I did not expect to become a King Charles stan in my 40s. That was not part of the plan. But here we are.

Here is your news brief for today.

King Charles Addresses Congress

Y’all, I have so much to say about this and I am saving most of it for The Spicy but I cannot let this moment pass without noting how genuinely m…

Read more

Today, Sarah and I talk about it in public. I hope our conversation is valuable to you. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Shots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, and the conspiracy theorizing was instantaneous

• Political violence is reshaping American public life

• Anti-authority sentiment in American Politics

• Moral Relativism, Shoplifting, and Models of Ethical Grounding and Civil Society

• Outside of Politics: Spotify’s 20th anniversary most-streamed list and our reactions

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

We have just a few days left to submit your design for our Good Neighbor T-Shirt Contest!!! Designs due by April 30.

Episode Resources

• Cole Tomas Allen, Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting Suspect, Was Propelled by Outrage, Authorities Say (The New York Times)

• Opinion | ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ (The New York Times)

• The New York Times has a culture problem (The Argument)

• Spotify 20 (Spotify)

Episode Transcript

Sarah 0:30

This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth 0:31

This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we are discussing the shots fired at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night and what it, plus just a whole run of anti-authority, vibes, sentiments, actions on display are telling us about the status of our American social contract. And then Outside of Politics, we’ll take a hard turn. Spotify dropped its 20th anniversary list of most streamed artist albums and songs, and it is a journey to go on, and we’ll take that journey together.

Sarah 1:05

If you, like us, found yourself in some very intense conversations over the weekend about political violence and maybe some conspiracy theories, we’d love for you to send this episode to your group text. It is the best, most impactful way to share our show with the people in your lives who you think would benefit from listening.

Beth 1:24

Next up, let’s talk about what happened Saturday night.

Sarah 1:34

Beth, I would love to talk about my son’s prom. Is that what you meant by Saturday night?

Beth 1:39

It was a beautiful spring weekend.

Sarah 1:41

It really was, and I resent that I opened my phone and it was tainted.

Beth 1:47

Chad and I had been standing outside in our backyard after some mulching and lots of yard work, and I said to him, “We should live here. It’s just perfect here. We should live here.” And then we came in and picked up our phones and the first text I saw before I had even seen a breaking news headline, the first text I saw was like, “This isn’t real, is it?”

Sarah 2:09

I was at a baby shower on Sunday. Somebody leaned across the table and said, like, do we believe it’s real? I was on Instagram that night posting about prom, really leaning in, and I’m telling you, within an hour, I saw a reel where a guy had said, “Did you hear what happened at that dinner?” And he was just wrapping his head in tin foil and making himself a tin foil hat. And then the comments were like, yeah, Trump’s polls go down, and this happens, and he’s just trying to distract. I mean, it was instantaneous- the conspiracy theories.

Beth 2:43

Everybody had a theory of what happened before we really had any facts about what happened, and those facts are still coming together, as we are recording on Monday morning. This morning, we have added to a picture of the shooter Cole Thomas Allen, a 31 year old man from California who took trains to the event. And the New York Times shared some writings attributed to him that show someone in real conflict. He talks a lot about his love of family and friends and how they’ve been so supportive of him, and also his anger about this White House. The New York Times says he alluded to allegations of sexual misconduct, saying that he is, quote, no longer willing to allow a traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. The writing does not mention the president by name. Authorities have said several times that he seemed to be targeting members of the administration. And that’s about what we know as we sit down today to talk about what this tells us about where we are as a country,

Sarah 3:45

well, we know a lot about the people who were in the room, including the entirety of this line of succession, except for 80 million year old Chuck Grassley, which is very concerning that this wasn’t given the security designation that it deserved, considering how many people in the line of succession were in the room. The Washington Hilton itself has a history of political violence. It’s where President Reagan was shot. It’s why they did all these renovations. That’s why they have the Washington’s Correspondence Dinner there, because they have a secure green room, and he has his own entrance and all these things. And also, just I was so struck by the people in the room who’ve been touched by political violence already. There’s a virality of Erica Kirk weeping as she’s leaving the ballroom. I mean, when I was reading about that and the story was like, well, her own husband was shot six months ago. And I thought six months? It feels like five years ago. I cannot believe it was that soon. So you have a very, very recent victim of political violence all the way back to Robert Kennedy Jr, whose father was assassinated. Steve Scalise was there. He was shot at a baseball game. And of course, this is the third assassination attempt against President Trump. It’s just the prevalence is overwhelming. It’s just overwhelming.

Beth 5:14

That prevalence is paradoxically something that makes it so believable that this happened, and that makes us want to believe that it was staged. Because it is unmooring to have a shooting in the news. I feel it in my body whenever a shooting is in the news, especially a shooting at a place like this, where you think, if that room wasn’t secure, what room is secure? I went on a whole mental train about this Friday night. I went to a baseball game with friends, and I was thinking about how normal it’s become to have your bag searched to get into a baseball game. We’ve been going to games at Great American ballpark for 20 years now, and this is relatively new, but it’s become normalized for us. And I hated that feeling as it occurred to me, and that was before the shooting was in the headlines. It just does something to us psychologically to be thinking about how this could happen anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

Sarah 6:20

I keep thinking about that terrible shooting in Louisiana where the man came and shot like eight of his own children and how I struggled thinking about it, and I ended up deciding not to cover on the News Brief because I thought, what can I add? What can I add to this, except for the reality of gun violence in America? And there is a similar sense in this face of this shooting; although, thank God it didn’t have anywhere near the loss of life the other shooting had, which at this point, the prevalence of guns and particularly the political violence which this president unapologetically stokes. I mean, Charlie Kirk doesn’t feel like six months ago, but it was just a couple weeks ago where he was delighted that Robert Mueller had died, and was like, I’m so glad he died. He didn’t die from political violence. But how long ago were we talking about RFK and the CDC and how Trump never even spoke to the fact that that building was attacked, that a federal building was attacked, and he had about two hot minutes where he said we were all together. It was like the whole country was there. I was going to attack them, and now I’m not going to. Or I feel differently about it now and then by Sunday night it’s the radical Democrats fault. And every other Republican Jim Jordan, Ron Johnson, are out there saying, see, this is why we need the ballroom. That’s why we need the secure ballroom. See, We’re at war with these people. It’s depressing. It’s just really, really depressing.

Beth 8:27

It took me a few beats to understand what the ballroom had to do with this at all. I couldn’t believe that that was the rushed talking point that emerged on the right about this. This is why we need the ballroom for real? Definitely, this president has not created a culture of respect for life. It was just Easter when he posted on truth social the threat to wipe out a civilization in Iran. Something has broken in us around any kind of floor past which we will not descend when we’re talking about the humanity of people who see the world differently than ourselves. And that has created conditions where I understand people thinking that this is a president capable of staging an assassination attempt, and I hate that feeling. I felt so gross this weekend because of how much I understand why this is a part of the discourse now that we’ve just lost so much shared context and faith in each other that we don’t have a person in the office who we would think what, Of course, he wouldn’t do that in danger. All these people? put the press in danger? All of this that should seem beyond the pale does not seem beyond the pale right now. And I feel really torn up about that internally because it’s bad for me. Not because I’m scolding anyone else, because I feel it in my own body how destructive it is to be in this headspace.

Sarah 10:10

I mean, beyond the pale is this entire brand. This is the pitch. It’s I’ll say, get them. Remember the crowds at his rallies in 2015/2016 that he would encourage to attack protesters. I just feel like the fork in the road was when he told us all, “I could shoot someone in the middle of Times Square, and people would still support me.” We bring that up all the time because it was just the truest thing he’s ever said. Not only can I espouse political violence, I could commit violence, and people would still stand by me. And we have seen his ability to espouse all kinds of immoral positions, policies, to stand at Charlie Kirk’s funeral and say, “I hate my enemies. I hope they die.” Beyond the pale is him. And so there is a part of me that’s like this is the cancer. This is the cancer he has wrought. That we have all decided that if I disagree with you politically, that changes how I treat you ethically and morally because we’re enemies. I mean, that’s the language he used. Even from the first assassination attempt. This fight language. Using a political violence against himself and others like Charlie Kirk to heighten scrutiny and attacks on his political enemies. I’m sitting here thinking like, oh, I’m attacking him when he’s just had an assassination attempt. I’m saying like, this is what you have wrought. But I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what else to say. He exhibits no concern when there is political violence against other Americans who he deems as enemies or otherwise. And there’s always this glimmer of him wanting to bring the country together, but I don’t think he has the capacity to do that. I don’t think he has the capacity to approach political violence, political disagreement, political polarization, partisanship, with anything but an instinct to fight.

Beth 12:55

Listening to conversation about this at Mahjong yesterday, as I did, there was a moment when I felt this catch in my throat like I was going to start crying, and I just said, I have to talk about this in public, and I don’t know how. I respect his life. I don’t want the president to be murdered. I don’t want the country to go through the trauma of the President being murdered. I certainly don’t want the country to go through that trauma right now when we’ve seen so many high profile events of violence. And the way that we respond to them, it’s so ugly. I don’t want that for us. So I think it’s different to acknowledge the way that he fundamentally has changed the way we talk about each other, than to wish him dead. And I don’t wish him dead.

Sarah 13:51

To me, it’s the coarsening. And it’s not just his language or about how he approaches political debate or competition. It is the environment that his policies create. It is the rich getting richer. It’s the pardons. It’s the, well, my friends get a no bid million dollar contract through the National Park Service. Or my friends can call and get their ex-wives deported. Or my friends get protected and blacked out in the Epstein files. I think it is this sense of our chief executive officer, the person who is tasked with enforcing the rule of law that says the rules apply to everyone equally, is unabashedly tearing that apart. Now the rules don’t apply equally to me or to the rich or to the powerful or whoever has my cell phone number. They don’t follow the same rules that the rest of you follow. And that’s why you hear about somebody like this, that everybody’s like he was a nice, normal guy. We couldn’t believe it. And it feels disorienting but also not surprising at the same time because I think it’s in the water right now in America that the system is not fair. The rules do not apply fairly or equally at all.

Beth 15:38

I think part B of that that’s equally important is no one’s doing anything about it. There are a lot of people who couldn’t name some of those headlines that you did, who couldn’t talk about the contracts or the cryptocurrency schemes, but they definitely know about Epstein and can’t believe that no one’s doing anything about that. They definitely see this war in Iran as something that’s so destructive and senseless, and no one’s doing anything about that. The main thing I think that comes through about the midterm elections is, do you want more of the same or do you want to elect Democrats to make it harder for him to do whatever he wants to do? That’s not a very inspiring message, and that helplessness pushes people into spaces where they say, you know what, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if they hit him. Or, you know what, maybe he faked it. The whole conversation we had about the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, I think is a manifestation of this sense that something is deeply wrong. Almost everyone has a story of personal suffering because of that deep wrong, and it feels like no one’s doing anything about it. And so authority has become only the negative, only the people who take advantage of these systems, not an outlet for the people who can actually help. I think that’s why you see an anti-authority posture almost everywhere right now, and we’re going to talk about that next.

Sarah 17:46

I think describing it as anti-authority is really helpful. I think that names the change I’ve seen from like a populist uprising. I think you see it in lots of places. It’s not necessarily populism, which is what Donald Trump wrote in on. This sort of outsider distrust of the elites that has become a distrust of everything- the facts, the people in charge, the systems, the institutions. And it’s not that we just want an outsider. We’ve talked about the nihilism before. It’s nothing changes, right? Like, who cares? Who cares really? it’s not who cares who’s in charge whether it’s an outsider or not. The outsiders got in charge and they became the worst of the elites. They used the swamp to their advantage. And I think that sort of anti-authoritarianism that you see is a reaction to, well, I don’t want change in my favor. Instead, it’s I don’t want change; I want revolution. I don’t want to fiddle with who’s in charge. I want to tear it all down.

Beth 19:20

I wonder if it’s anti authority more than anti authoritarianism. And what I mean is that it doesn’t feel particularly political to me. And I don’t know that most people want a particularly political answer. When you say people want revolution, it sounds like overthrow of existing government and creation of a new one. And I just don’t hear anyone who’s hungry for that because I think most people still want the things that work about American society. I think most people deeply desire a sense of order in their communities. They deeply desire a functioning school board. They would like to believe their member of Congress can be helpful. So revolution doesn’t feel exactly right to me either. I think there is just this unbelievable wariness that is translating to anger. And it’s political, yes, for all the reasons we’ve talked about. It’s also about AI and jobs and data centers. It’s also about getting 300 spam calls a day and emails from the school that are too long to understand and terms and conditions every time I try to open any website. I think that there’s just this smallness that is lived in every day right now because we’re in the midst of so much bigness. I’m having trouble describing exactly how I feel, but I want to figure out more precise words because I think you’re right that populism isn’t it right now. It’s something else. And I just wonder how much that something else lives within and without politics, or it straddles it.

Sarah 21:13

I just don’t think people can name what works. I mean, it’s not that they want it to work. They can’t name what works. There is a problem with every aspect of everyday American life. I just read a piece of New York Times. People can’t afford cars. There’s not like basic economic, affordable models of cars. There’s not enough housing. The housing we have is expensive. Healthcare costs are out of control. The public school system is struggling. People are worried about jobs because there’s not a lot of hiring because of AI. There’s data centers, there’s this tearing down of all these environmental regulations. The same time people are seemingly more concerned with toxicity in their food. We’ve got measles outbreaks, you name it. The health, safety, and law and order, the most basic functions of government of what they’re supposed to offer to their citizens, there’s no place to look right now and see functioning, just basic functioning, much less a vision for the future that’s encouraging or exciting or positive. I think that’s why, on the flip side, you do see positive examples. And the one I keep thinking about is Pope Leo. I think he is presenting what people want, an acknowledgement that things are hard, that there are standards that matter and rules that people should follow, and a clarity about what is required as we move into a tougher future. There’s no articulation of requirement. I think that’s why if you live an extremely online life and you saw this opinion piece in New York Times that particularly right wing figures are trotting out right now post the White House Correspondents shooting, where they were basically proposing the term micro looting. So, like, well, everything sucks, so who cares if you steal from Whole Foods. I am greatly reducing the overall argument of this piece. But the sense of, like, I’m getting scammed left, right and center. Who knows if I have social security and retirement? I’m going to pirate what I want to pirate. I’m going to steal from Walmart if I want to. The rich people don’t follow the rules. Why should I? This sort of just complete breakdown in what we understand as a society as acceptable behavior.

Beth 24:28

When you made the list of all the problems, I was hearing it thinking, yes, these are not really debatable propositions. And also it reminds me of the polling when people say they can’t stand Congress, but they like their member. Because I think in specific, a large number of people still do live very rewarding lives, and I think that’s part of why Pope Leo lands as well because he says, we can confront the injustices of the past and the present while still holding on to our joy and our connection to other people, and that’s what we must do. In fact, those two things have to go together. I would love to see political figures who can speak into that. And I think we have some emerging. It’s going to be really difficult to break through as a political leader because of this cancer that you named in the first segment, because of our skepticism about political figures and their motivations and their funding, just the sheer amount of money required to run a good campaign leaves everyone feeling very skeptical about the sincerity of what they’re hearing. When I read that micro looting piece, it just landed with such a thud to me because I thought, actually, no one wants this. I understand that personal feeling. I’m just going to return this to Walmart because it’s [inaudible] Walmart’s back. And we spent a lot of the last election talking about how upset people were that shampoo and conditioner and deodorant had to be locked up at Walgreens because the prevalence of theft. We don’t want to live in a society where people steal. I think most of us do want there to be grounded principles that we all agree on. We value the truth. We don’t steal from one another. We would like to be able to assume everyone has positive intention again. How do we get there?

Sarah 26:44

I would love new and robust polling, or maybe a focus group or two on that paradox of congressional support, if it’s still true, if it’s more complex, do I approve them just because I feel like what does it matter? Like, I can’t. They’re so set in stone. They’ve been there for 20 years. What am I going to do about it? I think that’d be kind of interesting to scratch at. I think we’ve gotten to this place where my politics defines my ethics. Who I define as my political enemy is inherently tied to what I will justify or condone when it comes to actions against them. This idea that you’re morally repugnant if you steal music from an indie band, but who cares if you steal it from Best Buy? That’s not sustainable. This is not the subjectivity of that approach to our individual actions. I just don’t think it’s going to work. I really appreciated the arguments critique of this particular “cultural” piece from the New York Times, which is politics is not where you want to find your ethics and morals. That’s not how you want to define what’s acceptable to you, and what is not is based on who it is. And if you had a political expert and a policy expert involved in this conversation called it politics analysis, it’d be very different. I think there is this sense of if everybody can have an opinion-- and not only can everybody be paid to have an opinion, but everybody can find a platform through social media to have an opinion. It creates fertile ground to not only ignore the very real expertise that’s needed inside particularly policy conversations, but also just to turn stuff that matters isn’t that as impactful and it’s just fodder for a funny haha conversation using Tik Tok reels as you’re jumping off point. And I think the reason that people are looking for places that offer guidelines, strict rules, moral codes-- it’s not just Pope Leo. The Catholic Church has seen a lot of surge in interest, which I think is fascinating. Of all the Christian denominations, Catholics have the most rules. Because I do think people don’t want that moral relativism of like, well, everybody can just decide based on how high their health insurance bill was or what trauma they’ve experienced in a hospital, if the murder of a man on the street is okay or not. That is its own type of instability. That is its own type of moral injury. And I know there’s not an easy answer to that, but the idea that you get a couple people in the room that say it’s not hard to get a couple people in the room that say, yeah, but they’re worse, so that makes us okay. Good content, to me, is not the answer to the moral relativism of Donald Trump.

Beth 31:01

The other thing that I think is helpful that we find in religious practices is the practice component, and I think that that’s what is so alarming to me about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I can feel my brain reviewing what we practice politically. Was it deserved or not? Is it true or not? What motivations does everybody bring to the table when they roll their takes out? I’m living the result of what we practice politically. And so what I’m looking for, and what I think a lot of people are looking for right now, are places where we practice something else, but in a bigger context. Because when I talk about a vision for the world, and I think that’s so much of what faith is, what’s my vision for the world? What’s my vision of being a person here and my place in the order of things? It isn’t about relativism. It isn’t about anyone else’s hypocrisy. And it’s grounding to think these are things that are true. These are stories that have endured for reasons. These are rituals that plug me back in to those stories and truths that endure, and I need that because the practice of pointing out the hypocrisy is so well worn in my brain at this point.

Sarah 32:47

I’m not advocating everybody become Catholic. I just want to be abundantly clear on that. I think there are lots of spaces you can find what you just described, but I think we need more louder voices that say this is wrong. And it’s not wrong because we’re all supposed to feel sorry for Walmart or Whole Foods. That’s not it.

