhile, the reports coming out of the facility are that the food has mold in it, that some of the food has worms in it, that people cannot get medical care for chronic conditions, that everything smells like gas and sulfur and rotting garbage because of where the facility is located and how it’s insulated. That the sanitation is awful. Senator Kim has said that. He and Representatives Menendez and Pallone have been in there, and they say it is unacceptable. It falls below the government’s own standards for what these facilities should be doing. And that’s the situation that we have when Governor Mikey Sherrill tries to go visit the facility and is given very limited access. The New Jersey Health Department is given very limited access to inspect it. So now the state of New Jersey has sued the GEO Group, saying, “You need to let us in, and the court needs to be apprised of the conditions that we’re hearing.” They’re worried about tuberculosis transmission because of the level of sanitation happening in here.

[00:25:52] Sarah: You hear stories all the time. I heard a story from an Irishman that was detained and deported, and he was like, “It’s like a concentration camp. I don’t know what other language to use to adequately describe.” And he wasn’t even at this one. He was at one that’s considered not that bad. You hear people who get out-- if they live, let’s not forget about the poor man they dropped off in the middle of the winter who died-- that tell people it’s awful. It is offensive to just basic levels of humanity, how people are treated in there. And again, I think unfortunately people think if you violate the immigration laws, it’s a crime. Like a criminal case. So I think they’re playing on people’s baseline understanding of the immigration process, and they’re playing on this idea that it’s the worst of the worst when it’s women and children and pregnant women who aren’t getting the care they need. And this idea that we just want to make it as hard as possible. The reason they want to treat people so inhumanely is they want to intimidate and scare people. That to get to the deportation levels that white nationalist Stephen Miller wants, people will need to self-deport, and so they’re just trying to scare the shit out of people so they self-deport. This green card change where you have to go back to your country of origin to process your green card because you’re on the legal pathway to citizenship it’s not a barrier. It’s an impossibility. They’re also the same week saying they’re going to close down all these processing places in Africa, so they’re going to send you back to a place you can’t do the process. They want to prevent people from becoming citizens. They want to stop immigration to America, a country built on immigrants. He’s married to an immigrant, for Christ’s sake. It’s just outrageous. It is outrageous, and my fear is that because of the other stresses that this administration has put on everyday Americans’ lives that’s not going to translate. It’s not going to convey. Now, it will to certain populations. It certainly has to the Latino population in places like Texas, and I think we’re going to see it show up in the midterms. But it’s just It’s not who we are. It’s unethical. It’s immoral. It’s a disgrace.

[00:28:18] Beth: I think the conditions being described in this facility would be wrong in a maximum security prison.

[00:28:23] Sarah: Absolutely.

[00:28:24] Beth: I think no matter what you have done in your life, if you are being held by the government, separated from your people, deprived of your liberty, you ought to receive adequate nutrition and medical care and not be psychologically tortured in any number of ways that reports describe going on in this facility. And I think that’s true whether you are an 80-year-old or an eight-year-old or a 48-year-old. The idea that a group of men in middle age are fine to suffer in these conditions but not anyone else also offends me. That this is wrong for people. For human beings, this is wrong. The question that I have is what would be right or what would be better? What is a step forward that the government could take from here? I hate that Holiday Inn remark from Mullen because honestly I think if the government is taking me, again, into its custody away from my people before it’s charged me with anything or proven anything or even demonstrated that it has the potential of proving anything, that yeah, they should put me in the Holiday Inn. Honestly, I should have a certain set of conditions that are pretty nice because I haven’t done anything wrong other than this person has a suspicion of what I might have done wrong. But if we decide, okay, here is a person who’s here illegally, they are waiting on a deportation process to unfold through immigration courts, what could we all agree would be acceptable for that person?

[00:30:08] Sarah: If Stephen Miller’s at the table, I think coming to any level of agreement is going to be very difficult. He has radical views, and he has an enormous amount of power within this administration, and there’s just no other way to say it. He has truly radical, racist, fascist beliefs. You read the reporting about his history when he was in the United States Senate and how the other staffers and senators was, like, the weirdo that everybody kind of tolerated, and now he’s setting the policy strategy. This is what happens. This is what happens when you put a radical in charge of our immigration system. And Mark Wayne Mullins can dress it up, and Tom Homan can pretend like this is just business as usual, but it’s not. It’s not business as usual. That’s why they’re under so many lawsuits. That’s why I think maybe the theme of this episode is my sort of schizophrenic, emotional reaction because I do feel like I’m alternating between hopeful and despondent. It’s getting more regular, this back and forth, because in the same way that Donald Trump’s insane posture towards our energy infrastructure and his actions in Iran is accelerating the electrification of the globe; who’da thunk it, right? He’s so bad. Everybody’s like crap, we better get our act together and electrify everything because he’s made everything so terrible. I think there could be a situation here with our immigration process. I think this could get so bad and so ugly that it could fundamentally break the Department of Homeland Security in ways it cannot come back from, which I wouldn’t be sad about. I certainly hope it gets so bad that we finally for the name of all that is sacred and good in the world, reform our immigration process. It is this weird very painful, very scary, very deadly for some people acceleration to the point where everybody’s “Fine, we’ll fix it.”

[00:32:12] Beth: If I could put some proposals on the table about “Fine, we’ll fix it” I would say, one, immigration should come out of Homeland Security.

[00:32:20] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:20] Beth: Homeland Security should be about criminal law enforcement and terrorism prevention and cybersecurity. Cybersecurity for banks, cybersecurity for water systems, cybersecurity for electrical grids. There is plenty of work to do. I would take immigration out of that and have a referral process to federal law enforcement for people who are the worst of the worst. The American public has said loudly and clearly, through elections and otherwise, that they believe people who’ve committed crime here when they are not legally here should be deported. We should have a process in the federal government to do that humanely and expeditiously. For people who are not a danger to society or a threat, the American people still want a process to make sure that people are here legally. I think a department that is focused on that process and that population could do that pretty well. It’s a lot of people. It needs a lot of focus. It’s a complex problem. We should be able to use technology to monitor people who are waiting somewhere in the immigration system in a much cheaper way, to just talk dollars and cents, than these detention facilities. I don’t want a billion dollars over 50 years going to the GEO Group to hold people in completely inadequate warehouses, when we could just monitor people with ankle bracelets. That’s an old technology now that can do so much to ensure that we don’t lose track of people, we are being responsible. We are also being resourceful and humane. I think that there are ways that this could work, and it wouldn’t be that much of a watershed from where the average person is in their views about how this should be handled.

