I put that discomfort beside the fact that I wrote a murder-mystery and family play to celebrate and am in the middle of working on Founding Father Karaoke. This feels like the most American thing of all to me: it all belongs.

Today, Sarah and I discuss how we’re approaching this milestone, what it means to us, and what role, if any, the President plays in observing 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. - b

Topics Discussed

- Why celebrating America's 250th feels awkward this year
- The America250 commission vs. Trump's separate "Freedom 250" / White House rally
- What the 1976 Bicentennial actually got right
- The military's place in the anniversary — a component, not the centerpiece
- Holding patriotism and clear-eyed honesty about the country's failures at the same time
- America's Potluck and celebrating at the level of your own town and table
- Outside Politics: naming your "mom aesthetic"

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Episode Topic Resources

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:04] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:01:04] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Guys, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but America is celebrating a big birthday this year. It is 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. The birthday invitations have gone out, and the country looked at them and went, “Do we feel like a party?” So today, we want to make the case that the answer is yes, a party is in order, not in spite of how hard things are, but because of it. And outside of politics, we’re going to discuss our mom aesthetic. Are we butter moms? Cozy moms? What’s the vibe?

[00:01:02] Beth: What is the vibe?

[00:01:04] Sarah: Before we get started, we are continuing to celebrate America 250 on Substack, and we are two weeks away from very exciting America 250 episodes on my show, Good Morning, and Beth’s show, More To Say. On Good Morning, I will be reporting the news from 1776. I will be reporting the news for that day, 250 years ago. I got a costume. I come in by candlelight.

[00:01:38] Beth: I’m so excited.

[00:01:39] Sarah: Felix helps me out. I don’t want to set the expectations too high here, guys, but- I slayed this. I’m just telling you right now. You were born to

[00:01:50] Beth: You were born to do this.

[00:01:52] Sarah: I was born to do this. I cry when I announce the news towards the end. I’m just telling you, I learned some things. It’s really good. I want to say with confidence it’s really good, and you should definitely come join Substack so you can participate in my 1776 News Brief. Beth, what do you have planned over on More to Say?

[00:02:13] Beth: I too am committed to intergenerational America 250 celebrations, so Ellen and I are having a little chat about what being an American means to us.

[00:02:21] Sarah: Love it.

[00:02:22] Beth: And then the big event is that we’re going to do Founding Father several years ago, a listener reached out speaking of things we were born to do, and asked me, “What would the Supreme Court justices sing if they all went to karaoke together?” And a whole genre was born from that. I haven’t pulled it out in a while. So I have really been working. I’ve read some articles about what the Founding Fathers’ Enneagram types would be, what their Myers-Briggs would be. I’m really trying to get in the heads of these people as I choose their songs. It’s a personal thing, your karaoke song.

[00:02:52] Sarah: Is it just the fathers? Can we get Abigail in there?

[00:02:55] Beth: You know there will be women at this party, too. There’s no way I’m doing a men’s only karaoke party here. So that’s the plan for More to Say. I know that sounds weird. You might be thinking, how does that come together? I just ask that you trust me. I think good things happen when you just trust me on More to Say.

[00:03:11] Sarah: I love it. So we have very exciting shows ready for our paid members over on Substack. Click the link in the show notes and join us for Good Morning from 1776 and Founding Father karaoke. Up next, why are we celebrating to begin with? Beth, it is the semi-quincentennial of the United States. Was this the first tough part of the celebration? Bicentennial rolls off the tongue. Semi-quincentennial a little bit less.

[00:03:59] Beth: It’s a hard word to say, and I am going to give credit where due. I think Congress in 2016 deciding to go with America 250 was a wise choice.

[00:04:09] Sarah: Smart call. So look, everybody’s been working at this for a while. There have been commissions, there have been committees. Now, did Donald Trump roll in with his partisan Freedom 250 and screw it all up? Of course, he did. But that doesn’t mean that the America 250 Commission’s work should go uncelebrated.

[00:04:36] Beth: I read a long piece in Harper’s Magazine this weekend about America 250. The whole magazine is excellent and worth reading cover to cover. I rarely do that with a magazine, but I did yesterday. This piece talks about how because Congress wanted a bipartisan committee, from the beginning, this committee has had an impossible task to both properly observe this milestone for our country and not get into anything that is disputed on a partisan basis. And since 2016, everything in our country has been disputed on a partisan basis all the time. And so that means that most of their work has been intended to be uncontroversial. So they had a contest where students wrote essays, and they’re going to get some field trips for rewards. Lovely. But how do you really acknowledge 250 years since the Declaration of Independence apolitically? Which is what they’ve been trying to do.

[00:05:43] Sarah: You can do it, but it’s not going to break through. You understand what I’m saying? In our current media environment to do something apolitical, non-controversial means that it’s not going to get a lot of coverage. I’ve said recently in my bookshop, I’ll say “Oh this is for America 250.” And people will say, “What?” I’m like, “ it’s our 250th birthday.” So I think that unfortunately it is the flashy stuff Trump has been doing that’s occupied the field, and I refuse to accept that. I refuse to say the only way I can celebrate is tuning in for the UFC fight or for his big old Trump rally he announced in the middle of the night last night because everybody backed out of his- in theory, non-partisan party he was going to have through Freedom 250, and now it’s going to just be a plain old Trump rally. And I think that he’s leaned in such a way and he garners so much attention that I’ve had so many conversations with people where America 250 comes up and it’s that means you have to like Trump. You have to celebrate with Trump. And I’m like, “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.” I reject the idea that this has to be tied up indelibly with him.

[00:07:03] Beth: Another piece from Harper’s Magazine, not to have mentionitis about it was talking about the bicentennial and the difference between then and now. And one of my criticisms of the UFC fight is how marketing-oriented it was. It was about sponcon and merch primarily. And it was good for me to read about the bicentennial and how merch was a big part of it. People really went for the kitsch of the bicentennial, and it was helpful to have stuff that everybody could be into on the other side of Watergate. It was like we had this terrible stain on the nation, and we washed it away with commercialism. And I understand that. I do that in my own life all the time. No judgment, America. This is a thing that we do. It feels so different to me now. I watched some of the UFC fight last night and I was thinking about what is it that really bothers me here? What really feels different? I read some pieces about how the South Lawn has been transformed before, how we’ve put baseball diamonds there. We had the Beach Boys there in the Reagan years. We’ve put tennis courts there. We’ve done all kinds of things to the South Lawn. So it’s not just the construction element. And it’s not just the recreation of it or the spectacle or the royal court feeling of it. It is the tonnage from this administration where every single thing that takes place looks like a personal favor to the president instead of something that is for the country. And the more I learn about the UFC fight, the clearer that becomes to me. But even if you just say, look, they did it for his 80th birthday and America 250, you can see that he doesn’t separate the two. He is America, and America is him now, and that’s going to be true for as long as he’s in office. And so I can see why people don’t want anything to do with that, and that is what motivates me to really lean into it.

[00:09:03] Sarah: Yeah, it doesn’t bother me because it is so fully absorbed as a celebration of him. I don’t even see it related. Just because he uses the term 250, just because he likes to trot it out, to the branding of it all, there is no real branding, emotion, marketing narrative that speaks to this country and its 250 years of history. How much more accurate to Trump branding, to the Trump politics, to the MAGA of it all, could a knock-down, drag-out, bloody brawl be? Like, what does that have to do with all of us? It’s just about him. It’s just about celebrating him. So to me, it doesn’t even feel related. I’ve never really felt anything Donald Trump does or has done sincerely celebrates, appreciates, expresses any kind of gratitude for the depth and breadth of the people of this country. To me it is branding, and his brand is so far away from what I think about when I think about 250 years of American history. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been moments of sincere fighting, including during the Revolution or the Civil War, or that there hasn’t been populism or nativism. I’m not erasing the darker parts of that 250-year history. But when you talk about appreciating and celebrating and seeing the totality of the people of this country, both now and for the last 250 years. Nothing about that feels Trumpian to me. So I’ve never even considered him and everything he stands for as leading or even being an essential part of America 250.

[00:11:19] Beth: I wonder how you think about the military gloss over everything that he is coming out of the White House in relation to America 250, acknowledging that he’s not going to be our guide to meaningfully consider the promises on which this nation is founded and how we’re living up to them. I think a lot of people do find it appealing to hear 1,200 seats at this fight were reserved for active duty military members. The television production of it really focused on, first responders. There were members from all of the armed forces branches standing at attention and saluting as the fighters walked out of the White House. That did bother me to have people who could actually be called into duty in the Middle East right now for war to be saluting people who fight for sport. I didn’t love that. But I know that I’m an outlier on that. I think a lot of Americans do think the military should be a big part of this anniversary. So I wonder how that strikes you.

[00:12:23] Sarah: As a part of my America 250 practice, I am reading Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming, the first in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Also seems like an appropriate moment to announce Rick is coming on the show to talk to us about the Revolutionary War and his trilogy, and it is incredibly war-focused in great detail. And so I’m never far in my own head from this moment we’re celebrating and the military reality that it precipitated. The stark military reality. We fought for eight years. So many people died in really gruesome ways. And I think part of what Trump and the MAGA movement has precipitated in me is a reclaiming of all these things that I think I saw as cliche, passe, eye-rolly, because I just refuse to let them occupy the entirety of this narrative. And the word patriotic does not bother me anymore. It’s a big word. It can hold a lot of different things. That’s what we’re going to talk about. But in the same way, I feel some widening of my aperture when it comes to the military. I don’t have some sort of knee-jerk negative reaction to any military presence. The reality is that not just in 1776, but over the course of our history people have given their lives. They’ve paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we can be here at 250 years, and I think that should be a part of any acknowledgement as much as the mistakes and the, discrimination and oppression. That has to be a part of the full picture as well.

[00:14:26] Beth: I think the military is a component. I think it would serve the military and all of us if the military were a component instead of the key component of these observances, that we recognize that the nation is built on fighters and warriors and also teachers and librarians and municipal servants and people who work at the Social Security office. I think that I’ve really been searching for places to consider beyond the military what makes a nation, beyond war what defines a nation, beyond the war what pieces have been put in place that have gotten us here. For this to have lasted 250 years, what was required beyond the military? That’s something that I’m really personally searching for in connection with the semi-quincentennial.

[00:15:19] Sarah: I think there’s all kinds of difficult aspects. And the point is not to turn away from them. It’s not to say, “ Trump’s running it. He’s ruining it, I’m out.” I hate that reaction. It gives him so much unnecessary power. He has enough as President of the United States. It’s not to turn from any commercialization or militarization or even like whitewashing. It’s to see it all as the complex reality of any big historical marking of the passage of time. If you’re marking 250 years, it’s going to contain a lot. It’s going to contain death and destruction. It’s going to contain organization and neighborhood building and ordinary citizens and extraordinary citizens, and I think trying to look at that all clearly is the work of this milestone. So let’s talk about all that up next. I have to say, Beth, one of the main reasons I am pretty committed to America 250 is just let’s just do a little reality check here, guys. I was not alive in 1976 for the 200th celebration, and while I really hope I’m alive for 300 at 94, I don’t want to be overconfident, and my ability to celebrate might be a smidge limited by my age. So it’s like you kind of only get one. You only get one chance to buy the limited edition design cinnamon rolls I bought this weekend with stars and stripes on the can. Or to do a July 4th murder mystery party, or to look around and see that everyone is trying to decide what this means and thinking through this history and reading all the David McCullough books you can possibly squeeze in before July 4th.

[00:17:32] Beth: It is nice to be part of a milestone. I’ve been thinking about this personality inventory I took a number of years ago that told me that I am a low affiliation person. I don’t tend to think of my identity as tied to groups. I’m happy to do a thing while it lasts and then move on from it. I’m not very nostalgic. And I’ve been thinking about that in connection with America 250 and why this does mean something to me. It seems as a low affiliation person, I would blow this off. And I realized, in part, that I think when I did that inventory, most of the connections in my life were fairly superficial to me for a bunch of different reasons. I have been building my connection to America as idea and aspiration for my entire career. I think law school put a deeper hook for me into sort of the American experiment than I had before, and spending every year since immersed in Supreme Court opinions and news and the community around this podcast. Every day there is a new hook for me into what is this thing that we’re trying to do together civically? And I love that. And so part of the celebration to me is just realizing I do feel a sense of identity as American. It’s complicated, but I feel it, and that’s important, and it’s something that I want for my children. I want them to feel that they are part of a lineage here. They have a heritage here, and those things can exist without being the province of, racism, nationalism, xenophobia, whatever. There’s a healthy way to claim that heritage.

[00:19:22] Sarah: I’m a high affiliation person. I don’t need to take the personality assessment. I know that about myself. It’s probably because I’m an only child. I just like to be a member of things. And look, let me wax poetic. I love being an American. The most basic aspect of citizenry to me is just geographical. What we’re talking about when we’re a citizen of a nation is some borders around a place. And I don’t care who you are. I understand if people have complicated, difficult reactions to America’s history. But I hope putting all that aside, you can look around at the geography of America and see how incredibly lucky we are to live in this country. It is a beautiful place. It is such a beautiful, incredible place. Obviously, I’m a huge national park person. We are celebrating America 250 as a family by driving in an RV from Texas up to Montana. I’m going to drive right up the middle. I cannot wait. Just the borders that contain these places from Yosemite to Yellowstone, from Mammoth Cave to the shores of Maine, like I just am overcome. I just think it’s so special. So that’s like a huge part of how I feel about being American. It’s just the actual physical place feels so incredibly special to me. And then I think we talk a lot about our frictionless existence, like our pursuit of ease, and I think that can show up in the ways we think about relationship and identity, and I think so much of the work we do here is to push against that and to say anything worth having, anything worth doing is hard, and it involves friction and difficulty and sadness and grief. And so the presence of all of those difficult emotions and how I feel about being an American is, to me, a feature, not a bug. I have difficult, complicated feelings about everything I love. My husband, my children, this work, my family, being a woman, being a human. To me, it’s like that’s not a problem. That is the reality of feeling connected and called to be a part of something. So all of that difficulty with America, and it is there, always there, in a weird way just makes me love it more. So like a moment to look at that-- that’s why I like birthdays, generally. I’m just a birthday person. That’s another affiliation I like. So a birthday and a moment to just-- especially coming off COVID and these very difficult re-examinations of so many pieces of our history and much like 1976, a difficult moment where people don’t think there’s a lot of promise in front of America; it feels really important and essential to say, “Yeah, but I love it anyway. And yeah, I’m going to keep trying, and I’m going to keep putting my good things in the river, and I’m going to keep looking back at all the people who came before me and see what I can learn from them and acknowledge their sacrifice and work and contributions and say, ‘I’m so honored to be a link in that chain.’” Because I am.

[00:23:19] Beth: I think one of the pieces that makes it precarious to feel patriotic, that’s always been part of the country, is a sense that maybe I’m okay right now, but what if I’m not? It could change in a second. It has changed before. We see how we have made progress and then taken steps backward in so many different ways. I like the opportunity and appreciate the opportunity with this anniversary to consider the people who were here before the Revolutionary War, and to think about those tribal nations that are still here and that still try to negotiate with our government even though our government has screwed those tribal nations over and over again, who still have built this nation and who still meaningfully give to it. I think it’s a good opportunity to look back at the writings of founders wrestling with slavery, who knew from the beginning that institution could lead to civil war and then did, and then to consider how people dealt with that and what they believed was worth dying for as they were building a new nation. Even as we are in the middle of Pride Month, and you sense a lot of fatigue around Pride Month this time because there is that looming sense that are these hard-won rights going to be taken away from us. And even as we’re dealing with the post-Dobbs world in which many of us have daughters with fewer rights than we had when we were their age and you have that sense hanging over like it is a stormy time. And I think that gives me meaning in reexamining this history and considering where we’ve been, and it helps me ask different questions than if I were medicating with America 250 the way that they did during the bicentennial. In some ways it feels important to me to take this anniversary and not just numb out on red, white, and blue, but really go to the history and think about my place in it. You said a link in the chain. Okay. What is that link? What are the things that we are fighting for, and how are we fighting, and what’s the evolution of that fight over time?

[00:25:48] Sarah: Yeah, because I feel like the examination of all of this history always draws me to the deep humanity of the people who came before me. I am not trying to romanticize them. I am not trying to create heroes. I don’t think I am papering over anything or apologizing for anyone when I say think about what was happening in 1776. Do you honestly believe as a human yourself who looks out across the world where there is still great harm and suffering and inequities, and think that these people should have, what, in 1776, cast off, created a whole new form of government, cast off the rule of a king to create something new and to also upend the entire understanding of gender and race at once? Sometimes I wonder when we speak about these people, when we speak about people that came before us at any time, what do we think should have happened? Perfection in an instant? I’m not participating in perfection of an instant. I know that there’s great suffering. My historical experiment is always I think in 250 years they will look back on us and ask the same sort of questions we ask about them. I think it will most likely be around consciousness and animal welfare. I still participate in the industrial farm complex. I still eat meat, even though I can see it. I can squint and see in 250 years what they will think about us. And I just have to grant that grace to myself and to every human that participated in this 250-year history, and every human that will get us hopefully to the next 250 years. I’m not saying they’re perfect. I’m not saying we’re perfect. I am saying that I am grateful and honored to be participating in the journey to more perfect in all things, as a citizen, as a friend, as a podcaster. That’s all I can do. I can just say, “I like being here. I like being in this country with these people. I like trying.” I’m glad that for 250 years we have kept trying. That makes me enormously proud. Even when we get it wrong, even when we mess it up, even when it feels like we’re in the midst of messing it up right now, I want to keep going.

[00:29:14] Beth: I’m interested in the felt existence of 1776 in a lot of ways because I think about how much more comfortable our lives are, and what is the relationship between comfort in life and your commitment to ideas? When you think about the women who started efforts to support the war, who melted down their serving ware for bullets, and who served as nurses and sewed shirts for the soldiers. When you think about them and the fact that they have children dying of typhoid fever, and they’re trying to keep the farms running, and just the daily experience of keeping a fire going consumes so much of your life. They still made space for really big ideas and hosted really philosophical conversations about what the meaning of a nation is and what role government should play and who should get to be at the table for making decisions. And I just look at my life, which is so much easier. I never have to keep a fire going all day. I never have to think about whether my water’s clean to drink. I don’t worry about my children dying of typhoid fever. I just wonder what percentage of my life is devoted to ideals the way that people who came before me devoted their lives to ideals and what does that say? And I just think that tension between comfort and principle is like really fruitful territory to explore.

[00:30:53] Sarah: Yeah, I really liked putting on my costume for 1776 and in the grand scheme of things, there wasn’t a lot to it. More than what I wear every day, but nowhere near what they were actually wearing because it kind of gave me this very physical experience of thinking about that time period. And look, I think the importance of America 250 is because it is a call to envision what are we doing here together? What ideals are we still pursuing? I think that we are desperate. The reason people think our future isn’t bright, that our best years are behind us, is because there is not a vision for that future right now because there is not an articulation of what a thriving American populace will look like in the face of artificial intelligence or falling birth rates or climate change. I think that’s another reason I’m so devoted to this milestone because that’s what you do. You take the moment and think, “Okay, here’s what people sacrificed to get us here. What are we willing to sacrifice to get us to the next 250? What are we trying to pursue together?” And a liberal democracy, full participation, freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly are ideals that are not perfected yet. They are still worth pursuing. And that’s why I value our work so much because more than most, we do get to think about that, and we do get to talk about that. And I guess America 250 to me is this moment to be like, “Join us. Please.” We have to not just have limited edition cinnamon rolls or UFC fights. We have to talk about what are we doing here together, because we have... I don’t know if we’ve lost that ability, but it looks a lot different now. We’re not having town halls like we used to. We are so atomized and maybe we’re listening to a podcast, but we have to take that somewhere. And so many Americans are. They’re running for office. They’re creating organizations. They’re coming together with their neighbors and their family members and their friends. And that is beautiful and worth celebrating. And no flashy cage on the White House lawn can erase that.