Beth 33:13

Or the president.

Sarah 33:14

This is wrong because of what it does to you. This is wrong because of what it does to us. One of the only parts of the micro leading conversation I found some agreement was the idea that even if you’re looking to express political discontent, that’s not the way to do it. That’s an individual hidden action that doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t change the policies of Whole Foods. It doesn’t lead to increased taxes on the rich. It doesn’t equalize our tax system or anything else. It’s just a pressure valve release. And now look, in the face of increased political violence, is there room for more pressure release? Sure, but if we cannot find some places of common agreement as a society over behaviors that we find harmful, not only to the person but to society as a whole, we’re in trouble. Then it’s just all politics. Politics in service of what? Politics should be in service of persuasion and civic participation and governmental efficiency and representative democracy, not just for rage bait and clicks, likes and shares. So I think the more voices we find that say I operate on a different value system. I’m not just trying to get your attention. I’m trying to share my approach to the world. Be it religiously grounded, be it strong, intellectual analysis, be it ethical complexity. I think there’s a lot of ways to approach this philosophically, spiritually, mentally, psychologically, but emotionally, seems to be like the only name of the game.

Beth 35:31

I had a conversation with someone who’s running for office right now last week, and I asked how this person’s doing, because it’s such a grueling campaign. And the person said however it turns out, I’ll be okay. I’ll get up the next day, keep doing my best. And I wish for more people like that in our public life because that, to me, is the path back to valuing authority figures as groups of people willing to take on responsibility, not people trying to impose their vision on everyone else, or people just trying to take as much from public office as they can. And I hope that the midterm elections give us a chance to think about how we walk back from anti authority, not to authoritarian but to that place where we can have a civil society bound by rules that we agree to follow because we willingly accept the presence of authority in our lives as necessary to our flourishing. We always end with something Outside of Politics because we really need to. And today we’re going to talk about Spotify, which has been really the dominant business model of recorded music for the last 20 years. And as I was looking at the list, Sarah, of the top artist and the top songs, it made me realize that my window of music is now like 30 years out, instead of 20 years out, because there was a lot here that I just thought, that’s not really my music. I’m too old for this.

Sarah 37:21

Well, I found the top 20 artist a real journey. Okay? Taylor Swift. Everybody goes, yep, sure, great. I listened to that. Fine. No surprises there, right? No Beyonce on the list. Zero Beyonce in the top 20. Definitely would have been probably who I would have guessed as number two. Beyonce has put out so many albums. Meanwhile, Rihanna, who hasn’t put out an album in years, is number 16. So particularly through the lens of like female artists, I was like, whoa! Billie Eilish, way up there. No Sabrina Carpenter-- now she’s pretty new. That makes a little bit more sense to me. Number two, Bad Bunny. Okay, cool. Sure got it. Number three, Drake. What? I thought he lost the feud? He’s three. Kendrick Lamar is 18. So I don’t know. Man, I don’t know if he lost that feud.

Beth 38:22

Well, and the Weekend pops up everywhere in these lists because of Blinding Lights and the way it’s had several different lives, but I think of the Weekend as almost a one hit wonder. That’s the only song I can name. I remember the SNL performance. I remember the Super Bowl, but that felt like just sort of a blip to me. And then when I put it in the context of the last 20 years, it was a pretty big blip, I guess.

Sarah 38:48

Yeah. So he’s number four. Ariana Grande five. Great. Got it. Okay. I wouldn’t have put her way ahead of Beyonce, but here she is. Ed Sheeran got it. No surprises there. Justin Bieber, okay, maybe, probably wouldn’t put him this high, but okay. Billy Eilish, then Eminem. I’m like, what? What do you mean?

Beth 39:12

The kids love Eminem. Eminem is having a whole new life with the youth of today.

Sarah 39:17

All right, I like that. I like Eminem. Kanye is out here at 10. He’s made a lot of music. Some of this, like, I wonder it’s-- the Weekend had one good song, but then a lot of people just put out a lot of albums. It’s like all over the place. Travis Scott, definitely not my music, not my jam. I know him, though, so I wasn’t too surprised by that; although, I would have never put him in the top 20. BTS is 12. If you told me the Spotify top 20 artist that Drake would have been three and BTS would have been 12, I’d have told you were crazy.

Beth 39:52

Is that a timing issue, though? If you scoot that window forward a little bit, I wonder what happens. Does BTS overtake?

Sarah 39:59

Well, they also disappeared for a long time. Maybe that’s part of it, too. Okay, then you have Post Malone, sure. Bruno Mars, okay. Jay Balvin, who the hell’s that?

Beth 40:09

I don’t know.

Sarah 40:11

I don’t either. They’re 15. What the hell? Okay. Then Rihanna. Then Coldplay, which also probably wouldn’t have put in the top 20.

Beth 40:22

Yellow is in the top 20 songs.

Sarah 40:25

Listen, you know what, I like Coldplay. I’m not sorry about it either. I don’t care if it makes me sound old. They make good music.

Beth 40:32

I like Coldplay too, but I don’t put Coldplay on repeat in my car. That’s why it’s surprising to me.

Sarah 40:37

Well, I used to, but probably not in the last 20 years. Okay, Kendrick Lamar is 18. Future is19; 20 Juice World. Who the hell’s that?

Beth 40:45

I don’t know.

Sarah 40:47

But they’re top 20, Beth. Are we that old?

Beth 40:53

Yes.

Sarah 40:55

I don’t like it, and I reject it, and I’m not that old. And stop calling me old.

Beth 41:03

Look, I listen to and enjoy and know a lot of new music, a lot of the Grammy, new artist of the year people I’m really into.

Sarah 41:14

I’m the biggest Olivia Dean fan on planet Earth.

Beth 41:16

And I noticed with the weather getting nice, I wanted to listen to 90s country music. I wanted to listen to Indigo Girls. Every single thing that I was craving musically over the weekend is 30 years old or more.

Sarah 41:34

Well, I’m working on this. I’m really trying to stay young at heart and not-- I was listening to Jen Sherman on my peloton ride this morning talking about how she stays young at heart. She stayed up to like 2:30 watching Justin Bieber at Coachella, which I will not be doing anytime soon. But I don’t know. I think it’s just the part of the Spotify discussion is how hard Spotify makes it to find new music and new artists because it will feed this sense of what you’re “craving”. Although, often when I’m really in the mood for something that I can’t quite name, I can never get there on Spotify. Like, I will follow the songs I love and I will listen to them, and it’s just never quite that itch that I’m looking to scratch, and I think it’s because I’m probably looking for something new.

Beth 42:29

I don’t ask Spotify for a lot of curation help because my Spotify is shared with my daughters, and therefore it does not know much about me. I don’t look at my Wrapped usually because it says way more about them than me. I think universally, if you took my whole family and said, over the last 20 years, what have you listened to the most on Spotify? It would be Hamilton, for sure, because we all enjoyed it and have listened to it on repeat for pretty much that window of time. It was popular then it wasn’t, then it was again and it was it stayed popular for us the whole way through. I don’t really use Spotify to discover new music as much as honestly now I discover new music through my kids. What they’re listening to becomes what I’m listening to, and then I enjoy it and leave it on and recommendations follow that. And so I guess I probably do get to a lot of new music through Spotify just because I share it with them.

Sarah 43:23

I am pretty aggressive about not sharing my Spotify with my children, so they have free accounts. They have to listen to ads. I’m not letting them into my paid world because I do like my Wrapped. I do share with my husband who has different tastes than me, so that will sometimes affect my Wrapped. But like Noah Khan was like a shared love between both of us that was like very-- and he was new to me. And I’m so glad that I found him because I love his music so much. He’s got a new album. I’m so excited about it. I think about who I love now like Brandy Carlile who was new to me five years ago. I really want to leave space for that. And I do think sometimes like Spotify makes it hard. It’s not even new artists. It’s like new types of music. It’ll just be like, well, I know what you like, so here’s more of it. I’m like, well, maybe I could learn something new. Maybe you could teach this old dog a new trick or two.

Beth 44:16

I do find a lot of new to me, though, in those genres of what I like. Spotify will introduce me to lots of new artists If I say, like, play a Patty Griffin song, and it does, then I’ll find all kinds of indie folk musicians Americana that I don’t know. And I appreciate that. I think that’s part of staying young at heart, too, just being open in general.

Sarah 44:39

Yeah, for sure. Well, we want to hear what your choices are, what you were surprised to see on this list, what you listen to on Spotify. People love to share their thoughts on the Outside of Politics.

Beth 44:55

We’re so glad that you do. Thank you for spending time with us today. We’re going to be back with you on Friday with a very special conversation. Rahm Emanuel will be here to talk about a number of policy proposals that he’s rolled out that do not sound like the same old politically. And I think that he might be finding a spot around authority that is useful and constructive and reflective of the public will that I could get behind. So we’ll see how that conversation goes. We’re excited to share it with you on Friday. Hope that between now and then you have the best week 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. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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.

Good Morning. It’s Tuesday, April 28. Here is your news brief for today.

Read more

A generation later, edtech is the default mode of learning. Playing the Oregon Trail was like having a dessert at school. For my daughters, learning via software is almost the whole meal.

I have all kinds of concerns about the status quo. Now, a class action lawsuit against Curriculum Associates (maker of i-Ready software) raises a new one: data collection and student privacy.

Links:

• The history of learning, instructional design, and educational technology (EdTech Books)

• Martin Weller, twenty years of ed tech (EDUCAUSE Review)

• How to tell if an ed tech product is working (The 74)

• Teachers on Chromebooks in the classroom (NY Times Upshot)

• The ed tech industry’s post-pandemic evolution (Softices)

• The class action complaint against Curriculum Associates (edtech.law)

• Curriculum Associates’ motion to dismiss (edtech.law)

I was having the most perfect Saturday. Just prom perfection — my oldest son Griffin went with my best friend’s daughter Kathleen, they’ve known each other their whole lives, and I was trying to get on Instagram to share the pictures. What do I come back to on my phone? Chaos at the Correspondents’ Dinner.

Here is yo…

Read more

“Cancel culture” is in the eye of the beholder in the private sector. There will always be speakers we find offensive, and there will always be people who find us offensive. As Sarah says plainly in the episode, mostly, there’s no winning. I hate that.

But I lose sleep over governmental cancel culture. When officials target people for indictment or deportation or denaturalization because of their ideas, we are in alarming territory, whether we agree with the speech at issue or not. I’m worried about the way the government prosecuted the Prairieland Nine. I’m horrified by Chip Roy’s proposed MAMDANI Act. I have a lot of questions about the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Outside of politics, a conversation about leisure: Derek Thompson recently asked on Substack what leisure time we end up regretting, and Kara asked what self-care we pay for without guilt. We can’t wait to hear how you answer those questions.

If there’s someone in your life who also likes to consider everything from free speech and Antifa to magazines and massages, we’d love for you to text them this episode.

-Beth

Topics Discussed

• Sharon McMahon and Utah Valley University

• The Antifa Executive Order

• The Prairieland Nine prosecution

• Chip Roy’s MAMDANI Act

• The Southern Poverty Law Center indictment

• Cancel culture and the criminalization of speech

• Outside of Politics: Leisure - what we regret and what we happily pay for

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Help us celebrate our community in Minneapolis! Submit your design for our Good Neighbor T-Shirt Contest by April 30.

Free Speech

• Sharon McMahon out as UVU commencement speaker following significant GOP opposition (KSL)

• Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education (Yale)

• Yale Has Come Up With a Surefire Way to Make a Terrible Situation Worse (The New York Times)

• “Failures of Kindness” by George Saunders speech transcript

• ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says (Stanford Report)

• We’re All Living in the ‘Mirror World’ Now (The Ezra Klein Show)

• Deplatforming and Defamation: Free Speech on Social Media (Pantsuit Politics - February 2021)

“Domestic Terrorism”

• Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization (The White House)

• Prairieland shooter convicted of attempted murder, others on lesser charges in ‘antifa’ trial (KERA News)

• DOJ indicts Southern Poverty Law Center on federal fraud charges (NPR)

• Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering (Department of Justice)

The MAMDANI Act

• Roy unveils immigration bill dubbed ‘MAMDANI Act’ (The Hill)

• Rep. Roy Introduces MAMDANI Act to Denaturalize and Deport Marxists and Islamic Fundamentalists (Congress)

Leisure

• Derek Thompson note on leisure (Substack)

Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:31] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:32] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. On today’s show, we’re talking about free speech. And we’re going to start with the story everyone has been talking about on the internet, Sharon McMahon getting dropped from a commencement speech by the exact people we thought were anti-cancel culture. Then we’re going to go somewhere more serious because underneath this cancel culture noise, there are terrorism convictions and a bill in Congress that would let the government deport citizens for their ideas. And that’s got us thinking about free speech in America. Everybody believes in it right up until someone says something they hate. Outside of politics, it is almost Maycember as we recently talked about. So we’re asking, in the face of all this stress and busyness, what leisure time do you actually regret? And what self-care is worth paying for? Is there a connection? That’s all ahead. Stick with us.

Beth [00:01:28] If you know someone who is frustrated by the free speech cancel culture debate sounding like just a shouting match, left cancels right, right cancels left. Everybody’s a hypocrite. Send them this episode. You don’t have to post it or share it. Just text it to one specific person, even better to your group chat. That is how our show grows. And most importantly, we think that’s how good conversations about these issues spreads.

Sarah [00:01:56] All right, next up, how did America’s government teacher end up as fodder for the right? Sharon McMahon was scheduled to be the commencement speaker at Utah Valley University. If Utah Valley university sounds familiar to you, that is the location of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. So she posted, as we all did, after Charlie Kirk assassination that it was horrific. Sharon also said that many marginalized Americans had not seen Charlie Kirkus engaging in good faith. She later deleted that post, but that was enough. And once certain GOP politicians and members of the far-right media ecosystem found out that she was going to be the commencement speaker, they went after her. Senator Mike Lee, Representative Burgess Owens, and they canceled her. She’s not going to be the Commencement Speaker.

Beth [00:03:04] On just a human level, I just hate this for Sharon. I know she’s going to be fine. She’s an adult. She knows what she’s about.

Sarah [00:03:11] She’s a tough cookie.

Beth [00:03:11] She has been through the internet’s vitriol meal before so I’m not worried about her, but I hate it. From the university perspective, I think it’s such a difficult time to be a college or university president. We’ve talked about this before. The best thing that all of us could do is maybe just give them some space. The level of ownership the public takes over universities and the speakers that they invite to campus is outrageous and completely unproductive. Knowing that that is the environment, I think if I were just sitting with friends who happen to run colleges or universities, I would say, recognize that any person you invite will be seen as political. There is no one in America, no one, who people believe is entirely nonpartisan and entirely unobjectionable. It doesn’t exist. And so my advice for commencement specifically would be to just not have an external speaker, to just let it be about your students, especially when the community is grieving this trauma. Like this was horrible for everybody who witnessed it in addition to the people who love Charlie Kirk. So I think that it is really, really, sad that Sharon was caught up in this or that anyone would have been in her situation. And I also think that you have to accept a status quo that I find unacceptable that people are going to take a shot at high profile speakers if there is any political entry point to do so.

Sarah [00:04:52] I don’t know. I think I maybe feel differently. Yale put out that study this week about what’s the path forward for higher education. It’s been sitting on my desk. I have not read it yet. I am anxious to read it. But a analysis of it crossed my screen, I believe it was on the New York Times, about like in the report they say colleges shouldn’t have this expansive purpose. Like Yale had articulated some purpose of like making the world a better place or something. And the argument was like, no, they shouldn’t. They should just stick to what they know. They should educate. And this person was like I don’t agree. I think this big purpose is how we articulate the value of education. And so I think that’s a little bit of what we’re scratching at. Should they just stick to the status quo or are institutions of higher education meant to make progress, expand our understanding of our place in the world, both individually and as a society. And I think that’s a tough question. I think outside commencement speakers are so important. I think some of them hit in a way that make everybody better, not just the people at the ceremony. They’re like George Saunders’ commencement about being kind. Steve Jobs’ commencement speech about finding your passion. They become these cultural touchstones where we get to have really great conversations about some of the most important questions in the kind of a college education I want for my son, which is how to live a good life, how to craft a better world. And if you don’t have room within that conversation to say, some people didn’t think Charlie Kirk was engaging in good faith, then we got a problem. That’s a pretty innocuous statement. But the only space they have is for hero worship. That’s it. That’s the only place that they have created around Charlie Kirk.

Beth [00:06:57] Agreed, and let me be abundantly clear that I think this is a dumb argument. I think Sharon is a perfectly acceptable person to have at commencement. I’m sure she would have done a fine job. I generally agree with you that higher education serves a lot of purposes, and those purposes are everything from helping you think about how to live a good life to the way that some University of Kentucky researchers were involved with the Artemis mission. Medicine. It’s incredible all the ways that higher education. Makes life better for everyone, not only people who actually go to college for a degree. I think if I were weighing all the factors here, I would lean in favor of commencement being about the students, but the academic year being about challenging everybody. And I would want to say to a Mike Lee, hey, if I’m not inviting people to campus who ruffle your feathers, and many of your Democratic colleagues’ feathers, I’m not doing my job. We are here to test ideas and to push our students and to be uncomfortable. That’s why we exist. I just think commencement in particular because of what you said, it is high profile. Often those speeches go viral. Maybe that’s a place to say, you know what, let’s just huddle up in our community because this is about our community. This is about our students.

Sarah [00:08:21] Well, I just think if this is what ruffles their feathers, it doesn’t matter what you do.

Beth [00:08:26] It absolutely doesn’t.

Sarah [00:08:27] It doesn’t matter if you keep it internal and try to make it about the students. If the bar is this low, there ain’t no clearing it. And I think that’s the important part here is. If sharing is not good enough, no one is good enough. There is no room for any sort of not just dissent, analysis, critical thinking. That’s what they’re arguing, is an end to critical thinking. And I think, look, that was true on the left and some of the cancelations on campuses. It was we don’t want any disagreement. What you’re doing is hate speech. So you can’t be here at all. And it doesn’t make it any better that now they’re doing it. But these were the people that were out there saying the woke liberals at the colleges have lost their minds and you can say anything. And they are without an ounce of hypocrisy or irony, saying, our turn.

Beth [00:09:27] Yeah, that’s what’s happening all across the government. All across the Government. I know you are, but what am I? It’s the animating theme.

Sarah [00:09:33] Yeah, I just think it’s so gross. And I think that there is a lot of room for colleges to exert some leadership. Take a lesson Utah Valley University. It did not work well for the liberal schools to kowtow. It didn’t. It hurt them. It hurt all of higher ed. And it’s going to be true on this side too.