[00:34:19] Sarah: I agree. And I desperately hope that the suffering being inflicted on innocent people, including innocent children, leads to this conversation and understanding and changing orientation to our immigration process and to the people who want to come to America for a better life

[00:34:44] Beth: And in the meantime, kudos to the mayor of Newark who has been courageous and persistent about this to Senator Kim, to Senator Booker, to New Jersey’s representatives, to Governor Cheryl, to Eyes on Ice. There are so many people across the nation who are not letting this fall off their radars and who are every single day, at personal risk often, walking headlong into this situation to say, “I don’t want my fellow human beings treated this way. I don’t want my government overreaching this way. I don’t want my community’s needs and my state’s needs to be dismissed by the federal government, and I want federal officials to do better than, ‘Oh, it’s just a handful of people on hunger strike. Nothing to see here.’ Yeah. So I’m really appreciative of those efforts. Okay, let’s take a big exhale. Sarah, I have been thinking a lot about how I want to feel this summer. I made a series of decisions. I shared one of them on Substack, and I think I’ve maybe touched a nerve for some subset of the population. I have a lot of time in the summer, all year long, but especially in the summer, when I am waiting for my children somewhere. I’m waiting on the deck of a swimming pool because they’re having a practice with their swim team. I’m waiting outside of a theater. I’m waiting at the library while they collect some library books. Just a whole lot of waiting time. And as I started to think about the summer, I was thinking, “Okay, when am I going to carry my laptop in? And maybe I could carry my laptop and my iPad and sidecar it so I could really get some work in that waiting time.” And I realized that makes me miserable. Trying to cram work into every pocket of the day makes me do bad work and also makes me hate everyone and everything. So my rule for myself this summer is that wait time is for fiction. I am not going to read books for work. I am not going to read Supreme Court cases. I’m not going to read the news. When I’m waiting somewhere, whether it is for 15 minutes or an hour, I’m going to pull out a romance novel like a good ‘80s mom and enjoy my life. And it’s working really well for me.

[00:37:06] Sarah: I think about this a lot. I get the question a lot, how do I read so much? So I read about 75 to 80 books a year, and it’s absolutely because times when I would be doing something else, I’m reading. A lot of that is time at night when I might be watching television, I’m reading. I don’t watch television almost at all. But there is an aspect of just reading whenever you have a chance that will definitely improve your reading life. I struggle in the out and about because I’m usually reading probably three to four books at once, and I read sometimes in the afternoon, I read in bed at night. So I have a book cart that kind of moves around my house with me. But because I kind of want to read all of them at the same time, I can’t take them with me. And I hate reading on my phone. Will not do it, hate it. Now, Nicholas has bought this teeny-tiny little e-reader that’s the size of an old-school iPhone. Tiny. And so he keeps that with him all the time. So instead of pulling out his phone, he pulls that out, and I am considering that. I kind of like that idea. And so he’s working through this World War II book that’s going to take him one million years. You could just keep a long, slow read on that and keep it with you. But the novels and stuff I’m reading if I leave the house, I’m not going to think to grab it because it’s in my room. It’s in my book cart. It’s got its little place. I guess I could just pick a car book. Like it’s just my car book. I also don’t do spend a lot of time in my car waiting for my kids though, because I got a driver.

[00:38:41] Beth: I think there are two branches of this idea. There’s a branch for people who want to read more, and that is a goal in and of itself. That is not really what I’m trying to do here. I am trying to avoid the stress and irritableness that arises for me when I am trying to work in those moments. And that’s the reason I’m not picking serious books for those moments too. I need something fluffy that doesn’t take a whole lot of my brain, that’s fun and delightful, and I look forward to. Because then when my kids get back in the car, I’m fine to put the book down. I can be fully present with them. My brain isn’t in the email that I was just writing or the call I just got off of. I can be with them in summer mom mode in a way that I just can’t when I’m shifting in and out of something a lot more serious.

[00:39:41] Sarah: Yeah. It doesn’t make me cranky to squeeze in work. It makes me feel like I’m winning. It makes me feel like I’ve gotten away with something. But it also means I’ll see something, if it takes more brain power, I’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll deal with that later,” and then sometimes I forget to deal with it later. So there is a risk to kind of squeezing it in. But I definitely get that, and I think there’s also space to just not do anything, which I encourage my children all the time. You can sometimes just sit. I’ve been listening to music. I’ve just been staring into the middle distance, which is pretty fun sometimes. Everybody should try it. So I definitely think there’s space to just put your brain on default mode and relax. Reading is definitely my preferred way to do that, so I think it’s a great idea.

[00:40:26] Beth: Yeah. That’s what the romance novel gives me. Or a light mystery or whatever. Just a chance to go into that relaxed space where I’m not trying to be productive. When I shared this on Substack I heard from Kate, who said that she had these pockets of time described as time confetti which I really like because I like the positive spin on this time instead of it being, like, a time suck, which is how I have described it before. And she heard an expert say “Roll those together for productivity blocks,” and I thought, I don’t want to. I want to think of it as time confetti, and what a joy that I get to sit and read my fun book right now and just not feel all the stress. And there’s just an aspect of this that’s trusting myself too. When I sit down at my desk to work, I will get it done. And I will do a good job, and I will have all the appropriate tools, and that thing I need to follow up on, I can either do it then or schedule it as a task that I promise I will do the next time I sit down to work. I’m just learning that no one is clapping for me spending the most minutes on anything. It’s the quality of the work and the attention that I bring to it, and allowing my attention to fully shift away from it in these moments. I think enhances what I do when I’m locked in, as the kids say.

[00:41:50] Sarah: Love it.

[00:41:50] Beth: Erin calls this her emotional support book. If you have emotional support books you’d like to recommend to us for the summer, we’d be delighted to hear those titles from you, or other strategies for your time confetti, ways that you celebrate and delight in it. If you want more celebration and delight with your time, please do consider joining us in Minneapolis at the Spice conference, the EP retreat, or our live show. All the information for that is in our show notes. We’ll be back with you next Tuesday. Between now and then, have the best weekend available to you.Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Read more

I’ve been saving some good news, y’all. I know that requires discipline and I want you to appreciate it.