[00:33:30] Beth: It is the together to me that is so essential. For another project that I’m working on for our audience eventually, I was looking at the history of salons and the way that women gathered, philosophers, intellectuals in drawing rooms, across the world to discuss big ideas and just thinking about how we’ve been trying to do that over the years. With our members, we have read Habits of the Heart. We’ve read a number of The Federalist Papers. We’ve read the Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America. We’ve been trying to ask these questions for years now in community, right? Together. Okay, where do we come from? What does this mean? Where are we going? And it gives me a lot of confidence in asking these America 250 questions because there is a lot of homework behind the way that I’m searching for that future vision. That has to translate into my own living room for it to feel worthy of the splashy red, white, and blue fireworks moments. And I sense that a lot of people want that now. It is not good enough to have a red, white, and blue Monster energy drink. It is more okay, but I want to sink into the sense that I’m connected to other people here, and that we’re doing something together to leave this thing better than we found it.

[00:35:00] Sarah: Obviously, we have lots of options available in our Substack, but we wanted to share this national initiative that we think is the truest, most beautiful reflection of what we’re talking about when we say celebrate America 250. It’s called America’s Potluck. It is a nationwide--

[00:35:21] Beth: you got me.

[00:35:21] Sarah: I know, right? I don’t even need to tell you anything else, do I?

[00:35:22] Beth: Just the name. That’s all.

[00:35:24] Sarah: A nationwide community-driven initiative encouraging neighborhoods and communities to gather for a shared meal on Sunday, July 5th to mark 250 years of American life together. Their goal is to have 25,000 potlucks. We have the link in the show notes, so you can click it, find out if there’s a potluck near you, host one if there isn’t. I think this is the most beautiful way to answer this complicated milestone with a grounded, integrated, holistic approach to celebrating America 250. I love it so much. Because again, we are not celebrating because everything is perfect. We are celebrating because it isn’t and we want to keep trying together. Beth, The New York Times had this piece about your mom aesthetic. Apparently it is a big deal on TikTok to create content and name your mom aesthetic. So it’s like butter moms, which is like a ‘90s mom situation. Or maybe you’re a cozy mom, and you’re really into matching pajamas and snuggling. The idea is by naming an aesthetic, you give some sort of comfort and consistency and I guess a foundation in this very scary world of parenting

[00:37:03] Beth: I read this and realized a couple of things. My instant reaction was to think, “Dum, dum, dumity-dum. I hate this,” and then I tried to pull back from that and I realized that I had very different aesthetics with my two daughters because my life was very different with the two of them. I think with my older daughter I was, when she was a baby, rushing to work in the mornings, picking her up from the babysitter in the afternoons, always wearing a suit with a yogurt stain somewhere on it. And that wasn’t a performance for anyone, that was just the reality of my life. It was stressed and hectic and pulled in a lot of different directions. It was better with Ellen. I had less of that. I was coming, I think, a little bit more into myself. I was older. I had taken a step back from my career. And then the other thing I realized as I interrogated what do I feel beyond this is so stupid get off my lawn kind of reaction, was that I think part of what bugs me in this, and a lot of the internet mommy content, is that it becomes about one person as the definer of the relationship with the child, right? If you are doing cozy mom, do you draft cozy dad or cozy other mom into the equation? You know what I mean? It feels like you’re the main character now, and the child is an accessory, and then if there’s a partner in the picture, that person also is just an accessory to your plan for the family unit. And I think we’ve woven in and out of a lot of different aesthetics here, or just life patterns because we’ve had a very equal partnership all through all through their growing up.

[00:38:57] Sarah: Counterpoint, doesn’t bother me at all. Here’s why I like it. I was thinking, like, when I was in the mommy blogging world, the battle lines, the identity was either stay-at-home mom or work mom. I wrote so many blog posts about being a stay-at-home mom versus a working mom. So I’m delighted that those are no longer the lines because everybody works in all kinds of different ways, and it’s way more complicated, and that makes me so happy. I like that this is individualized in a way because I think the mom noise can become so loud that any exercise that says, “ You can decide what kind of mom you want to be. You can pick. It doesn’t have to be this perfect standard or this tradwife or crunchy mom or whatever the name.” You can just make up your own. And I think that’s a really positive direction. Because as much as parenting is a team sport, there is something about mothering that is very distinctive and can be lonely and can be physical. A lot of it in the early days takes place in your body, on your body, a part of your body. So I don’t know. I kind of dig it. I think it’s empowering a little bit.

[00:40:30] Beth: That’s an interesting interpretation that has some appeal to me. I bump up against the marriage of my personal desires as expressed through aesthetic. Because that’s what it is, right? It’s more than clothes. When you lean into an aesthetic hard like this, you’re really painting an aspirational vision of your own life, right? This is how I want to feel. This is how I want other people to interpret me. There’s a status component, for sure, as well as a spiritual component, I think. Internally, this is what I want to cultivate in my life. And I think it’s tricky, and this is going to be true whether you’re trying to define an aesthetic or not on TikTok. But there is this tricky dimension of motherhood that is always like how much of me is mother and how much of me is person, and how is my child impacted by that ratio? And I wonder if I were trying to turn my aspirations for my life into content in that particular way, what would the effect on my children and my family dynamic be? I don’t know.

[00:41:46] Sarah: I have a mom aesthetic. I’ve never named it until this exercise. But I’m calling it camel coat core. That’s what I’m calling my aesthetic.

[00:41:56] Beth: Okay. You do love alliteration.

[00:41:59] Sarah: I have said for a long time that I think some of the most positive portrayals of motherhood are in holiday films. So the camel coat core is a callout to Kate McAllister, my favorite mom, the mom I aspire to be, in Home Alone. With, I think, an assist from Sybil Stone in The Family Stone, who also wears a camel house coat. A very rich, beautiful camel house coat for what it’s worth. And I think both of these mothers and the way I envision motherhood and think about motherhood has been they don’t get it all right. She leaves her child at home. Sybil fights with her kids. But there is an aspect of I am creating experiences for you, which I think is definitely a part of my mom aesthetic. Nowhere is that more true during the holidays. There’s always a aspect of the moms in A Christmas Story and Home Alone, all these stories, that there is I’m crafting an experience for you, especially as a young child. Which has definitely been a part of my vision of myself as a mother that I’m set directing here, to a certain extent. At certain times positive and negative consequences of that, of course. But that I’m here, that we’re trying to create this experience as a family together, but that family is at the center of it. I like that these women clearly have strong marriages, that they have careers or had careers, that they’re full and complete people that screw up, but that just really fiercely love their kids while also looking so good in their camel coats. So that’s mine. Camel coat core. I named it. That’s my mom aesthetic.

[00:43:56] Beth: Good for you. I guess the closest thing I have to this is something that came up when I worked with a parenting coach for a little bit because I was really confused by sibling fighting in my house. She had me choose an avatar for who I want to be as a mom from pop culture, and I picked Moana’s grandmother because I love that she’s willing to be sought out for advice, but isn’t trying to dole it out constantly. She gives both her son and her granddaughter room to make mistakes and to feel their feelings and to be mad at each other. But she is there to narrate a little bit when they ask her. And when they don’t ask her, she remains there. She lets her presence be there even when she’s not being called upon and that’s what I’ve always wanted for Jane and Ellen to know that Chad and I will just be here. We’ll be here, and they can always be with us, and we’ll be wishing the best for them and putting our energy around them no matter what’s happening. And I have really tried to draw from this avatar a sense of playfulness and lightness because I can be super serious, and I can use way too many words and I can feel that the stakes of everything are very high. And when I have that sense coming on, I try to like physically emulate Moana’s grandmother, just move more fluidly, laugh a little bit, relax into the moment.

[00:45:25] Sarah: I’m trying to think of a good word for that. Like I’m trying to think. What’s an S word for mothering, caring, parenting? Because you have a surf, a swim. You know what I’m saying? Like a surf mom. I guess it doesn’t have to... I just wanted to be a little...

[00:45:47] Beth: maybe I can just be a Pisces mom. That’s what I am in general.

[00:45:50] Sarah: Pisces mom. Pisces parent, then you’re getting back to the.. Okay, we did it. Okay. Pisces parent, camel coat core. I like it. I think it’s fun. I think it’s fun. I think being able to like zoom out and do a little macro examination around your mothering and your parenting, never a bad thing. Never a bad thing. You can get a little consumed, for sure. But I do think like just an overall direction can be helpful. I cannot wait to hear everybody’s mom aesthetics and your thoughts, of course, on America 250. Please do not forget to join us on Substack at pantsuitpoliticsshow.com to get all of your America 250 treats. Until Friday, keep it nuanced y’all.

Show Credits

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

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

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

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

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

Topics Discussed

• The SpaceX IPO and its red flags

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Resources

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

• The SpaceX IPO, explained (CNBC)

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

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

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:03:15] Sarah: Okay.

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

[00:03:23] Sarah: Okay.

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

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

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

[00:03:48] Sarah: Okay.

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

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

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

[00:04:21] Sarah: That’s a red flag.

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

[00:04:50] Sarah: Okay.

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

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

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

[00:05:19] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:08:16] Sarah: Right.

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

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

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

[00:10:50] Sarah: Okay.

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

[00:11:04] Sarah: Okay.

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

[00:11:25] Sarah: Whoa.

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

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

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

[00:14:37] Sarah: Yeah.

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

[00:14:47] Sarah: Yeah.

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

[00:14:53] Sarah: Please, let’s do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:18:25] Sarah:  Including us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:41:33] Beth: I wouldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:43:10] Beth: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Credits

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Topics Discussed

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

Episode Resources

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

• Meander Bookshop

• Meander on Bookshop.org

• Meander Bookshop on Instagram

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:21:33] Sarah: Yeah. That’s good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:38:23] Sarah: That’s true. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:42:03] Beth: I’m smart that way.

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

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

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

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

[00:42:25] Sarah: It’s very exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Credits

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

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

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Topics Discussed

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

Episode Resources

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

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

• Delaney Hall protests escalate (CNN)

• Delaney Hall background and protests (BBC)

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

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

[00:02:20] Sarah: Agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:28] Sarah:  This is not it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:15:48] Beth: Yes.

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

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

[00:16:07] Sarah: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

[00:17:33] Sarah: Yeah.

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

[00:17:40] Sarah: Yeah.

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

[00:18:09] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:28:23] Sarah: Absolutely.

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

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

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

[00:32:20] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Topics Discussed

• Graham Platner and the Maine Senate race

• Political scandals and changing voter tolerance

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

• Progressive vs. moderate framing in the Democratic Party

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

• Emotional maturity as a political standard

• Partisan identity and double standards

• Bronte the Stylist on Instagram

• Team changes at Pantsuit Politics

Episode Resources

The Sexting (WSJ)

The Tattoos (AP News)

The Senate Race (UNH)

Rep. Auchincloss’s position (The Hill)

Sen. Kim’s comment (CNN)

“Somebody Will” (Shucked)

Bronte the Stylist (IG)

Sarah’s outfit app (Cladwell)

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:08:06] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:25:57] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[00:31:54] Sarah: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

[00:33:32] Sarah: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:41:55] Sarah:  It’s not a series.

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

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

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

[00:42:24] Sarah: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:44:50] Beth: Yes.

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

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

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

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

[00:46:17] Sarah: And that’s okay.

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

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

Show Credits

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

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

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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.

That frame changes my expectations about candidates, and it changes my ask of my fellow voters. I’m not trying to be inspired by candidates. I’m looking for people who will gum up the works because I think the current works aren’t working.

Sarah and I discuss the races and the works that aren’t working today (including the gerrymandering spiral and money in politics and the DOJ). And then we take a big exhale to talk about summer movies. We hope you take that exhale, too.

- Beth

Topics Discussed

• Ken Paxton’s primary win over John Cornyn

• What Paxton’s victory means for the Texas Senate race and Republican Party

• Redistricting updates: South Carolina, Alabama, Florida

• The midterms as a structural check on executive power

• DOJ investigation of E. Jean Carroll

• Summer movie preview: Project Hail Mary, The Mandalorian & Grogu, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, Supergirl, live-action Moana

• America250 murder mystery: Murder at Mrs. Morris’s Table

Episode Resources

• The $130 million ad price tag for the Texas Republican primary (Punchbowl News)

• How Paxton entered the race and what Cornyn’s gun vote cost him (Punchbowl News)

• The NRSC statement that named neither Cornyn nor Paxton (NRSC)

• South Carolina Senate blocks Trump-backed map after early voting began (NY Times)

• Alabama three-judge panel rejects discriminatory maps (NY Times)

• Alabama federal panel opinion (CourtListener)

• Florida judge lets DeSantis redistricting map stand (NY Times)

• Mystery super PACs quietly boosting weaker Democratic candidates (Punchbowl News)

• DCCC’s unusual tactic of joint ad buys with preferred candidates (Axios)

• Texas School Police Pepper-Sprayed, Tackled, and Tasered Students (NYT)

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:31] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we’re going to discuss the shape of the midterms. The Texas Senate race is settled now. We have our nominees. We’re going to talk about the latest developments in the redistricting race to the bottom. We’re going to talk about some of the stranger dynamics heading into the midterms. And then Outside of Politics, it’s time for summer movies. We’re gearing up for a genre that one of my friends called aggressively fine. And I think that’s a perfect description of a lot of summer movies, but I’m excited to talk about it. And first, we want to make sure you know what we have in store for our America 250 celebrations.

[00:01:06] Sarah: Okay. I just did my first murder mystery party, Beth. And I think what I learned immediately, in particular after talking to you about your deep and wide experience with murder mystery parties, is that the kit itself really matters.

[00:01:22] Beth: It does.

[00:01:23] Sarah: The quality of the clues, the quality of the story, the instructions make a huge difference to the impact of the murder mystery and the fun everybody has. And I say all that because you queen of the high standards have crafted an American 250 murder mystery party for our premium members. Tell the people.

[00:01:59] Beth: I have. So this is a dinner party taking place in 1776, and I tried to bring all the lessons that I’ve learned from using different kits to this to say “Here’s how I would do it.” So in the instructions, I say, “I would text this now.” You know what I mean? To just try to make it really easy for people who’ve not hosted before. And I don’t want to give too much about the plot away, so I’ll just tell you that one of my favorite characters in this is Sarah Franklin Bache, who was Ben Franklin’s daughter. So she was in her early 30s around this time. All of the characters are based on real people, except one. That is the victim in the story. This is not a real murder, but it is a real committee that was meeting, made up of real people, and I added some women in the committee because I just felt like there needed to be women in the story. And there were women in the story in the background, so I tried to bring them to the foreground. So one of those women is Sarah Franklin Bache. She was handling so much of Ben Franklin’s correspondence that she really understood the dynamics of people’s different agendas, and who was, like, more loyalist than other revolutionaries, who really didn’t want to fight, who was really trying to avoid getting to war, and who was, like, all in, but who was maybe all in for their own purposes. So she just had everybody’s number, and I love that for a murder mystery party.

[00:03:27] Sarah: So I have convinced our best friends to do this over July 4th. We’ll be all together, and we have very many teens and young adult children. I can just assign myself this character. I can be in charge and just make myself Sarah Franklin Bache, right? That’s allowed?

[00:03:42] Beth: You can, although the host characters are Robert and Mary White Morris.

[00:03:48] Sarah: We’re doing July 4th at their house. Can’t they be those people?

[00:03:51] Beth: They can be those people then.

[00:03:52] Sarah: Okay.

[00:03:53] Beth: So you can just tell them that you want to be this person. Here’s the key. You really need one person who’s hosting who’s willing to know how everything goes.

[00:04:02] Sarah: Okay.

[00:04:03] Beth: A lot of these kits are written so that the host can play along and doesn’t have to know how everything goes, and I’m here to tell you that makes for a bad party.

[00:04:12] Sarah: Okay.

[00:04:12] Beth: You’ve got to have somebody who’s willing to steer this ship in a direction, and that means that they’ve read everybody’s character cards, they’ve read all of the clues and the reveals, and they’re willing to keep it moving in the right direction. So as long as somebody else will do that for you, this would be a great character for you, I think.

[00:04:28] Sarah: And I’m here to tell you to the value proposition of all this, these kits are expensive. And you’re going to get this kit along with all the other stuff that’s coming with our America 250 celebration, including but not limited to me reporting from 1776 from the News Brief the week before July 4th, for the low price of $15 a month.

[00:04:54] Beth:  That’s right. And the knowledge that you are supporting independent political media trying to do some good in the world.

[00:05:01] Sarah: That’s right. So what a better way to support and celebrate America’s 250 than to support freedom of the press with your dollars, and to get all this fun stuff as a very exciting bonus.

[00:05:14] Beth: You did a good job steering me back on course there, too, because I could talk about this for 100 years.

[00:05:20] Sarah: Or another 250. Maybe we will.

[00:05:22] Beth: There we go.

[00:05:24] Sarah: So go to the show notes to find out how to become a member of our premium community and get your very own copy of A Murder at Mrs. Morris’ Table.

[00:05:35] Beth: Speaking of characters, let’s talk about Ken Paxton and John Cornyn. Cornyn has been a senator for 24 years, and that career has come to an end in his runoff with Ken Paxton.

[00:05:58] Sarah: In the most brutal way imaginable.

[00:06:00] Beth: Absolutely brutal.

[00:06:03] Sarah: Brutal.

[00:06:04] Beth: 64 to 36%. Yikes.

[00:06:07] Sarah: It’s like the widest margin of a defeat for a sitting senator in a long time.

[00:06:13] Beth: Nearly 50 years. Cornyn won three counties. Yikes.

[00:06:19] Sarah: There’s a lot of counties in Texas. Kentucky and Texas have the most counties, just in case y’all needed a little state trivia. So there’s a lot of counties, to only win three of them is pretty rough. And it’s not like this man was out here pulling a Thomas Massie. He didn’t vote for impeachment.

[00:06:39] Beth: He did not.

[00:06:40] Sarah: He’s not out here criticizing Donald Trump. He is a loyal foot soldier, very conservative, not somebody I would ever vote for in my whole entire life, and still not good enough. Can’t really tell why.

[00:06:53] Beth: Also, a massive fundraiser for other Republicans.

[00:06:57] Sarah: Yes.

[00:06:58] Beth: That’s why everybody’s so mad. John Cornyn was a money machine.

[00:07:02] Sarah: I read that he took over the George W. Bush apparatus in Texas. He picked up the organization and foundational work that came from George W. Bush’s presidency and had control of that fundraising apparatus and directed millions and millions of dollars at Republican candidates. And again, wasn’t what anyone would describe as a troublemaker. It’s not like he ran against Donald Trump in the Republican primary. It’s not like he was out there stumping for Ron DeSantis. I don’t even know why he doesn’t like him.

[00:07:33] Beth: He posted a photo of himself reading The Art of the Deal, in fact. He was as obsequious as you could be. His sin in Texas that caused Ken Paxton to run against him was that he worked on bipartisan gun legislation after Uvalde. And that’s where Ken Paxton decided this guy is a RINO, he’s not looking out for Texans’ interests.

[00:07:57] Sarah: That on the heels of this New York Times reporting that all these police officers in Texas post-Uvalde are aggressive and violent towards children, it’s just a lot to take in, Beth. It’s a lot to take in.