Beth [00:09:57] People want leadership. You would hope that everyone understanding that we can’t clear each other’s bars. We can’t and that’s true no matter what your philosophy you are gravitating towards. We can’t clear each other’s bars. So find some freedom in that. Okay, well, that’s what I’m going to do then. I’m going to push everybody around. And again that is what higher education exists for. Not to espouse one particular kind of ideology. But to put all of them in front of you and shake you up inside the vortex of lots of competing thinkers text speeches that make you think, oh God, they have a point too. That’s the best of higher ed.

Sarah [00:10:40] I am worried because we do hear this so often. We’ve heard it from ministers, we’ve heard from fellow podcasters, we’ve heard it from teachers. Hell, we just did a spicy on the pit. We hear it from healthcare professionals. It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter. There is no neutrality. There is not safe space on which to stand and not offend somebody. And so I think so much of this is the environment created by our president and his approach, but we don’t have to participate in it. And that is often our advice to people, is you will, and that’s okay. And that’s easy to say because that can manifest in all kinds of threats. I mean, Sharon got threats, not surprisingly. We’ll do to you what they did to Charlie. Just violent threats and all this stuff. Scary, scary, scary reactions. And we all have to reckon with that because the reason we all feel offended is because there’s a little bit of all of us that have participated in the journey that got us here. Now, not all equally, but at this point in America, you would be hard pressed to find someone that has not self-censored, who has not argued that someone else doesn’t deserve an op-ed, doesn’t deserve a Facebook post, doesn’t deserve a Twitter profile. The sense that they’re so offensive, they got to go. And I think that’s what we really have to examine in our free speech environment. Because we have an amorphous free speech cultural approach. And then we have government action, which is what the Constitution prohibits. And that’s what we’re going to talk about next. Beth, I have been following the story for a while. I’ve been wanting to talk about it on the show because this is very concerning to me. It should not surprise anyone that MAGA’s approach to free speech hypocrisy extends beyond Mike Lee’s comments on Fox News into actual governmental action. So in September of last year, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Couple of small problems. One, Antifa is not an organization. There is not some head of Antifa. When something happens, somebody doesn’t come out from Antifa and go, it was us. Because there’s no one doing press for Antifa. It is a loose term to describe a broad ideology, usually far left ideas, anarchism, communism, anti-capitalism. Some people that describe themselves as Antifa are violent, but many aren’t. And this overarching federal designation can be really dangerous.

Beth [00:14:25] Hearing that the president designated Antifa a terrorist organization can really make you just roll your eyes and think, well, there he goes again. What’s important to understand is that when the government designates something a terrorist’s organization, they do it because it lets them bring new tools. That’s how you have to think about Donald Trump and his executive orders. He issues those orders to turn a key that unlocks power he would not otherwise have. So, when he designates Antifa a terrorist organization, that says to law enforcement, you get to do new things. And one of the new things that law enforcement has been doing is studying Antifa-like movements outside the United States, where they have even stronger surveillance powers, and then tracing back groups outside of the United States to American citizens. As we’ve talked about with FISA before, you sweep up Americans when you start to look at organizations outside the United States, and then they come back in and selectively choose Americans to spend a lot of time looking at and maybe charge with a crime and maybe overcharge with a prime because this is a terrorist, not a regular suspected criminal.

Sarah [00:15:39] Because there’s no real federal authority to designate purely domestic groups as terrorist organizations. It reminds me of what they did with Anthropic. All of a sudden a domestic company we’re mad at is now a supply chain risk. That’s something that’s never happened with a domestic group before because they see anyone who disagrees with them as an enemy. And so they use the tools that we used to use against our actual foreign enemies and they’re bringing them to bear against American citizens because of their viewpoints. So it wasn’t just maybe they will charge people- they have. On March 13th of this year, nine activists in Texas were convicted on providing material support to terrorists and attempted murder. So what happened is these people came together to do a noise demonstration out of a Prairieland ICE detention facility on July 4th. They set off fireworks. Now, in the chaos and scrum created by the fireworks, one person discharged their weapon that I believe they had legally and an officer was shot and wounded in the exchange of fire. One person of the nine that they said all of you are domestic terrorist organization and you supported this and they convicted all of these people and they’re now facing serious time because they went and protested outside an ICE detention center. And the government is arguing that Antifa is a national security threat, but some FOIA requests have revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s own files do not support what they were arguing in court, and yet these people are still convicted.

Beth [00:17:26] I think the details of this are pretty interesting for two reasons. One, it demonstrates what leveling up, that calling them terrorists, does. So this is a group of people who probably would have been charged with something by a regular old administration because they weren’t setting off fireworks and going, ooh, pretty. They were throwing them in the direction of the facility. They did some property damage, not cool. If an officer gets shot, somebody’s going to get charged with something. Yes, Texas is open carry. Maybe the firearm was legal. My understanding is that Benjamin Song, who is the person whose weapon it was, is a former Marine Corps reservist. And he said that he was doing some kind of specific shot into the ground and that the bullet ricocheted and hit the officer. There was apparently some forensic evidence that tended to show that the bullet hit something. Any way around it though, a normal administration probably would have charged this group with something. That’s different than the FBI taking battering rams to their homes, setting off flashbangs in their living rooms, seizing their laptops and phones, and charging them with this web of crime related to basically being enemies of the entire United States because they went too far at a protest. The other thing that I think the details really illustrate is again the way that what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander with conservatives. Because so much of how the Department of Justice described these people could have been ripped from an indictment of January 6th protesters. The way they dressed, the way they communicated, the way they amassed weapons to prepare for this. It was like rereading charges against the January six folks. But now it’s not okay and it’s very scary because who’s in charge has changed and who’s being protested has changed.

Sarah [00:19:28] Well, and there’s just a lot of, well, how do you like it? You did it to us. But if you think this is the same as January 6th, guys, put it to the American people. Because January 6th was not about sorting people by their ideology and dialing up. Now, I think there are a lot of people who think it was. And, look, maybe we should talk about that. Maybe we should talk about were we overcharging people on January 6th? Now I would argue there’s still a nexus to me, even if you think they’re being overcharged, to the actions. I think the overcharging came because it happened at the Capitol, at that time, in that way. But again, the nexus with these people and how they’re been indicted is not to their actions but to their ideologies. And that’s what’s concerning for me. But the conservative approach, the MAGA approach is, well, you went after our violent extremists in a way that was not fair and so now we’re going to go after yours. I think we see that this week with the DOJ indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering because they were paying informants to infiltrate extremist groups. I don’t understand. In what universe does a nonprofit have to describe in detail exactly what they’re doing with their money? But they’re like, well, they were giving them donations and they were propping up the organizations they were supposed to be fighting. No, they weren’t. To me, it is ridiculous on its face, but they are out here charging. And it’s clear because the Southern Poverty Law Center designated some groups they liked, like, oh, I don’t know, the Proud Boys as domestic terrorist organizations. So it’s like, well, we’re going to do it now to you.

Beth [00:21:20] The other parallel I see reading the description of these folks, you could also be reading about ICE. The nefarious details of being dressed head to toe in black being masked. It is just like are you with us? Then all of that’s very cool and actually quite manly and patriotic. And if you’re against us and it makes you a very scary terrorist, you probably shouldn’t have any rights at all. I think it’s worth noting the forum shopping happening here too. The Prairieland folks were-- this happened in Texas; they were indicted in Texas. They got a conservative jury pool to choose from. Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted in Alabama. These cases don’t go anywhere in D.C. And New York. Now that’s a problem for us as Americans. That’s a big problem. We have to see the strategy here too. Yeah.

Sarah [00:22:14] To me, if the Supreme Court was worth anything, which it doesn’t feel like it is right now, this is a problem because it’s not viewpoint neutral. You’re not going after the same groups for the same reasons. You are clearly targeting specific ideologies. Even Chip Roy-- who, look, I’m not looking to as an example on anything. And I don’t think this bill is going to go anywhere, but I still think what they introduce is indicative of the approach. And he introduced the Mamdani Act, obviously directed right at Zohran Mamdani. And basically what it does, it would allow the denaturalization or deportation of immigrants, including naturalized citizens who advocate for the restructuring of economic and social relations to reduce class distinctions. Dawg, I’ve advocated for some stuff like that. Like that’s a pretty broad definition. Like basically anybody who advocates at all for any level of economic socialism can get kicked out. Like this to me is just a continuation down the road of like we’re going to target these students for an editorial in the school newspaper advocating for the Palestinians and that’s it, you’re deported.

Beth [00:23:42] Can I tell you what Mamdani stands for? Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherence and Noxious Islamists Act of 2026. This is violative of the First Amendment along every single dimension. It names specifically Chinese communist, Marxist, Islamic fundamentalist doctrines. And I think it’s fascinating to go against anti-capitalism, socialism, and communism when this very week, as Chip Roy trots this out, we’re talking about a federal bailout of Spirit Airlines. We’re talking about this administration doing deals something like $20.9 billion that this administration has taken for the U.S. Government in equity and private sector companies. So I’m not seeing capitalism fully on display from our current president and the idea that you would pass this vague law that gives the DOJ enormous powers to decide what forms of anti-capitalism are acceptable and what aren’t, to decide what ideas about economic systems run afoul of loyalty to the United States or not. And then to name, the act names, the conduct of writing, distributing, circulating, printing, explicitly protected activities under our First Amendment is wild. Also wild to me that this is coming from Chip Roy, who is running for attorney general in Texas. That’s what makes this so relevant to me. I think Chip Roy knows there’s an audience for this. It gives him something to talk about on the campaign trail. And the fact that he still believes there’s an audience for this is really disturbing.

Sarah [00:25:43] Yeah, I mean, we’re supposed to trust the same DOJ who was like going after the reporter who wrote a story about Kash Patel’s girlfriend. That one, the same one? Okay. It’s scary. I don’t even know another word for it. It is a complete abandonment of our First Amendment principles. And look, I want to be clear. It is not only on the right. I think there are a lot of particularly European examples that we need to take seriously because I think if we’d gotten another term of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, there would be push for this on the left. Because what they do in UK, in Germany, they make explicit ideologies illegal. You can go to jail for Facebook posts and it’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable, but I do think there was a moment where everybody was like, no, we should. If it’s hate speech, you should go to jail for your Facebook posts. I think some people are comfortable with that. And we have got to talk about that. And we’ve got to be transparent about this is not acceptable. I’m sorry, if whatever is noxious to you, be it Nazism or Islamic ideas or socialism or fascism, whatever it is, if it is noxious, let it out into the sunlight, baby. Put it out there. Let it show its ugly face so everybody can decide. Because I am disturbed by these international trends in supposedly liberal democracies. I mean, this week in Australia, some drunk dude got up at Bondi Beach and mimicked like shooting people. He said some anti-Semitic things, even though they found that was not antisemitic intent because he was intoxicated. And they put him in jail for a year. What? No!

Beth [00:27:39] The draft of the Mamdani Act that I saw also tries to write courts out of the process. Basically the determinations here wouldn’t be subject to judicial review because it’s an immigration enforcement situation, not criminal law. And so what kind of parameters go around this? If you in college wrote an essay about how maybe the communist manifesto made a good point here or there. Can 25 years later that be used to denaturalize you? That’s why we don’t convict people for their ideas because ideas change and ideas require an awful lot of context. We convict people for their conduct. We deport people for their conduct. What did you or did you not do that you were required to do that a Republican legislator who is known for being part of the Freedom Caucus is introducing thought police legislation that if enacted would give rise to a brand new McCarthyism, is something that I think is worth taking seriously even though I agree with you that this bill is unlikely to pass.

Sarah [00:28:58] Yeah, I think all of this has to get-- again, fine, I’m glad he put it in a bill so we can talk about it. Let’s pressure test this. Is this what we want? I couldn’t help but think back because I do think this is a source of a lot of Republican ire. I think particularly Donald Trump are on a revenge tour from him being deplatformed. And I went back and I was thinking about our statements back in 2021 when he got deplatformed, I found this little moment. I do not want President Trump back on Twitter ever. Ever. I think he should remain deplatformed because his rhetoric and narcissism remains and will continue to remain a threat to our republic. And I think having a conversation about the power of social media companies to deplatform a sitting president and what that means, and the impact of that is important. Not because there’s some massive free speech violation, but because it does speak to the power of the platforms. I don’t know how I feel about that anymore. I don’t know if I think I don’t want him on Twitter. Looking back on it, it is in the short term, such a reasonable reaction to be like I just don’t want to see it. But I keep about that conversation Ezra Klein had with Naomi Klein about we thought if we just closed our eyes, it wasn’t there anymore. It’s like a toddler. If I close my eyes, you’re not there. If we remove you from X, then that means the idea goes away. But that’s not how it works. Often, silencing an idea gives it power. That’s why free speech is important. Let it breathe. Let it see if it has legs. Don’t shut it down and give it a power it does not deserve.

Beth [00:31:07] The only asterisk I would put on that is that I still do believe a private platform should be able to host who it does and does not want to host. Whether they make a good judgment, a wise one, a judgment that’s good for society is a different question. But this is why I don’t like the power of the government coming to bear in free speech matters when it’s not about government restrictions on speech. I will defend all day any of these platforms rights to say, no, I’m not going to have you here. I’m going to give the time of my organization to you and your statements. I am not going to deal with the fallout of your statements here. I think that’s their right. Those are private platforms. They can put restraint on speech if they want to. I don’t think it’s the best idea. I think Trump being kicked off of Twitter was excellent for Trump. I think it has only given him more power. I think it saved him from himself in a number of instances. This is how I feel about Robert Kennedy in the Democratic primary. I think there should have been debates in that primary, show people who he is and what he’s about instead of letting him acquire this mystique and us not really hearing his voice as a whole nation until he’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services and we’re listening to him in Congress going, whoa, this was maybe a mistake guys. So I’m with you on, in general, the answer to bad speech is just more speech. This is why I think the situation at UVU is bad, but it’s not what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up at night is when you send law enforcement into people’s homes to track down their communications because you’ve decided they’re terrorists because of what you think they think. And in this Prairieland case, one of the things the Department of Justice included in describing the criminality of these folks were that two of the women distribute zines about their radical left ideology. Imagine writing that as a law enforcement officer and not having a record scratch moment in your brain where you think, whoa, we’ve totally crossed a line here.

Sarah [00:33:25] I just wonder if the distinction, at least for the public, between private platforms, government action, I just think that that distinction is very blurry and always has been. Sure. And so I’m just trying to think about if that’s true, which I believe it is, I don’t think people make a big distinction. It’s why everybody says I’ve got rights to free speech. Maybe we should just take that seriously. And I don’t know what that means except for what we did for a long time, which is bring the power of the government to bear in defense of free speech, being a robust no. Any kind of restriction we’re going to show up and go, nope. Because I do think the private platforms and the public debate, has fueled this government action. Like this set them off. And I take seriously and I don’t think it’s all hypocrisy and bullshit that they did feel there was ideological specificity and government actions under both the Obama administration and the Biden administration. Do I think they’re to this level? No, but do I think were there? Yeah, I do. I think their critique of some of the IRS actions is fair. And I think there’s some other moments where those administrations, if not outright targeting them, it was there. There was an ideological focus. You know what I’m saying?

Beth [00:35:07] I do. I wish that almost every administration of my adult life would have turned the dial down a little bit. I wish the public would be content with a little less from our public officials. Not just in what they do once they’re in office, but what they say about everything. Who cares what Mike Lee thinks about a commencement speaker.

Sarah [00:35:37] Seriously.

Beth [00:35:38] And on the other side of the aisle, I get frustrated listening to conversations about whether Democrats have sufficiently called someone out for their behavior. Often calling someone out for their behavior makes it impossible for you to do your actual job because you burn all of your relationships. I would rather have a lot less calling out publicly, a lot more denouncement and more effective actions being taken by small bipartisan groups doing things that don’t hit the zeitgeist.

Sarah [00:36:10] Yeah. I mean, you see it. There’s still this thought policing going on with Graham Plattner and Hassan Piker and all these other different ways that people are still saying that’s a no-go. I was reading Matt Iglesias and he was talking specifically about Israel. He had kind of made a point and he’s talking about the reaction. And he was taking as a given that we’re in the persuasion business in politics. And I thought, oh, that’s the problem, right? It’s almost like every time you want to call somebody out, every time we’re debating something, I think the first question should be, do you think there’s anyone persuadable on this? Because if you don’t, then what does it matter about free speech? That’s how we get in the spot where we’re willing to constrict and restrict and prosecute. Because we think it’s a war between two sides and there’s nobody in the middle able to be persuaded through actual argument. And I think we’ve gotten in that space because of Trump and the way he dials the pressure up and because of the stakes, because there are real things on the line here. And so it just became everything is high stakes. So who gives a shit about persuasion? We don’t really need free speech. We need to fight. We don’t need to persuade, we don’t need to make arguments, we don’t need to have thoughts or ideologies or present an actual case. We need to fight harder. We just need to do the things that move the needle. You even see that right now with all the conversation around gerrymandering in Virginia, like we just had to fight back. And there’s a part of me that’s like, yeah, people are hungry for action. I agree with that. I feel that way about the Supreme Court. I want action. I want to see some of the energy around the gerrymandering with the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean we abandon ideas. It doesn’t mean that we have to stop persuading people. But you don’t hear that language. I don’t think people do assume that this is persuadable. Because of the way the internet frames the argument so often between the two loudest 20%, you just get this is a war, not a debate.

Beth [00:38:30] And look at the wars around us. No one wins. They just rage. I was going in the exact same place that you went, that this belief that no one is persuadable is the virus that has led to policy like let’s just carve up the state based on who controls our state legislature in a way that’s most favorable to our party. And at some point you have to say, for what? When I look at Mitch McConnell’s legacy, the way that he broke so much, changed so much, use every rule to such severe advantage for Republicans, I wonder if you could have an honest conversation with him today if he could answer for what? In service of what?

Sarah [00:39:18] Of where we are now with Donald Trump and the end of NATO. Is this what you wanted, buddy?

Beth [00:39:23] What has advanced? What have you done for the world through these actions? You went to war. What’d you get for it?

Sarah [00:39:30] Yeah. I mean because to me his ideologies the truest where I believe he’s a true believer his NATO, and as a polio survivor, childhood health and vaccines. How we doing on both those fronts, friend? Did it work? Was all this sacrifice and this war worth it? Did you persuade anybody? I don’t see evidence of that.

Beth [00:39:54] He might be happy with the Supreme Court.

Sarah [00:39:56] Yeah, right.

Beth [00:39:58] Is that worth the war?