The anti-weaponization slush fund is dead.

Todd Blanche had this exchange with a congresswoman where she asked him point blank if the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was moving forward, and he just said: it’s done. Done done. A judg…

Read more

Read more

I waited on this brief for election results, and I have to tell you: California is still counting. I don’t know what I was thinking making that a headliner. They’ll be tallying mail ballots for another week or two. But we have…

Read more

…if you ever need administrative help, I’m your girl. I know sorting through email may not be the aspect of your work you want to delegate, but I’m sure there are other things that would be nice to pass off as the Pantsuit Politics world continues to grow. You may not be ready to take on help (volunteer or paid) at the moment, but I’m putting the offer out there for either.

sent us an email on February 23, 2018, telling us that she loved Pantsuit Politics and would be happy to help us if we needed it. More than six years later, she has decidedly outgrown the charter of “administrative help.” Her project management skills have grown and deepened. Every person she interacts with outside Pantsuit Politics tells us she’s the best in the business, and we know it’s true.

We first met by email on August 29, 2016, when she reached out a discussion we had on perceived abuses of the social safety net. Fast forward to September of 2021, when we sent her a note on Voxer in a panic because both Alise and Megan Hart, who managed our book club at the time, were going to be on parental leaves as our first book was launching. Maggie joined our business as if she’d always been part of it because, in so many ways, she had been. Maggie’s heart is present in everything she touches, and we know that’s why so many of you call her a friend-in-your-phone.

Alise and Maggie are both leaving Pantsuit Politics after a long, great run. They each leave a legacy in our community and our business. We are cheering for them and have no doubt that they’ll find happiness and success in the next chapters of their careers.

We wanted to open space here as their virtual going away celebration. We know they’d love to read your notes in the comments. We will miss them, and we are in good shape for our next chapter because of the thoughtful work they’ve done with us.

With gratitude,

Sarah and Beth

I also have a proposal: someone should make the 100 emoji rainbow for Pride month. I don’t know how to make this happen. I just needed it to exist somewhere outside my own head.

Okay. Deep breath…

Read more

Topics Discussed

• Graham Platner and the Maine Senate race

• Political scandals and changing voter tolerance

• "Normie" politicians and the unapologetic posture in American life

• Progressive vs. moderate framing in the Democratic Party

• What we actually need from candidates: policy, biography, communication style

• Emotional maturity as a political standard

• Partisan identity and double standards

• Bronte the Stylist on Instagram

• Team changes at Pantsuit Politics

Episode Resources

The Sexting (WSJ)

The Tattoos (AP News)

The Senate Race (UNH)

Rep. Auchincloss’s position (The Hill)

Sen. Kim’s comment (CNN)

“Somebody Will” (Shucked)

Bronte the Stylist (IG)

Sarah’s outfit app (Cladwell)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:30] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:32] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:33] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we are going to talk about Graham Platner, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat in the great state of Maine, and what his latest scandals say about Maine voters in the midterm, the Democratic Party, and all of us. Outside of politics, Beth and I have a new Instagram obsession, and we’re going to share it with all of you. Plus, we have some really big news to share with you all about changes here at Pantsuit Politics, so you’re going to want to stay put until the end.

[00:01:08] Beth: First. You may have heard over the weekend that the Freedom 250 celebration that the president is putting together has been messy.

[00:01:15] Sarah: It fell apart, Beth.

[00:01:17] Beth: Been pretty messy. Several performers said, “I didn’t realize how partisan this would be. I don’t want to be part of that.” Now, I do have questions because here at Pantsuit Politics, we were not depending on the president or Freedom 250--

[00:01:28] Sarah: Absolutely not.

[00:01:30] Beth: Or even country music legend Martina McBride to make our celebration a great one. We’ve been thinking for months about all of you, and we wanted to be sure that however you’re celebrating America 250, we have you. So I made you a murder mystery dinner party kit, one of my favorite things in the world to do. My daughter Jane did the graphic design. It is ready to go, ready to roll out for you and your people. If you have smaller children, maybe extended family members, and you want to gather around and have some fun learning some key stories about our founding, I’ve got you covered there as well. We put Reimagining Citizenship meditations into an e-book for those of you who want to meditate on your journey with citizenship in the 30 days leading up to July 4th, and we’re almost there. So if you’ve been waiting to join us as a premium member, this is the moment, because you get all of that. You’ll get our very exciting premium episodes the week of July 4th and everything we make between now and then, and you’ll know that you’re supporting our work here. So the link to join us is in the show notes, and we really hope you will.

[00:02:32] Sarah: Also, we’re all wearing our Be a Good Neighbor celebratory T-shirts. Literally hundreds of you have ordered said T-shirt. Now, there has been some confusion on the sizing because there is a unisex, a women’s, and a kids’. So if you run into any problems, the only thing you need to know is just email us, hello@pantsuitpoliticsshow.com, and we’ll fix it for you. No big deal.

[00:02:54] Beth: We want to be good neighbors.

[00:02:54] Sarah: That’s right. We’re going to be good neighbors. Everybody’s going to have the best shirt available to them, okay? All right, next up, Graham Platner. Beth, shall we take Mr. Platner’s scandals in chronological order?

[00:03:14] Beth: It’s tricky, but how about I start by telling you about the tattoo?

[00:03:18] Sarah: She took the tattoos and I took the sexting, guys. That’s how we divided the labor today.

[00:03:23] Beth: That’s 2026 for you. I took the tattoos and Sarah took the sexting. Okay. If you were not paying attention, Graham Platner, 41-year-old oyster farmer and veteran running for Senate in Maine. He comes out with a very splashy commercial where he looks kind of rugged and has a little bit of sexiness about him, and you can tell this is not your dad’s Democrat- is the message that was being sent. And shortly after that, we thought, yeah, not your dad’s Democrat because he does have a tattoo that is a symbol from the SS dating back to Nazi Germany. Okay? His story is that he got this tattoo on a drunken evening in Croatia while he was in the military because they all thought it looked really tough, and for 20 years he went about his life taking shirtless pictures and dancing in shirtless videos, as one does, and would not have done that if he thought he was sporting Nazi symbolism on his chest.