[00:08:15] Beth: Yeah, in a dramatically unaccountable system. I’m anxious to see the follow-on reporting. Somebody comes out with a big piece, and then everybody goes at it, too, and I’m interested to see more of that. But if I were a Texan, that would have my attention even more than this primary, honestly. If you’ve got police officers in every single school in your state, and the results are these incidents that aren’t even being reported to a central kind of watchdog authority, that’s worth getting involved in.

[00:08:49] Sarah: I’ve been a little worried about the Texans because they feel real beat down to me. You say “Yay, Ken Paxton is a defeatable candidate,” and they’re like, “He’s won statewide so many times, he’s the worst, but nobody seems to care.” I want to give them a little pep talk, and I want them to remember that nothing is static in American politics, and there is no reality that is unmovable. And James Talarico is not Beto O’Rourke, and, Ken Paxton is not John Cornyn. He’s certainly not Ted Cruz. And I just want them to buck up just a little bit. I just want to buck up just a little bit. And even if James Talarico doesn’t win, there is a real chance that somebody else will because of this race in Texas, which is now going to require millions and millions of dollars that I’m sure many Republicans would have preferred to direct towards Maine or Ohio or Alaska.

[00:09:55] Beth: I definitely understand why Texans feel so down about this. I’ve struggled to come up with a framework for myself. On one hand, I look at Ken Paxton, who is so unapologetic about such a multitude of sins, and I see him as a pure Donald Trump descendant, perfectly in line with the MAGA philosophy. I don’t apologize. I do what I want. At least I’m honest about it. Almost a sense of Pepsi is unacceptable to me in all situations, but I understand that if you like Pepsi and you’re offered a Pepsi and a Diet Pepsi, you’re taking the Pepsi. And I think that’s what happened in this race. Because Cornyn could have run as a Bush Republican. He could have said, “This is the mold I came up in. This is what I believe to be true. This is my vision.” He could have leaned into that. I would love to run an experiment where he does that and see what the results are, if he’s defeated as badly. I think he’s still defeated, but is he defeated as badly? I don’t know. That’s how I feel about Thomas Massey as well. He was standing up to Trump enough to piss Trump off, but not enough to seem materially different than his opponent to a lot of people who are casually paying attention. If you’re just watching the ad mailers, they sound like they stand for the same thing. Trump’s mad at one of them and not the other. One’s been there a long time and not the other. You know what I mean? So there’s this outsider thing and this authenticity thing that Paxton encapsulates. I read a long post this morning on X. I don’t know why I still go on X. I feel like I learn things, and then I also get upset. I read a long post on X from a guy about Talarico and Paxton. And this guy said, “Look, my faith is really important to me, and that’s why I loathe James Talarico in a way that I’ll never loathe Ken Paxton. Because Talarico is false prophet.” He puts on the cloak of this thing, but it’s not the thing that I believe in. And Ken Paxton is a reprehensible dude, but he just is. He doesn’t pretend to not be.” And that logic is exhausting to me, but I also I want to stare at that logic. I want to stare at that place that a lot of people are in, because I hear that from our listeners in Texas too particularly and throughout the Southwest. I hear a lot of people saying, “ This is the worldview of my family members here. This is the worldview of people I know.” So I want to take it seriously. And that’s why I understand the despondence. I hope you’re right that’s limited enough that there’s an opening here.

[00:12:37] Sarah: First of all, there is no logic there. It might be something, but there’s no logic in that to me. If your faith is important to you, you don’t vote for somebody morally reprehensible. So I don’t know how to say that any other way.

[00:12:53] Beth: But do you get what I’m saying? He thinks that Talarico’s version of Christianity is morally reprehensible to a greater degree, because he thinks that Talarico is using something that matters to him and saying things like, “God is non-binary” that we’re going to hear 10 million times between now and November, and that offends him more than Paxton’s corruption in office, infidelity to his wife, on, and on.

[00:13:23] Sarah: I get it. I just don’t think there’s a lot of logic in it. I think the answer is what the answer has been for many years of United States history. And I’m not saying that we’ve always lived it out perfectly, but the standard is the separation of church and state, and we separate people’s understanding of their own religion from their understanding of the state’s role in enforcing that religion. And I think you get really far apart when it comes to Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then you ask, so do you want someone who’s reprehensible and shows no moral character enforcing a view that the government should play a active and aggressive role in enforcing morality on the populace? Because I feel like we’ve got a conflict there. Whereas, James Talarico, you might not like the way that he speaks or lives out his religion, but his stance on the government’s role in enforcing people’s understanding of morality and ethics is pretty clear. I think that’s where he made his mark as a state legislator, was standing up and saying, “This matters to me, but that doesn’t mean I want it on the walls forced down everyone else’s throat.” And I think that’s a winning message for a lot of people. I just have to believe when it comes to not necessarily our Run of the Reel Texas voters, but the Republican Party generally, Republican Party leadership, and by that I mean elected officials I have to believe that there is a breaking point here somewhere, just based on my fundamental understanding of human psychology and human behavior, that there has to be-- and maybe we’re nowhere close, and maybe I’m being naive and overly optimistic. There has to be a place, a point where people stop swallowing his shit. It has to be. There is. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it with Marjorie Taylor Greene. We’ve seen it with Thomas Massie. We’ve seen it with Tucker Carlson. I feel, I hear the tea kettle and it’s just the piercing is getting louder and louder. And when you have the leader of your party taking out established, long-term sitting senators with fundraising prowess and saying in the same week, “I don’t care about the midterms.” There’s got to be a breaking point. There has to be a breaking point.

[00:16:01] Beth: Here’s the way that I look at it right now for myself because I look at some of the candidates the Democrats are fielding who I’m not excited about, like a Graham Plattner. I would find it challenging to vote for Graham Plattner at this point the midterms to me represent a moment where you ask, do we want to give the president a smooth runway, or do we want to gum up the works a little bit? Because the truth of this moment is that he is still going to be the president for two more years without a lot of brakes on his power, and especially without a lot of brakes on his power that he respects. So even if Democrats took both chambers of Congress, he still has the veto power. It’s not like they can go in and remake America. They can go in and make things harder for him. They can go in and be a little bit of a brake on what feels to me like a runaway train. And historically, we have liked divided government and have used the midterms that way. The public might not articulate it that way, but that’s what we’ve done, like a little bit of a brake on this. So I could vote for a candidate that I think doesn’t really represent my views, isn’t the kind of person that I would like to see in office if my choices are a smooth runway or a brake here. And I hope that argument in Texas can prevail, where you’re not asking everybody to embrace Talarico’s progressive view of Christianity or embrace Christianity at all, because again, that shouldn’t be what this is about. Diana Butler Bass, who I respect tremendously, posted something about this is going to be a massive trial of Christianity in Texas. Paxton’s version is, does Christianity mean you are pro-life and anti-Democrat and anti-trans, or does Christian mean that you love your neighbor and you care about the poor and the marginalized? That’s what this is. And I thought, “Oh, God, I don’t want that. I don’t want that.” That’s not what a Senate race should be. You talk about an inappropriate container for something, that’s not what a Senate race should be. So I hope there is a way to reframe this thing where it is, do you want any kind of brake on the president’s agenda or not? And if that doesn’t work in Texas, then I hope it can just be about do you want somebody who feels they owe you something or someone who’s just in it for themselves? Because that’s what Ken Paxton’s career has been about. Ken Paxton is in it for Ken Paxton just like Donald Trump is in it for Donald Trump. And so is this about the victor getting all the spoils or electing somebody who does think about other people when he wakes up in the morning? Well, Texas is one race of a handful that are really in dispute. The Cook Political Report still has Texas in the likely Republican column, maybe lean Republican after Paxton won the primary. But there are three toss-up races, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio in the Senate. And then the House, of course, is where we have 18 toss-up races, but still a pretty significant Republican advantage that grew more significant because of the redistricting efforts that have been swirling for the past 10 months or so. And we have some developments in the redistricting swirl.

[00:19:56] Sarah: Yeah, and to the boiling point of it all, South Carolina Senate refusing to approve a Trump-backed voting map, which was going to eliminate the state’s lone majority Black district and James Clyburn, a historically significant member of the House of Representatives. And I think to watch these moments Come in the midst of his stranglehold on the party. He’s taken out John Cornyn. Again, it feels really important to me that you’re still seeing people push even as the threat of any disloyalty grows stronger. He’s already making a list of 2028 people he wants to go after, and one of them is Lauren Boebert.

[00:20:43] Beth: So South Carolina refused to approve a map that it sounds like the White House pretty well created and gave to them. For us. The process offended people, the timing offended people, and just overall, you had a number of Republicans say, “This is bananas.” And you see that dynamic on display in the judiciary with respect to Alabama’s maps. A federal panel of judges said that Alabama’s maps, even under the new Supreme Court standards, were explicitly based on race for the purpose of discrimination. And I was looking at that opinion. It’s 102 pages long. It is a painstakingly written opinion. And over and over it says a judicial version of, “This sucks. This is lose-lose. This is horrible that this close to an election, we are here looking at these maps. And no matter what we do, the result is bad. This is a bad situation.” So my hope is that the boiling point comes, whatever you think about partisan gerrymandering, whoever you think does it worse, whoever you think started it, whether you think that independent commissions are a good idea or an abdication of authority given to state legislatures, like wherever you are on it, I would love for all of us to be able to come together and say, “A few months before the general election, when primary elections are already underway, we don’t want the maps messed with.”

[00:22:19] Sarah: What I keep thinking is at the beginning of this presidential term, this second Trump term- We spent a lot of time on his mumblings about a third term. We spent a lot of time thinking about the stacking of election officials in states across the country, the stacking in state parties of Trump allies, foot soldiers. I spent a lot of time thinking about ICE at the polls and voter disenfranchisement and intimidation, and now I’m like, “this is the way they’re going to cheat. This is the chosen path to cheating and trying to maintain victory in an election that everyone can see they are set up to lose.” I feel like it was like staring us all in the face the whole time, and I think it particularly becomes clear as they do the Trump thing, which is push people past all reason. Push people past all capacity to defend actions, to this quote from the Republican state senator in South Carolina that said, “Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway.” It’s just they cannot because it’s like everything else surrounding him. He will not allow anything but the following of his whim, and if that means you have to follow him right off a cliff, you better take a running start . There’s just no gatekeepers. There’s no respect for the process. There are so few norms left standing, and the unapologetic We’re going to do whatever it takes to maintain our power, and we don’t care who we have to step on and who we have to defeat and what laws we have to break and the ways in which we have to strain the democratic process. We don’t care because this is what he wants, and so everybody better run out and get it for him. The way that Ron DeSantis has run to do his bidding after the way he talked about him and treated him in the primary, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but wow. Wow. And the Florida maps are the ones, like they got a little bit of a win because DeSantis has taken the Trump approach of stacking the courts with his appointees. But I don’t know what you’ve read, but what I’ve read is like these are too aggressive and they could not turn out the way they expected.

[00:25:03] Beth: I think that’s right, and I really want to park on that point. The brake on this is a resounding message that we don’t like it. The brake on this is people showing up in these midterms and saying, “I’m willing to vote for someone I never would’ve voted for before, and I might not again in two years or in six years. But right now I want to say clearly this is unacceptable to me,” because the gerrymandering has not gotten as bad as it can get. It can get worse. People are already looking at 2028 and talking about non-contiguous districts, grabbing a county here and a county way over here in the state on both sides of the aisle. So again, it’s not that I think Democrats are perfect or have any kind of moral high ground on districting particularly. It is that the White House going to state legislatures and basically bullying them with the threat of primaries and flooding their districts with outside spending to punish people who don’t comply is not okay. And what we have in the midterms is an opportunity to say, “That is not okay with me. I want this to stop.”

[00:26:11] Sarah: To the objective reality of people’s breaking points. I don’t know where that is. I don’t know with regards to our elections, the enormous stress our system has been under for the last 10 years, first with just the narrative, just the unapologetic way that he speaks about our elections as if they’re all rigged. That was the first wall to fall, right? We’re just going to talk about and lie and say that it’s not legitimate. It’s not a legitimate system. Our elections aren’t legitimate. So that was the first incredible stressor on our constitutional democracy. Then you have this political, no-holds-barred approach to gerrymandering. And I do actually believe that Democrats do have some moral high ground because when you look at states that approached-- at least took the first step, even if they undid them-- were at least trying to make some progress towards non-partisan commissions, it was Democratic states. And to me, that does matter, and it does speak to something. So I think it’s the just constant barrage that our elections aren’t fair and the unapologetic lying about election fraud. I think it is the partisan approach and the just-- We don’t need any competitive races. We don’t need that. We don’t need a contest of ideas. We can all just fight it out among the twenty percent of ideologues that exist on each side. And then I think the final sort of stressor that I wonder When and how we’ll get to a place where people will say enough, is the money in politics. The billionaires and the increasing number of billionaires that are just pouring money into elections, influencing elections, these super PACs coming in, trying to influence the other party’s elections, and this stress on the one person, one vote, the Voting Rights Act. Like, all of this is just building and building to I have to believe a breaking point.

[00:28:28] Beth: Because it’s not isolated to elections, that approach that you just described, the sort of chipping away here, undermining there, is happening with respect to all of the foundational pieces of the constitutional order. I’ve been thinking about this so much with the news that the Department of Justice is investigating E. Jean Carroll for perjury. In isolation, it’s one other story in a barrage of stories. In a world with wars and Ebola, it doesn’t rise to the level of hair on fire. If she lied, people shouldn’t lie under oath. You could talk about prioritization and the vindictiveness, but what more is there to say about any of that except that it’s part of a pattern? Because the judicial system’s power as a co-equal branch of government in so many ways rests on the concept of finality, that once a court has made a decision and it has gone through the appropriate appeals process, that decision stands. That’s why it’s such a big deal to overturn precedent because we respect what work has been done before, and we especially respect that work in the context of the same people and players and facts, the same story. So what does it mean for the Department of Justice to investigate a civil plaintiff for perjury on the other side of cases that she won? And those cases were about truth and facts. They were defamation cases. Now, it’s not exactly the same. Legally, I don’t think there are res judicata sort of collateral attack principles that apply here. But it’s another example of the president trying to use the executive branch, the Department of Justice, to build a parallel process to the court system to undermine what the court system stands for. So he’s chipping away at elections, chipping away at Congress for sure, says outright, “I don’t really need Congress for things. I can do it. I can do what I want. I can declare war. I can bulldoze the White House. I can do what I want without Congress.” And then you have this with the judiciary. That contributes to that tea kettle feeling that you’re describing, and it can be really depressing because in a vacuum, there are so few action steps that we can take as citizens. But the midterms are our chance to say, “We don’t like this. We don’t like where all this is going.”

[00:31:01] Sarah: I would add to the pile the fact that he very clearly articulates that he believes he should be able to determine everything, whether it’s morally right to go to war, whatever he wants to do. He says when asked, “Me, I get to decide.” He wants to be king. That’s why I really think they’re going to do another No Kings protest on his birthday, the day of this UFC fight, and it might be the first one I join. Because it has to be swarms of Americans in the street. I don’t think it’s just the midterms. I think there are other ways to join together and say, “We don’t want a king on our 250th anniversary.” It’s just so outrageous, and it’s making everything worse, everything more expensive. The pressure building in people’s everyday lives and the way that this political chaos is trickling out into closed businesses and increased costs and government cuts. It’s just going to continue to build because this is not sustainable. This is not sustainable.

[00:32:08] Beth: It’s I do what I want. I don’t think about the American people’s finances. I don’t think about the families of soldiers. I don’t think about Congress. I don’t think about America’s role on the world stage. I do what I want. I don’t think about anybody else, and I take what I want from all of it. There’s so much taking for the president personally, and I hate coming to the microphone to be like, “Trump is bad.” I hate that. I would much rather be having arguments with you about policy and being able to compliment actions of the administration to say, “Here is a needle in a haystack,” or, “Here’s a silver lining,” or, “Here’s something that they’re doing that I think is interesting and worth talking about.” I don’t have any runway for that right now because what I see is that runaway train. I don’t see any brakes on a very small number of people wielding the levers of government for personal gain in money and power, and I just want something to throw in front of that track to slow it down. All right, we’re going to go in a totally different direction because we need to. That’s exhausting. Let’s talk about summer movies. I want to tell you, Sarah, that I have seen only two movies this year, I think.

[00:33:49] Sarah: I haven’t been to the theater at all. It’s May.

[00:33:52] Beth: Yeah. I think I’ve seen two movies: Project Hail Mary.

[00:33:57] Sarah: I wanted to see it

[00:33:57] Beth: which I loved.

[00:33:58] Sarah: I wanted to see it. Everybody loved it, but it was so long. It’s it was so long, and I just couldn’t make the time.

[00:34:04] Beth: It felt so short. I’m going to be honest with you. It felt very short. I don’t know how. If you had said to me, “Ryan Gosling is going to carry a whole movie on his back for hours and hours in space,” I would’ve been like, “No way.” But it flew by. It was touching. I laughed. I cried. I still think about it. I’d like to see it again. It was great.

[00:34:26] Sarah: Okay. Maybe I’ll go to the drive-in this summer.

[00:34:29] Beth: That’d be a great drive-in movie.

[00:34:31] Sarah: Okay.

[00:34:31] Beth: Fantastic.

[00:34:32] Sarah: Okay

[00:34:32] Beth: Highly recommend that you do that. On the other hand, Chad and I went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu.

[00:34:38] Sarah: I heard it was bad.

[00:34:40] Beth: My popcorn was excellent. That’s really all I can say for it. I liked my popcorn. I liked my date. This thing was wild. Now, I am not a Star Wars lover. I am a Star Wars plus one. I see the things because Chad loves the things. If you take Star Wars, the original trilogy and suck all charm and life out of it, and add copious amounts of CGI. You just say “You know what this thing needs? More monster fighting.” Just monster fighting, every six minutes monster fighting. That is what you have. And a series of decisions that are very confusing to me. For example, Jeremy Allen White is in this movie. You never see him. Why do you hire Jeremy Allen White for something and not put that face on the screen? He’s just a voice actor in it. Why do you hire Pedro Pascal if you’re going to keep him behind a mask the whole time and have him speak in a monotone? He’s not really acting. He’s just like marching along doing a thing. I’m so confused by all of the choices that were made around this movie.

[00:35:50] Sarah: I think that’s a no for me. I don’t like Star Wars in the best circumstances. Gosh, I’m going hot. I’m telling people I don’t like Elvis. I’m telling people I don’t like Star Wars. The Michael Jackson people are coming for me. I’m just feeling...

[00:36:01] Beth: you’re telling people not to choose violence while you are in every conversation.

[00:36:04] Sarah: I’m choosing violence. I just don’t like Star Wars. I don’t even like the original movies. I think the dialogue is so clunky. I understand why they’re important historically, cinematically. But they’re not my jam. They’re just not my jam, so there’s no way I was going to see this.

[00:36:19] Beth: You know what? I bet if you watched this, and then you watched them again, you might think they’re great.

[00:36:24] Sarah: No, but that sounds like a terrible way to spend my time, so no thank you.

[00:36:28] Beth: It was interesting to observe people in the theater who had a very different reaction. I think the people who were there with us enjoyed it. There were women in the theater who reacted to Grogu, like the tiny Yoda-type figure. I’m not willing to call it Baby Yoda because Yoda, that puppet was interesting. That puppet had some soulfulness about it, and a lot of expressiveness. This is like a doll. I don’t get it at all. But there were women in the theater who reacted to this thing as though it were a live in the flesh newborn among us. Just aahs and coos, and like baby talk noises out loud in the theater. When we left Chad was like, “Should we have asked people what else they’re doing on their first day on Earth?” Because this was a wild experience.