Sarah [00:39:59] You’ve got unlimited spending. I hope that’s what you wanted. I hope it was worth the sacrifice in every other area. And look, I do believe people are persuadable. I do believe politics is still about persuasion. And the stakes are high, but I still want to live in a democracy and there’s no democracy without persuasion. There’s no path forward if it’s always just war of attrition. I’m so exhausted by this back and forth, changing parties. Send me back to wear one party controlled for a couple of years, couple of decades. Like this is exhausting.

Beth [00:40:38] You mentioned Graham Plattner and you see this in lots of primaries right now. Here’s the disqualifying view for me. Well, we used to just call that having a choice. A lot of these primaries that are being fought like wars are embarrassments of riches because they represent choice where voters of a state can show up and say, wow, this kind of looks like the breakdown of ideas and personalities and styles in our populace. That’s how it’s supposed to be. I’m concerned that the gerrymandering wars this year will be more fodder to try to legitimize our elections. That if we have a blue wave in November, the talking point becomes it’s only a blue wave because they cheated. As I’ve heard about Republicans before, they only won because they cheat. The more we do that, the less we will trust any result ever. And the less ability we have to get this train back on the tracks, which I think we can do if we can hear again, one another as saying this is my idea. And you go, oh, not for me. And then we’ll see who can persuade the most people and move forward, even if it is a truly unacceptable result to us. We accept it because we live in a democratic society, and we value that more than winning the specific issue of the day.

Sarah [00:42:15] I couldn’t agree more. I hope we value our democracy more than the battles that are raging on whatever platform. So last week we talked about Maycember and its creep and its approach and how stressful and busy this time of year is. So we thought maybe it would be also a good time to talk about stress management and leisure and self-care and how we manage these specific issues busy periods.

Beth [00:43:01] I really love Derek Thompson asking the question, what leisure activities do you regret? How often do you regret leisure activities? This is a very real thing for me. On the days when I am most rung out at the end of the workday, I do find myself watching a whole lot of Instagram reels. And while I enjoy some Instagram reels, 15 minutes is the point of diminishing returns for me. I do about 15 minutes, a cigarette break, essentially. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve laughed a little bit. I’ve probably sent something to someone that it reminds me of, love that. After 15 minutes I’m going mentally and spiritually comatose in a way that I have strong regret for when I realize that a couple of hours have gone by and now it’s bedtime.

Sarah [00:43:55] Yeah, I would say 10% of the time I’m on reels, I find something that literally sends me into hysterics that I think about for a long time, that I’ll like rewatch. The problem is it’s so random. I’m like the mouse pressing the button to see how often I hit one of those periods. It’s addictive. But I’ve got it tight. I brick my phone from 8pm to 7am in those very sensitive periods particularly when I’m laying in bed either at night or in the morning so that I just can’t. Because the regret is often pretty strong. I know it’s addictive. Now I would say other leisure activities, reading I almost never regret. I find it very relaxing. TV or movies with my kids particularly watching them with someone else very rarely regret those. Leisure activities time with friends like almost never, except my friends who keep me up too late. But even then, the regret’s still not very high. So yeah, I would say like most of my leisure activities, baking, all of the, you know, chillaxing kind of stuff you do in your house, very low regret. Sometimes.

Beth [00:45:13] I shop and have shopping regret because I find shopping extremely relaxing. So I’m working on that

Sarah [00:45:22] See, I don’t find shopping relaxing because I want to get it right. I have a lot of like I will spin and you can just spend so much time looking at stuff and figuring stuff out and thinking about it. And also just in this economy, I find spending any money all very stressful, Beth.

Beth [00:45:36] I love to wander around a store. I mean, I love it. Love, love, love. I love online shopping too. Oh, you’re talking about in person, not online shopping. Yeah, in person too. I love walk around a story. And I never regret walking around a store as long as I remember that I do regret purchasing sometimes. So I have to keep that in mind.

Sarah [00:45:54] I very rarely regret purchasing clothes I buy in person. It’s very rare. And that’s why I don’t do almost any online shopping for clothes anymore. I want to try it on. And so the regret is very rare if I try it and buy it. Especially because I don’t do a lot of in-person shopping. Whereas, in my 20s I would shop a lot in person and so I would end up at sale racks and I would end up talking myself into things even after I tried them on. I don’t do that as much anymore. I shop rarely. If I find something and I try it on and it works, I will spend the money. It doesn’t need to be on sale.

Beth [00:46:28] I’m exactly the opposite because I know online there are brands. This fits me well. I’ve been happy with the quality if I need a thing. This is where I should go but in person I do talk myself into it. It’s like I’m here. It was fun. I’ve tried it on it’s okay and then I get it home later. I’m like why Beth? Why did you do that? So that’s where Derek Thompson’s percentages are helpful to me. I do not regret the walking around especially if I’m with Jane or a friend or Ellen, but I do regret the purchases often.

Sarah [00:46:58] Well, the spending of money takes us to our listener question that’s sort of in this theme. Kara asked us, what’s your favorite self-care service you actually pay for? So like we’re spending the money and we never regret it. What’s yours?

Beth [00:47:14] I have two, one that I am on the fence about whether it qualifies as self-care. I get regular massages. Definitely self- care. I honestly think of that as health care. Fair, yeah, no, I agree with that. I agree that, preventative care. There’s so many issues in my body that that has helped me stay off medication. Like it just, it has made my health and wellbeing infinitely better. And so I don’t know that that counts as self-care. So my self-care one, I love a magazine. I love to pay for magazine subscriptions. I never regret my magazine time. But they’re so bad. Which ones do you actually get that aren’t bad? I love Better Homes and Gardens. I love Southern Living. I love political magazines even. I just like to sit down with a magazine and touch the paper and look at the pictures and read the little notes. It doesn’t have to be super engaging to me. There’s something in my brain that clicks. It’s different than a book. It feels lighter, feels closer to being on Pinterest or something, but without the screen. And it just makes me so happy.

Sarah [00:48:20] I also get weekly massages. Don’t regret it, even though my husband kind of drops not so subtle hints that he thinks it’s a lot of money. And it is, and I don’t regret. I don’t know if you remember this or if you had this experience. When I was growing up, my mother, my grandmother, my uncle, my stepdad, their backs were going out all the time, which was like, oh, their back is out. They had to like lay on the floor or just take to the bed. I was always concerned about that. My back does not go out. And I believe it is because of Marina and her magic.

Beth [00:48:53] Well, I also feel that I have learned from Beth, confusingly, that’s my massage therapist name. Beth has taught me really how to pay attention to my body in a different way. And so there are things that have come up that we’ve spotted earlier than we might have otherwise. It is really hard for me to think of that in the same way that I would think of lighting a candle and having a chocolate chip cookie and a book. It’s really fundamental to my ability to live in the world as I do.

Sarah [00:49:23] Yeah. Marina, my massage therapist, is sort of like a witch. She’ll just be like, oh, were you scrambling over gravel? And I’ll be like, yes, weirdo, how’d you even know that?

Beth [00:49:36] Same with my person. Honestly, I do want to say because we’ll get emails about this and I understand. This is an unbelievable privilege to be able to put the budget out for this service. I wish everyone had this. I believe that healthcare in the United States would be cheaper for everyone if we made this kind of investment upfront.

Sarah [00:49:55] Yeah, that’s why I don’t regret. Listen, it’s a lot of money. I don’t do other things because I do this. I make sacrifices.

Beth [00:50:01] Same. Yes.

Sarah [00:50:01] And I don’t feel an ounce of guilt about it. Because again, you realize, especially as you get older, I think that’s what selfcare is. Really good selfcare is catching the tightness, be it in your fascia, muscles or spirit, before it turns into an injury, before it turn into a condition. That to me is like what selfcare should really be. And look, I just want to be clear too. These are not relaxing. This is not what’s happening. There is work going on. It hurts a lot of times. I get cupping, like it’s legit.

Beth [00:50:40] It’s like taking your car to this shop. That’s how I feel.

Sarah [00:50:42] Yeah. To me that’s kind of what good selfcare should be. It shouldn’t just be distraction and relaxing. That’s what Derek’s getting at. Like it’s not just, let me zone out. It should be engaging. And I think this is true for leisure. Like it should be engaging. And good leisure hobbies involve a lot of discomfort and frustration if you’re learning a new skill or you’re trying to complete a project or whatever. I think that’s a key component. You don’t just want free and easy distraction. You want something a little deeper.

Beth [00:51:22] I like party planning for this reason too. Because it isn’t zoning out, it’s zoning way in. I spent last night cutting letters out. I’m going to have a conspiracy theory party next month. And I wanted to put everyone’s names on their envelopes with their invitations like in block letters from newspapers and magazines. So I was cutting all the letters out last night. And it was just great because you do that with so much love in your heart for the people that you’re going to send them to. And it’s creative, but not taxing. And also, you know that it is going to push people out of their comfort zones a little bit, but in a good way that I think they won’t regret on the other side of it. And I think that’s part of why I will spend a lot of money on a theme party because I think it is a gift to the people I love.

Sarah [00:52:16] Well, I cannot wait to hear what y’all spend money on, what you regret. I think this is going to be a fun, robust conversation in the comments over on Substack. We hope that you have enjoyed this show and this conversation, and if you have, that you will share it via text, with friends, or a friend, or a family member, or whoever. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday with a new episode of Pantsuit Politics, and until 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. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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.

Subscribe now

Sarah and Beth dig into The Pitt Season 2 finale — Dr. Robbie’s emotional unraveling, Baby Jane Doe’s uncertain future, and whether Noah Wyle has romantic chemistry with literally anyone. The ICE agents on the Fourth of July, the charting catastrophe, Joy’s inviolable boundaries, the turmeric lady, the roof — it’s all here, plus a spirited disagreement about whether Dr. Robbie should be raising a daughter.

Episode Resources

• A ‘BARBARIC’ PROBLEM IN AMERICAN HOSPITALS IS ONLY GETTING BIGGER (The Atlantic)

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning in live!

📆 Join us for next week’s Spicy Live which will be at 1pmET/12pmCT due to a scheduled interview (which you are going to love). See you there!

Get more from Pantsuit Politics in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I hope you’re having the best Thursday available to you. I have some genuinely wild stories for you today, including one that involves bacteria playing drums, so just stay with me.

Here is your news brief for today.

The Global Suicide Rate Has Fallen 40% Since the 1990s

I want to start …

Read more

That was ridiculous. Blasphemous, declared every corner of Al Gore’s internet.

But Trump is often the cartoon version of deeper, more consequential forces in his administration. Today, I’m talking about the God Squad, which this administration didn’t invent, but did…oh man…resurrect.

Links:

• What to know about Rice’s whale, a rare species …

Read more

Y’all, they are dropping like flies out there — in lots of different ways. Let’s get into it.

Here is your news brief for today.

JD Vance’s Islamabad Trip Is Off — Iran Isn’t Coming to the Table

JD Vance is not going to Islamabad. The trip got postponed because the Iranians declined to show up, and it’s real hard to…

Read more

Y’all, I’m doing great today because Kentucky Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman announced her run for governor — and she’s coming on the show first. First. I’m sorry, I just needed to say it twice.

Here is your news brief for today.

U.S. Fires On and Seizes Iranian Cargo Ship in Gulf of Oman

So our military fired…

Read more

I’m struck by a throughline in all of these stories: Who’s at the wheel, and who has given up?

Outside of politics: Sarah and I accidentally took very similar trips to Western national parks during our kids’ spring break. We talk about big skies, the visual record of time passing, and what the desert does for our patriotism.

If this episode is useful to you, we’d love for you to text it to someone in your life with a note about why they might enjoy it, too. -Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Roberts Court and the Shadow Docket

• Day 53 of the War in Iran: The Commander-in-Chief Question

• Section 702 and FISA

• Outside of Politics: Big Skies and Big Silence for Spring Break

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Help us celebrate our community in Minneapolis! Submit your design for our Good Neighbor T-Shirt Contest by April 30.

The Roberts Court and the Shadow Docket

• Inside the Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court (The New York Times)

• It Doesn’t Have to Be You (Pantsuit Politics and Jason Kander)

• Sarah Isgur (Scotusblog)

Day 53 of the War in Iran: The Commander-in-Chief Question

• Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears (The Wall Street Journal)

• Trump’s fixation on White House ballroom is increasing, Post analysis finds (The Washington Post)

• Which Iran is America dealing with? (The Economist)

• For Iran, Flexing Control Over Waterway Is New Deterrent (The New York Times)

Section 702 and FISA

• Senate extends surveillance powers until April 30 after chaotic votes in House (The Associated Press)

Outside of Politics: Big Skies and Big Silence for Spring Break

• Sarah’s Travel Itineraries (By Plane or By Page)

Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:31] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:32] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We have a lot of ground to cover today. So we’re going to start in the Supreme Court where a bombshell New York Times investigation based on leaked internal memos traces the origins of the shadow docket directly to Chief Justice John Roberts. Then we’re going to talk about the war in Iran, the erratic statements coming out of the White House, and the power vacuum inside the leadership in Iran. And what all of this is costing the world. Outside of Politics, we both went out west for spring break and we have some things to say about big skies and big silences and what it can do for your spirit.

Beth [00:01:08] Before we get started, it has been a chaotic week. And if today’s episode helps you make sense of the world a little bit, we have a small request. Would you just text it to a friend? The best way to grow a show like ours for people who are going to love what we do and love the community around it is just one text at a time. Not like a vague, you should listen to Pantsuit Politics. But this episode, for this reason, it just makes a huge difference for us. And we truly appreciate your support.

Sarah [00:01:47] Next up, let’s talk about the shadow docket. Beth, you and I both started reading this report from the New York Times on Saturday morning and could get no further than the introduction for the sake of our mental health. We both just said rage is not how we want to start our Saturdays and we had to put it down.

Beth [00:02:06] No. And I had that initial reaction of rage and knew that it’s the Supreme Court. It’s complicated. I need to really think about this. This is a Monday issue, not a Saturday issue.

Sarah [00:02:18] Okay. We are recording on Monday and you have read the whole report. Do you still not feel rage? Because in disclosure, I definitely do.

Beth [00:02:28] I think I feel less about this story than I think about it. So I start with a question, where do these memos come from? And why are they out here right now?

Sarah [00:02:37] They are saying got these. We got them.

Beth [00:02:40] Yeah, why? Who gave them to you? And what’s that person want the world to know? And what exactly has Chief Justice Roberts done to that person? Because that’s what these memos do, right? I don’t think it’s accurate to say this is the birth of the shadow docket in any respect, but it certainly represents an acceleration of the shadow docket. And it very much, more than anything about procedure, tells you Chief Justice Roberts is not behind the curtain who he presents to the world. And I would just like to know why we know that right now.

Sarah [00:03:18] Okay, well let’s dive in. So yes, they talk about this in the investigation. The shadow docket traditionally was used for like death penalty cases, election cases, sometimes abortion cases, where time was very truly of the essence. If we let time pass, then it either becomes truly irrelevant or irreparable damage will be done because you’ll be dead. And so it really won’t matter if we hear your case about whether you deserve the death penalty or not. Okay. Then, in 2016, we get President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. This is towards the end of his second term. He has struggled to get any real environmental legislation through Congress, and so he puts the Clean Power Plan in motion through the EPA. Further background is that John Roberts was a little pissed at the EPA. He felt like through some mercury regulations and some statements that basically are like too bad they shut our mercury regulations down but they’ve already happened, that they were running an in-run around the court over at the EPA, okay? So, everybody’s off doing their Supreme Court summer plans, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Italy. People are out getting paid to be Supreme Court justices and living their best life.

[00:04:42] And he sends this memo that says, well, these red states have sued on behalf of the industry, saying this is going to be so expensive, this is going to be terrible, like it was a hail Mary. Even the red state attorney generals in this article say like, we thought when we sued to have them freeze this regulation immediately, that it was a pipe dream. They had never used the shadow docket in this way before. So they get before the Supreme Court and he sends this memo to his colleagues and that this was a 5-4 Supreme Court. We had to wait on Anthony Kennedy to decide anything in the good old days of 2016. And he’s like, well, they’re the using this to get around what we all know is going to happen, which is we’re going to strike this down. And it’s going to be so expensive for the oil and gas co-fired power plant industry and we just have to stop it. And there’s like a little bit of debate with the liberal justices who are like does anybody see the problem here that this is not how we operate? And Justice Roberts is, like, not really. And Scalia is like, yeah, they’re undermining our legitimacy. And I’m not. You guys, I’m prone to proximate knowledge and frivolity when summing things up, but I’m doing that here. These are like three sentence emails back and forth. And then Kennedy rolls in and is like, yeah, I’m good with it. And that’s it. That’s how we end up with this new approach to the shadow docket.

Beth [00:06:19] Well, I would like to point out that the first response to the Chief Justice’s initial memo came from Justice Breyer and he proposed a compromise path. Justice Breyer says, basically, Chief, I see what you’re saying. I see where you’re worried about. I also have done a little bit of reading and it looks like there’s a process where these companies could request an extension of time because we’re talking about something that was contemplated, the Clean Power Plan, to be a year’s long target. And Justice Breyer says, let’s tell people go seek that extension and if you’re denied, come back to us. And that’s a way for us to kind of balance all the interests at stake here. And Chief Justice Roberts then shows himself to be just totally impatient about this. I don’t want to do that. Justice Breyer also said like what’s a few months if they go through this process requesting an extension they don’t get it and then they’re back to us in a few month, that’s not going to move markets or mountains. The chief justice is just so insistent that this is a dud from the Obama administration. He thinks it’s just enormous overreach by the executive. And he wants to shut it down immediately. I think that’s what’s so telling in these memos because you often see a John Roberts in his jurisprudence who seems so reluctant, so hesitant, so reticent to have to ever issue an opinion, except in a very few cases where you can tell there’s some passion behind it. And here it’s all passion; it’s passion driving the bus. And it is political passion.

Sarah [00:08:01] He is not asserting any legal arguments. He just isn’t. He is making a political argument. When Nicholas and I were talking about this, he was like, well, how much more evidence do we need that this is a political body? Because they create the shadow docket for one reason, to slow the administration down when it’s an administration they disagree with. And what do they use the shadow docket now? To unleash the full speed of an administration they agree with. And then to worry about the legitimacy when I thought the-- first of all, hats off to Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor. Just incredible reporting. This is why when people like, I don’t know, want to get mad at the New York Times for that bullshit Lauren Bezos article, I just want to be like, yeah, that’s annoying. But when they do shit like this, come on, like it’s hard to argue with the level of reporting and importance I think this has.

Beth [00:09:03] That annoying stuff sells newspapers so that this kind of reporting could be funded.

Sarah [00:09:09] Absolutely.