[00:04:27] Sarah: Did you recognize the symbol?

[00:04:29] Beth: No, I did not.

[00:04:30] Sarah: I didn’t either, and I just want to disclose that. I didn’t recognize it either.

[00:04:35] Beth: And I think this is a really tricky thing. There are so many tricky things around this. I didn’t take classes that took me deep into Nazi symbolism, and yet that symbolism is so present and hurtful to people today because World War II is not ancient history. And so I take him at his word that he was drunk and overseas and got a tattoo that he thought looked cool. Do I believe that it really was not until he was running for the United States Senate that someone said, “Hey, what’s that?” I don’t. I don’t think I believe that. But nonetheless, he had a good friend who’s a tattoo artist in rural Maine and quickly was able to have the tattoo covered. He now has a dog with a Celtic knot right there. And the Associated Press said in an unusual move for a Senate race, he did take his shirt off and show us that the tattoo, in fact, has been covered up. Now, in talking about the tattoo He did use the R word. He said that this was the most R word thing he’s ever heard, and so that kind of set off a mini controversy that was like a flight with some of his old Reddit posts. Yeah. He has a flight of controversy. He has made comments on Reddit about Black people not tipping well, rural white people being racist and stupid, women who are victims of rape needing to take some responsibility. There’s a lot there.

[00:06:10] Sarah: Real great hits.

[00:06:10] Beth: And what he has said about all of it is like, “I was in the military. It really messed me up. I have done a lot of work on myself. I am sorry for my past mistakes. I am proud of who I am today.” And that’s where we were until the sexting came up.

[00:06:28] Sarah: And he survived that first round pretty well, so well that the governor of Maine, Janet Mills, and his Maine challenger in the Democratic primary dropped out. And he is consistently polling above Susan Collins, who would be his Republican opponent once he wins the Democratic nomination, which I think we can assume he’s going to do at this point. Then this weekend, The Wall Street Journal publishes an expose. Apparently last year in August, his wife, Amy Gertner, disclosed to a campaign staffer that she found multiple message threads on his phone where he was exchanging sexually explicit text messages with I think six different women. The Journal further disclosed that they found an active account with Grand Platner on Kik, a private messaging app often used to arrange sexual encounters I had never heard of. And The New York Times did some additional reporting. It was this aide who left the campaign who disclosed this information. Now, they have both said, “We’ve worked on our marriage.” They’re pretty newly married. They’ve only been married since like I think 2023. They’ve been in therapy. They’ve worked this out. This is just people trying to take him down. And that’s where we stand as of now.

[00:07:50] Beth: Feel sad for Amy about the way this has come out because here’s this thing that’s obviously been really painful for her, and now every headline almost blames her for it being public knowledge.

[00:08:03] Sarah: Yeah, because she told the staffer.

[00:08:05] Beth: And I hate that for her.

[00:08:06] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:08:08] Beth: It’s normal to sit down with a staffer when you’re running for a national office to say, “Here’s some stuff you should know. It’s going to look bad. We should be prepared for it.” So she did the right thing by sharing that with the campaign so they could be prepared for it, and yet here we are and they seem unprepared for it.

[00:08:29] Sarah: I can’t tell if it was like, y’all should know, or if she was, like, actually trying to talk to the staffer for emotional support.

[00:08:36] Beth:  Yeah, that could be.

[00:08:38] Sarah: I haven’t been quite able to tell that because both of their reactions to the staff person disclosing this feels like maybe it’s the latter. I think there’s so much here, obviously.

[00:08:49] Beth:  There’s So much here.

[00:08:50] Sarah: I think the first thing that comes up a lot with Graham Platner, rightfully, is his politics. He has taken a very progressive stance. He’s endorsed by Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, and which is a pretty interesting contrast in relationship to Susan Collins, who has clearly survived in Maine by being very centrist. This feeds this sort of perpetual debate inside the Democratic Party. Should we be progressive or should we be moderates? And to that I say, what are we talking about? Do I think economically most Americans are closer to where Bernie Sanders has always been? I do. I think health insurance pushes everybody a little bit closer every single day. But I also think Matt Yglesias does a lot of work on this. There are lots of cultural issues or other policy issues like, for example, affirmative action where Americans need some moderation from the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party is out of step with a majority of voters on things. So I think the way this debate through any kind of manifestation, including Graham Platner, gets reduced down to we have to flip the switch on or off with regards to progressive politics is reductive and not helpful. So I think that to me that’s my political view on his very progressive stances.

[00:10:11] Beth: He feels like a throwback to Occupy Wall Street when you listen to him talk. The reason that I would not be comfortable voting for him is mostly on those policy grounds. I don’t like hearing him talk about like burning everything down in Washington, DC. I feel like that’s happening right now. He approaches that horseshoe moment for me where far left and far are so angry about everything that the anger itself becomes the political ideology and the political plan and the political strategy, and that does not appeal to me at all. I think a lot of what he talks about, though, clearly is connecting with a segment of voters in Maine, and I don’t think the Democratic Party can answer should we be this or that because this and that are so blurry on their own. And how many seats do you want to have? You’re just going to have different results state by state. Maine is so fascinating because you have Susan Collins, who is one of the more left-leaning Republicans in the caucus, and the other senator is an independent, Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats but is an independent and has taken some votes that differ from the rest of the party. And so does that independent spirit then leapfrog all the way to where Grand Platner is on issues? Maybe. I don’t know. That’s for the people of Maine to decide. What interests me most about Grand Platner is less him as a human being and more what he represents about insider-outsider status, what we think about authenticity and truth, and how normal can you be and ascend to this kind of office, and what do we expect of each other, and how long do you need to show that you’re a different person before people accept that you’re a different person. Those questions, what he represents is a lot more interesting to me than this individual guy in Maine who the voters of Maine will judge, and they’ll do what they’re going to do. I liked what Andy Kim said about this, the senator from New Jersey. He was just like, “ I’ll work with whoever the people of Maine elect to the Senate because that’s my job.” I thought, “That’s the right answer.”