[00:37:12] Sarah: We’re not well as a people. We’re not well as a people. I don’t know what else to say.

[00:37:17] Beth: Okay. There are other movies coming that I’m excited about. I’m really looking forward to Disclosure Day.

[00:37:22] Sarah: Yeah. I’m excited for another Spielberg movie. I like the cast. I would like, oh, I don’t know, new intellectual property. Crazy idea.

[00:37:34] Beth: We don’t have a lot of that on deck for you, I’m sorry to say. No. because the other big movies are Super Girl, so part of the franchise, and I do not think it looks good. I like this actress Millie Alcock, but I don’t think this looks good. We have another Spider-Man. No thank you. It’s called Brand New Day. Does that make it feel fresh to you?

[00:37:50] Sarah: No thank you. No. Toy Story 5?

[00:37:54] Beth: Five. They are tacking a tablet and I’m interested

[00:37:56] Sarah: Yeah, I’m into the screens versus toys premise. I think it’s very well timed much like Yesteryear, the trad wife novel, which nobody likes but it doesn’t matter, keeps selling like hotcakes, just because it’s like we want to talk about this, and this gives us a way. Yeah. So I don’t even think it matters if Toy Story 5 is good or not.

[00:38:13] Beth: Yeah. We want to talk about it.

[00:38:15] Sarah: But people are going to be all over it. I don’t want a live action Moana. No, thank you.

[00:38:19] Beth: Moana feels like it was made five minutes ago. This makes me feel really old that they’re doing a live action Moana. I don’t like

[00:38:24] Sarah: I don’t like the live action movies. I just don’t.

[00:38:27] Beth: I don’t either.

[00:38:28] Sarah: They’re not for me. I don’t get it. I don’t want it. Nobody asked for it.

[00:38:32] Beth: I think the problem is that it’s the expressiveness again. The live action animals cannot be what the cartoon animals are in the movies. And so it just feels so flat compared to the original.

[00:38:43] Sarah: Yeah. It’s giving The Polar Express. Everybody’s dead in the eyes because they’re all half CGI. Remember when they made that movie?

[00:38:48] Beth: Yes.

[00:38:49] Sarah: People love that movie too. I don’t know why. Again, I’m getting so many emails. It’s fine. I’m a big girl. I am excited about The Odyssey. Super excited about The Odyssey. Love it even more now that there’s controversy and right-wing angst about the casting. Y’all are so silly. As if all the Greeks and Romans were white. Do you know anything at all about where ancient history took place on the globe? I really struggle. It’s just so stupid. It’s like Jesus being blonde. What are y’all talking about? I don’t get it.

[00:39:26] Beth: I know.

[00:39:26] Sarah: Y’all sound dumb.

[00:39:29] Beth: I’m excited for The Odyssey too. I think Christopher Nolan is always going to do something interesting.

[00:39:33] Sarah: Right.

[00:39:34] Beth: Whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to be interesting. I love Matt Damon.

[00:39:37] Sarah: Who doesn’t?

[00:39:38] Beth: How could you not?

[00:39:39] Sarah: I even watched that dumb cop movie, him and Ben Affleck made. You know what? It was a great evening.

[00:39:45] Beth: I watched that on an airplane. Do not recommend. It’s not good enough to make an airplane ride tolerable, I got to tell you, it was tough.

[00:39:52] Sarah: No, you need a big screen.

[00:39:53] Beth: It was tough. But Matt Damon on the big screen, Tom Holland and Zendaya in the movie together. Charlize Theron. I like a lot of these people. I think it’s going to be interesting.

[00:40:01] Sarah: I’m into it. I’m going to watch it. I’ll be great. It’s probably going to be four hours long, but that’s okay.

[00:40:05] Beth: It will be so long. It is The Odyssey.

[00:40:07] Sarah: Can we just stop with the... Y’all, a movie should be an hour and 20 minutes.

[00:40:12] Beth: I totally agree with that. I want an hour and 40 max.

[00:40:15] Sarah: I don’t understand why the movies are getting longer as our attention spans are getting shorter. Now, I don’t want these micro dramas. I’m not saying I want a 10-second story on a YouTube Shorts, okay? I’m not into that life either. But can we just tighten it up a little bit? Can we tighten it up just a little bit?

[00:40:31] Beth: I think this is entirely related to a conversation that we just had on our Spicy live for Substack yesterday. The ticket price is more expensive, so the movie’s got to be longer. No. Don’t you think that’s what it is?

[00:40:43] Sarah: I need everybody to stop doing that. I need everybody to stop deciding that we need 15 practices to justify the extracurricular studio price, and we need 100 awards to justify the school program, and we need long-ass movies to justify the thing, and we need giant servings to justify the restaurant prices. The perpetual growth is cancer, everybody. Just Be cool. Curate and just tell me you’re charging me for the curation. Damn

[00:41:13] Beth: I would have paid $20 more at Mandalorian and Grogu for 50% fewer monster fights. I would have written a check so fast.

[00:41:20] Sarah: I ‘m not Paying anything ever, much less 50% more for a Star Wars movie. I said what I said.

[00:41:27] Beth: I’m excited to hear what you all think of these movies, especially if you would like to just talk about how good Project Hail Mary is. I am wide open for that discussion. And we hope that you enjoy your weekend, and we hope that your summer is off to a good start.

[00:41:40] Sarah: And to the movies and the summer and the America 250 of it all, one of the other exciting things happening in our America 250 summer is that our beloved listener Norma is going to do a patriotic-themed film club in July. It’s going to be so fun. I can’t wait to see what movies she picks.

[00:41:56] Beth: What you know is that Norma is never going to waste your time.

[00:41:59] Sarah: No.

[00:41:59] Beth: Never, ever is Norma going to waste your time.

[00:42:00] Sarah: She is exacting when it comes to cinema, guys.

[00:42:04] Beth: In all things, norma is not going to waste your time. So you can trust her. Community is built on trust. We would love for you to join us there. You can find all the links to do so in the show notes. We’ll be back here with you next Tuesday. 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.

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That energy seems to be in the air as Memorial Day unofficially kicks off summer. Pope Leo has distilled his thoughts on the dignity of humans. The public at-large seems to be with him on the indecency and foolishness of war. Universities and schools are changing policies in light of lessons learned, and people running for office are asking what we want our literal lessons to be.

Sarah and I discuss the headlines and the lessons we’re learning about school as parents and from teachers. Then, we end in the only way a podcast kicking off summer should: with an ode to ice cream. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Texas Senate Primary

• Iran War

• Pope Leo and Human Dignity

• Tulsi Gabbard Resigns

• Education Policy

• Outside of Politics: Ice Cream

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Episode Topic Resources

• Full Text of ‘Magnifica Humanitas’: Read Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical (National Catholic Register)

• Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power - (Vatican News)

• Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s remarks on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas”

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

• M.C. v. Curriculum Associates (EdTech Law Center)

• The Education Crisis Nobody Wants to Fix (Pantsuit Politics)

• The Highest Elected Teacher in Kentucky (Pantsuit Politics)

• Lawsuit targets i-Ready maker over student data privacy concerns (The Educators Room)

• iReady class action: a federal suit says the app your school requires is harvesting your child’s data (Law News)

• Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result: Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? (The Atlantic)

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:31] Beth: And this is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:33] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We hope everybody had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. Since Memorial Day is considered the unofficial beginning of summer, we thought we would catch up on some headlines and talk about what we’re paying attention to this summer. And also because we know some of you have weeks of school left, we’re also going to do a little school year wrap-up, talk about education ideas. Some policies are getting a lot of attention in higher ed and beyond. And then Outside of Politics, we’re going to talk about summer’s favorite food, ice cream.

[00:01:10] Beth: I like that you just declared it summer’s favorite food. There is no debate to be had about what summer’s favorite food is. It’s ice cream.

[00:01:12] Sarah: If there was a vote, do you think anything would get close?

[00:01:17] Beth: I don’t think so. I think this is a rare moment of consensus for us, and I like it.

[00:01:22] Sarah: Yeah. Come on, guys.

[00:01:24] Beth: This summer also is America 250, which you know we are all in on here at Pantsuit Politics. We have so many exciting things planned for you. The big finale is our live show in Minneapolis because spending time with people in person from all over the country who love their country enough to listen to a political podcast and then show up in person to hang out with each other is the best way we could think of to wrap up this occasion. So if you would like to join us for our first ever Spice Conference, as we call the Spice Cabinet our premium members, or come early for the executive producer retreat, especially if you want a hotel room with only other Pantsuit Politics listeners, we would love for you to get in on that action quickly. June 12th is our deadline to register for those events. After that, those rooms will go back to the hotel. We genuinely want to sell that hotel out so it is just Pantsuit Politics listeners. We’ve done that before in Santa Fe, and it was a really cool experience. So the link is in the show notes. You have until June 12th to make up your mind, and what are you waiting for? It’s going to be amazing.

[00:02:29] Sarah: I feel pretty confident saying you’re not going to regret coming and spending this weekend with other Pantsuit Politics listeners.

[00:02:35] Beth: Absolutely.

[00:02:35] Sarah: I don’t think I’m overpromising there. I really don’t. So come join us. All right. Next up, let’s talk about the summer. Beth, did you know it’s a super summer? I told the News Brief people this morning.

[00:02:53] Beth: I didn’t know until I watched your News Brief, and I was very excited because you know I love summer.

[00:02:59] Sarah: I know. It’s not my favorite season. I still found it exciting. If you have not heard, Memorial Day was the earliest it can be in the calendar, and Labor Day is the latest it can be in the calendar. So America’s 250 is a giant, big summer palooza on the calendar already. I really find that delightful.

[00:03:18] Beth: I do too. It’s like the universe is encouraging us here.

[00:03:21] Sarah: Lean into the summer energy. Okay. The first thing we need to talk about with big summer energy is to alert everyone that we are recording this episode on Tuesday, May 26th, before we know the results of the Texas GOP runoff for the Senate seat held by John Cornyn, who is being challenged by Ken Paxton, who most very recently received the endorsement of one Donald J. Trump.

[00:03:51] Beth: And I do not believe that Ken Paxton would have received the endorsement of one Donald J. Trump were the numbers already not tilting in his favor. So I will be very surprised if Ken Paxton is not the winner of that primary, but we’ll talk about it on Friday.

[00:04:05] Sarah: I don’t know if it’s strategic. It sounded like from the reporting that he just got real mad because they wouldn’t fire the parliamentarian. Is that what you read? That’s what I read.

[00:04:13] Beth: He does get a bee in his bonnet on the regular and just make up a new thing. I was reading this summary of his presidency so far, and the word whim kept coming up. And I thought, that’s right.  That’s what it is.

[00:04:25] Sarah: My favorite part of this was the reporting that he felt like the United States Senate was getting in his way, and I thought, “Wow, are you on a different page than the rest of us if you think this particular United States Senate is standing in your way.”

[00:04:47] Beth: Would that they were, mr president.

[00:04:49] Sarah: Would that they were.

[00:04:52] Beth: That is the Constitutional design.

[00:04:55] Sarah: I do have another breaking reporting before we get into the bigger weekend headlines that I did want to discuss with you. Did you see that he’s heading back to the doctor again?

[00:05:04] Beth: I did.

[00:05:06] Sarah: For the third time.

[00:05:06] Beth: Don’t worry. It’s just a normal routine check-in. That’s what I’m told.

[00:05:12] Sarah: But it’s not routine. It’s more than routine. This is the third one since he was sworn in. And why are there always dental visits? What’s the dental visits about?

[00:05:22] Beth: I have sympathy. I’ve had some dental issues this year. It’s very unpleasant.

[00:05:25] Sarah: Fair.

[00:05:26] Beth: It does take a lot of time. Feels like a part-time job when you have dental issues.

[00:05:29] Sarah: Okay. I don’t know. I have some questions. I don’t plan on them ever getting answered.

[00:05:35] Beth: Right.

[00:05:36] Sarah: But I do have some questions.

[00:05:38] Beth: I have only questions. I have only questions about pretty much everything coming out of the White House. I’m told this visit is routine. I was assured this weekend that the war was wrapping up.

[00:05:46] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:05:47] Beth: Just who knows?

[00:05:48] Sarah: I think what we do know is that the word ceasefire has lost all meaning. It means nothing. It means nothing between Israel and Lebanon. It means nothing between Ukraine and Russia. And it certainly means nothing between Iran and the United States. So they’re negotiating. I think they were literally on their way to Qatar to take out this next round, which from both sides sounded like it was getting... It had some movement. I’m trying to think of the lowest I can set the expectations.

[00:06:18] Beth: I was Excited to hear where it was getting because I never really understood that. It was getting.

[00:06:23] Sarah: Yeah, I don’t think it was getting anywhere, but I do think it was moving. And then I wake up this morning on Tuesday, and we’re striking in “self-defense” against missile sites. I think the reporting from Central Command-- I don’t know if reporting’s the right word. The story from Central Command is that the Iranians were laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and so the United States, we launched strikes. And now, of course, the Iranians are accusing the United States of violating the ceasefire. They’re threatening retaliation. Who knows what will have happened by the time people are listening to this episode in a mere 24 hours or less.

[00:06:58] Beth: All weekend as I took in this reporting about the negotiations, I thought, “I don’t know what’s supposed to be different about this.”

[00:07:05] Sarah: No.

[00:07:06] Beth: To me, what the word ceasefire means is global leaders now understand that war is unpopular. People don’t want it. People want it to stop, and so they are churning out information to say, “Yeah, it’s totally in the process of stopping.” At some point it will stop.

[00:07:23] Sarah: It’s maybe stopping at some point in the future.

[00:07:25] Beth: But we are currently not at that point.

[00:07:28] Sarah: Yeah. It just feels like spin. It just feels like they know it’s unpopular, so we got to spin it, but really what we’re talking about is intractable conflicts and quagmires that never go anywhere. Although, I will say I felt that way about Ukraine and Russia, and now I’m out here reading reports about the collapse of Putin’s rule. Could that happen?

[00:07:53] Beth: I don’t know.

[00:07:53] Sarah: I mean, he’s losing. That’s for sure. Just in case you’ve been wrapped up, as you should be, with the Iranians, the situation between Ukraine and Russia has progressed. It is going somewhere, and it’s nowhere good for Vladimir Putin.

[00:08:09] Beth: I just don’t know if it’s anywhere good for Ukraine either. That’s the problem. These things are moving, but they are not moving, in my view, in a win-lose direction. It is just that once war has started, everybody loses. How much are you going to lose? How publicly are you going to lose? We’re seeing that with Iran. If there is a deal to be had here, it is a worse deal for the United States than what was in place before the bombing started. And I just think that’s going to be the lesson everywhere.

[00:08:38] Sarah: Yeah. And I think that I don’t know if that’s going to get across to the American people. His polling would suggest that it is coming across that like we started something with no plan, on a whim, with no actual long-term strategy in place, and it has made us worse off. And even if I feel like the stock market is rising and falling less on every single statement he says, right? It’s like everybody’s catching on that we’re coming out worse, no matter what.

[00:09:11] Beth: If we’re thinking about what am I watching for this summer, one of the things I’m watching for is what lessons are people learning. Are people becoming more apathetic? Is this more evidence that nothing matters? Or are people taking this information and feeling motivated by it?

[00:09:28] Sarah: I felt like the reason Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, landed so strongly from my worldview, from my perspective, was because it was finally somebody saying, “We can learn. We can lead towards a solution. We can say just war no longer applies. This is what we’ve learned. We’ve learned that humanity is never better off, and unless it is in a situation of intense self-defense, then don’t think that there’s some justification for taking these actions that make everybody worse.” And that was like the small part on war. The whole thing was really about artificial intelligence, and it just felt like such Leadership. That’s the word I keep coming back to. It felt like leadership in a place where people struggle to learn lessons because I think we have to learn them collectively. And if you don’t have somebody leading the conversation in a way to say, “We should learn, we should grow, we should get better, things should get better for everybody,” then it does make it hard to learn a lesson. It does make it hard to take, have a takeaway. And so when somebody like Pope Leo comes along and says, “I will lead us to a place where we can come to conclusions, where we can learn, where we can improve the situation for everybody,” God, it just feels like a warm hug.

[00:10:49] Beth: It’s the opposite of nothing matters. This document connects war and artificial intelligence and an apology for a role in legitimizing slavery and all kinds of other things with the thread of human dignity. It is you matter. You matter, and we matter, and all of us matter. I was really moved by a quote in one of the articles I read about this coming together, when someone said, “Hey, we’re really concerned that so many people believe that so few people matter right now.

[00:11:20] Sarah: Yes.

[00:11:21] Beth: So many people believe that only a handful of tech executives and the politicians who could regulate them and the people who can fund them, they are the only voices that count now. And here comes this document that does what the best of the church does, of any church, right? Any church, religion at its best is saying, “All people matter. All people deserve dignity, not because of what they create or produce or facilitate, but just because they are.” And that message coming out so clearly in this modern form, strategic form... you can see the Pope learning lessons in a whole bunch of different ways about how the church can speak and be heard. It’s really encouraging.

[00:12:05] Sarah: The only thing I don’t know is 42,000 words is what I would consider a modern form in our time of tiny attention spans. But I thought the way he took this, the past, “I’m going to speak to the past. I’m not going to offer you a vision of the future without acknowledging the failures of the past.” This man. I’m going to be Catholic before it’s over. I’m just telling you now. I’m on my way. So the way he articulated over and over again-- because to me what’s special about it is not just we all matter, but he’s saying “This is why we matter, because we are creations of God, because we all contain this divine spark.” So it’s not just that I’m, like, offering this universal, approved by everybody. I think the way he balances these are the values of the church, this is why they matter to everybody, but we do have values, and maybe you don’t agree with all of them. Maybe you don’t agree that there’s a spark of the divine in every human being, but we do, and that’s where we’re finding the structure and the values and the foundational principles to offer both a new and better understanding of the past and where we failed, and a new and better understanding of the future, because it does matter, and this cynical nihilism is not making anybody happier in the present, much less in the future.

[00:13:27] Beth: I read a book a few years ago about young people and faith, and the book talked about how young people in particular desire the specificity of faith. They desire, “We believe this.”

[00:13:39] Sarah: Yep.

[00:13:40] Beth: You don’t have to believe it, and you don’t have to agree with us, but this is what we believe. So I agree with you that it’s interesting to see that thread come through in this document. He’s not trying to talk to the whole world in terms of the teachings that animate his thoughts, but he is trying to start a conversation for the whole world.

[00:13:58] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:13:59] Beth: Which is another opportunity that I hope lots of denominations and faiths see this and chime in. Here’s our perspective, and here is what’s different. Let’s have an argument about it even among the world’s great religions. AI is worth having that argument over.

[00:14:15] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:14:15] Beth: And I love that he started it and reminded people that those arguments can go somewhere. I love that he had an executive from Anthropic there. Let’s argue. Let’s do it. And I think that it answers a call that you hear from some people in Silicon Valley. We shouldn’t be the only people thinking about this. The best policy on AI I’ve seen so far came from a church board because the church said, “These are our principles. Okay, given these principles, here’s where AI can be used. Here’s where it should not be. Here’s how we’re going to keep having conversations as the technology changes and as we change.” That’s what I’m looking for everywhere. That’s the energy I need.

[00:14:58] Sarah: Yeah, because I feel like he didn’t just start it. He’s leading it. This is not just an opening volley, right? This is like I’m coming to play. I’ve thought about this. I have 42,000 words on it. This is not like I didn’t fire off a Facebook post about my generalized thoughts. This is a careful outline of our foundational principles and what we think and are advocating for should come next. And to me what was so stark is him coming out, leading this conversation, especially because of what you just articulated about young people, in contrast to another gunman. A very young 21-year-old gunman at the White House. And man, it barely made the headlines. That this young person came to the White House, opened fire, lost his life, a bystander got shot, and Trump was in the White House, and it just everybody’s like “Huh, there we go, another person who feels like their only option is to go open fire on this president.”