Beth [00:09:10] Play your Wordle, guys. It helps.

Sarah [00:09:15] Play your Wordle guys, it helps. That got me. Yeah, and I thought Adam Liptak did a good job of saying, like, they were worried about legitimacy, but the way they have accelerated this process and refuse to explain themselves to the American public has undermined their legitimacy. They’re sitting on bottoming out public approval rates. And so, to me, I’m just at the point where I’m like, you don’t find-- be a political institution, but you don’t get a set up there for life with absolutely no accountability except for through the New York Times? Come on.

Beth [00:09:51] Sarah Isgur, who does really good reporting around the Supreme Court, tweeted a couple of examples from 2013 and 2014 of the court using the shadow docket in this way, we just didn’t have that language at the time, to show that this isn’t the beginning of the Court operating in this way. It doesn’t help with the partisan look of it because those were instances related to abortion and marriage equality. So where does the court want to assert its power? In very political spaces and powerhouse economic spaces. I think that when you look at the arguments that are being advanced in these memos, it so clearly demonstrates that these justices don’t believe our processes are up for modern challenges. And I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about with every story today. People don’t believe that the process serves anything anymore. And so they just smash and grab and do whatever they damn well please because they think they are on the right side of the question and so the process doesn’t matter. And as I was telling Ellen, my 10-year-old daughter, this morning who said that learning about the three branches of government right now is so boring, it’s not so boring. Three branches of government means that we are constantly in a staring contest over power. There isn’t an ultimate authority. And even when you write a law, you stare at each other to say, who’s going to enforce this? Who’s going to hold me to it? And these memos show that these justices don’t think the process has a role to play in some kind of counterweight to what is just a staring contest. And that makes me incredibly sad. It’s been on display in their opinions and their lack of opinions for several years now and to see it this starkly is really something.

Sarah [00:11:45] I got in this conversation with Jamie Golden over the weekend about if we could wave a magic wand, like, what’s the one thing we’ll fix? I sent her this article, and I said, “I think this is the Holy Spirit is telling us to start with the Supreme Court.” The idea that the Supreme court is not political has always been a type of important civic fiction. They’re still human beings. And I just think it’s time to accept that. And to put procedural protections in place with the understanding that this is in part a political body and it needs accountability. Lifetime appointments have run the course. If we all need to move faster and acknowledge that the processes were built for a different time, then somebody make the case for me for lifetime appointments. I’m open, I’m here to listen, but I’m skeptical. If we can now see very clearly that whatever processes we put in place to protect against political decision-making at the Supreme Court have run their course, then it’s time to think through some new processes. A bigger court, a court that’s not based on lifetime appointments, like a rotating court of some kind? Enough!

Beth [00:13:07] I would argue that some processes don’t need to run faster, that the timing, the slowness, the deliberateness of what the Supreme Court does is really important. And what this court particularly has demonstrated over the past five years at least, probably longer than that, is that there’s a reason you go through the district court and then the court of appeals and then an oral argument and then you exchange memos like this ad infinitum to get to a place where you’ve considered the power that you’re wielding. I think that’s the reason that we would rather Congress make laws than executive orders get passed around like candy. I’m watching Survivor 50 right now and I’m really interested in the way that they articulated in the most recent episode-- this doesn’t spoil anything, it’s just like a thread running through the season-- that there’s frustration with the players in the middle. They believe the players in the middle have the most power. There are two clear alliances, line in the sand and then there are people who are obviously shuttling between those two. And the people in the two clear alliances don’t like it. They are worried that those are the folks with the best chance to win the game and I think they’re probably right. You see that thinking on display in these memos too. Justice Roberts feels very comfortable that he gets to five against the Clean Power Plan. That’s not how the Supreme Court should operate. And that was back when we still did have a floater in Justice Kennedy. We don’t have that anymore and it’s hurting the court badly. So I would say whatever kind of reforms we can initiate around the court, we need something that gives us the best chance of having floaters again.

Sarah [00:14:51] No, I totally agree. I mean, that persuadable middle is so important. And, look, that’s what introduces weakness in the other branches too. When you have gerrymandered districts where there’s no persuadable middle or no place for them to play any role, that’s where you get weak candidates, weaker representatives. There’s no accountability. And it’s like nobody wants to persuade the middle because it takes time. Everybody wants to move fast. But I think we’re seeing the repercussions of that move quickly, smash, grab approach. And it smashing. Yeah, it’s smashing up the legit of the Supreme Court.

Beth [00:15:36] I listened to the conversation you had with Jason Kander, which I really, really enjoyed. And it got me thinking because you all kept using the phrase big changes, big ideas, about what the public actually wants. And I would like to put in a vote for medium ideas. I think there are a number of things that the American people would coalesce around. Obviously, this needs to change. I think a problem in our politics-- and this is a bias that goes back to my foundational kind of Beth from the right when we began leanings-- when the Supreme Court acts, it wields a giant hammer to smash and grab. It wields really big power. When Congress does something, it’s huge. It can be the tiniest little thing. And you especially see that in environmental cases. A teeny tiny regulation buried in subsection C of clause four can completely upend how agriculture operates in the United States. These tools are so powerful that the time associated with them needs to be slower. And it’s frustrating because we do have big problems and we do want to be responsive to a world that moves a lot faster than it used to. But that pace of the world can have some counterpoint in a government that acts deliberately and with awareness of its power. And we’re so far removed from that right now. And when the court lets go of its deliberateness, it really changes the dynamic.

Sarah [00:17:13] Because, look, I’m not even loving how they’re using the hammer when they take a more deliberative process. I think it was wildly irresponsible how they just took the gates off gambling. And we’re like, yeah, let’s see, go for it and see what happens. I don’t think there’s any acknowledgement or care. Look, I can’t believe I’m about to say this because I don’t give a shit about these tariffs or the Trump administration’s problem refunding them. But even that, just to be like, no, give it back. It’s not that simple. Even with Roe v. Wade, they don’t care. I mean, there are doctors now like having their license under investigation because they didn’t intervene in the same way because they were afraid of going to jail in Texas. And it’s like I don’t know why doctors couldn’t have seen the writing on the wall. Like this is going to be paid first and foremost by women, but also the consequences of that decision are also being paid by a medical profession. And it’s like in a profession and a specialty that did not need more burden. So it’s just so irresponsible. And especially like coming from like Alito and the way he just is so confident of all his worst instincts and refuses to play out any real intellectual argument about how this could work or why this matters or if he’s right. It’s just infuriating.

Beth [00:18:39] He hit a sore spot for me 10 years later with these memos because Alito observes that, yes, the Clean Power Plan envisions a long timeline, but that means companies will have to change what they’re doing now because coal plants aren’t shuttered at the drop of a hat. And I thought, well, that’s funny because this administration sure acts like they can be switched on and off like a light. One of pet issues right now is the way the administration keeps telling coal plants that were supposed to shut down, stop, you have to stay in business. You have to spend thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay open when you had planned to close because we like coal. That’s how we’re covering. We don’t like this, we like this. And so we’re going to use this enormous power at our disposal to do whatever we want. All that said, it takes me right back to the question I began with in this segment. Everybody who pays attention to the Supreme Court knows that all of this is deeply wrong. These memos pin it to the individual justices, not just to it being 2026 and a brand new world. Who leaked this stuff, and what did they hope would come of it?

Sarah [00:19:53] I don’t know who leaked it, but I’m glad they did. I have been saying this about the liberal justices. Stop reading it from the bench. I don’t care. Do something. Once you hear read it from the bench about how the Supreme Court’s in trouble, do something. So somebody did something. And you know what, good for them. Beth, as this episode comes out on Tuesday, we are on day 53 of the war in Iran. We are, I guess sort of in a ceasefire.

Beth [00:20:35] That’s a really astonishing number because I’ve been hearing that we’re like two weeks from being finished.

Sarah [00:20:41] Forever.

Beth [00:20:43] For several weeks now.

Sarah [00:20:47] For several sections of two weeks. Okay, so the reason we are all a little discombobulated as to the timeline and where we are right now is because the president of the United States cannot get his facts straight. He says it is closed. The Strait is closed. No, wait. Iran has agreed to never close the straight again. But then immediately Iran’s like, no, it’s closed. Well, we’re back to the peace table. Iran says, no we’re not. We are not coming. Then we have the Wall Street Journal reporting that when an F-15 was shot down over Iran in early April, that aides kept Trump out of the room during the minute by minute rescue updates because, and this is a quote, “His impatience wouldn’t be helpful.” So, Winnie Speaks. It’s all over the map and he does not seem to be connected to the facts on the ground and perhaps that’s because they’re keeping him out of the room because when he’s there and the facts it’s still playing out, his impatience is unhelpful.

Beth [00:21:56] I had been thinking while you were talking, who is the reliable narrator around the Iran war? I guess it’s the Wall Street Journal because his impatience wouldn’t be helpful does sound like the most factual observation I’ve heard about this conflict in weeks. And then he comes out and takes credit for the rescue of those airmen. He’s not involved in the operation, it’s successful, and then he brags about how successful the operation was. I guess that’s the best case scenario with this president, though.

Sarah [00:22:27] Well, Pete Hegseth is not reliable either. He’s coming out and saying their weapons have been depleted. Trump backs them up. Oh yeah, they don’t have anything left to shoot into the air except for reports say they have 40% of their pre-war stock of drones and that they’re using this current ceasefire-- using that word loosely-- to dig out some missile launchers they’ve been hiding underground and that their missile supply could soon return to 70% of what it was pre-wars. So I don’t think that’s accurate either.

Beth [00:22:59] I feel like tracking what Hegseth and Trump say about this war is like listening to a graphic novel that’s being written in real time. You can see these points of emphasis that they want to hit hard. Like you can imagine like the boom from the page. But the story is not tracking. There are always more questions that are raised by what they say than answers offered. And I think that they both are pursuing I don’t know if it’s several timelines in a multiverse or if they just can’t decide how they want the plot to evolve here. But I can’t find anything to hook into where I am in their minds enough to understand what success looks like. And that to me seems to be the problem. If you want to have real negotiations, which you would think that our business man in chief knows rest on everyone’s trust for one another. How do you go in and take out all their leadership? They either intended to do that without thinking about what it would do to the capacity to negotiate, or they didn’t intend it, which raises its own questions about their competence.

Sarah [00:24:15] Well, I don’t think he does know trust is an important part of the negotiation. None of the negotiations he has run in his personal business life was built on trust. It was built upon bullying, maximum leverage, and then maybe just not fulfilling his end of the bargain because he didn’t want to. Sound familiar?

Beth [00:24:32] It does. I also was thinking this morning about how often we discussed in his first term that he wanted to run the economy so hot, no matter what, and it left him with no options. That sense that interest rates should always be zero means that when things fall apart, you don’t have any tools at your disposal. And that seems to be how he’s conducting this war. If I threaten the extinction of your civilization, if I go in and kill all your leaders at the very beginning, if I take out all of the targets that are reasonable targets within the country at the beginning, where do I go from here? And it feels to me like the answer to that question is that America is shedding power and leverage by the day.

Sarah [00:25:17] Absolutely. I do think one of their timeline goals, him and Hegseth, is just to like normalize war crimes. So he keeps saying it’s a blockade. Well, a blockade is a war crime. So everybody keeps coming out after and being like, no, we’re just blocking their ports, not the Strait itself, don’t worry. And this sort of we’re going to bomb civilian infrastructure, which is a work crime. It’s infrastructure day. So apparently we are still doing infrastructure day, we’re just doing it by just destroying other countries infrastructure. We’re going to bomb the water, we’re going to bomb the bridges, so that’s a war crime. And so it’s like, but I don’t think he cares. So I don’t know if the goal is to just ultimately normalize the idea of like we do what we want, we don’t care. That definitely seems to be one of Pete Hegseth’s goals. But I think you’re right. Putting together your pet project from the last section, what is happening here is the decimation of the global supply of oil. So Europe, South America, Asia in particular, are saying, okay, it’s not going to help us quickly, but we have got to get even better, even stronger, even faster when it comes to clean energy. Well, guess who stands to profit from that? China. Because they have been pouring enormous state resources into the clean energy sector while Trump is spending billions of dollars of our tax revenue to prop up the industry now that has the entire global economy by the nuts. Not to be crude.

Beth [00:27:01] So warfighter not bound by any kind of rules, goal number one. They did tell us early in the administration they wanted to weaken the dollar. They’re doing that. I guess you could say if they wanted make oil more valuable, they’re accomplishing that. At what price though and who benefits from all of that? Those are real open questions to me.

Sarah [00:27:29] I want to talk about Iran, and I want to talk about the global economy a little bit more. But before we turn from their perspective, I have to bring up this Washington Post analysis that found that his mentions of the ballroom are growing. He has publicly mentioned this project, roughly a third of all his days this year. And it just keeps getting more and more frequent. Above affordability. Above the oil and gas prices. And if he’s not talking about the ballroom, he’s saying things that don’t make sense like the Sharpie story that never happened. If you didn’t follow this, he was at a cabinet meeting and he told the story about how Sharpie made a special Sharpie for him, except they didn’t. It never happened. Beth, do we think he has dementia? We got to ask it. The question has to be asked.

Beth [00:28:26] I don’t know if he has dementia. I do know that the signs of age and strain are evident. That the erratic behavior is accelerating and I didn’t think we had room left on that. Silly me. I think you also see in Trump some of the sillier manifestations of issues that run all the way through this administration. Another pet project of mine is becoming the God Squad, which is this group of people who make environmental decisions. Will we continue to protect certain species? And they call themselves the God Squad. Now we all got very angry, understandably, about Trump posting an AI generated image of himself looking like Jesus. I’m madder about the God Squad. He is the silly cartoon version of sentiments that are circulating all around him all the time. This war fighter nonsense, the religious blasphemy, I think, that occurs daily in this group of people coupled with a sense of religious purpose, like they are all divine warriors for some version of Christianity.

Sarah [00:29:41] Wait, wait, wait. You forgot one.

Beth [00:29:44] Give it to me.

Sarah [00:29:45] Don’t forget that they’re also getting rich like insider trading on all this power and deals. You forgot that one which is also a pet project of yours.

Beth [00:29:53] Do you remember that country music song, It Matters to Me? That’s Trump. So he wants everything to be about what matters to him and the ballroom matters to him. He’s got enough money at this point and he’s printing it every day through a variety of meme coins and whatever else. But the ball room is like an undeniable testament to his power and that’s the currency that he cares about. Now the arches are the same way. So you have all these dynamics swirling. And then when you pair those with a process story like Iran shot one of our fighter jets down and we’re chasing after our pilots to try to hold them as prisoners of war and we had to leave him outside and occupy him with something else because his attention span can’t handle this kind of work; that’s when we have a problem in a story that it doesn’t matter how many psychiatrists on the socials weigh in on his capacity, members of Congress need to be holding hearings and asking questions about that.

Sarah [00:31:03] Well, and here’s the thing. With Biden I just don’t think I kind of respected the wisdom of the masses. And because it’s so easy in today’s day and age to confuse the loud 20% on social media with the masses and to get real cynical about the majority of views, those aren’t the majority of views. The anti-vaxxers who are so loud on Instagram are not the majority of people. The majority of people have very positive views about vaccines, which is why RFK had such a tough week last week before the House and Senate. And so with Biden, I think I thought this is just people saying this stuff is just the loud 20 percent getting clicks on the Internet. And I’m trying to take it more seriously when it starts to show up in the masses. And the polling on his age is making him more erratic is shifting pretty dramatically in real time where people are like, no, it’s clear. He’s getting more erratic and the age is making it worse. And he and all of the Republican party ignore that to their peril. Ask me how. I know.

Beth [00:32:20] It’s not just the wisdom of the masses either. The most sharp statements about his mental decline are coming from people who used to work for him, who used be very close to him. When you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, even Megan Kelly out there saying, something’s off here, you got to take that seriously. A number of people from the first term, people who were loyal to his administration and proud of a lot of the work they did are saying, this is a mess, he is chaotic. And all of that is being said when we were told that Susie Wiles runs this tight ship, we’re not going to have the palace intrigue this time. Even with all the structure built to contain his natural flair for drama, it can’t be contained.

Sarah [00:33:15] Yeah. Well, and maybe I have in theory, I’m developing in real time here. Maybe the insider trading coming from the White House is just a fire sale. People up close and personal going, you better get while the getting’s good. Get on your oil futures trading when you know he’s going to get on Truth Social at 3 a.m. And make sure you make a couple billion dollars while you can. But don’t worry, Beth. The White House sent a memo telling everyone to knock it off, so I’m sure that’ll fix it.

Beth [00:33:45] I’m sure it will fix it. And also how dare anyone suggest that anyone was doing it in the first place, the White House says.

Sarah [00:33:51] I know.

Beth [00:33:51] All this said, I agree with everything that you said about ignoring at your peril the signs of age and strain and the way the public is perceiving that. I think that’s all true. Sitting alongside that on the shelf for me is my incredible frustration when I hear Democrats who are elected officials talking about this or who are seeking to be elected officials. I don’t care if you think he’s crazy. I don’t care if you think he has dementia. I don’t care if you think he’s in cognitive decline. Do your job. You can subpoena cabinet officials and have them come to a hearing and talk to you about what is actually happening behind closed doors. Not his mental state. What people are doing. When they ask him a question, how he responds. What questions he’s not being asked, and who is the decision maker if he’s not the decision-maker. You have that ability. You have the ability to restrain his authority to go prosecute this war that doesn’t seem to have a real objective. Do it. I just feel like because this resonates with the public, there is an incentive for political actors to hop on the bandwagon and kind of walk around the world like what are you going to do? He’s a madman. Well, you still have a to-do list. Please get on it.

Sarah [00:35:13] Yeah. Well, I don’t want to be Debbie Downer here, but the wheels are not going back on Congress anytime soon. They could barely get that FISA extension passed for like, what, till April, 10 whole days? April 30th was the extension. Woo! And Trump and Mike Johnson both wanted this full extension and it did not get through. So, wait, maybe I’m wrong. Hold on. Maybe that’s a sign that the wheels are getting coming back on and they’re just not doing anything he tells them to do.

Beth [00:35:37] And FISA, to call back to our Supreme Court segment, is an issue that deserves deliberation and slowness and real negotiation. They’ve been trying since the last time they reauthorized FISA to negotiate some limits on this incredible power the government has to surveil people. If you don’t know what we’re talking about with FISA, that is about the ability of the United States government to listen in on conversations and intercept communications conducted outside the United State by people who are not U.S. Persons. But everybody knows, and the issue that Congress has been debating for literal years now, is that when you pick up that kind of discussion between people who are not US persons, you sweep up all kinds of conversations happening among people who are. And we have got to figure out some judicial oversight for that, some tighter controls. Trump himself, who is now demanding this clean authorization of FISA, has said that this law is terrible and it’s how they were able to spy on his campaign and we need to get rid of it. So which is it? Now that he holds the power to do this kind of surveillance, he wants all of it without any limitations. But candidate Trump sang a very different tune about this. And I’m kind of glad they kicked it for 10 days because I hope that means something real is being debated, not just central bank currency or whatever craziness they want to attach to it, but something that gets to the substance of this power and the potential for its abuse.