[00:12:17] Sarah: Yeah. To the normie of it all, I think this is so hard. I really want to tease out what I think we’ve compressed, which is that being someone who is unapologetic about certain behaviors means you’re a normie. There’s nothing normal about Donald Trump across his entire life. And so it became that if you’re crude and you’re unapologetic about your own behaviors... I’m not even going to say your mistakes, because he doesn’t describe them as mistakes. So if you have certain indicators in your personal life and you refuse to say that they were mistakes or apologize or make any sort of allowance for them, then that became like you’re not a politician, you’re a normal guy, right? It’s like we’ve put these things together and they’re not the same thing Donald Trump’s not normal. He is unapologetic. And maybe it’s the defensiveness that reads as normal, because I do think that is the posture of a lot of American life right now. I’m going to do what I want. I owe no one an excuse. It’s like I said on the show a long time ago. I don’t even remember what we were talking about; just behavior in retail, I think. And it just feels like the vibe is, “You owe me everything and I owe you shit.” And so there’s something about Sweeping up that cultural posture, that unapologetic entitlement that makes you authentic and normal, that I do think is problematic. And I don’t want to necessarily say this describes Graham Plattner. He has been apologetic. He has said “I suffered from PTSD. I had an incredibly difficult return from my military service.” And I don’t even want to pick at the boundaries of he says he’s a working-class guy, but he went to prep school, and he said she sent him to war, but he signed up. I don’t think that’s how people think about their lives. I think the nitpicking about people’s memories and narratives is kind of stupid, in my opinion. I don’t think that’s how anybody... We would all fall for that. Let me just say that. Every person alive, the narrative you tell about your own existence would be problematic if picked apart at this level. But so I’m not even saying he’s an exact Illustration of what I’m talking about, but that he’s under this umbrella of the unapologetic cussing. The unapologetic “ vices” make you normal and authentic, make you not a politician, but you are running to become a politician.

[00:15:10] Beth: My experience every day in a lot of different kinds of spaces is that the president and a lot of political actors and the way that they’re performing this normalness is way outside the mean of normalness, that most people are not as rude or profane or unapologetic, are trying to live really good lives. I recognize the irony in what I’m about to do here, but I keep thinking about a musical theater song. And I know that is not speaking to like the masculinity crisis and the white whale Joe Rogan voter that Democrats are looking for.

[00:15:53] Sarah: Great way to celebrate Pride, so good job.

[00:15:55] Beth: There you go. There’s a song from the musical Shucked where this guy has just lost his girl, okay? And he’s out in the middle of a field, and he sings this anthem about how if she doesn’t want me, somebody will. And he talks through all the reasons that’s true. And it’s just basically I work really hard. I take good care of my dog. I have a truck. I’m doing my best out here. I can catch fish. I can provide. I’m trying. And that’s enough. And someone will see the value in that, and we will get together and fall in love and be happy. And I love this song. I wish this could be the American male anthem right now, even though it’s a show tune because I think that is what most guys are looking for. Even in that space that has been so exploited by the manosphere, the more you read about it, the more those interviews I read I went and hung out with the guys playing the video games, and here’s what they told me. It is I want to be a dad. I want to have a family. I want to work hard and do my best and give something to the world and know that it’s seen, appreciated, and valued. And so this performance of screw everyone, I do what I want, feels really discordant to me with what everybody’s actually looking for. What I can understand from it is a sense of here’s a person who isn’t going to look down on me. And I think that when you have in the most Well-understood caricature of people who work in Washington, DC, a sense that they look down on everyone and think they’re better than everyone while still taking from society at large, and that is certainly exploding right now. I’m just taking. I’m in it for myself, but I pretend not to be. Then I get why anybody who doesn’t look like they’re pretending not to has some appeal.

[00:18:03] Sarah: I love your vision. I do think we’re a little limited by our own experience. I think there are vast parts of the population that don’t want to work hard that are really floundering, especially when you talk about young men. And I don’t think that’s necessarily because they want that, but I feel like they’re not presented with a path. But I think it’s less interesting to get into the manosphere, although there’s certainly some like masculinity-coded conversations happening around Graham Platner. No doubt about it. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I want, so I definitely don’t know what we want. Because on one hand I can say we are suffering from a Congress that is overly represented by Wealthy people, by older people, by lawyers. I have said and believe that Congress should be a more diverse body that understands a vast array of American experiences, including military service, psychological trauma, financial struggles. I say it and I mean it and I believe it. And at the same time, this job, particularly being a United States senator, requires a high level of skill, professionalization and I think the intersection of when politicians screwed up and they weren’t honest about why and what they were going to do next is why you have the reality we live in now where a scandal doesn’t take out a Ken Paxton, it doesn’t take out a Graham Platner. And I get that. And I don’t think that’s a bad evolution. It’s not like we were handling scandals really well; although, it did kill careers. But maybe that wasn’t the right answer either. You see what I’m saying? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if we should be like, “No, this is a higher standard of behavior we require from our representatives at the highest level of power,” or, “No, we need to allow more grace and nuance so that they can be real integrated human beings,” because when we don’t let them be “ real integrated human beings,” that’s why they hide scandal, that’s why they hide behavior, that’s why they act so weird when they get caught. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

[00:21:00] Beth: I think you’re going to hate my answer on this. What I am really looking for in 2026 as I put together the lessons of the past 10 years is emotional maturity. And I get how feminine-coded that is. And that’s a lot of what we have been debating for a couple of years. Did we go too far in this direction? But here’s the thing for me. I love that Shucked song because it is emotional maturity. It’s like a person who says, “I know what is a good life to me, and I know how to be content.” And when I look at the fact that most people who go to Congress are already wealthy and rapidly become much, much wealthier, then I kind of work backwards from that and think about what kind of person could go to Congress and afford to be in Congress, which is a hard thing, but not get tremendously wealthier through that service, where the goal of the service changes, and it becomes less about service and more about entitlement. And so if I think about any one of these individual things with Graham Platner, don’t care. People change. I agree with you. People don’t have cohesive stories of their lives, and if they do, that’s weird. It’s weird that I went to law school with some people who knew they wanted to be in Congress from age 20 and acted accordingly every step along the way. That’ll mess you up in a different sense. It’s just like who can be grounded and stable and have a support system in place to help them go do this thing that is going to pull them in every direction simultaneously? And what we see over and over, you’ve said this for years, don’t hate the player, hate the game. The game messes people up. So when I look at something like this latest story around Platner, what made my eyebrows shoot up is 2023. They’ve been married since 2023, and in 2026, in the midst of a campaign for Senate, we have this perfectly normal, lovely woman having to make a video saying to the whole world, “Marriage is hard. Infertility is hard. A Senate campaign is hard. And we’re going through all those things at once, and counseling is helping us.” And I think to myself, I can be right with all of that and have complete empathy for it and respect the journey these two people are on, and also wonder to myself, “Can you handle the game that you’re about to walk into?” Again, that is for Maine voters. But that gets to me to the bigger question. When we are taking risks on people, which is what the moment calls for, we don’t need any more of the people who knew they wanted to be in Congress when they were 20. We’re just full up. We’re stocked on that. Good for them, but we are full up and we have seen where that leads. We have to take risks on people. How can we take risks on people who seem to be pretty mature and pretty grounded and pretty stable?