[00:15:59] Beth: Here’s what came to mind for me when I saw this story. When I was in law school, I took a business law class where the professor, who I disliked so much that I can’t even remember his name now, I have mostly erased him from my memory. But the first day of class, he held up our textbook, which is just a whole bunch of cases that we’re going to read about business law, and he said, “This is a book of failures. If you are a good business lawyer, your clients should never end up in front of a court, especially not the Supreme Court. Your job is to see around corners and prevent this from happening.” That was a great way to start our class.

[00:16:33] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:16:33] Beth: As I read this story, I thought, “Are we starting to see a book of failures for the Secret Service?” This gunman was known to them, that’s my understanding.

[00:16:41] Sarah: Oh.

[00:16:43] Beth: The fact that this keeps happening over and over again, there are some unique things about President Trump, but there have always been people who have mental illnesses, who attach to public figures in destructive ways. There have always been groups who have wished to assassinate a president. This is happening too frequently, and I am curious about whether we’ll ever get transparent reporting on that, or congressional investigation, or something to help us understand why this keeps happening, why they keep getting this close, why we aren’t in front of this more.

[00:17:18] Sarah: I think that’s true, and also I do think there is something different about right now to the artificial intelligence of it all, and the war of it all, that people feel particularly powerless. And to what you said about they think only certain people matter and certain people have impact. And when that is the narrative, and I do think that’s the narrative right now, then it’s not surprising to me that particularly young men feel that the only way to bring control back into their hands is violence. That’s not new. That’s also something Pope Leo could speak on. That’s not a new thing. And I do think just because of the economy, the job market, the institutional struggle, the global conflict, and definitely artificial intelligence, people feel so lost and out of control. Now, to the law enforcement or intelligence failure of it all, I am worried that these are escalating. And here we have Tulsi resigning, I’m sure after taking a sledgehammer to our intelligence apparatus. And it’s one thing when you have lone gunmen going after the president. It’s another thing when you have global conflicts, loss of allies, increased enemies, and I’m just not really sure anybody has their hands on the wheel when it comes to national security and intelligence. I’m a little concerned about that

[00:18:55] Beth: I was just reading about how the president does not have a lot of respect for our cybersecurity infrastructure in the federal government because instead of thinking about the function of the government in protecting water supplies and electrical grids and banks and so much of the infrastructure that makes the country run, he thinks about CISA, that particular agency, as associated with the 2020 election.

[00:19:25] Sarah: Hot take, who does he have respect for in the federal government?

[00:19:30] Beth: Fair. There are so many spots that you can point to within the intelligence and security space that have been significantly and purposefully degraded under this president, even as the need for that expertise has increased substantially because of this president.

[00:19:50] Sarah: I do believe, Tulsi, that she is resigning because her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis, for what it’s worth.

[00:19:56] Beth: Absolutely, and I’m really sorry about that. And I’ve seen some very sweet photos of the two of them. And whatever you think about her as qualified for or effective in this role, and I have strong feelings on both points, it’s a horrible thing to have happen in a marriage and to be coping with, and I hope that they are able to really enjoy this time together.

[00:20:17] Sarah: But I think to the what we’re paying attention to this summer, I just think we’re getting to a point in this particular presidential term where we are starting to see the fallout of the whims. And I don’t just mean in his polling numbers, right? I think that we are going to see the stress this has created on the federal bureaucracy play out in some real ways. I think we will probably end the summer with some more cabinet resignations or “joining the private sector.” Because as the fallout of his decisions continues, he’s going to start blaming people, and he’s going to keep lashing out, and I think we should all just expect that.

[00:21:08] Beth: And in terms of what I’m looking for over the summer, especially going into the midterm elections and as 2028 really takes off, for the past year, there’s been a lot of discussion about what we can learn from Trump in terms of campaigning and reaching people and drawing in constituencies who typically are apathetic at best about politics. The governance failures of those whims tell me that we need something completely different. We should not take those lessons. That those are the wrong lessons. Maybe they’re helpful lessons for campaigning, but they are not helpful lessons for governing. And so how do we all integrate that in our understanding as we go vote this November and two years from now? I’m very interested to see what develops.

[00:22:02] Sarah: Up Next, let’s talk about our education system. Do a little check-in as some of us are already out of school and some of us have a couple weeks left. My high-level take as a parent in the K through 12 system this school year is that it felt like to me the shift went from Phones are the problem. because I think there’s enough sort of phone policy now, and it’s widespread enough. Plus we’re getting some studies that taking the phones away completely doesn’t really change that much that quickly, to more of an emphasis on the ed tech and the software. We have the big class action suit against i-Ready for a lack of data security. I felt like I read a lot about what are these doing? Are these helping? To me, that felt like the focus that we’re really starting to get some sustained attention on, post-COVID, we rolled out all these computers. What did that shift? The software, is it actually delivering on what it’s promised? Or is it just a marketing machine that sweeps up everybody in its wake and doesn’t actually deliver? That, to me, felt like the macro trend that I felt this school year.

[00:23:18] Beth: That’s where a lot of my attention has been, too. Part of that is because I have a fifth grader, and I think fifth grade is a place where you can really see ed- tech failing to deliver on that promise.

[00:23:29] Sarah: Yep.

[00:23:29] Beth: And it’s more of a stressor and a check the box. I have a freshman in high school. I’ve noticed a big difference in her commitment to and interest in school now that she has a little bit less of that ed- tech every single day and has more classes that just feel like classes. And there are group projects, and they read whole books and talk about them. I didn’t realize how much had been missing for her at school until she started to get some of it in high school. So that’s been exciting to see and sad at the same time because I think about how many of those types of experiences I was having really third through eighth grade that she hasn’t had yet. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that as a parent, too.

[00:24:15] Sarah: And it feels like even from our conversation with Rahm Emanuel and all his ideas, that it’s coming back into a policy conversation. I feel like post-COVID, everybody kind of decided like we’re not up for any big changes right now. We’re good. But now, especially as we move into the more 2028 primary space, we had Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman on, she talked a great deal about education. It feels like it’s not just about individual parents thinking wait, or individual school systems like what’s working, what’s not, but that there’s more of a national conversation about what actual policy changes do we want to make? What are we still debating as far as like school choice or charter schools? What are we up for having a conversation? What do we want to have a conversation about around teacher pay or teachers unions? It just feels like all of that’s like coming back online as far as actual policy.

[00:25:30] Beth: The sense that I have about that is that, one, it’s exciting because it means it’s a priority. And two, it’s extremely complicated. And I sense from teachers generally in our audience-- I’ve spent a lot of time with teachers this year for More to Say. I sense among teachers real trepidation about it because it seems like wherever we are, teachers get left holding the bag.

[00:25:57] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:58] Beth: And I think what I’m coming to realize in a deeper way is that you go into teaching because you want to be the CEO of your classroom. You go in thinking, “I’m a professional. I have a passion for learning myself and a passion for sharing learning with others.” You don’t go into teaching to be told, “Now, every week your students need to complete five DreamBox lessons. And all of your plans for the week need to be uploaded in Canvas or Google Classroom or whatever, so that if any student misses, they can just hop on and see what they missed and get caught right back up.” The role of the teacher it feels like no matter what set of policy objectives we’re aiming at, is continually minimized to just be like one cog in this giant wheel. And until we fix that, I don’t think the wheels all spin together and move us somewhere.

[00:26:59] Sarah: Here’s the tough part. Now, the teachers in our audience, I totally agree. I think the teachers in our audience largely came to teaching as a vocation, as a calling. They have a purpose. That is not my experience with all teachers. I think there’s a lot of teachers that take the job for a lot of complicated reasons that aren’t necessarily vocation. And I don’t think we have a good system to acknowledge that reality, right? And I think that’s why you hear more and more conversations around teacher pay and teacher performance and teachers unions because the people who are laying it all on the field are like, “Oh my God, you got to be kidding me.” And also, if you have, as I do, very close friends who are teachers, nobody knows that better than teachers; that some of their coworkers are in fact not leaving it all on the field. You know what I’m saying? And also they shouldn’t be called to leave it all on the field. They can also just get paid like for the professionals they are. Hell. And I think what’s so clear to me as this these conversations start to bubble back up, including with our episode around Rahm Emanuel, what is so true about education, which there are just so many constituencies. It’s not like anybody who rolled into the discussion around Rahm Emanuel’s policy ideas, I didn’t look at anybody and be like, “Oh my God, give me a break.” Even if I disagreed with them, even I was like, “No, I think that’s not quite right,” it’s not like any comment I read I was like, “Oh, come on,” like you’re reducing this in a really simplistic way. You’re like, “Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m not sure that should steer the ship, but it’s not a bad point.” You know what I’m saying? It’s so exceedingly complicated. There are so many constituencies. What we’re trying to achieve is hard. And also taking a year to figure out it’s hard. I’ll never forget. I was in an SBDM meeting one time, and they were talking about ed- tech, and they were talking about this new math curriculum, and the company tells us it takes one to two years to really get it working and to see the results. And I’m like what about the kids who took it the one to two years? You’re unwrapping, man? They don’t get to do third grade math again. So just all of that is so difficult, and you hear that in the policy conversation. It’s not like somebody rolls in and is like, “This is easy.” Everything with education is hard.

[00:29:12] Beth: Which makes me wonder, how do you successfully talk about it when you’re running for office? I think that someone like a Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman has an advantage built in because she was a teacher. So she at least has the credibility. I’ve been there. I’ve walked in your shoes. I’m thinking about you, I promise. I promise I’m thinking about what actually happens in classrooms in a way that many people are not capable of thinking about what actually happens in classrooms. If you don’t have that credibility and you’re still trying to elevate the issue, you are someone like Rahm Emanuel, this is important to me. I believe we’ve failed around it as a party or as a country. I think both things are true. How can you discuss it knowing that there are all these constituents, that people have a good point, that the purpose of school is different family to family, even within the same school district? When I hear conversations about grade inflation, it’s been in the headlines this week, conversations about what standardized tests mean and what their role should be, I realize I’m just in a different place on what school is for than a lot of people, even in my community. Because a lot of people in my community still look at school as the on-ramp to career. And because my career has been so weird, and I do a thing that wasn’t a thing when I was in school, I think about school as collecting a whole lot of skills, building foundational critical thinking, and then you get out into the world, and the world’s going to change, and you have the capacity to change with it.

[00:30:51] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:30:51] Beth: But that’s just not where a lot of parents are. And so designing any kind of proposal around schools, you’re supposed to begin with the end in mind, but we all have different ends in mind.

[00:31:01] Sarah: Yeah. Listening to Rahm Emanuel, I think both things were true. One, he is passionate about it. He believes it’s the most important thing, and I agree with him. And two, he hasn’t had a kid in the system in a while, and that’s also clear. And I don’t know if it should be required that you’ve had a kid in the system. Maybe the clearest vision about what will work is somebody who has a little distance, who can say “I see you’re caught up emotionally in this because it’s your time and it’s your kid and everything but sometimes to get to a compromise, to get to a negotiated place, you have to have a little distance.” And I don’t know what the answer is there. I know what I’m looking for is just people who are talking about it, who are acknowledging we’re not where we should be. I agree. I think the career readiness has gone too far, and we’ve lost the plot that a functioning democracy depends on an educated citizenry, period. And I don’t mean educated to make sure you make the most money. I mean educated that you’re a learned, knowledgeable, wise person with a base understanding of science, the scientific method, history, literature, and math. And I do think that’s another thing that started happening. You heard these conversations around education this year that were like, “What are we doing?” Especially around teachers. What else could we ask them to be? Security guards? Social workers? Psychologists? Behavioral specialists? What about actually teaching? And I think that kind of breakthrough... and I think this is true in lots of things, in lots of ways, but I think education is definitely one of them. Higher ed has lost the capacity to lead the way because it is so consumed with its own market and institution and institutional failures. I think institutions of higher ed in particular should be leading the way on policy and strategy and thinking around education, and I think they’re getting there. That’s another thing I saw this year that I was encouraged by. As a person who’s about to send a child to college, I pay very close attention to higher education trends. And you have the study from Yale. I’m not saying it’s perfect, this report on what the changes need to be. You have Harvard voting to stop with the everybody gets an A. It does feel like there is some energy around acknowledging that higher ed is also not in a great place and has some changes to make and has some improvements to be working towards, and I think that was really encouraging to me as well.

[00:33:31] Beth: What I think is really important about naming that about higher ed, even though every kid is not going to go through higher ed, is that you can’t just talk about K-12 without talking about all the things that happen around it. So, for example, I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about kids with disabilities, and especially for people whose children have severe disabilities that require lots of therapies and lots of support systems, school is the only place we’re providing that right now. More fundamentally, school is the only place in society where we speak with a clear voice to say, “These children are seen and valued, and they matter, and we owe them these supports.” So when you start talking about educational changes without thinking about kids who need that extra support at school, you face a lot of opposition because school is the place where that’s happening. If you want to make some changes that would conflict with, take resources from, intrude on, or otherwise impact this enormous and itself incredibly diverse population of people, then I think you also need to be talking about where else that happens. Where else do those therapies come into play? How else as a society do we say this child has dignity and worth, and we owe this child these services and these supports and every opportunity to participate fully in society? But we don’t do a good job of that anywhere but school right now. And that puts even more pressure on the teacher to wear a million different hats. And more pressure on the administrator to stretch every dollar as far as it will possibly go. More pressure on the district. The pressure just keeps adding up because we keep doing it through this one mechanism, and I think that one mechanism is showing the results of that, not just with respect to disabilities, but all the places where we do it. So building more support around the school will enable the school to be a better school.

[00:35:33] Sarah: And maybe just the theme is we’re looking for leadership. If it comes from Pope Leo, great. If it comes from candidates presenting new and exciting ideas around problems we all know are an issue, wonderful. If it’s higher education stepping up and saying, “Hey, we have thought leaders and scholars here, and here are our ideas about what can come next,” even better. because we have an absence of leadership in the White House, and so the more places where people step up and exert and show leadership in other institutions, the better. Beth, we recently talked about articles that just stay with us. Article that stays with me is this piece in The Atlantic a couple years ago that was basically like, ice cream is good for you and nutritionists don’t want to talk about it because they really can’t explain it. But there is a decent amount of science that ice cream isn’t that good for you.

[00:36:44] Beth: I loved that article. I think about it all the time too. And something about it just feels right to me.

[00:36:51] Sarah: If you think about it long enough especially as a mother of a diabetic. And they talk about this in the article. A lot of this makes sense. Because it is so high in fat and protein with the sugar, and that is just not something you get in a lot of sugary foods. But it changes the game tremendously. Tremendously. And even as my eating has evolved as I’ve gotten older and I can’t eat the things I used to because they make me nauseous or they crash me out too hard- like a donut. I don’t feel that around ice cream. Ice cream does not make me feel like that. Now, weirdly, milkshakes do, and I don’t know why. We have nutrition scientists in our audience. Can someone explain why the ice cream is okay, but the milkshake makes me want to puke? That would be helpful to me.

[00:37:37] Beth: And I will say with the ice cream, I got to eat it before 4:00 PM.

[00:37:40] Sarah: Okay.

[00:37:40] Beth: You know what I mean? I can’t eat ice cream late in the day.

[00:37:43] Sarah: Yeah, no you’re not allowed to eat until 10:00.

[00:37:46] Beth: Then I really start to feel bad. I won’t sleep well. But before 4:00, a little scoop of ice cream gives me a boost.  It does.

[00:37:53] Sarah: Listen, my peak summer experience, I like to eat ice cream on the move. Okay? So ice cream is not my first dessert. If there’s like ice cream in my freezer in November, it’s not going anywhere. Okay? It’s just going to chill there. But if I’m traveling somewhere, if we’re on a summer vacay, and we’re anywhere. I don’t care where we are. Every afternoon I’m like, “Let’s go get a little ice cream con.” Ice cream cone as we walk around. Ice cream on a boardwalk. Ice cream in a city. Ice cream on the beach. I don’t care. Am I walking? Is it hot? I want to have an ice cream cone in my hand. Do you understand?

[00:38:27] Beth: I do. I understand that part of your comments, but I do not understand the ice cream chilling in your freezer because it is my dessert of choice. It is the thing I would rather have than anything else. So tell me, what flavor are you getting for your ice cream walk?

[00:38:42] Sarah: Okay, because of the soft foods which is probably why sometimes I will not search out an ice cream, and especially if there’s if like a vanilla ice cream’s in my freezer, I don’t care. So my ice cream needs to have something to chew on in it. So Dairy Queen, obviously we love the Dairy Queen. In the South, we’re devotees. So my Dairy Queen

[00:39:04] Beth: What’s better than Blizzard? Come on.

[00:39:07] Sarah: A Blizzard with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And I try other things. Now wait. I will say this. In the summer, sometimes they do a Drumstick Blizzard with chocolate covered pieces of cone in it. And that I just cannot. It’s how I also feel about the Blue Bells that had-- they do a Kentucky Derby one that you can never find it anymore, that had a pie piece, like pie crust pieces in it. There’s something about if you take the container, like a pie crust, an ice cream cone that’s like super sweet, and you put it in the ice cream. Put it in my veins

[00:39:46] Beth: First of all, I think a drumstick is a near perfect food. I love a drumstick. You get some peanut butter on there, I’m thrilled.

[00:39:52] Sarah:  Have you had the drumstick Blizzard?

[00:39:55] Beth: Yes, I’ve had the drumstick Blizzard. It’s so good. Very good. I struggle to expand my Blizzard repertoire because I love an M&M Blizzard so much.

[00:40:04] Sarah: You just go back.

[00:40:04] Beth: You talk about crunch in your ice cream, the M&M Blizzard is bringing the crunch. It’s so delicious. It’s the perfect amount of chocolate. It is really one of my favorite treats of all time.

[00:40:16] Sarah: Okay, so I’m a vanilla base with a chocolate add in. I do not in fact enjoy chocolate ice cream.

[00:40:24] Beth: I like chocolate ice cream, but for my Blizzard I want a vanilla base with the M& Ms.

[00:40:28] Sarah: It goes beyond my Blizzards. I do like a Ben & Jerry’s, and I like a Ben & Jerry’s that has a vanilla base. I love the Phish Food. That’s one of my favorite Ben & Jerry flavors. If I’m, like, in a ice cream parlor, I will get a cookies and cream. If I’m in somewhere where there’s gelato, Europe, I’m doing a stracciatella where they mix the chocolate in and it hardens. But I’m almost always a vanilla base with a chocolate add-in. Almost always.

[00:40:57] Beth: Interesting. So if I am in an ice cream parlor, I’m getting butter pecan. And I know this is controversial. I know this is like coming out and saying I love Werther’s Originals in my purse.

[00:41:08] Sarah: Listen, but Nicholas’ s is rum raisin. You seem like a completely beautiful, normal person compared to rum raisin being your choice.

[00:41:16] Beth: Thank you very much. I think butter pecan is almost impossible to do well in the grocery store container.

[00:41:25] Sarah: Okay.

[00:41:25] Beth: But from a parlor, I think it’s the best. I just love it.

[00:41:28] Sarah: I’ve only ever had butter pecan from the grocery store.

[00:41:32] Beth: Then you’re doing it wrong. I’m sorry.

[00:41:34] Sarah: Does Graeter’s have a butter pecan?