Sarah [00:37:17] Well, back to Iran and what comes next. JD Vance for some reason I do not understand, continues to attach his name to negotiations which are supposed to take place. The ceasefire expires tomorrow on Wednesday. Iran is saying they’re not coming. There does seem to be a true vacuum. The Supreme Leader is in critical condition and not exerting any power. The political leaders are, to my eye, in an ever decreasing influential space. And the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has increasing power in the space. There was some reporting from the economist that at the first round of negotiations, everybody was used to Iran coming with like two to three people, very tight team, knew exactly what they were doing. Well, some of those people have been killed and there’s a power vacuum. So they showed up with an 80 person faction. Where you have these Iranian Revolutionary Guard hardliners clashing. And, to me, that was what was so evident over the weekend with the Strait is open, the Strait is closed. Those were two different people talking. One was like a minister in the cabinet and one was a military official. So that’s why you got two different messages. It’s two different factions.

[00:38:40] It’s like everybody’s worst nightmare with Iran that it will collapse into this faction-driven situation. And Isaac Solover at the Tangle was saying he worries this will just become an ambient war. But to me, the ramifications on the global economy, what we’re seeing is a pricing of futures of oil. And that’s why the stock market responds on a dime because we’re talking about futures, but in Asia they have to pay for the oil now and it’s like $150 a gallon. There is not enough. And it’s not just not enough oil, it’s a not enough of all these other critical resources that make everything from like instant noodles to plastic bags, okay?

Beth [00:39:24] Fertilizer. The food.

Sarah [00:39:27] Like a real food crisis. Yeah, to me, that’s going to prevent this from becoming background noise, but they have taken an approach that has produced this quagmire. I don’t see any path. I truly don’t a see a path here. They’re not going to budge. Even if one faction decided to budge, I don’t see the hardliners and the military budging. They want $20 billion? And we’re going to be in a worse place than we were with the JCPOA? I don’t see it. I wouldn’t be signing up for this gig if I was JD Vance.

Beth [00:40:03] If I got the promise of one question to get an honest answer from the White House on in connection with this war, I think what I would ask is what were your assumptions about regime change? Because on the one hand, it feels like regime change was a baked-in assumption that the United States would start bombing, the people of Iran would take to the streets again, they would overthrow whatever’s left of the Ayatollah’s regime. And then what? Because that’s where it stops, right? It seems like there was no planning for the messy situation that always happens. I can’t point to any story where the leader is deposed and the next day the people have rallied around one person who can then come to the negotiating table with a foreign power and really get something done. The only example of that, and maybe this is the problem, is Venezuela. Because we went in and arrested Maduro, and then basically looked at Delcy Rodriguez and said, do what we want or you’re next and so she did.

Sarah [00:41:09] Well, and the people didn’t rally around her. She was just a part of the puzzle that suppressed the people to begin with so she had the keys to the jail and could keep them in there.

Beth [00:41:17] And look, that’s a difference too. They didn’t go in and take out everybody. They just took Maduro, but the rest of the structure stayed in place. If Trump wanted to do that kind of shakedown again, why’d they go in and kill everybody? Was that incompetence or strategy?

Sarah [00:41:33] Beth, is that a serious question?

Beth [00:41:35] I know. That the question that I would ask. If I could get one honest answer, that’s what I want to know about the conception of this operation.

Sarah [00:41:42] I know the answer to that. I don’t need their honesty around that. I want their honesty on what do you sincerely think is your next move here? What do you necessarily believe is the strategy moving forward? I don’t think there’s an answer, even an honest one.

Beth [00:42:00] Seems like a problem.

Sarah [00:42:01] It seems like a problem. Not just for us, for everyone, for Asia, for Europe. Things turn dark when there’s real scarcity. When there is not enough food, when people have to suppress their demand. Listen to this guy get interviewed with the New York Times where he said he stopped driving his diesel truck because the price of diesel was so high. And also he had taken up fasting. This is a Trump voter. He said he still trusts Trump. I’m like, wow, fasting? Fasting and you still trust the outcome here. That might hang for a little while. That is not a permanent solution. When people start having to change things dramatically and there’s not enough to go around, things are going to get real really fast.

Beth [00:42:50] And that has happened around a number of wars in our history, and I’m sure on Trump’s mind is the celebration of some of those wartime leaders, but those were people who were able to say here’s why we’re doing this. I am asking for your sacrifice, nation, in service of this higher ideal. Nothing about Donald Trump ever, one, foreshadowed that we’d be asked to sacrifice under his leadership. We were supposed to kick back and live large. And two, gives him the words, the focus, the communicative ability to say to us, here’s why and here’s what you’re being asked to sacrifice for, and I promise on the other side of this here’s what’s awaiting you. They just don’t have it.

Sarah [00:43:44] Next up, we’re going to take a hard turn and ground ourselves in the Mountain West. Beth, much by accident, we had very similar spring breaks.

Beth [00:44:04] By complete accident. We discussed none of this.

Sarah [00:44:06] No. We took a trip to New Mexico and Texas to see White Sands National Park, Carlsbad Cavern, Guadalupe Mountains, and Big Bend National Parks. Four national parks in one week. It was fabulous.

Beth [00:44:25] And I had to be in Santa Fe for a retreat with some of our listeners, which was wonderful at the end of that spring break week. So my family and I flew to Denver at the beginning of the week and rented a car. And we also did national parks. We went to Rocky Mountain National Park, to Arches, to Canyonlands, to Petrified Forest, to the Grand Canyon and to White Sands. We did a lot of driving.

Sarah [00:44:49] There’s just so much driving. Because people even in other national parks, people who are from that area of the country are like very rapidly doing some mileage calculations, looking at a map in their head and going, whoa, what?

Beth [00:45:02] Well, I can tell you because the rental car had four miles on it when we drove it out of the lot and we returned it over 2,600.

Sarah [00:45:08] Oh my god. That wasn’t even a full week because you got to be-- you didn’t have to be with our listeners. You’ve got to be with our listener, right?

Beth [00:45:15] That’s right. It was wonderful.

Sarah [00:45:16] In Santa Fe, like by Thursday. We did a lot of driving. We had two five-hour days because Texas is so big. But we didn’t do quite that much. Is this like y’all’s first like big national park trip?

Beth [00:45:27] Yes, it is. This is our girls first time really out West. We’ve taken them to California once, but they haven’t seen the West in any meaningful sense. And you know how we are. If we’re going to do something, we go very hard. We do not do relaxing vacations unless we are at the beach, totally tuned out. And so we thought we’re out here, let’s just do a little sampler platter. Let’s not spend a lot of time in any one place, but let’s show them a lot of what is out here.

Sarah [00:45:52] What part was your favorite and what part do you wish you’d had more time in?

Beth [00:45:56] My favorite was Petrified Forest, actually.

Sarah [00:46:00] I haven’t been there.

Beth [00:46:01] I love how you can look at rock and see the passage of time. And that the passage of time is somehow beautiful just really spoke to me. I felt it deep in my body being a petrified forest. So it was my favorite. I think everybody else in my family would say arches or white sands, but I really connected there. I probably wish that we had had more time at Grand Canyon.

Sarah [00:46:31] Yeah, it’s so big.

Beth [00:46:31] The girls didn’t love it because it felt very touristy compared to the others. You’re getting on busses to go from one section to another. There were lots and lots of people compared to everywhere else we’d been. I really loved going around on the south rim to the place where you can actually hear the Colorado River. And we were there at such a nice time of year. It’s not blazing hot yet. And I think it would have been nice to have a little bit more time to actually do like a a hike or two there and really just kind of feel it out more.

Sarah [00:47:04] Yeah, we’ve only done Grand Canyon in a very touristy way when the boys were very, very small. Like we literally just like went out to the top, looked across and we’re like, wow, look at the Grand Canyon and then went to a wedding. So I really want to go down into the canyon. I want to do the like whole situation down in the bottom. And so that’s definitely on our list to do. I can’t believe Arches isn’t on anybody’s list. I loved Arches when we did it with the Mighty Five Parks in Utah. And I liked Canyonlands too. Arches, I think you get that same sense of the passage. I didn’t understand how the formations were made, like, oh, well, it’s different rock and they were way at different passage rates or whatever. And I did feel like when I left Utah under the Mighty Five, I deserved like a geology degree. I just learned so much about that over the course of our time there.

Beth [00:47:51] Chad and the girls really loved Arches. I will disclose, one, I didn’t feel great the day we went to Arches in my body. And elevation does mess with me. So the higher we went, the worst I felt. The other thing is like you definitely do feel the passage of time. And I spent a lot of that day going, how did this happen? And Googling things and thinking about salt more than I ever thought I might. But the rock is pretty brownish orange. That’s just kind of where you are. And I loved Canyonlands and then even more in sort of the painted desert part of the Petrified Forest. The rock itself just tells the story. Like it is like looking at an infographic about the different ages Earth has been through. It’s so beautiful.

Sarah [00:48:34] Well, we loved White Sands as well. The sledding down the dunes was fun. And the sunset there was incredible. Carlsbad Cavern is fun because we live near Mammoth Cave. So like the difference between the two caves, like Mammoth Cave is mammoth. It’s a very, very big cave system, but it’s not very deep. Carlsbad Cavern, is like an L. Like you go straight down and then across into like a-- it’s not a little room, but it a little compared to Mammoth Cave. So understanding the difference between the two cave systems... It took us like an hour to get down to Carl’s Bad Cavern walking down. At Mammoth Cave you just walk down a little slant and then you’re there. But Big Bend is very special.

[00:49:12] Big Bend is a very special park. It’s one of the parks that’s so big, it has like multiple different ecosystems. There’s a basin in the middle. There’s the Rio Grande. There’s multiple different like the Chihuahuan Desert. And the desert kind of grows on me. I’m not prone to desert life because I’m so very pale. But the more you spend in the desert, I think the more you’re like, I get it. First of all, I saw so many roadrunners and they’re so cute and I love them so much and they are so fun to watch. And I really, really fell for the Rio Grande. We had such a good time down on the Rio Grand. We crossed over. Felix swam across [inaudible] and thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it was just beautiful, beautiful country down there. Look, I love Texas a little bit more every time I visit it.

Beth [00:50:00] I want to ask you about that sense of desert growing on you because something I noticed while we were out there is that in the moments when I felt sad, which I got a few text messages from people going through hard things, I felt sad in a way more intense way than I ever do at home. And I decided that it must be the trees. I think the trees at home just really take a lot of my energy and process it for me. And the starkness of the landscape, it felt like all of my emotions were just like bouncing around and echoing back at me. Not to be too woo-woo.

Sarah [00:50:33] Well, here’s the thing. What I have learned over multiple national park trips is there is something there that can carry it for you. It’s just often hidden. They were talking about in the Chihuahuan desert that there is this living crust that’s holding everything together, that’s keeping the plants alive, that like a small pool can instantaneously become full of toads and shrimp because the eggs are just waiting for water. And in the same way you feel that in the Biscayne Bay or in Arroyo even national parks that are basically water. The mangroves and what the role they play in the biology, in the ecosystem. Like I think I’ve developed like a much deeper appreciation of the complexity of every ecosystem and how they can hold what you ask them to hold. They’ll just going to hold it in a different way. And I think we can say art trees hold a lot, but until you stand at the base of a Sequoia it is a totally different vibe. And that’s why I love it so much.

[00:51:43] We recently had a conversation on another podcast where they wanted us to show up and shit all over America. And the national park system, especially in the context of our 250th anniversary and the geology, the geography, the ecology of the United States is just incredible. I’ve never even been to Alaska. It’s just insane. It’s such a gift. It’s such a powerful, incredible piece of our country. I cannot get enough of it. I love every park more. The rankings in the Holland family it’s like a stock ticker. It’s just constantly up and down, up and changing, up and up, up and changing. Now I will say, in full disclosure, Yosemite is my number one and it will be hard to beat. It has maintained its place. But they’re all so special and I’m just so grateful to live in a place where we can experience all that.

Beth [00:52:49] I will say this trip made me more patriotic too because it’s not just that we have all of this diversity in our ecosystem, but we have the opportunity to go see it. It’s pretty much available. I mean, it’s expensive to rent a car, the fuel is expensive. Compared to lots of other trips, this is a pretty cheap way to experience something really meaningful. I did a future problem solving exercise with our listeners who came to the Santa Fe retreat with me and I wrote a future scene where people had basically checked out on the federal government and were depending on their states for everything. And part of that future scene involves states negotiating with each other over tariffed products. You look around and see our opportunity to drive from one state to another without even stopping and letting the state know you’re there, to spend your money everywhere seamlessly, to show up at these national parks because you got the one pass that you need from the federal government to go to all of these different places.

[00:53:57] It’s amazing the way that we have opened up our part of the world to one another. And you can really see that that’s the source of America’s power. And that’s way bigger than anything happening at the White House. That for 250 years we’ve said, come explore this vast land. We’re not going to stop you, we’re not going to keep you out, we’re going to say, no, you’re not from Arizona, the Grand Canyon is for the Arizonans. It’s amazing that we’ve done that. And it is the source of our greatness not just because of the national parks, but because we have said we share this together. And we take pride in our individual places, but we share it all. It really touched me while I was out there.

Sarah [00:54:39] Well, and look, I was living through and watching this political story in Big Bend while I was there. It clearly works on everybody, especially the people that work there. This is West Texas. This is the border, okay? This is not San Francisco. And there were signs everywhere, stop the border wall. Do not put this border wall through Big Bend. And it worked. They’re not doing it. They backed off. Because I think that living there, experiencing these places, it is the time, it is this sense that we as a country have this incredible gift, resource. We didn’t make the Grand Canyon, but we do steward it. And I think that is perspective giving, if you allow it to. Look, it makes me sad when somebody goes, oh, we’re not national park people. It does. Because I do think even if you’re not an outdoorsy person, there’s something about visiting a national park. I think there is the sense that this country and its land is bigger than us. I think there’s a sense that you kind of have to respect it and take it seriously, that’s really powerful.

[00:56:07] You can’t just walk onto like a five mile hike in the middle of Big Bend on a whim, right? You have to take it seriously. You have to plan that we have all these incredible resources. My husband is an Eagle Scout in Enneagram 6 max prepper. Do you know the first thing he does at any national park we go to? We go right to the nature station and we talk to a ranger. So you have to interact and you hear this expertise and you see the federal government showing up in this incredibly impactful way in the everyday lives of Americans. I mean, I could truly wax poetic for hours about all these different threads that come together when you visit a national park and it changes you. It changes the way you think about our country. It changes the way you think about yourself. It changes the way you about God and life and love. It is truly something every American should find a little time and space in their life to do. I believe that.

Beth [00:57:15] The other piece that I want to call out from this time in the West that really moved me was spending some time with indigenous people and hearing about that negotiation of stewardship of the land. The struggle that dual sovereignty creates. The way that is so present and shows up in water and electricity. The hotel that we stayed in for our retreat in Santa Fe is 100% owned by Pueblo people. And one of them came to us, the very first thing we did was hear his story. Learned about the history of the hotel and the history his tribe. He talked to us about Chaco Canyon and their struggle with the federal government. And he offered us a blessing while we were there. And that combination of politics, the space for struggle, the space for all is not well, and we still love it here and we’re still happy to have you here as our guests, it was very, very moving. And I really want to spend more time in spaces like that, listening and learning and reflecting and problem solving and just trying to advance my own understanding of the people that we have taken a lot of this land from as a nation and still share it with and who still seek to live harmoniously. It’s a pretty mind blowing state of affairs that we have.

Sarah [00:58:53] Well, if you have been inspired to take on a trip, I have itineraries. If didn’t know this, my family and I basically just write up what we did. We write up our itinerary; we write up all the guides. If you’d like to hear more about the details around this trip or some other ones around the Mountain West or other national parks, we just went to two national parks in Minnesota over the summer. Those will be available. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. We hope you will take a moment and text a link to this show to a friend and say, hey, I know you love national parks, take a listen. Or, hey, are you filled with rage about the New York Times piece about the Supreme Court? Here’s a conversation just for you. 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. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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.

We’re considering this decision alongside the weekend’s shadow-docket reporting in the New York Times, and asking what it looks like to approa…

Read more

I hope everybody had the best weekend available to you. Our beautiful eldest child, Griffin Stewart Holland, finished his Eagle Scout project this weekend — he built garden boxes for our local food pantry. I could not be more proud of that kid.

Okay. Here is your news brief for today.

U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Expires This …

Read more

But the race I’m most invested in on this ballot is our county judge-executive. In Kentucky, judge-executives touch almost every aspect of managing the places we live: snow removal, road construction, property taxes, business development, housing, water and sewer. You name it; the judge-executive has responsibility for it.

The last time our judge-executive was on the ballot, just over 10,000 people (in my county of around 140,000 people) voted in that race.

And I get it. Our brains fill up with our daily to-dos, insurance renewals, pet illness, the water heater leaking. Then we pour in national news, and we start to overflow. It takes energy and capacity to care about local races, and many of us simply don’t have it. I understand.

But I have that capacity, so I want to see how I can use it.

Enter Ballot Club.

Share

Several years ago, my neighbor Bethanie and I invited friends to my house right before election day. We made a simple slideshow listing the races that would be on our ballots. We described what the offices do (Kentucky elects constables! It’s bewildering!) and listed the candidates. We had some snacks, and we talked through the slides with the room. Does anyone know this person running for school board? How about this city council candidate? Have you ever tried to call our rep? What happened?

It was a lively, educational, fruitful, zero pressure conversation among lots of people from different corners of my life and their friends. We had one objective: everyone leaves a little more prepared to vote.

I’m planning to do it again for our upcoming primaries. Here’s my slideshow, which I’ll post on all the socials. I’ll invite my people and their people to come to my house if they want. I’ll assure them that I’m not fundraising or stumping for anyone. And we’ll see what happens.

Here’s a link to the slideshow with working links, in case some of these elections affect you!

This feels very low-stakes to me. If no one shows up, some people will still look at the slides and click some links. Purpose served!

If I have a house full, I’ve only promised something that I’ve already done (and some snacks).

It takes an investment of time to put the information together, and if you, too, have that capacity, here are some ways to get started:

• Your state’s Secretary of State runs elections. Look at the Secretary of State website for important deadlines, a link to check on your voter registration status, and any other election headquarters-type information.