[00:24:10] Sarah: Two things. Yeah, I agree that there is a difference between saying, “I lived a normal human life, and I understand how in isolation some of the choices I made during living my normal human life can be picked apart and seen as some sort of representation of my character.” I do think the fact that the majority of voters seem to have decided, “No, we’re not doing that,” is good and well and shows some progress and evolution. Because we should stop doing that. I’m tired of the... I did this. I did this for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I did background. I did oppo research. And we should maybe just stop. Unless it was what I was doing, which was your actual votes, but what were we supposed to know when we all of a sudden heard some of Barack Obama’s minister’s speeches? These sort of gotcha oppo research. And also I do think that the Access Hollywood tape should have been disqualifying. So I don’t know, maybe I’m just lying to myself. I do think voters have decided stop trying to short-circuit the process this way. Maybe it’s information we needed, but stop trying to... the gotcha everybody seems to have moved on from, especially if it’s behavior in the past. I agree that this sexting is not in the past. It is not a good stress management technique in the middle of a Senate campaign to be sending explicit messages to up to 12 women at a time. That to me shows someone who is struggling emotionally and psychically with the task before them, probably because he’s so stressed about people finding out about all this shit.

[00:25:51] Beth: And is going into a body where we know that kind of behavior tends to be made worse.

[00:25:57] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:57] Beth: We know that kind of behavior is already a problem in this body. I think about this a lot with John Fetterman, and I know that he is a special case because he had an actual stroke too. But I just am looking for people who seem to have really good stress management skills that are not about to go into this place that exacerbates things that you were already struggling with.

[00:26:24] Sarah: Okay, so to the 20-year-olds of it all, I would like to put in an endorsement for some of those people. Here’s a thing I think we haven’t grappled with that I believe is related and comes up with this whole Graham Platner thing. There’s clearly a huge age differential here. We have Susan Collins who’s in her late 70s, Graham Platner’s who’s in his 40s. If you want somebody in their 40s who is equipped emotionally and has the experience throughout their life to be able to handle a Senate campaign or a presidential campaign or like this level of politics, they’re not going to be a normie, not at that age. There’s a reason James Talarico’s not married. There’s a reason Susan Collins doesn’t have any kids. There’s a reason Cory Booker’s going out there and getting married all of a sudden. It’s all-consuming. It’s all-consuming in a way that is going to make you seem abnormal, right? Because it isn’t a normal experience, not at this point in history. Now, do I think uncapping the House can maybe make it a little more normal? I do, but that’s not where we’re at right now. It’s not a normal experience. And if you want people prepared to do it that aren’t 75, then it’s going to look real different, and they might need to be locked in from the age of 20 on. Just saying.

[00:28:14] Beth: I think that’s a really interesting point, and a mix is probably what we need. I don’t mind some of the technocrats and some of the nerds because I think we need that experience. I was just thinking this morning to tell you how not normal I am, that really our next president probably needs a good handle on maritime law. With the Strait of Hormuz and all the shipping disputes, I was reading about the French boarding another ship that was violating international law, and I just thought moving goods and people around the world is going to be one of the most urgent, relevant things the next president will face. Now, would the country be excited about somebody who has a real handle on that stuff? No. So I’m not looking for the kind of inspiration and connection that most people are with their politicians. Personally, I would love to be governed mostly by Gen X right now because I think that Gen X people are experienced enough to learn from people older than them and from people younger than them and past the phase of life that I’m in right now, where you’re thinking a lot about your kids and your parents all the time. Not that they aren’t thinking about those things, but they seem to have a little bit more distance and freedom. So that seems about right to me. But that’s also a silly formulation. We can’t just decide this is the one type of person who’s going to be there. And I do think that’s what at large as a society we’re rejecting. At large, we don’t really want to hear about demographics in any way right now, and I get why. Because we think, let’s just judge by the people and get the right people in there. What’s so weird about that to me is then you’d think we’d also let go of the partisanship. If we’re just judging by the people, then why do we have folks who you know Would be smearing a Republican with Graham Platner’s personal issues every single day of the week defending him. That’s strange to me. And Ken Paxton is the inverse of this, right? People are defensive of Ken Paxton, who are actively right now smearing Graham Platner every day of the week for his personal indiscretions. I’m ready to let go of that piece too. If everything is going to be on the table, then let’s let it all just be on the table.

[00:30:39] Sarah: I think there’s another. I’m making a Venn diagram here. So I think there’s the politics. What do your actual politics and policies convey to people about who you are and how normal you are? Then I think you have your biography, which is another piece of the Venn diagram. The reason people are still so partisan is because the partisanship has nothing to do with policy, and is at just this point just an identity marker, which is the hardest thing for people to release. So if your identity marker matches mine, then that’s all that matters. Now, I think the third part of the Venn diagram is communication style. Now, this part makes sense to me about why Donald Trump ended up where he is. His biography is not normal, but the way he talks, particularly in comparison to a Barack Obama, is super normie, right? I think Graham Platner has a very strong communication style. Watch ed some of him with Jon Stewart, and he sounds smart. He sounds thoughtful. He has a very strong ability to communicate, which I think is probably reaching the voters very strongly.

[00:31:51] Beth: But smart and thoughtful, not professorial.

[00:31:54] Sarah: Right.

[00:31:54] Beth: Not, “I might look down on you.”