[00:41:38] Beth: Graeter’s does. Now, at Graeter’s I don’t get the butter pecan because Graeter’s pours the chocolate in while it’s spinning the ice cream, and so there are these enormous--

[00:41:47] Sarah: I love it so much.

[00:41:48] Beth: Unbelievably high-quality chunks of chocolate chip

[00:41:50] Sarah: Hot fudge is just next level. Next level. It’s so good

[00:41:54] Beth: So at Graeter’s I’m into the chocolate category. But UDF’s butter pecan, delicious. Every little local ice cream shop, I feel the butter pecan is much, much better than what you can buy at the grocery store.

[00:42:12] Sarah: Do you put chocolate on top of it?

[00:42:14] Beth: No.

[00:42:14] Sarah: Okay. I’m going to try it. I’ll try anything but once.

[00:42:18] Beth:  Just have some butter Pecan in a cone. It’s great.

[00:42:21] Sarah: Okay, because I really don’t think I’ve ever had butter pecan at an ice cream shop.

[00:42:27] Beth: And the farther south you go, the better it gets. You know what I’m saying?

[00:42:29] Sarah: I love pecans. Look, it’s my favorite nut. If a dessert has a pecan in it, I will eat it. I think they elevate literally everything.

[00:42:36] Beth: If you’re in South Carolina, you must get a butter pecan ice cream.

[00:42:39] Sarah: Okay. That makes sense to me, because praline adjacent. You know what I mean? Now, I have a couple times gotten... I was in Miami once in Little Havana, and I got this I don’t remember the name, but it was, like, a cookie jam mix-in. I still think about it. But I very rarely get a fruit ice cream.

[00:43:01] Beth: Yeah, I don’t want a fruit ice cream. I’m going to have a problem.

[00:43:04] Sarah: No. It’s just going to be chocolate. It’s going to be chocolate. And I don’t get sorbet either.

[00:43:08] Beth: No Cause again you can get a good sorbet. If you want a sorbet, you can go to the grocery store and get a good sorbet. You can make your own sorbet at home.

[00:43:17] Sarah: True.

[00:43:17] Beth: Super easy, pretty delicious and refreshing. If I’m buying ice cream where a human is scooping it for me, it’s just I have a different expectation for that than everywhere else.

[00:43:27] Sarah: That makes sense to me. If I’m in a parlor, I will often get-- even though my Blizzard item is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I almost never order a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in a like ice cream shop. I’m almost always getting some sort of cookie add-in. But here’s a weird one for you. I don’t like any sort of brownie add-in.

[00:43:50] Beth: I think that’s because you don’t like the things that are soft.

[00:43:52] Sarah: Yeah, it’s too mushy. So a cookie is real good, and sometimes I’ll get cookie dough. Do you remember how revolutionary chocolate chip cookie dough was in the beginning? Nicholas and I were talking about it the other day. Do you remember the first time you had it and you were like, “This is life-changing.”

[00:44:06] Beth: Yes. 100%. Have you seen the Instagram reels of people roasting cookie dough like a s’more over a fire?

[00:44:13] Sarah: Nicholas was talking about this, but I don’t know about that. Yeah. Now, and I do like a s’more Blizzard. I have found that sometimes when I go out of my comfort zone a little bit at DQ, I do like the ones that feature the marshmallow flavor. Even though I’m prone to like, “Ooh, that’s too sweet,” I don’t know. I kind of dig it.

[00:44:31] Beth: I don’t want marshmallow anywhere.

[00:44:33] Sarah: Really?

[00:44:34] Beth: I don’t.

[00:44:35] Sarah: Do you eat s’mores?

[00:44:35] Beth: Except in hot chocolate.

[00:44:36] Sarah: Wait, do you eat s’mores?

[00:44:38] Beth: That’s it. Don’t really like them.

[00:44:39] Sarah: Oh, no.

[00:44:41] Beth: I’ll do it as a novelty for the experience and the vibe.  But I don’t want it, no.

[00:44:47] Sarah: God, I love s’mores. Have you ever had a s’more with a Peep?

[00:44:50] Beth: Yes. And I like the crunchiness on the outside, but even with a Peep, I’m just like, it’s just marshmallow. I don’t really want that.

[00:44:58] Sarah: It’s just a take. You know I love a s’more.

[00:45:00] Beth: The person who asked us to talk about ice cream specifically wanted to know our feelings on mint chocolate chip.

[00:45:05] Sarah: I will eat it. I’m not opposed. Sometimes I’ll be like, “You know what? That sounds good.” But it’s real hit or miss.

[00:45:16] Beth: It is hit or miss because people try to make it almost medicinally mint.

[00:45:20] Sarah: Yeah, and it starts getting a little toothpasty.

[00:45:22] Beth: I don’t want that. Yeah, but I do love mint. Honestly, if there could only be one way that things smell in the world, I would choose mint. I love mint.

[00:45:31] Sarah: I’m just going to lean a lot more on chocolate and peanut butter. And you know what really goes together well? I, one time, in I believe it was Midway, Kentucky, had a piece of chocolate cake with cinnamon ice cream that I still think about.

[00:45:48] Beth: Oh, yeah.

[00:45:48] Sarah: Delicious.

[00:45:50] Beth: Yeah.

[00:45:50] Sarah: Delicious. Now, what is your take on the banana split?

[00:45:57] Beth: I rarely want a banana split because it’s too fruity.

[00:45:59] Sarah: Me Either. I don’t like a banana split.

[00:46:01] Beth: The form in which I most enjoy banana as it relates to ice cream is, one, a homemade banana ice cream is exceptional.

[00:46:09] Sarah: Okay.

[00:46:10] Beth: Okay? If somebody has an ice cream maker that actually involves ice and salt and not so much the electricity, spinning things, like the old-fashioned way of making ice cream with bananas, incredible. Love that. I also think that the Dippin’ Dots banana split is very good.

[00:46:27] Sarah: Dippin’ Dots is a great finale for this conversation. For those of you who do not know, Dippin’ Dots were invented in Paducah, Kentucky, and are still manufactured here to this day, which is one of our major claims to fame. So obviously I’m legally obligated to enjoy Dippin’ Dots. But even if I weren’t, I would still like them. Here’s the problem with people who do not have a deep and abiding relationship with Dippin’ Dots as those of us who live in Paducah and/or Kentucky do. People eat them too fast. A Dippin’ Dot needs to be, like, a lightly melted, guys. Maybe like 10 minutes. 10-ish minutes after you’ve gotten your Dippin’ Dots. But people eat them straight and they stick to your tongue, and it’s kind of like it’s too cold. Obviously, it’s ice cream of the future, it’s very cold. But like a lightly melted Dippin’ Dots cookie and cream at the water park is great. It’s great. It’s a great experience. You have to believe me.

[00:47:18] Beth: The Dippin’ Dot, I think, is for the water park, the amusement park, the walk and eat that you’re talking about.

[00:47:25] Sarah: Yes.

[00:47:25] Beth: You’re supposed to get some sun on them as you eating them.

[00:47:29] Sarah: Yep, just a little.

[00:47:29] Beth: And I think that the multi-flavor Dippin’ Dot is the way to go, because they’re so cold that if you just get a flavor, it doesn’t taste like much.

[00:47:37] Sarah: No.

[00:47:38] Beth: But I like the banana split because you’ve got some variety going on there.

[00:47:41] Sarah: And the cookies and cream, they put actual cookie chunks in there.

[00:47:44] Beth: There you go.

[00:47:45] Sarah: Just saying.

[00:47:45] Beth: I think the mint chocolate chip Dippin’ Dot is quite good.

[00:47:48] Sarah: It’s pretty good. Okay. Listen, I’m just so proud. We went to Japan and there was Dippin’ Dots for sale, okay?

[00:47:53] Beth: They’re fun.

[00:47:54] Sarah: They’re fun. It’s the ice cream of the future.

[00:47:57] Beth: For decades now. That’s okay.

[00:47:59] Sarah: It’s okay.

[00:47:59] Beth:  Who’s Counting?

[00:48:00] Sarah: It’s okay. All right, I’m excited. You know what we haven’t discussed? This is how we will end and open it up to the audience.

[00:48:08] Beth: Okay.

[00:48:09] Sarah: I’m always up for homemade ice cream recipes. So if someone has perfected the homemade ice cream, which is an entire just genre we have not discussed, I’m into it. That is actually where I do enjoy a fruit ice cream. I do think a homemade ice cream shines with a peach or a strawberry

[00:48:30] Beth: I think that’s true. I’m really having to bite my tongue right now because we do have a Ninja CREAMi. And that is a whole genre as well.

[00:48:37] Sarah: I want one of those and Nicholas won’t get me one because he doesn’t love me.

[00:48:40] Beth: Nicholas, you got to do it, my friend. You will never regret it. That is a whole genre to itself, too. I think that’s different than the homemade ice cream that I grew up eating.

[00:48:51] Sarah: I want to churn it. I want to hear the sound.

[00:48:53] Beth: The churning is a unique thing, yes. But the CREAMi, very good. Very enjoyable.

[00:48:58] Sarah: And it’s got to be a million times easier. You’re not dealing with rock salt.

[00:49:01] Beth: Correct. And it makes just a little bit so everybody just enjoys a little bit.

[00:49:06] Sarah: This is what I want.

[00:49:09] Beth: And you should have it.

[00:49:12] Sarah: Okay. All right, so I want the CREAMi recipes and I want the home-churned recipes. because you want the home-churned for a party. You’re having a barbecue.

[00:49:21] Beth: They are distinct, for sure. They’re very different.

[00:49:24] Sarah: We probably could just do a whole podcast series about ice cream, but I’ll try to tighten it up a little bit here. All right. I’m excited to hear from everybody. I hope everybody has enjoyed this episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are going to be sending more information about Minneapolis. We really want y’all to come. We want to sell out this hotel so we can all hang together and we don’t have any interlopers. 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.

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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.

Remember — we are here for you however you are celebrating America250! Don’t miss our full slate of celebratory treats for premium members":

Also, if you’re desperate to discuss the primary election results, check out our spicy bonus episode from this week.

Topics Discussed

• Cultural Consensus and Its Impact

• Art, Trust, and Marketing in the Digital Age

• Outside of Politics: Nonlove Songs

Episode Resources

• Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (Penguin Random House)

• Famesick by Lena Dunham (Penguin Random House)

• Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney (NPR)

• Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art by Rochelle Gurstein (Yale University Press)

• Publishing Confidential by Kathleen Schmidt

• LolaMarie Closet Cleanout

• The Feed Is Fake (Vulture)

• Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A Sets Record at $181.2M at Christie’s (ARTnews)

• Michael (2026 film) (Wikipedia)

• John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

• 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s — the jock jams/melody episode referenced by Beth (Apple Podcasts)

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:02] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. There was a convergence in the force this week. My 10-year-old daughter, Ellen, asked me randomly how books get on bestseller lists.

[00:00:12] Sarah: Great question, Ellen. No one knows.

[00:00:14] Beth: We had a great conversation about it. And then Sarah, you texted me about the Michael Jackson biopic and why those movies keep getting made. And this story from Vulture about clipping dominating social media has been living in my head. So today we’re going to put those pieces together to think about how the cultural consensus sausage gets made, which is related, I think, to election results. We talked about those on our Spicy Thursday episode on Substack. We needed some space to be very candid in that episode. So if you’d like to find that conversation, we will link it in the notes for you. But we’re going to put those pieces together here today in Outside of Politics. We’ll keep discussing music, but this time we’re going to answer a listener’s request to talk about songs we enjoy that are not about romantic love.

[00:00:58] Sarah: Yeah, we had to talk about the primary results on the Spicy because that’s a fucking open accepting zone. There had to be some cussing, all right. Also on Substack, we are kicking off our America 250 summer. We have relaunched Reimagining Citizenship, our 30-day e-book of meditations for people who want to celebrate a little more quietly. We have Beth’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party Kit and a Family Play Kit, all available to paid members on our Substack. Later in the summer, our beloved listener Norma is doing a special patriotic rendition of our film club. I cannot wait to see the lineup. The week of July 4th, we have all kinds of special themed premium shows, including news briefs from 1776 and Founding Father Karaoke. Everything except our very special guest coming on this show over July 4th is a part of our premium membership, and the link is in your podcast app. If you’ve been thinking about joining us in Minneapolis for the live show in August, June 12th is the deadline for hotel rooms at our first ever Spice Conference and executive producer retreat. So go check it all out. The link is in the show notes.

[00:02:10] Beth: We have so many ways for you to celebrate. You are not going to get spammed with any of those ways though because we do not use the kind of campaigns that we’re going to talk about today. So next up, let’s discuss what is behind popular consensus. Sarah, so Ellen says to me, “Mom, are you and Sarah’s books on the bestseller list?” And I said, “No, they are not, Ellen.” And she said, “Why not?” Which I thought was a great question, because they are good books.

[00:02:43] Sarah: First of all, which bestseller list, Ellen? Because there are some bestseller lists that are pretty straightforward, USA Today, Publishers Weekly. The bestseller list that everybody wants on, the New York Times bestseller list, is a black box, and does not seem to be driven by sales. It seems to be driven by Vibes? I can’t tell. It’s hard to tell. There’s a Substacker I follow that I will link to in the show notes who talks about the publishing industry, and every week it’s another “This doesn’t make any sense. This memoir was number one, and now it’s fallen to five. That’s not how books sell. They don’t rocket to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and then fall off the planet. Something is up here.” And this has been a long time beef with The New York Times bestseller list. And also, let me say, this bugs me. I hate it. And if I ever had a book on The New York Times bestseller list, you would see a reel of me crying about that. So that’s why they can get away with it.

[00:03:41] Beth: Yeah. I told Ellen that we have talked to lots of people about this because when you’re launching a book, there is a ton of conversation about how to successfully get those early sales, especially the pre-orders, and we learned that even those lists that are straightforward, just about numbers and copies sold, those numbers and copies sold get manipulated in all kinds of ways. Especially if you’re talking about political memoirs. You have PACs that order tons of books through different stores all over the country to try to make it look organic, but those PACs are absolutely trying to make sure that the book gets on The New York Times bestseller list so that they can claim that. There are so many tactics where someone is buying those raw copies for the placement, and what you’re not seeing is a representation of the quality of the books. It’s just how good was the campaign behind the book.

[00:04:34] Sarah: Now, I think books are such an interesting place to begin this because they’re still a physical product mostly, even with an e-book. We’re not talking about clicks. We’re not talking about likes. We’re not talking about even listens on Spotify, which I think are a little more ephemeral. We are talking about a physical copy in your hand, for the most part, that are being reported on these lists, and that’s still how most books sell, but they’re not as huge a percentage, I think, as some people would assume of book sales. People still want a copy. And so it’s this very interesting intersection of both online virality, because BookTok drives enormous sales when it comes to the publishing industry. When you are an author and you go to start to talk about your pitch, they want to know about your platform. It’s basically your job to sell the book. So there is this online component, but it’s also still driven massively by word of mouth. When you talk about Virginia Evans, the correspondent, that was a slow burn because it was getting recommended, because you know why? It’s a freaking great book. There’s a part of books that’s like podcasting to me a little bit. You can’t skim a novel and decide if it is deserving of the virality. You have to read the story. Is it going to hold up? Are people going to like it or not? Now, look, I don’t agree with all of the popular novels out. People love Remarkably Black Creatures. That’s a book that kind of had a slow burn and went viral. I hated that book. I didn’t hate it. That’s too harsh. I thought it was very predictable, and insulting to octopus, but that’s neither here nor there. And so there is this swirl around books. It’s still word of mouth. You still have to read it and decide if it was good, but it’s also you have BookTok, and you have platforms, and so it is really an intersection of what’s real, what’s fake, what’s an actual good product that’s being recommended by real people, and where is it like a black box of the New York Times deciding everybody should read Bell Bird and Strangers, which they should. It’s great. It’s well-written. That’s another interesting intersection of that; is that’s a great book, but also, they did six profiles of her. And magically, despite sales numbers that didn’t quite match, she’s at the top of the list.

[00:06:49] Beth: And there are major differences in fiction versus nonfiction, and the way it gets marketed, and who gets to write those books and why, and always, I think, within that community of readers, you’ve got people who want to have the sort of meta publishing conversation. A lot of the people who are writing Goodreads reviews have wanted to sell their own book forever and are mad about it, and so are kind of working things out. There’s just a lot going on around any kind of art, but I think it’s just really helpful and empowering to know when you look at a bestsellers list that it could represent any number of things. And it’s just better to me to have that information in my mind than to go in believing that it is just about sales or just a curated list of what the New York Times thinks are the best books right now.

[00:07:35] Sarah: And particularly in the memoir space I think this is another example of what is represented in this conversation when we talk about what’s a real recommendation, what’s real virality, what are people actually enjoying or whatever. Two memoirs right now that are at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and there’s some conversation about whether those are real numbers or not. I have read both of them. They are both excellent. Belle Barton’s Strangers is great. Lena Dunham’s Famesick is great. I love both of those books. I love Lena Dunham, well-established. I established my fandom on The Spicy a few weeks ago. And also, I don’t want to just read memoirs from rich people, okay? Educated was also great. I’m glad she made it through. I’m not sure she would now. I think the problem is not that people that are well-resourced or connected never have something to add and don’t make good art. It’s that they’re creating an ecosystem with what gets rewarded and what art gets made is chosen by people from a smaller and smaller group that can control this viral ecosystem. That’s why I’m not mad at BookTok because I think it pushes back on that well. But you talk about Reese or Jenna or all these book clubs or whose memoirs are getting written. It’s rich people. The first book in Jenna’s imprint or whatever is some woman... I’m sure the book’s good. I’m not saying the book’s not good, but it’s some woman her kids go to school with, which you can imagine what kind of private school economic ecosystem Jenna’s kids go to. So it’s like there’s this snaking its own tail thing that’s happening that’s at the same time it gets harder to break through once you’ve made it. That is perpetuating how much harder it is to get the art made in the first place.

[00:09:21] Beth: What you’re describing with memoir feels to me like the book world’s version of existing IP in the movie space or the biopics.

[00:09:28] Sarah: Yes.

[00:09:29] Beth: Because the biopics say essentially we already know this person’s famous. They already have a following. Some fandom, probably a multi-generational fandom, will show up for this movie, and if we’re going to invest a bunch to make this movie, we want to know that there’s an audience for it.

[00:09:44] Sarah: Yeah. And that’s another thing that it’s not simply in one direction. So many of these biopics get made, and I don’t think people know this. I don’t think this is widely understood. I think people get the IP thing. They want to extract as much from these IP. But so often with these biopics, if you’re Michael Jackson, if you are Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, particularly Bob Dylan, particularly Elvis, these catalogs have been sold. They exist as a commodity basically now that has to retain its value because the people who bought the catalog spent an enormous amount of money to purchase the rights to these songs. With Elvis, and this is widely reported, that Baz Luhrmann biopic which certainly hooked my small child at the time, and he was obsessed with Elvis for a year, and we listened to a lot of Elvis music and bought an Elvis record, was meant to maintain the value. I hope nobody yells at me. Some of these catalogs, I don’t care how much they paid for them. They deserve to fade. Elvis has two good songs, okay? He was an important pop icon historically, and I think he was innovative, and I get it. I know all the things. Listen, I’m well-versed in the Elvis universe. But Suspicious Minds is the only song I would choose to listen to over and over again from Elvis. There’s not this deep, rich catalog. It’s not like The Beatles, who don’t do a lot of that for a reason, they don’t have to. They’re The Beatles. But and I wouldn’t even make the same argument about Bob Dylan or Springsteen, but there is this sense of we have to keep pumping value into these. It’s not like we can only extract values from these people and these biopics, but we got to keep putting the value back in. We got to hook new fans. And I think it perpetuates how overwhelmed we all feel. Can’t we just let some music fade, man? I’m reading Ragtime right now with my America 250 Book Club, and I listen to the songs and i’m like this is an interesting moment of history because somebody’s not forcing Ragtime music down my throat all the time. It just faded, which is fine. Some things can just fade, man. We don’t have to listen to Elvis Presley’s music into 2200 or whatever, you know what I’m saying?