• Often, your Secretary of State’s office can point you to the right county official for more detailed information. In Kentucky, our county clerks run elections, and my county’s clerk does a fantastic job sharing election information. In other states, you might be looking for a county election supervisor or a similar title. If you’re not finding anything, trying Google-ing “who is the top election official in __ County, [state]?”

• Here’s the tricky part: information for each candidate. If you know of a local or regional news outlet, start there. See if they have an election guide or candidate round-up. Sometimes a local television station will have good links and resources. I resorted for one candidate to a Reddit thread because it was the best I can do. That’s ok! This isn’t a test (for you…you can divine what you will about the candidates from what they’ve shared about themselves).

In the general everything-overwhelm, we say to plug in locally so often that it sounds trite. Maybe it is. But I like seeing what I can do and doing it. - Beth

Leave a comment

Outside of politics, we consider the call for parents to hold hands and agree that we’ll all do less together. From Maycember sprawl to spirit week standards to the charcuterization of everything, we sort out what we’re doing and why. -Beth

Topics Discussed

• Zohran Mamdani’s 100 Days: Pothole Politics and What Democratic Socialism Looks Like in Practice

• The Affordability + Corruption + Service Formula — A Democratic Blueprint?

• Navigating the Coalition: Mamdani, Trump, Hochul, and the Art of Getting Things Done

• Outside of Politics: Maycember and the Case for Parents to Just… Stop

Episode Resources

Help us celebrate our community in Minneapolis! Submit your design for our Good Neighbor T-Shirt Contest by April 30.

Zohran Mamdani / NYC

• Mayor Mamdani Unveils Website Tracking First 100 Days Achievements (NYC Mayor’s Office)

• Zohran Mamdani celebrates ‘pothole politics’ in a raucous rally marking 100 days as NYC mayor (CNN)

Maycember

• Parents, Consider Underachieving (The New York Times)

• The Family Commons by Chloe Sladden (Substack)

Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:31] This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We spent Tuesday talking about the federal government and the global picture- not pretty. Today, we’re going to zoom in to New York City, where Democratic star Zohran Mamdani just passed the 100-day mark as mayor. Democrats across the country took notes from Mamdani as a campaigner, so we want to consider him in office. We’re asking today whether and under what circumstances star power translates to political power. Outside of Politics, we’re coming even closer to home. Has Maycember come early in your house? It definitely has in mine. Like a month and a half early. There’s a Maycember sprawl out there. And an essay called “Parents, Consider Underachieving” says that perhaps parents like politicians are over promising and setting ourselves up to either under deliver or die trying. So we’re going to talk about that.

Sarah [00:01:24] Fair. Before we get started, if you enjoy this episode, we’d like to ask you not to dress up for a theme day or bring individually wrapped nut gluten and red dye free cupcakes to a class party tomorrow. We would just simply love it if you would tap five-star rating and leave a quick positive review in the podcast player of your choice. It only takes about 30 seconds. It means the world to us as we continue to try to help more people achieve a healthier and more well-rounded perspective on politics.

Beth [00:01:50] Next up, let’s head to the Big Apple. Sarah, last night, Jane Silvers my 15-year-old daughter had to file her taxes because she worked at the city pool last year. And she’s going back this summer, she’s very excited. And it was funny she was talking about how she was comfortable giving some money to Andy Beshear but not to Donald Trump. And like a lot of things, she knows that’s not how it works and chooses not to care. Like that is her framework for it.

Sarah [00:02:25] Yeah, because she’s really giving it to the Kentucky legislature, not Andy Beshear.

Beth [00:02:29] That’s right. But it was interesting to hear her perspective on all of that. And I thought, she’s really seeing what MAGA governance looks like. I picked it up mostly as a campaign strategy. And I think about it in terms of a campaign strategy all the time. But this is her vision of government. People get their tax refunds, those refunds-- she’s going to get $15 back-- doesn’t come close to making up for the increased cost that come from tariffs and an unnecessary war and against the backdrop of corruption and fewer government programs that mean fewer jobs, not just fewer jobs in government but in general. And she sees that nobody has their hands on the wheel when it comes to artificial intelligence. So this is a good moment to think about what is an alternative vision? We need lots of alternative visions for people like her who are seeing what MAGA governance has meant.

Sarah [00:03:25] Well, it’s so interesting that you say this. I had this thought because of America 250 and because of my age and because I have children approaching young adulthood. I spent a lot of time thinking, well, what was different than how I grew up? And when I was growing up, there was stability in the governance and instability in the politics. And in this weird way, I feel like we’ve like flip-flopped. There is a type of stability in the politics, in the tribalism, in the polarization, in the fragmentation of media, in the influence of the internet and online spaces. And there’s like complete instability in the government, in the functioning of particularly the federal government and how that would play on you, particularly as a young person, how it plays on me as a middle-aged person. We were talking politics, but it was like there was this undercurrent, this assumption that center will hold. I don’t want him to win, but we’re talking about maybe some back and forth on cultural issues. We’re not talking about these things we assume to always be true changing permanently. And that just feels so different than today.

Beth [00:04:59] It does. And I think everybody has an awareness that there probably shouldn’t be stability in either. Stability in governments led to a malaise around governance and governance not keeping up with the world as it was evolving. And as I watch the Democratic primary for presidents starting to take shape, it feels too stable to me. There are a lot of things happening. You and I used the word on our spicy episode over on Substack yesterday of nostalgic; I think there is a lot of that sense of, well, everybody’s going to go write the books now. They’re going to start meeting the donors, and oh, you appeared in South Carolina, you went to New Hampshire, you went Iowa. And you can feel that a shift is needed in light of the complete instability in governance. And that’s why I think that looking at Mamdani is interesting because here you have a much younger person who did advance what campaigning looks like. He did it a different way. And a different way than people had settled on was the new way. You know what I mean? I feel like Trump did a thing and everyone reacted and said, oh, this is how you campaign now and Mamdani evolved that even more. So I’m really interested in looking at what he’s done, even though it’s only been 100 days and that’s not very long, especially in a city like New York. I’m interested in seeing what we can divine about an alternative vision from him and what we learn about bringing some of that instability to governing to try to evolve it to an iteration that makes more sense to people like Jane and your sons.

Sarah [00:06:35] Well, with Mamdani what I feel like he forces me to do is not accept sort of instability. Because I think for what it’s worth, people are realizing, oh no, the stability was nice. JK. Yeah, it might’ve led to some allays and distrust in the institutions, but our global economy was built on stability, the understanding of a type of global rule of order. Kept a lot of violence and authoritarianism and check around the globe and there’s going to be an enormous amount of suffering as a result of this instability. What Zohran Mamdani to me pushes is not the flip or the flopping between campaign and governance, but this integration to say because of our media environment, because of the sort of decentralization, because of the way people live their lives, because of this instability is playing out in their lives. You have to stop thinking about them as separate things. The communication strategy, the persuasion, the action, the showing up in governance has to all go together all the time. And I hate to say this, but in a ways Trump does that. In a way,.

Beth [00:08:01] Yeah, totally.

Sarah [00:08:01] He never stops campaigning, right? But he just campaigns. He doesn’t govern to a certain extent. Or he certainly doesn’t govern with a long-term strategy. What I see Zohran Mamdani doing in a really integrated way is tying both together. I do have a long-term strategy and I do have a long term idea about governance that you cannot separate from this approach to communication. Maybe that’s it, like what he revolutionized wasn’t just campaigning, it was communicating. And it’s like he’s like the good angel version of what Trump does. Talking all the time in ways that perform and connect in our new media environment. But he’s doing it in service of something besides himself.

Beth [00:08:53] Well, I think service is an important word there. What I see Mamdani working out in real time is what does democratic socialism look like in 2026? And I’ve been critical of Democrats for hooking into affordability too much because I just think if you win by affordability, you lose by affordability. There’s only so much that you can do about how much groceries costs. No matter what office you hold. You can do some things, you can definitely make it worse, as we’ve seen, but there’s only so much that you can do to make it better. And if you tell the public it’s going to be cheaper under my leadership and it’s not cheaper, you’re sunk. Mamdani talked about affordability all the time. And I think there’s a little bit of a shift in what he’s doing as mayor, as he works out the contours of this message, what people ask for versus what they really want. Prices are going up. For a lot of reasons the mayor of New York has nothing to do with and no control over. But I think this focus on what he calls “pothole politics” which is a nod to the sewer socialism of a couple decades ago, where it’s not so much socialism as ideology, as big picture vision of government coming in and making life work better for people, but a sense that government does exist to serve people in really mundane ways that do make their lives better. That getting trash in trash cans makes people’s lives better. And I think the way that he’s integrating as you’re talking about that campaign and governance is showing himself personally serving. You can find him everywhere on the internet wearing a reflective vest because he’s out with people with the scaffolding. He’s actually helping remove some of the snow. Like the way he’s demonstrating maybe this vision of populism or socialism is less about high-minded, big-scale programs and more about a sense that first and foremost, I work for you and I work for you in the details, in the blue collar sense, I work you. And I think people are really hungry for that and it is such an effective contrast to what’s happening in Washington, D.C.

Sarah [00:11:10] Yeah, because I think there are three threads there that I want to knit in together. I think affordability is a winning message because it’s true, because everything is so damn expensive and you have to speak to that. So I see the temptation from all kinds of democratic politicians. I think the risk what you’re articulating is so true. And I think the other winning message that you knit together and present as this sort of work ethic, which to me is tied to the generational leadership, which I’ll get to in just a second, put a pin in that, is the corruption. It’s everything is expensive because they’re making themselves rich. So you don’t have to solve the prices. Look, people aren’t stupid. They understand that there is a certain amount of price setting at the grocery store. That is not within the control of the federal government. For better or for worse, what I have witnessed from the American populace is a complexity of thinking and understanding that I maybe had given up on if I’m being honest. Like I do see people, especially around Iran and gas prices and just maybe it was going through COVID and understanding the global economy and the global supply chain, all these pieces. I think the silver lining of the pace of change in our lives is that people are understanding it’s complicated, man. And so I think they get like he can’t come in here, wave a magic wand and make everything cheaper.

[00:12:54] But if he comes in and if he says all the time, I know it’s too expensive. I hear you. Here’s the things here. And not just that it’s too expensive, but I understand what is too expensive. Rent, transportation, childcare, groceries. I get it. And I am working hard, which to me, like I said, is generational. He can literally work harder. He’s in his thirties. He can’t shovel the snow. Chuck Schumer going to go out there and shovel snow? No, sweetheart’s too old. They tell you literally not to shovel snow if you’re over like 45. It’s like a public health recommendation, okay? Some people have heart attacks. So it’s not just the shoveling, it’s like working all the time. So it’s all those pieces. I’m not here to just get rich for myself. I came here to work really hard all the time for you. And so I think it’s not that it doesn’t matter, but I think if you put those pieces and say I’m fighting corruption, I’m working harder than anybody’s ever worked before. And it is to try as best I can to get to what is costing you so much money. He doesn’t have to bring down the price of gas. People know he can’t do that. I think there’s just a lot more breathing room when you treat people like they have a thinking mind and with respect and that their struggles are serious and you are doing everything within your power to get at that problem.

Beth [00:14:26] I think that’s right and I think that he’s doing an effective job of listening for what the problem is among a large tent of people. It seems like he’s interested in what the problem is from people who would not self-identify as democratic socialist. So he does his 100 day speech and he says, yeah, taxes need to go up on the wealthy knowing that he can’t make taxes go up on the wealth in general. The only lever he really has are property taxes. And he has heard from black homeowners in New York, don’t raise property taxes, that will hurt us. I understand the thinking, but that will heart us. So I think that he’s doing a good job listening. I think all the time about when I was doing human resources work and we were trying to get people to pay attention to open enrollment. This is your health insurance. I need you to go in and make these selections and pay attention to what’s going to happen next year. And constantly people would say the communication around this is so poor. And I learned from listening that what people say usually when they say the communication is so poor is not you didn’t tell me or even you didn’t tell me in a bunch of different ways because we would. What’s underneath that is I need the world to be a little bit simpler. I need you to show an awareness that I have a whole job to do and you’ve just added another piece to it.

Sarah [00:15:48] Yeah.

Beth [00:15:48] And if you want me to handle this other piece, I need you to take something off my plate while I do. And I think the politics version of that might look like this orientation to service. Chuck Schumer can’t shovel snow, but what can he do that looks like service to his constituents? I think that one reason it’s really tricky for a governor to run for president while they’re still the governor is that people start to get a sense that you’re not working for me anymore. And I like you best when you’re working for me all the time. I feel it everywhere. This is why I don’t like politicians with podcasts because I think, wait, you’re supposed to be working for us and this seems to be about you. And I think Mamdani has found this way and he hasn’t been doing it long enough for us to get too cynical about it, but he’s found this way of both advancing his own profile and message while very effectively communicating, I’m out here working for you.

Sarah [00:16:47] Now what I am watching, and it looks like he is also rather naturally talented at this as well, go figure, is listening and working with other political figures. That’s not something you have to do as much during a campaign. So, the ability to work with Governor Hochul, which he seems to have been able to do. I mean, she basically refused to ever endorse him. He’s got to deal with the city council. And then of course we have his complete and utter love fest with Donald Trump.

Beth [00:17:39] So I think with Governor Hochul, it’s going to be interesting to watch as time marches on here because so much of what he campaigned on, he does need her on board for. She has come in and said yes to over a billion dollars for a childcare program. Now it is far from universal free childcare for all New Yorkers, but it will get about 2002 year olds into a program and that’s not nothing. That’s the kind of thing you can learn from and evolve and build on. There are going to be places like higher income taxes where she’s not going to want to do him a solid. So how he navigates that I think will be really interesting. He’s got people in his coalition who are upset that he’s endorsed her re-election campaign because they see her as not one of them. This is what always I find off putting about democratic socialism because my primary lens for it has not been someone governing. It has been the socials and the democratic socialist strain on social media feels like such a small tent. And a small tent that intends to get smaller constantly because there’s a real controlling thread that runs through it, a sense that there is one correct way. And if you step over the line on any dimension or you see it differently anywhere, you’re out. Well, you can’t run a city that way and he’s not running the city that way.

Sarah [00:19:04] I don’t get any sense from him that he’s afraid of that.

Beth [00:19:07] No, I don’t either. And I think that having somebody out there to show that who’s actually like won an election. AOC battles this all the time because she hasn’t done that either. She said, I’m in office now, I want to get things done. It’s not so simple as it is on X. And she takes a beating over it from some people in her tent, but it has expanded the people who find her appealing. And I that’s going to happen with him too.

Sarah [00:19:32] Well, because he didn’t win because he’s a democratic socialist. That’s not why he won. He won because he saw how Mamdani is really good at this. And he talked about ideas and had plans that people connected with. And he was an amazing organizer. I mean, they have a huge budget shortfall. He’s got to find some money. It’s not going to come from cuts. He’s got some tough challenges. It’s a big, hard city to run with just an incredible diversity of people in coalitions. I know that the Jewish population has been disappointed in so many of the things he’s done. He got wrapped up in this terrorist attack at Gracie Mansion. Like he’s dealing with some really tough stuff. And to watch him navigate it, I think when I was reading through his report, I think what’s so hard is you don’t get the credit for the shit that didn’t happen and for preventing things is just so hard to chalk up as a success. And like going to Donald Trump and doing the tap dance he did, it has as reported prevented ICE in New York. That is an enormous win that would be disastrous. They don’t call it New York nice like Minnesota and that was a disaster. They call it New York attitude. Do you see what I’m saying?

Beth [00:20:54] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:20:54] Like that would go badly for a city that I care a great deal about. And so I think his ability and from the reporting I read, it was like one of his female maybe his chief of staff or somebody who had the idea to put all this together for Trump in a way that like spoke to his ego. I feel like you could put into Claude now, whether you’re the king of England or the mayor of New York or some poor South American country he’s beaten up on. How do I make Donald Trump be nice to me? And you probably get a pretty good plan at this point. But credit where credit is due, that seems it was just really, really smart. It was just, really, really smart. And I just think that if you can charm everybody from Kathy Hochul to Donald Trump, and you’re working with all these like city council and boards and you getting even an inch of progress, that’s a victory.

Beth [00:21:47] Well, the other thing he prevented that I think is worth noting, it’s easy to imagine a world where Trump and his administration yanked federal funding from New York City. They talked about it. They said they were going to do it. New York already has a structural budget problem. That would have been disastrous. And the willingness to go do that dance, even though the dance is pretty obvious, to go do it takes humility. That is an act of service. It’s funny, preparing for this episode and thinking about the pothole politics and the way he’s approaching Trump, I thought this really eviscerates some of that ideological battle inside the Democratic Party because the people who I think of who operate most this way would be considered way, way to his right. I think about Gretchen Whitmer, how she has been willing to work with Trump because again you can get some things done and you can prevent an incredible amount of harm if you’re willing to do it. I think About Josh Shapiro and that get shit done orientation, government is here to serve you and service as the focus is popular. And I think service as a focus can be popular wearing a lot of different labels and wearing a lot of different rally tones and in a lot different bodies. I don’t think you have to be in your early 30s to pull off what he’s pulling off. If you center that idea, I roll up my sleeves and I work for you all day, every day. I wake up thinking about it. I go to bed thinking about and I get it. And we won’t bat a thousand or anywhere close to it, but you see I’m trying and you never questioned that I’m trying. That’s I think a winner.

Sarah [00:23:26] Well, and I think the other thing you can’t discount is the snow. Listen, it was so much snow. Just blizzard upon blizzard, more snow than New York had seen in so, so many years. And if you live in the middle of the country, like I do, where we also got an enormous amount of snow and they just pile it into a corner of a parking lot and leave it there, okay? Think about the logistical challenge of doing that in a place for New York City. There aren’t big parking lots to pile snowdrifts in and just leave them there. It’s really, really hard. And he handled it, not just the snow itself, but the temperatures and people freezing. I mean, for as little governance experience as he had, that could have be a disaster and it wasn’t.

Beth [00:24:20] And some people did die and he did take some heat early on and it seems like they adapted. Another thing that I’m looking for in leaders of all varieties right now is who has learned something and changed because they learned something. I think it’s really fascinating that Mamdani has kept on the more moderate police commissioner. It feels to me like he’s surveyed the scene and realized that if crime started to rise, for any reason, early in his tenure, he will own that and it will end him. It will finish. All this goodwill that he’s amassed will go. And I think learning that lesson is important politically, especially if you have a long-term vision about where you want to get. You can’t afford missteps. And he wanted to really come in and say, in non-emergency situations, we’re sending social workers instead of police officers. That looks right now like two people in the mayor’s office, a very, very small initiative, but that’s the way to start a very small initiative instead of believing that you got it all figured out because you’ve had some big dreams. When you put it into practice this way, that’s way to do it. A little bit at a time and see what you accomplish and iterate and iterate and work with people and prove out your success.