[00:31:56] Sarah: This is how you get an AOC, who is also not living a normal life. Even before when she was a bartender. Bartender to member of Congress, not a normal transition. Mamdani, not normal to be that young and be the mayor of New York City. It’s the communication style. So I think that’s probably his strongest asset right now. I think it’s so strong it’s overcoming the weakness when it comes to the biography. And I think ultimately, the politics is a strength because I think especially the more you emphasize the economy and the corruption, people are done, and they’re just going to get more and more done. And I think with Ken Paxton, I think you see a similar thing. Clearly he knows how to communicate with Texans. I don’t like it, but that is what it is, and I think then you lay over the wash this of partisan and I’m going to defend Graham Platner because I’m a Democrat and I want to beat Susan Collins, and you’re going to defend Ken Paxton because you’re a Republican and you don’t want a Democrat from Texas. And then it’s even more compressed and entangled when really I think it’s these three kind of things working in concert.

[00:33:02] Beth: And it’s those things working in concert laid on current events. So I think about Congressman Jake Auchincloss coming out and saying that he finds Platner’s tattoo and his comments about it disqualifying. Auchincloss is a Democrat, seems like an up-and-coming guy, somebody who does media well, also a good communicator.

[00:33:24] Sarah: Big centrist, though.

[00:33:25] Beth: Big centrist, so ideologically in a different place. Which would be an interesting case if they were more ideologically aligned.

[00:33:32] Sarah: Right.

[00:33:33] Beth: But he also says he’s Jewish, and he’s looking at this in a moment when Israel on the international stage is going through the biggest shift in how people view the nation of Israel as a nation, as a state, and how it operates on the international stage. And because of that, you have rising antisemitism met with people saying, “I can’t not say my piece about what Israel is doing in the world because I’m afraid to be antisemitic” and people saying, “Yeah, I guess I am antisemitic,” and this horrific confluence of pressures around a topic that is painful because it is not ancient history. And so you look at somebody like Graham Plattner who comes in with not careful speech, this symbolism that he says he was unaware of or at minimum casual about. Not that I think he was a Nazi by any stretch, but maybe he knew and just thought probably most people don’t know, and it still looks cool, and whatever, it’s there, I did it. So how does all that overlay on this moment?

[00:34:47] Sarah: Complexly. Very complexly. Because that’s the thing, all of this says to me that we are just in a stage of transition, that we are trying to digest the reality of 10 years of Trump in American politics in all kinds of ways, including the candidacy of Graham Plattner. And to the other side, I don’t think we’ve learned the lessons and we’ve decided the key takeaways. But I do think we’re going to see more and more candidacies and candidates that press on these complexities, that push us to say, “But wait, it wasn’t okay for them, but now it’s okay for us.” Maybe that’ll just break the partisanship. That’d be a really great result if that’s what ultimately happens, and everybody goes, “Never mind, we’ll just let it go.”

[00:35:36] Beth: I hope so. Because the other thing in my mind as we’re talking is that there are going to be people who are mad we are having this conversation at all. Because in addition to all those factors I just listed about Israel, you do have Donald Trump as the president making decisions every day that are enormously consequential. And so there are going to be people who think elevating any of this, spending any time on it, is a betrayal because the moral imperative is electing Democrats to the Senate, and I made this argument in our last episode, to at least put some friction on the runway for President Trump. I agree that it is an imperative to put friction on the runway for President Trump. I also want to have a conversation like this and think pretty deeply about where we are in that state of transition, because I don’t think it gets better if we are always in that defensive posture. That feels to me like what we have done really unsuccessfully as a society for the last 15, 20 years, always being in that defensive posture. I think the Republican Party has gotten much more extreme and ineffective because it decided the Democrats are an existential enemy, and I think the Democratic Party has gotten more extreme and less effective because it’s decided that Republicans are an existential enemy. And so I can hold in both hands that come November, when you have a choice on a ballot, you got to make the best choice for the moment. And other than that, you need to be thinking about where we are. We all need to be thinking and discussing what works for us in these roles. What are we learning? Who do we hope to see as our senators?

[00:37:24] Sarah: Here’s the thing. The learning from this particular era of American politics should not be that the moral imperative is to put some friction on the runway for Donald Trump, because surely to God, we have all learned at this point that this particular political figure is very empowered by friction. I don’t think he wants anything but to have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House to fight him because that’s where he’s most comfortable, is fighting and communicating the fact that everything, every problem is the Democrats’ fault because they’re in charge of the Senate and they’re in charge of the House and they won’t let him do any of the great things he wants to do for America. Now, do I think that show is running its course and people don’t fall for it in the way that they used to? Yes. But make no mistake, I think that’s what he wants. I think that he wouldn’t be sad. I don’t think he gives a shit if they win the midterms or not, the Republican Party, that is, because I think he likes that. That is where he is most comfortable. We think that we’re going to elect a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, and he’s going to go, “Oh, no, I guess I’ll just hang out for the next two years.” Hell no. Now, I still want a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. I want investigations. I want legislation stopped. I’m not saying that’s not the political imperative, but it will strengthen him in some ways. It will corral the people who were maybe loosening their grip on that partisan identity, because they will fall back in line and they’ll say, “Oh, yep, they’re fighting us and they are the existential threat, and this is what we have to do.” Just be clear-eyed about that. This isn’t going to be some easy victory and then everybody’s going to see the error of their ways and never vote Republican again.

[00:39:08] Beth: You know that from our personal lives. If you have someone in your life who is fundamentally selfish and thinks of themselves as a victim, everything is heads I win, tails you lose. And that’s how it is with Donald Trump. And so that’s another reason that I don’t feel constrained from saying, “I see some problems with this Democrat on the ballot,” because I don’t think anyone’s position is strengthened intellectually, morally, relationally By ignoring what everybody can see and failing to pull apart what does this mean for me? Where do I want to go from here?”