[00:11:51] Beth: I do. And the way that you’re talking about these catalogs as an asset that receives continual investment to preserve its value is, at this point, a really well-worn strategy that’s proving to work. It worked with Queen. It worked with Elton John. It worked with Michael Jackson. So his estate financially backed this movie, and after the movie launched, for the first time, Michael Jackson hit the top global artist list. And I’m curious what the streams on his music looked like before this film, but I can imagine that they started to look like a depreciating asset that needed an injection of new life.

[00:12:34] Sarah: It surged a little bit in value after he died. Nothing more valuable to a catalog than a dead artist. But Michael Jackson is complicated. And the way this estate protects and purposely obfuscates what we all know, which is that Michael Jackson, by his own admission, slept with little children, is... What bugs me about this I think there’s all this clipping and virality in the catalog and the greediness. I don’t understand how a country that is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein is buying ticket after ticket to go see Michael. Make it make sense, America. Because let me tell you something, Michael Jackson was a talented artist. Against all my better instincts, I will bop along when, Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough comes on in a store. Okay, it’s a good song. And if they would just let it go they could continue to be good songs, but they want to clean up his life and that’s what bugs me. And if you’ve seen Leaving Neverland, it is not something you can ever forget. Now, you can’t watch it right now because they have legally pursued it to a point where you can’t watch that documentary anymore. But why can’t they just let the songs be? Like, why do they have to force him down our throat at this particular moment in history? That’s what bothers me so badly about this biopic

[00:13:52] Beth: I read that the director from Leaving Neverland came out recently and said that Michael Jackson was worse than Jeffrey Epstein in his mind

[00:14:00] Sarah: Absolutely. I 100% agree.

[00:14:04] Beth: I also read that there were scenes in this movie originally that dealt with those issues in his life that were cut in connection with non-disclosure agreements, and that the movie ultimately has become merchandise. I read a really good review that said the line between cinema and merchandise has come close to being obliterated here.

[00:14:26] Sarah: It just disgusts me. But so then they’re really not different. Everything is a commodity. The music is a commodity. The life is a commodity. I think the through line of this whole conversation when we talk about the books and the music and all of this is the way that consumption is eating art. You can’t let a music fade if it no longer speaks to a new generation. It’s hard to break through as a new artist that perhaps could speak to this generation because the people protecting the previous commodities or the people guarding the gates at the New York Times or at Marvel or at Disney, because it’s the other piece of this is everything gets so big. Like the publishers, massive consolidation. Movies, consolidation. Streaming, consolidation. And so you have big, giant corporate conglomerates protecting their assets, not interested in producing art as much as they used to. Not that MGM was consumed with artistic integrity—I’m not saying that-- back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But it was really interesting. I want to know what you think about this. I was talking to a friend who is a artist in America. My friend Mike, lives in Philly. He’s an incredibly talented musician. He was like, “I just think it’s going to be where art is local.” If you want art, music that is not a part of this corporate ecosystem, you will find people performing live and it’s like we’re going back. You will just have to find the live person. You will get the record, which is what I did at my local arts and music festival two weeks ago, and that’s it. Because even in a Spotify ecosystem, like that’s another huge corporate conglomerate that is steering us all in ways that like we don’t understand and they do not disclose, that prevents any sort of breakthrough or connection

[00:16:44] Beth: I think it’s important and interesting right now to tease out the relationship between art and our trust of how the art is promoted.

[00:16:56] Sarah: Yep.

[00:16:56] Beth: Because I don’t think that something made for money is not art by necessity. Art and money have always had a relationship. There have always been patrons. There’s always been a business aspect to intellectual property and music catalogs and everything that we’re discussing. But it’s so important to me to talk about this today in relation to our conversation about AI because the way that you discover that art does change your relationship to it, right? If you see the local band, you’re invested in them differently than you’re invested in someone online, unless you have been so inundated online that you feel that you know that person. And that’s where I think this piece from Vulture called The Feed Is Fake is worth everyone’s time.

[00:17:43] Sarah: Yes.

[00:17:44] Beth: There’s a version of reading this where you walk away and you’re like, “Oh my God, everything sucks.” I’m trying to take the version where I say, “Okay, now I know.” “Now I understand why I’m seeing something over and over.” The article talks about clipping as a strategy employed by lots of different companies, people. Sometimes clipping happens around an artist, not at that artist’s behest, and sometimes absolutely at that artist’s behest. But to your point about breaking through if you’re a new musician, one of the bands called out in this article is Geese. That clips were made of Geese and fake accounts spanned the internet with them, and those accounts were built to look organic, and eventually it does become organic because everybody’s seeing it so much that they get involved. And the way that the algorithms reward something that everybody’s doing means that everybody has an incentive to keep doing it. And when I read this article I thought, “Okay, now I understand why during the recent Olympics I kept seeing clips of Surya Bonaly, who was a figure skater from my childhood.” I couldn’t understand why I kept seeing over and over clips of her. I enjoyed them. She’s an incredible athlete. But I realized someone must be paying a dollar per thousand views to get her out here again for some reason. I’m not saying it’s her. I have no idea. This article makes clear often it is very unclear who’s behind these campaigns. But it’s helpful to me to know that we don’t just have a resurgence of that fandom. There is a strategy behind it.

[00:19:22] Sarah: The title image of the piece has a graphic representation of clearly what’s supposed to be Justin Bieber, and they talk about Justin Bieber in the piece. And I had been wondering, I’m like, “Why all of a sudden?” because I don’t particularly care for Justin Bieber. Everything I’ve ever read about him seems like he’s a jerk. I think he’s kind of sorted it out. I’m not mad at him. I know it’s hard to be famous that young. It was like the Grammys performance. It was the Coachella performance, and I saw people on Instagram watching it over and over again, and I’m like, “What is going on here?” And so when I read all this, I was like, “Oh, okay.” And they were saying you don’t break through without artificial help anymore. If you’re actually going to go viral, unless you’re the poor lady at the Coldplay concert, you have to have somebody behind you pushing that virality. It’s just too hard to break through otherwise. And what I thought about immediately in my own life is Olivia Dean. I love Olivia Dean. But I began to love Olivia Dean because I saw one million Instagram clipping Come Be The Man I Need. And then I started listening to Olivia Dean. There was some fake aspect of that too where they were purchasing. I think you’re right. This is not an invitation to be completely cynical. Advertising and marketing have always existed. There was the payola with the radio stations back in the ‘50s. That was a huge deal because the DJs you thought were picking based on taste were getting paid. So like life finds a way and so does money, right? So there will always be an influence an aspect of this. And I just think there was a moment where we thought the democratization of the internet was really going to elevate all our opinions and influence, and we have these influencers, and they’re just real people that are connecting with us and telling us the truth. And it’s just a reminder like ads are ads. They’re just going to stay being ads. And listen, not irrelevant to politics, the other thing that went around the internet this week was all the paid political content producers, like people who everyone trusts and they think they’re just honest activists and they are getting paid a lot of money to promote certain political candidates. Just important to note, this has applications far beyond just what we’re listening to on Spotify.

[00:21:35] Beth: It also helps me understand why Nick Fuentes is everywhere. I see clips of him constantly. I don’t think he is a particularly insightful person or particularly charismatic or any number of things that would make someone rise to this level of virality organically. Lots of people have interests that make it worth this extremely cheap form of getting a lot of eyeballs around incendiary conduct. I think back to when I read Robert Mueller’s report way back in the day, and that report talked about how when we’re discussing election interference, we have to pivot from thinking Russia hired people to come interfere with physical ballot boxes in Michigan, and understand that Russia plays a very long game here, and they say, “Hey, people in the United States are easily incited by race conversations. Let’s make sure that every story that has an element of racial tension gets recycled and put in front of everyone, and that the temperature on that conversation consistently goes up.” Some of this just helps explain to me the disconnect between what I feel in my community and what I feel online in these political conversations, just remembering, okay, this is no longer really politics as much as it’s advertising.

[00:22:57] Sarah: Yeah. Every time I open Instagram, it doesn’t matter how much I go in the behind the scenes and say I’m not interested in shopping, the first thing I get is some white lady around my age saying, “Here are the things on Amazon worth purchasing. Here are the Amazon pieces of my wardrobe worth adding.” Every time. Every single time. And I will say, the one thing that has broken through, who she is now of course adding Amazon links and things, is I think it’s like Lola something, her name’s Jessica in real life, cleaning out her closet. Has she come to your Instagram feed?

[00:23:31] Beth: No, I have not seen her yet, but I bet I will now that you’ve mentioned her to me.

[00:23:34] Sarah: So she was interesting to me because I’m going to assume that this woman who started with a couple thousand Instagram followers is not out there paying to be clipped. She’s very funny, and watching her clean out her closet, which is massive, she just has so many clothes is pretty entertaining. But so it is super fascinating to me when something breaks through that is clearly not corporate produced. There are still moments of that, but it’s not for everybody. It’s just like for my algorithm, and because they keep all this in a lockbox, we have no idea what that means. But I’m not like opposed to any recommendation coming from the internet. It’s just harder to find any ones that feel or sense real. I’m super skeptical at this point of any like political content creators on Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. I know how those work, and I am very skeptical when they show up. I’m like do you really care about it this much or are you just following the feed?

[00:24:33] Beth: I have a lot of skepticism about them too. You will not see me posting political content on Instagram. This takes me back to what you said about Mike and finding live bands, because I do still really value some influencers on Instagram. It tends to be people that I know or people that I found when they were pretty small. I think about Authentically Emmy, who we know personally. I’ve bought a lot of clothes because she recommended them. She’s excellent at what she does and super ethical about it. Texas Farmhouse Forever is another account that I love. My friend Queen City Lisa, who I’ve talked about before, super local influencer who sends me to a great cup of coffee here or there. So I think it’s like the band. There is a different trust level when I know it’s really small. It doesn’t mean that I think it’s not art if it came through in that clipping way. I love the song Where the Hell is My Husband? There’s a lot of strategy behind that song, right? That song is everywhere all the time and all the places, and I understand that’s not organic. It’s still a great song. So that’s what I’m really fascinated by, especially as more stuff is being made not by people. How do we think of what’s art, and how do we think about trust and art and marketing all existing together in this big cloud?

[00:25:48] Sarah: Yeah. I’m a little less cynical about using marketing, even new aggressive marketing techniques, to tell us about new art. I’m growing increasingly cynical about the way old art is being protected. And I mean that even art, like paintings on the wall. That was another big headline this week is Jackson Pollock entered the $100 million-plus at an auction world. This is not because in the year 2026 everybody’s just decided that Jackson Pollock is a bigger genius. It’s because people are parking their wealth in art, and because we have allowed wealth to grow to such a galaxy-level experiment, and you can only spend so much damn money, so that’s why this important da Vinci sits on Bin Salman’s yacht. It’s just because they’re vehicles for wealth. It’s not about the eternal nature of some of the stuff that’s being created. It’s about we have to protect our wealth. This year I’ve gotten really interested and read a lot of books about what becomes canon and why? So I’m reading this book called Written in Water that’s all about, we didn’t always think Venus de Milo was the picture of classical beauty. Used to be this other Venus de Medici that everybody was obsessed with, and then it shifted. Same with Mona Lisa. She didn’t become famous until she got stolen. Even these things that we consider eternal, they shift. I just read Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, such a fascinating book about the female authors that influenced Jane Austen, and where did they go? Why are they not considered a part of the canon? Big reason we could only have one girl, and we decided it was going to be Jane Austen. So even this idea that there’s these eternal pieces of art that shifts and changes with time, but when it becomes a wealth protection mechanism, that natural process is not being allowed to happen. Elvis is not being allowed to fade because he no longer deserves to be there. Don’t email me. But because it’s being protected because it’s worth value. And there was an aspect of this that could happen with traditional art because they were housed in museums, although, museums care that people still want to come see their eternal pieces of art, but not in the same way that some private equity group that bought Bob Dylan’s catalog cares. And I just feel like it’s like art should feel, and all art, paintings, sculptures, movies, TV, music, books, it should help us make sense of the world. And when it contributes to this sense of overwhelm we feel in the world because nothing’s allowed to die, I got a beef with that.

[00:28:21] Beth: I think that’s a great transition to our listener’s question about art that has moved us but that isn’t about romantic love, because romantic love is certainly the smooth road to a hit song. So let’s talk about the rougher road. Sarah, Kara asked us to talk about music that’s not just about romantic love, and I love this question. The problem is that my brain immediately went to country music, and I have a feeling that yours did, too, because we are both such ‘90s country fans.

[00:29:00] Sarah: The country music is better at this. I’m sorry. Just because I can’t let this go, and I think the evolution of all this is so fascinating, I just want to say before we move on past romantic love, that shit evolves, too. Have you seen all those interesting charts about the words we use and the amount of songs that are about heartbreak, and that kind of shifts over decades, and the way we talk about the phases of romantic love, and where those are represented in pop songs is super, super interesting to me, too. It’s like even that is not static. That shifts and changes. Even this topic that we think is eternal, that changes all the time, too.

[00:29:33] Beth: My digression along similar lines, I was just sitting here thinking about this fantastic episode of 60 Songs That Explains the ‘90s, where they talk about melodies that sound like they have always been because they get picked up for baseball games or jock jams. When we were kids if it gets played in a sports environment over and over, you dissociate the melody from the song and the artist, and the melody has a life of its own. It’s a beautiful episode. We’ll link it here. It’s so well done. But I think the same thing because the type of melody that enters that pantheon today is very different than Sweet Caroline, but Sweet Caroline has not faded because of baseball and weddings. And what’s the chicken and the egg in that cycle?

[00:30:20] Sarah: And that doesn’t just happen on the other side of a song being created and shared. That is the story of Yesterday. That Paul McCartney woke up with a melody, and he thought he’d heard it before because he was in pubs, and they would sing these songs, and they were old songs and songs people had “ always been singing.” And he kept asking “Where’d I hear this one? Where’d I hear this melody?” And there’s this great line in the book I loved called John and Paul: A Love Story Through Songs, where they talk about John Lennon was trying to break what music was considered, and Paul was trying to create music that seemed like it always existed, and that’s when you put them together, that’s why you had such magic, which I thought’s so interesting. And I think there is an aspect of melody that can feel eternal, and then there’s an aspect of narrative and lyrics that when you’re either speaking to a universal experience like romantic love or other universal experiences. I’m a lyrics girly. I’ll just disclose that. I’m a lyrics girly, first and foremost. I love melody. I love harmony. Very important to me. I’m into it, okay? But I’m just telling you, when you put a lyric on something and I go, “Whoa,” then you got me. So it’s like the singer-songwriters for me are the ones who are like, even beyond country, but definitely mostly in country, that are really getting to something deep and universal beyond romantic love, for sure.

[00:31:46] Beth: Three chords and the truth.

[00:31:47] Sarah: Three chords and the truth.

[00:31:48] Beth: Since you read that Beatles book, I want to know if you can tell me if this is true. I saw this about Paul McCartney recently online, and because the world we live in, I don’t know if it’s correct or not. But it said that he does not take photos with fans, and he’s explained it as when he is asked to take a photo by someone, he doesn’t feel like himself anymore. He feels like something different. He compared it to taking a photo of a monkey at the zoo, and he said, “It makes me feel like that monkey instead of like me, and I just want to feel like me all the time.” And I loved that, but I also did not trust it.

[00:32:22] Sarah: I don’t know if it’s true. All I can tell you is that it would align with something I know to be true, which is that when The Beatles performed in Shea Stadium, They could not hear themselves, and the footage is bananas. What was happening was not like a performance-listener relationship. It was like everyone in the stadium was at such an emotional level, and they clearly felt like they were, like, at the center of the sun. And it’s one of the last times they performed for a live audience. They just were like, “Whoa. No. We’ve unleashed something here that’s not good for us or for anybody else.” And so, to me, it would align with that experience in Shea Stadium if he did take that position because... And I think that’s what happens, too, with when they’re writing songs about... the Beatles, the first part of their career, they were, like, singing a lot of girl group songs. Almost every song at the beginning of their discography is, “I want to hold your hand.” It’s all about romantic love, and then you see them shift. because I do think there’s a certain maturity that happens in artists. As they get older and they have more life experiences, then they start to write about other experiences, and so you see a lot of these songs we’re going to talk about later in people’s career, and The Beatles are a perfect example of that.

[00:33:46] Beth: Yeah, The Beatles are a great answer to this question for sure. That’s a great segue to a category of songs that I thought about in response to this question. I love when artists sing about the experience of being famous. Some of my favorite Taylor Swift music reflects on the experience of being famous. I don’t connect with Addison Rae as an artist. I really like Fame is a Gun. I think that’s a super interesting song.

[00:34:08] Sarah: You know this is my favorite topic basically in life, is people talking about being famous. God, this has turned into a Beatles episode, but it is what it is. You get the interplay of their before and after I think in really fascinating ways, not just when they’re talking about fame. But Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane are just two choruses of the same song. They’re talking about childhood. They’re talking about nostalgia. They’re talking about where they grew up. And so they’re in conversation with each other about childhood. I think songs about gr-- I’m, like, tearing up. I feel like country music does this so well. There’s so many songs that capture particularly what it’s like to grow up in rural America that will just instantly catch me. Even cheesy ones like Kenny Chesney’s Back Where I Come From.

[00:34:49] Beth: Is there Life Out There from Reba.

[00:34:51] Sarah: Yes

[00:34:52] Beth: Come on.

[00:34:52] Sarah: I Love it. Now I will say in the country genre, I think, and she’s getting back to this, which makes me happy. You know i love a song... It’s even less about the subject and more about... I love a clever, funny song. There’s some about love, but I think other topics lend themselves better. I think one of the best in the biz is Kacey Musgraves. I’ve never encountered an artist that can write a funnier song. Family is one of my favorite songs, and Biscuits, and they’re both hilarious. They will make you laugh out loud. But Family is just one of my favorites for as far as capturing the like what is it? They buy too much wicker, they drink too much liquor, but blood’s always thicker. I love that song. I love the way she captures something deep, but in a very funny, catchy way.

[00:35:41] Beth: Follow Your Arrow is funny.

[00:35:42] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:35:43] Beth: And it’s not even meant to be as cheeky as those songs. And then on the other side of that, I think Merry Go Round about family is an unbelievable song from her.

[00:35:50] Sarah: About growing up in a small town. There’s a lot of small town... And look, I think that’s true all the way on the other end of the spectrum. I think you get that in other genres. Particularly I’m thinking about hip hop, about what it’s like to grow up in an urban environment, what it’s like to grow up in a different kind of pressure cooker, what it’s like to come to the big city and try to make it. One of my favorite genre of songs is making it songs. There’s a reason we all sing Empire State of Mind, because it’s great. Whether you like New York or not. It’s a great song, and it captures that feeling of being in the place of New York City, but being in a place in your life where it feels like there’s so much possibility.

[00:36:27] Beth: Then on the other end of life, later chapters, I think Americana does a great job of reflecting back and reflecting on what it’s like to get older and what it’s like to raise children and to watch children get older and what it’s like for relationships to change. I think Patty Griffin’s new-ish album, Crown of Roses, is beautiful for that reason. I would recommend everything on that album as just a nice mature woman considering where she is in the world right now.