Sarah [00:25:41] Well, I just feel like he’s careful when it needs to be careful and creative when he needs to be creative in a way that’s been pretty productive. Now, look, neither of us live in New York City. I’m going back in May. I was there this winter. I do go to the city a great deal. I love it so, so very much. And maybe the New Yorkers will roll in our comments and be like everything is a shit show. But from where I’m sitting, as a lover, occasional visitor and Kentuckian, he is doing creative things where he can make a quick change that could help people. I love the rest stop for delivery workers at City Hall. Stuff like that. And then being really careful when it’s something like crime or taxes or being creative with the grocery stores. He’s going to get one of those grocery stores up. And it’s like one free grocery store, two free grocery stores is some creative juice and a probably smaller lift. So do it. You know what I mean? I think he’s being very smart and strategic. It’s not just him. He is, by all reports, a really good team, including people with a lot of experience in New York City government. So it was just so helpful because it’s so bad in other places AKA the United States federal government, that to see this level of strategic adaptability and creative energy and just service. It’s like I’m here for you. I work for you. Instead of you guys are all here to make me rich.

Beth [00:27:11] That’s what interests me most. I obviously can’t speak to how it’s going in New York City. I think that you have to, if you’re a Democrat watching him and thinking about what it means for you, consider that the job of a mayor is very different than the job of a senator or the job of a president or the jobs of a governor even, or the mayor of a different city. New York is a really unique gig. But the ethos that he’s projecting that I think is amassing political capital for him throughout a bunch of different groups, that interests me as something that could be repurposed and retrofitted to a lot of other places. And I hope that it will be because the biggest concern that I have right now for the midterm elections is that things are going so badly that there is a temptation to say, well, it will be enough for candidates who are not Republicans or who are not MAGA Republicans. And that’s all we need. And I just don’t think that’s true. And I don’t it serves the Democratic Party. I don’t think it serves the country, especially in the long-term to kind of rest on, well, he’s so bad and we’re not, it’ll be okay. So I like seeing someone who’s saying, I got a vision. For where we could go. And here’s what my vision looks like. And it’s a big enough vision or at least it’s motivated by a big enough idea that it could translate elsewhere. Outside of Politics today, we’re going to talk about Rachel Feinzeig in the New York Times writing an essay called “Parents, Consider Underachieving.” Could I read you just a little bit from the opening to set the scene?

Sarah [00:29:01] Please.

Beth [00:29:01] “I see you parents who have been killing it this school year. You were there for the Halloween parade, the Valentine’s Day craft session, the inexplicable request to come to class for your child’s half birthday. You made sure said child was dressed up for every school spirit day, somehow managing to continue caring even as you knew the inevitable next school spirit day loomed. Now it is spring. And while I admire your continued enthusiasm, I for one have very little spirit left. I’m asking for your support. I am proposing that we all just give up together.”

Sarah [00:29:32] Well, first of all, she stole this idea from Jen Hatmaker. Let’s just start there. Jen has been on the enough. Like, I don’t know if Jen ever called it Maycember, but for a long time she’s just been like don’t come at me in spring. I can’t do it in May, I’m done. Let’s get everybody across the finish line. I do want to speak to the sprawl. I actually think what you and I are experiencing is that-- and you can read it in this opening. Maycember is really about elementary school students. Everything she’s listed as an elementary school student there. I think the older your kids, the reason you feel the sprawl is because a lot of their stuff, for example, prom, which is what I’m running around telling them with right now, is at the end of April. And you’re starting to get like, if you have any testing, if you’re picking courses, like you’re doing recitals. I think this sprawl is as your kids get older, you’re not going to-- parties at the school it’s just like a totally different thing, but it’s not less, it’s different.

Beth [00:30:36] It’s different and it is administratively challenging in its own way. And I know you’re in this situation too when you have one in elementary school and one or two in high school. Melding all that together, thinking along all those different dimensions, okay, I’m still kind of managing this one’s needs, but I’m just guiding and coaching this one. It’s a lot.

Sarah [00:30:58] Well, and there’s still like spring sports and shit. There’s just all this other stuff. And I think a key component that doesn’t get articulated a lot, including in this piece, about what gets so hard around late April, early May is you’re trying to think through summer. So you’re trying to wrap up the school year and you’re trying to book camps and plan and coordinate basically two and a half to three months all at once.

Beth [00:31:24] It is a reflection of the natural world. I was just thinking the same thing because so many things are ending and beginning at the same time. And it does take its toll on you. And even where it’s natural and that’s how it’s supposed to be, I do think there is a continued need to talk about how it doesn’t all have to be so special. I can report one small step for mom kind, but a giant leap for me in this category. We were gone for spring break over Easter and as we are out in the mountainous West, my girls are like, “Where are our Easter baskets?” And I said, “Out your window. That’s where they are. This is what I got you for Easter. You’re welcome”

Sarah [00:32:15] I have to confess because I’m an insane person, especially since I have a 16 or 14, 11-year-old. I packed chocolate Easter bunnies, jelly bean eggs and Cadbury cream eggs in my suitcases with little bags and had them out there for the Easter morning because I am a crazy person, clearly.

Beth [00:32:33] No, I thought about it and I was like, Beth, that’s bananas.

Sarah [00:32:39] I’ve had Easter baskets delivered to the Airbnb before.

Beth [00:32:44] Why? I get it, but also I have to push back on myself and be like, come on, man.

Sarah [00:32:51] Well, here’s the thing. I really have to be careful. Felix is already accelerated, for example, with his cursing language, media habits, so much because of his older siblings. But it’s tempting to like stop some of these things. I’m, like no, Griffin got a full 12 years of this shit. I can’t just like peace out Felix at [inaudible]. When I think when I sent the Easter baskets, God, he was probably like six or seven. Like he still believed in the Easter bunny. And so I thought, I got to do it. And it was really fun for them to have an Easter egg hunt under the palm trees-- we were in Florida.

Beth [00:33:38] I’m sure it was, but do you see the contribution to this situation?

Sarah [00:33:41] I do. But here’s where some things by the third kid I was like I haven’t been to a classroom party... Let’s put it this way, I do not remember the last one I went to one. I was, like, no I’m not doing that. Now the blessing of having boys is often they are like I’m not doing that stupid spirit day. I don’t want to do that. I don’t t want to dress up. They like a pajama day. They like to wear their baseball hats. But I don’t get swept up and the like full situation of the spirit day because I think sometimes it’s like the kids don’t even care.

Beth [00:34:17] I think this is another place where I have some progress to report because Ellen’s Elementary School, every year they do a run as a fundraiser and they do huge Spirit Week around the run. And we have a very, very active PTO. They practically all act like full-time employees and I’m grateful for them and to them. And they put together an amazing Spirit Week idea a couple of years ago. And I am sure that in the meeting they had it was all good vibes. It’s going to be so special for the kids, so memorable. We’re going to raise a bunch of money for the playground, hooray, hooray. And when I got that list, I did want to put my fist through a window because it was so complicated. I chose to buy so much because Ellen really wanted to participate and do it right. It was a little bit less intense the next year. This year, it was pajama day, school colors day. Wear this t-shirt that we give you at the beginning of the year day. And I thought, okay, crazy socks. We’re making some progress. We’ve all agreed. We’re going to do a little bit less here and I’m here for it.

Sarah [00:35:22] It was the same for our Christmas one. It was like two years ago, because I actually texted Jen Hatmaker and I was like, help, we’re going the wrong way. It was like 12 days. I was, like, guys, it’s Christmas season. Do you remember? And then the next year it was two. I was okay. Somebody, not me this time, sent an email and was like my dawgs, dollar down. I’ve noticed some progress. I just think what I really like that she names is it is hard to opt out individually. I love those stories about the community. There’s an article in the New York Times where the community got together and was like, okay, we don’t want our kids to have phones. Everybody, can we get on board with this? And they did, and it was magical. Like we are social beings presenting everything through the lens of like individual free will and maximalization. Ain’t working. And so where can we get together? Like, can we talk about revolutionary territory where a PTO meeting was set up or a survey was sent to say what would you like us to get rid of? What’s too much? What’s the biggest stress point for parents that the PTO creates? Can you imagine?

Beth [00:36:52] Standing and applauding in my heart.

Sarah [00:36:54] Can you Imagine?

Beth [00:36:55] Yes.

Beth [00:36:56] Like that’s some PTO leadership I would be interested in seeing. I think there are so many places where that’s called for right now, where people are just hungry for someone to say, what can we cut? Where would you rather write a check at the beginning of the year than participate in all these fundraisers? Are you willing to pay for three people because you can afford it and other families can’t? I think a lot of people would say, yes, absolutely. And then take the butter braids off my docket. Maggie talks a lot about this, that she and her husband have a Taekwondo studio, so they’ve thought a lot about kids’ activities. And she said a lot of this pressure comes from you as a business owner thinking, well, you’ve paid for your kid to take all these lessons.

Sarah [00:37:43] Yes, I think about that all the time.

Beth [00:37:44] I need to deliver something spectacular for you at the end. I’d be delighted to say, no, you don’t. I had a morning this week where I spent 35 minutes-- I counted them-- managing tickets.

Sarah [00:37:59] Who’s keeping count? Me.

Beth [00:38:01] I managed tickets for Ellen’s various end of year performances for 35 minutes. I didn’t even add up the money I spent on all those tickets because it would make me sick. I didn’t think about the costumes that were involved. Just tickets for various things. I spent 35 minutes on that. That’s silly. And I would be happy to say, “People, I will pay you for the lessons and the classes. And you don’t have to wow me at any point. I believe in the intrinsic value of what you’re offering. It’s enough, thank you so much.”

Sarah [00:38:32] I have a more, even more revolutionary suggestion.

Beth [00:38:35] Okay, let’s do it.

Sarah [00:38:37] We don’t have to go to all those.

Beth [00:38:39] Yeah.

Sarah [00:38:40] We just don’t to go all of them. Griffin often is like, “You don’t need to come to this.” And I’m like, “but you’re performing.” He’s like, “So what? It’s not going to be that good. Don’t come.” I have friends who if their kid is in a local community theater production, they will go to every performance. There’s like seven. I have friends who every parent and every grandparent is at every practice. Maybe we don’t need to be. Maybe we do not need to present at every single thing.

Beth [00:39:15] This is such a tricky balance because on the one hand I totally agree especially about the practices. That to me is easy, take the practices off your list. But then I get in my head I have really good conversations with my daughters in the car. Like I miss already driving Jane everywhere because Jane tells me the most in the car and now she’s writing with friends to things. And while that’s completely right, she needs to develop that independence. She needs that time with them. Everything about that is good. It makes me a little bit sad. As an adult, I have such appreciation for the hours that my parents spent at band shows. Like it’s a big deal to me that they went and they sat there. And I think that as much of a pain as it was sometimes and as much as a pain it is sometimes for us, it’s fun to know the other parents who do the thing. Like there’s some community in that stuff. Finding that balance is hard, but I do agree like baseline if we could not judge each other for missing things, if we can come to a place where we’re culturally like, hey, I’m going to go to this one, why don’t you go to that one, where we make it normal to miss some things, I think that would be helpful.

Sarah [00:40:27] Well, back to the New York City of it all. I have a friend, Elizabeth, who has three beautiful children in New York city. And you can just see like the difference when the kids can move independently. Like when you don’t have to drive them somewhere and they can go to this rehearsal or this practice, like the freedom. I think we’ve built this car culture that has contributed to the over-parenting in this like truly structural way that I think is really important and it’s like, yeah, I totally hear what you’re saying about like time in the car but also we could just not go to as much shit. They could not be in as many activities and we all just stay home and go for a walk. Like it’s so hard and I do think the sense that you have to witness it all is tied up in the maximalization of parenting. And it’s not all like tiger parenting, right? I think some of it is this perpetual sense of how fast it goes and how you want to soak it up. But you should talk to Jane less and you should feel sad about that. And that’s probably exactly what you need to feel because she’s going to move away and you’re not going to talk to her that much.

Beth [00:41:39] That’s right.

Sarah [00:41:39] I mean, not my babies. They’re going to live next door. But other people probably need to make this journey. Just saying. And so I think it’s a lot of things. I think it’s like the car culture. I think it’s the over emphasis on the nuclear family. So 50 years ago, 60 years ago in theory, you would probably be living by some family members with younger kids, you’d have nieces and nephews, you’d be involved in their life. They would have kids at different times. So it wouldn’t feel like this like all or nothing family experience because there’d be more family around to experience.

Beth [00:42:18] There’s a writer I really like on Substack named Chloe Sladen who writes the family commons. We’ll link that for you in the notes. And she posted in Substack notes that chart where you see the difference in one family of the radius that kids were allowed to explore by themselves. And it’s like the grandfather has this massive like eight mile situation where he would walk to fish. And then the father’s circle was like our house to this pool. And now grandson is like basically around our block and that’s it. It’s a really stunning visual that puts some of these pieces together. And then she said, “I would love to see this mapped with some statistics about how many of the neighbors parents know.” Because that is a huge piece of it, right? I let my kids roam pretty free around here because we know a lot of people around here and that not possible everywhere I understand. When you’re thinking about where am I putting my time then, I would rather put my time in knowing more people around here than getting the theme days exactly right. And I think the challenge is that a lot of those activities, themes, games, practices are our vehicle to know each other. And so how do you unravel all of that?

Sarah [00:43:41] No, I totally agree. My kids have free run of our neighborhood. First of all, their grandparents live pretty like up the street. And so I always know there’s somebody in the neighborhood next to us. And I know a ton of people in our neighborhood, parents, and they’re going to their friend’s houses. So I think that makes a huge difference. And I would like them to be even more free and I have let them ride their bikes further than sometimes makes me comfortable. I think that’s a huge part of it. And I think the other thing she names really well is all of this activity sets the bar so high for what fun looks like, what a good day looks like. It’s not back in the day where something my kids take totally for granted would have been a huge deal for me. And now they’re like standard of what is fun, what is a cool day. It would have been like a trip to Chucky Cheese. Well now that’s not a big deal. A trip to a jump park’s not a big deal. We say this all the time. My kids are like, “You took us to these things.” But my children have been to like nine countries, almost all 50 states. Felix is 11. Like the travel, the day-to-day weekends. Now we have pretty lazy weekends sometimes still, but just the standard of what a day should look like is so high. I think because we feel like we’re competing with the screens and the screens can hold their attention. And so to get their attention away from that, it has to be pretty engaging.

Beth [00:45:14] Yeah, and I think that I forget because of how hard we’re all working to make everything magical and engaging for them, and because of the screens, it is often the simpler things that are the most memorable. Like, Ellen loves a picnic. And by picnic she means, like, we throw a couple peanut butter sandwiches in a basket and walk outside to our backyard and spread out a blanket. So I’m trying to remember that especially as it’s getting warmer and there are more of those options where you can really just kind of bring it down. To do that, to bring it done. And that’s why I felt really proud of myself about the Easter basket. I thought I’m just going to say like, “Look, here’s the natural world, hooray.” Now Chad and I did run into a Kroger to replenish our cooler of roadside snacks and we picked up a couple of Reese’s peanut butter eggs, which I think are the superior form of Reese’s delivery vehicles, which maybe sounds like another Outside of Politics.

Sarah [00:46:08] False.

Beth [00:46:08] But we handed those to them in the car and we were like, “Happy Easter everybody.” And I thought, this feels good to me. This feels good. Like they had an expectation. I did not meet it. They saw that the world didn’t end. It was still a lot of fun. That what they were doing was still really special. And I’m just going to keep working on that. Like, how do I do less, but make it mean more? That feels like the opportunity.

Sarah [00:46:30] Well, to the Easter basket of it all, where we started. I do hope, now, we’ll have to hear from our listeners with really young kids. Maybe my algorithm has just moved on. But there was a moment where the Easter baskets were out of control. Bicycles, three new outfits, just consumerism on crack. Now, maybe it’s just because everything’s so expensive and maybe that’s why Easter baskets got more reasonable. And then there were like St. Patrick’s Day gifts and Halloween gifts and all this stuff. So I’m like I’m hoping some of this just by the pragmatic reality of how much it costs has been dialed back a little bit. I don’t see it as much in my life. I don’t see people posting pictures of that, even I people I know. So maybe there are places where people are like, okay, enough is enough.

Beth [00:47:26] Well, I also think that a factor here that cannot be discounted is what I’m going to call the charcuterization of everything. Never in my life have I given a gift in a basket that has not cost like three times what I would have spent had I not given it in basket format.

Sarah [00:47:44] A hundred percent. First of all, baskets are expensive.

Beth [00:47:48] Baskets themselves are expensive, and then you get into all this filler. I have multiple times lately, birthdays, at Christmas, started getting together stuff for a basket for my daughters, and then picking up all this stuff that they don’t need that I will end up throwing away six months to a year from now, and then I’m just teaching myself to methodically put it back and be like, I’m going to get this one thing that they will like and I’m going to wrap it in paper. And that’s going to be that.

Sarah [00:48:16] Yep, I love it. Okay, so everybody just take it down a notch.

Beth [00:48:21] We’re all taking it down the notch.

Sarah [00:48:23] Together.

Beth [00:48:24] Yes, we’re holding hands.

Sarah [00:48:26] Yeah, we’re not presenting another area in which we’re all failing as a parent.

Beth [00:48:29] No.

Sarah [00:48:30] We are happily coming together to say, hey, let’s take it easy on ourselves and each other.

Beth [00:48:39] Here’s our reminder to chill out. You have permission to chill out. Well, thank you all so much for chilling out with us today. We’re so glad you’re here. We can’t wait for your thoughts on both aspects of this conversation. We’ll be back with you on Tuesday for another new episode. Until 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. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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

It’s the good news day, and I am genuinely obsessed with the first story. Like, I immediately texted my pediatrician.

Here is your news brief for today.

Paediatricians’ Blood Is Being Used to Make New Treatments for RSV and Colds

Researchers are going to start using blood from pediatricians — who, one can only assume…

Read more

Good Morning. It’s Wednesday, April 15.

Okay, y’all, I’m going to be honest with you — I have complete and total spring break brain. I made all my notes, I got myself ready, and then I just... forgot. I woke up this morning and was like, wait a minute, did I ever record the News Brief? Here I am. Better late than neve…

Read more

Cataloging fossils is tricky. So is “citizenship verification.” Today, there’s more to say about President Trump’…

Read more