[00:39:48] Sarah: Yeah, because the candidates that get through that are real risks to both parties are the ones that either party, because that’s the ultimately the only check, because the system we’ve got set up right now is the check on your power is your own party, full stop. And the system where we decided because the other guy’s worse, we’ll let everybody through, I think is bad, and I think it could use some improvement. And I hope that we’ve all learned that lesson, although sometimes I wonder. What I really care about is what the people of Maine think in our audience. I do want to hear from our listeners in Maine. I want to hear how different it feels on the ground in Maine, like what your perception is of Graham Platner and Susan Collins and how this campaign is rolling out. I think that’ll be a really interesting conversation in the comments over on Substack, so I look forward to that. Up next, we’re going to talk about an Instagram account. Beth, I’ve had Instagram accounts that I’m fascinated by or that really make me laugh or that I’m just enamored by. I don’t run to Pantsuit Politics and make a commercial for them in our Outside of Politics section in the way we’re about to do. Because this Instagram account is not just distracting me. It’s just made my life better. It’s made my life better, and now I’ve got you hooked too. If you are watching the video Pantsuit Politics right now, you’ll see that Beth and I are both wearing scarves, and the reason is because we follow Bronte the Stylist on Instagram, who gives you a prompt every day for your outfits, and today’s prompt, as we’re recording on Monday, June 1st, was style a scarf

[00:41:37] Beth: Yes, I like what Bronte the Stylist is doing a lot. I do want to say, as you’ve talked about it as an Instagram obsession, I’ve been like, “Is that true? I guess it is.” Because it doesn’t feel to me like something that is trying to--

[00:41:51] Sarah: Keep me there.

[00:41:51] Beth: Make me sit down and watch more and more and buy things.

[00:41:55] Sarah:  It’s not a series.

[00:41:56] Beth: She’s like, Listen, I’m going to tell you once a week some prompts for your outfits to use what’s already in your closet in new and different ways,” and I love that. I think it’s great.

[00:42:10] Sarah: So fun. Wednesday’s prompt is wear pink because on Wednesdays we wear pink. She doesn’t do that every Wednesday. I just want to say that. But they’re very basic. It’s not dress like a 1950s housewife. It’s wear blue. Wear a maxi skirt.

[00:42:22] Beth:  Choose three Colors.

[00:42:24] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:42:25] Beth:  Put three colors Together.

[00:42:26] Sarah: Put three colors together. Put them together in this particular way. I just find it a nice starting point. Because I have an app that I use called Cladwell that I’ve used for years that has everything I own in my closet. It’s very Clueless. It’ll put together an outfit for you. But then I’m looking at the weather or what do I have to do that day; whereas, I don’t know why I’m not even checking the weather anymore. I’m just like I’m just going to wear what she tells me. I’m just going to do the prompt. I’m going to do the prompt. And I think it’s because you’re not just trying to dress to solving a problem. It is a creative exercise, which is why I love clothes. At their best they’re a really fun, creative exercise, and I think her prompts really bring that out.

[00:43:10] Beth: So it doesn’t solve the problem for you. It is a prompt. It’s a beginning. So you think, wear a scarf, and then I don’t know about you, but I went through a lot of iterations of what might that mean and what do I want to wear with it.

[00:43:22] Sarah:  Do you know How long it took me to figure out how to tie this knot? Like 15 minutes, Beth. It took forever.

[00:43:29] Beth:  And it looks great. If you’re not watching the video, Sarah has a beautiful knot in the scarf around her neck today. My scarf is in my hair because another thing that I’ve gotten from watching her videos is understanding that my hair is part of my outfit every day. This is a piece of it. She explicitly says that in one of the challenges this week. It’s to kind of channel your inner Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. And she said to think about your hair because Carrie’s hair often played a real role in the overall look, and I appreciate the way that she is taking what I already have and just giving me a question or an idea to look at it differently.

[00:44:05] Sarah: Yeah. I love it. I’m telling you guys, it’s such a fun account. I would like to see people do this sort of approach with other things like in your house, with your meal planning. I think there’s a real opportunity here that she’s cracked open. So go check it out, Bronte the Stylist. Now, before we go, we have a pretty massive announcement here at Pantsuit Politics. It is the end, truly, of an era Because both Maggie and Alise are leaving Pantsuit Politics to pursue other careers, jobs, chances, opportunities, and dreams.

[00:44:50] Beth: Yes.

[00:44:51] Sarah: So massive change here at Pantsuit Politics.

[00:44:54] Beth: What I really want you to know is that Maggie and Alise are two talented, kind people that we have been so fortunate to work with. They made these decisions. We did not fire them. We are not trying to reduce our expenses in that way. This was not about performance. They’ve been great, and we wish them every happiness on earth. And know that they will be happy because they’re the kind of people who will go out and make their happiness. So this has been hard, but it is okay and we support them and we know that they’re still rooting for us. It’s just change, and change doesn’t always feel good, but it’s often healthy.

[00:45:29] Sarah: I guess I knew in my thinking brain that we weren’t all four going to retire in the podcast industry. When I say that out loud I understood that probably logically, but yeah. Change is hard. That’s why it means so much to have the support of all of you guys. We have made a post on Substack as a place for everyone to go give their well wishes and congratulations to Maggie and Alise, because we know that they’re a huge part of this community, a huge part of so many of your lives. They’re not going anywhere. They’ll be on Substack as members; although, I would not blame them one solid ounce if they wanted to take a break from our content after five to eight years of listening.

[00:46:13] Beth: I’m sure that they need some real space from the sounds of our voices for a while.

[00:46:17] Sarah: And that’s okay.

[00:46:18] Beth: Here’s another thing I really want to say. I love you all so much. Please don’t send us your resumes yet. No. We need a minute to get our ducks in a row here because this is a huge change for us. It is a big deal to send someone your resume. We do not want to be part of the employer ghosting situation where you send a resume and you never hear back. When we are ready to hire, we want to communicate clearly what we’re looking for. We want to do it in a process where we can be respectful to you. So I know that there are people out there who think, “Oh, I could help and be valuable,” and I’m sure that you could. We just need a minute, and we will communicate that broadly and clearly when we’re there. But for the summer, we’re going to get our arms around things. So just give us a second to get our arms around things, and then we’ll be back in touch.

[00:47:08] Sarah: Thank you for joining us for today’s episode of Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in your ears on Friday. And until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

• “He wants to get it right for his Federalist Society bros and for all the moms who defended him during his confirmation hearings.”

• “He votes with the hardliners but then says, ‘guys, don’t lump me in with them — I’m a good dude.”

Read more

Iran

So all day Friday the news was: he’s in the Situation Room. My dad called to tell me this like it was breaking information. Why has the situation changed? I’m not sure it has. We don…

Read more