[00:36:55] Sarah: I totally agree. I think over half of the High Women’s album are songs that are not really about romantic love. They’re about other moments in life, definitely motherhood. My Name Can’t Be Mama Today, what a great freaking song. But Brandi Carlile, let me just say, I’m concerned for myself, for my own emotional life as this progresses. Brandi Carlile songs about motherhood. Okay, so she starts with The Mother when her daughters are very little. Perfect song about raising little. “Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind.” Yep. My absolute favorite line of that song: “She filled my life with color, canceled plans, and trashed my car, but none of that was ever who we are.” Oh, no, here it comes. Okay, so that’s bad enough. I think her daughters are, like, tweens now. Her new album has a song called You Without Me. It will destroy you as a mother. It will rip your heart out your throat, and it will stomp on it, and then you will be left in the fetal position crying on the floor. Just it’s an attack. I don’t know what to say any other way. It’s an attack. It will leave you weeping. It’s all right there in the title, You Without Me. I saw her live and she was like-- You just start to realize the story she told was hilarious because her and her wife are raising these girls and apparently they’re like sports fanatics, and her wife are like, “ What is happening? We are good-natured lesbians. We don’t want to go to baseball games. Like, why are we being forced.” And they’re going in their own way, man. They’re going to live all this life and there’s a great moment in the song where she talks about “You’re going to start buying your own records and like deciding what you like.” And they’re only tweens. What is coming for me when Brandi Carlile’s daughters graduate from high school or college? I love her so much, but I’m just kind of you can’t do this to us. Stop writing songs about these experiences. I can’t take it, Beth.

[00:38:47] Beth: First of all, I think she’ll find lots of nice lesbians at baseball games. And secondly, I have a sense that’s what Kara’s looking for with her question. Like these kinds of songs that really do speak to what you’re living now. I’m excited that she’s doing this, and I’m hoping Beyonce does more of it, too. I think Protector is one of the best songs on Cowboy Carter about her daughter, and I love how she plays with being her protector and then being her projector. And I think that reflecting on what it’s like to be a famous person raising a child who also wants that life is really fascinating. But it’s hard to write about older kids because you’re contending with them as people, too. You are contending with that separation. Which stories belong to them as much or more than they belong to me, and how do I deal with that in the public sphere? I can’t think of anybody more equipped to take us through that territory than Brandi Carlile and probably also than Beyonce.

[00:39:40] Sarah: But listen. Beth, I can’t take any more lines like, “Heavy are the hands that you are free to slip right through.” Do you understand? I’m not up for it. I can’t do it.

[00:39:53] Beth:  Let’s crowdsource some new music for you then.

[00:39:55] Sarah:  Do you see the tears In my eyes right here? I do. They’re already here, and I’m reading the lyric to you. That’s it. Do you know what happens when I listen to this song for like the 1500th time? Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Give me some nine to five, just give me some upbeat, keep me focused on the day-to-day. You don’t got to rip my heart out.

[00:40:18] Beth: I do love songs about work, too.

[00:40:20] Sarah: I do too.

[00:40:20] Beth: I am crazy about My Tears Ricochet from Taylor. Yeah. That kind of reflection on work I think is so interesting. So that’s what we’re looking for. Let’s together figure out what songs we’re listening to that aren’t just about romantic love. I like those songs too, but let’s make a good list that won’t only rip Sarah’s heart out.

[00:40:37] Sarah: And I don’t want my fan card taken away. Obviously, you don’t talk about where Brandi Carlile is without talking about The Road Paved by the Indigo Girls, with Get Out the Map, Closer to Fine. The lyrical masterminds over there laying down some truths about stuff beyond romantic love, for sure.

[00:40:57] Beth: I hit Galileo at least once a month to just check in with my philosophy and ethics about life.

[00:41:04] Sarah: So I love Galileo, but my favorite Indigo Girl song that’s not about anything that other people write about, I guess is the best way to say it, is Burn All the Letters. Damn, I love that song. I love Burn All the Letters. And it’s just sometimes like what if we wrote a song about Virginia Woolf’s diary and people that came before us and how they disclosed and what they didn’t disclose, and should we be think-- not a subject rife for songwriting, unless you’re Amy and Emily.

[00:41:30] Beth: Sarah, you and I have talked about starting a music podcast many times, and I think our passion for that project only grows through conversations like this, so thank you Kara for the question. Thank you all for listening today. Please remember that we have your back for America 250 celebrations. All the links are going to be in the notes here, and you can find everything on Substack. We will also be back with you on Wednesday because of the Memorial Day holiday, and until then, we hope you have the best long 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.

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

I’m here for meaningful observance, not tacky and selfish commandeering of the principles this nation was founded on. Witness my rage-bordering-on-disbelief in learning that President Trump has set aside $1.776 billion (with a B) in taxpayer dollars to give to people who allegedly suffered at the hands of the Biden administration. We talk about that fund and the President’s trip to China today.

Then we turn our attention to artificial intelligence, a topic so big and amorphous that it’s hard to know where to begin. So, we decided to start with ourselves, right where we are. Sarah and I share how we are personally using AI and what we’re learning from that process.

Outside of politics, it’s not quite summer, but summer feels completely spoken for. Sarah and I have completely different plans for the next few months. We share a sense of compression around those plans. If you’ve found a Goldilocks summer, we will sit at your feet and learn from you. -Beth

Topics Discussed

• Trump Goes to China

• The AI Backlash

• Outside of Politics: A Goldilocks Summer?

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

America250 Good Neighbors T-Shirt by Bethany

Episode Topic Resources

• Kentucky’s Curious Cast of Political Characters (The New York Times)

• Trump’s China policy is a disaster (Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias)

• Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies in a deal to drop IRS suit (The Associated Press)

• Jury tosses Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman (The BBC)

• Graduates Boo Commencement Speech About A.I. (New York Times)

• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed during graduation speech about AI (NBC News)

• What the Internet Costs the Planet (More to Say | Beth Silvers)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:28] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

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

[00:00:32] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we’re tackling Trump’s trip to China. Is no news good news when it comes to Trump diplomacy? We’re also going to discuss the $1.7 billion in taxpayer money going into a slush fund for Trump allies, and then we want to check in on where we’re all at with AI. How much are we using it? Is it actually helping? Outside of politics, summer is about to begin, and we’re going to talk about our plans and our big feelings about the season.

[00:01:01] Beth: Speaking of summer, I’m excited because it’s America 250 Summer. I am embracing America 250 Summer. I am putting American flags where I would normally put heart emojis on messages. I’m just going for it. I’m all in because it feels like reclaiming something for me. We’re going to talk a little bit about the complex feelings about that later. But for now we want you to know that we are kicking off here a full-scale America 250 celebration. If you are observing the semi sesquicentennial, we got you. We’re your girls. However you want to celebrate, we tried to think about you and what we could offer you.

[00:01:37] Sarah: Yeah. We’re not asking you to put the flag emojis everywhere. I want to be abundantly clear. I support Beth’s choice. However, we know it’s complicated. And plus, even if it wasn’t, everybody doesn’t celebrate the same way. Some people prefer a quiet celebration. Some people prefer a celebration with primarily other adults. Some people want all in on the family celebration. So what we’re telling you is however you want to celebrate, we have you covered.

[00:02:06] Beth: And if you’re thinking observance more than celebration, we’ve got you. And on that front we took our meditation series, Reimagining Citizenship, from last year and put it in written form for you because we thought you might prefer to just sit with those words and maybe journal a little bit about some of the questions and ideas that come up in it. So we’re really excited to share that with our premium members.

[00:02:30] Sarah: Then Beth went full Beth and went out and made a murder mystery dinner party. She made a family play. These are all going to be gifts to our paid members to help them celebrate America 250. I’m going to get some costumes. I’m going to report the News Brief from 1776. What we’re trying to convey here is we’ve got big plans, okay? And there’s going to be some incredible shows as we get closer and closer to July 4th. We’re going to tell you all about this over the next few weeks. Don’t worry if you’re not catching it all now. What we want to start with is that we asked you to design the official Pantsuit Politics America 250 T-shirt, and you delivered. We got so many incredible submissions, and we are so excited to announce the winner is Bethany with her incredible Be a Good Neighbor pendant design. The shirt is available now. The link is in the show notes. Bethany, we love it, and we cannot wait for everyone to be wearing it all summer long, and especially at the finale of our personal America 250 summer, our Minneapolis live show.

[00:03:34] Beth: That’s right. That will be in Minneapolis at the end of August. If you want a hotel room for the night of the show, if you want a seat at the Spice Conference, if you want a spot at the executive producer retreat, we’re in the final days here. We need to lock that in by June 12th, and we really want you to come. It’s going to be really special. We’ve put a lot of heart and soul into planning this for you. So the link to join us there is in the show notes.

[00:03:58] Sarah:  Okay. Next up, let’s talk about Trump’s trip to China. Before we get started on the trip to China, we do want to say we are aware of Senator Bill Cassidy’s pretty terrible loss, third in a three-person race in Louisiana’s primary. And we’re going to talk about that on the Spicy live on Thursday, which will be at 11:00 AM Central Time instead of the traditional 10:00 AM Central Time because we want to wait for the results from the Kentucky Primary, specifically Best Congressional Race featuring Thomas Massie. So we’re going to talk about both races on Thursday on the Spicy live at 11:00 AM Central Standard Time.

[00:04:51] Beth: And I plan during that time to, among other things, exercise some of the feelings I have about how that race has been covered. I don’t appreciate the way people talk about Kentucky in general. And I have some things to say about that.

[00:05:05] Sarah: Did you see the cute little writeup The New York Times did about all our wacky Kentucky politicians?

[00:05:10] Beth: I did, and I thought that was the best of the Kentucky coverage that I had seen.

[00:05:14] Sarah: I agree. We’ll get into all of that on Thursday, but first we’re going to go to China. Trump went to China, Beth. It was a nothing burger. There was so little coverage.

[00:05:23] Beth: Can we talk about how incredible it is that the first time this man ran for president, the way that he said China was a joke. The derision with which he talked about China, the frequency with which he talked about China screwing us, it was a joke that comedians still use to imitate him.

[00:05:43] Sarah: I struggle every time I put Trump and China in a sentence together my brain goes China. I can’t help it.

[00:05:48] Beth: And yet it’s just a great honor for him to call Xi Jinping his friend.

[00:05:53] Sarah: I think the best analysis I read is that for so long China needed the United States as a type of validation, that when we and/or our leaders would travel to China, the United States was the global superpower, and China needed to gain that status in the eyes of its own citizens. But that’s not really true. It didn’t have a lot of pomp and circumstance, right? It wasn’t trying to roll out the red carpet and say “We’re a superpower too.” It wasn’t just a nothing burger in the coverage, it was the nothing burger in the way they treated Trump while there. It was gracious, but it was just like, “You’re my peer now, and I don’t need your validation.” And we are not just a manufacturing superpower. We have all these other areas of growth, particularly when it comes to green energy, which everybody needs now. And I saw somebody call it the G2. That’s what Trump wants it to be, is just the G2. But I think China sees that day is here. We don’t have to prove anything to you. There’s not a lot of negotiation to be had because we don’t need that much from you. And he comes back and he’s touting this Boeing deal. China’s going to buy 200 planes from Boeing. Everybody’s like “Big deal.” I think Boeing stock even slumped because people were expecting it to be at least a 500, and this is the biggest thing he had to announce, was this paltry little plane deal.

[00:07:18] Beth: I think paltry little plane deal is a really good encapsulation of the Chinese attitude towards him right now. Because I don’t even think it’s that they see us as a peer. I think they see us as in decline. And the sun setting on this presidency and the sun setting on America’s power in the world. And it’s not an unreasonable posture for them to take given that a lot of the problems he was there to address are problems of his administration’s own making. We have no leverage with China right now because of the situation in Iran because of the Strait of Hormuz. We took this trade competition and set it down on a field that specifically disadvantages us.

[00:07:58] Sarah: Yeah. I was reading some analysis from Matt Yglesias, and he was just talking about if you think Americans are mad about this war and the economic cost it is extracting, you should check in with the rest of the world. They’re furious. They’re in danger, and so any leverage we might have had as this sort of diplomatic superpower, he’s shredded all our diplomatic relationships with our allies. And they’re pissed, rightfully so. I’m pissed. I know they’re pissed because the economic fallout-- the economic fallout’s not a big enough word. The economic shock that continues to roll across the global economy when it comes to the Iranian war and the Strait of Hormuz. And yeah, sure, Xi Jinping agreed there shouldn’t be a toll on the Strait of Hormuz, but he didn’t say what he was going to do about it. He didn’t say what does that mean? Who cares?

[00:08:46] Beth: I thought that and $7 will get you a Starbucks now.

[00:08:49] Sarah: Yeah. Or a tank of gas, depending on where you live. You could see that This isn’t a real estate deal. This is bigger and more complex. He’s not up for the challenge. The situation continues to get worse, and he does not have a plan. He does not have a plan. And look, I don’t think that means that China is ascendant. They have their own problems. Their economy is also suffering because they cannot use exports to prop it up like they used to. They also have a government that’s not wanting to stabilize the economy in the ways that it used to. They have a real estate sector that’s still in problem. They also have a demographic crisis. I’m not saying that this means that the world is China, but I think they have come out ahead with regards to the war in Iran. They are just continuing to increase their renewable capacity, and you still got Doug Burgum out there talking about what do we do when it rains? Is this a joke? Guys, probably the same thing you knew you’d do when you were like h-huzzahing at wind deals when you were the governor. Stop playing dumb. You know this is bad. We have to increase our electric capacity. We’re not doing that. Y’all are propping up coal plants. Meanwhile, China gets it. It’s increasing its renewable capacity hand over fist and manufacturing the renewable products that the rest of the world needs to increase its green energy capacity. So in that way, I would say it’s ascendant, but it’s just frustrating. It’s all these problems are so self-evident, and I’m not saying that the solutions are easy, but we’ve just got Trump out there shredding relationships, propping up old economic realities and ignoring the economic crisis that he himself created.

[00:10:34] Beth: Yeah, I want to be clear. I’m not mad that Trump went to China. I started out by pointing out that hypocrisy because I think it is a demonstration of the way that everything in his second term is built on even shorter-term thinking than everything in his first term. Because the problems of the world are so interconnected now, because as you said, so many countries have a demographic challenge, so many countries have migration challenges, everybody’s reckoning with global warming to different degrees. There are so many shared problems. If you hear hantavirus on a cruise ship, everybody has to worry about that now. And so that is a real opportunity for diplomacy to be something different, bigger, better, stronger than it’s ever been. We should have more friends now because we share more problems in common. So him going doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me that there was no breakthrough on Taiwan. I don’t think there’s going to be. Strategic ambiguity has been the policy of the US government for a long time for a reason, and this is something that I’m really trying to push myself on. I have criticized progressives, campaigns, lots of different constituencies for wanting to take too much control over situations while I have supported pretty hawkish foreign policies, which is just the ultimate version of trying to take control over something that’s fundamentally out of your control. So I’m really trying to push myself on questions like, would I support us taking the kind of posture towards Taiwan that we’ve taken towards Ukraine? Am I even happy with the results of the posture we’ve taken towards Ukraine? Would I be okay with an American dying at war for Taiwan’s sovereignty? I think probably not at this point in my life. And so I am trying to really press myself on those questions. It doesn’t bother me that he went. It doesn’t bother me that he tries to forge some level of friendship. It bothers me that is his ultimate priority because he thinks that those friendships will make lots more money for a very small number of people, and it bothers me that I think he just gets played every time because he ultimately doesn’t know what he’s doing and has fired all the people who do know what they’re doing.

[00:13:01] Sarah: It doesn’t make me mad that he went to China, but the reporting from ABC News about the $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded/fund does make me mad, Beth. This set me all the way off. If you missed this, I am sorry to be the one to tell you. So Trump had a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Again, just one more way that we have lost all sense of appropriate separation between the President of the United States and his business dealings and his approach to the federal government, his approach to his own party. But he had this lawsuit. Now, he dropped it in exchange for the Justice Department creating a $1.7 billion taxpayer funded anti-weaponization fund to compensate people who they say were targeted by the Biden administration. So I think what we can anticipate here is taxpayer money paying people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, the ones who haven’t gone back to jail for committing further violent crimes since he pardoned them at the beginning of the second term. I don’t know, maybe he’ll pay them too. Who knows? The sky’s the limit.

[00:14:24] Beth: That is not speculation. That would follow a pattern that’s already begun. Because they have already given a large settlement to Michael Flynn who pled guilty to what he was charged with initially, and then took back his guilty plea, and then was ultimately pardoned, and now has taxpayer dollars in his bank account. They have already given money to Carter Page, who, let’s be fair about it, was improperly surveilled. Okay? The process that the FBI undertook to surveil Carter Page was inappropriate. An inspector general found so. So he was wronged by the government. I don’t think that means taxpayer dollars ought to flow into his bank account. But that’s what has happened. When the president brought this lawsuit against the IRS, the judge in that case told the parties that she needed to see some briefs on whether there was actual controversy between the parties. She said to the Department of Justice, “I need a legal brief from you that tells me you are adversarial to the president, because I’m not seeing it, and I’m not going to sit here and collude to transfer taxpayer dollars to the president.” And so to get around that, to not have to do that briefing, to not have to have a judge meddle in their business, the president dismisses this lawsuit, and he does it just after something like 93 Democrats went to the judge and said, “You should dismiss this case with prejudice to refiling because all this is collusion to transfer wealth to the president’s allies.” And so he got in front of them, dismissed it himself before she acted, and it’s not 1.7 billion because the joke is on all of us. It’s 1.776 billion. 1776. See, isn’t this all hilarious? Isn’t this all a big liberal trolling exercise? More accurate than if we want to talk about it with people is to round up to 1.8 and to be a 10th of a billion dollars angrier about it.

[00:16:28] Sarah: Let me just say this. Since we’re all just agreeing to be in a death spiral, how much money is James Comey going to get? How much money is Jerome Powell going to get? You think this ends with you? You think the precedent that the federal government going after political enemies means that the taxpayers fund a slush fund? What is this? This is outrageous. Outrageous. No transparency, no congressional oversight, just payment. So not only do we have the bribes going into the administration, we’re a foreign government, we’re a crypto investor, we’re a political donor, we’ll give you money for your ballroom if you look the other way on these regulations. If MAHA can stand behind our new flavored vape, that’d be great. So not only do we have the bribes going this way, now we’ll have the bribes going out. We’ll have the bribes going out. We can pay people who maybe witness something, who maybe know where the bodies are buried. Let’s pay them, too, so that we’ve got the corruption flowing just as, all directions. All directions. And here’s what really set me off, Beth. This is enraging, just on its own. But I read it at the same time I finally read the New York Times par- report on the DHS, and how they are going after the families separated from their children during the first administration. They’re going back after them. So they are paying off people who attacked the Capitol and attacking people who were separated from their own children. Just when I think there are no words, just when I think it could not get worse, and he’s out there posting on True Social all hours of the night, just videos of him walking besides an alien, pictures of Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi floating in sewage. We’re supposed to talk about this for a living, but I am running out of words. I really am.

[00:18:31] Beth: That seems like an excellent transition because however everyone else might feel about AI, this president seems quite enamored of it.

[00:18:39] Sarah: He loves it. Oh, Lord, he loves it so much. He loves all his AI images of him setting off nuclear weapons and I just... Deep breaths. All right, next up, let’s talk about AI. The other big headline this week was the OpenAI trial pitting Elon Musk against Sam Altman, which I’m interested in, but I think the most important takeaway is not whatever the jury recommendation is, whatever the ultimate decision is in the trial. I think it’s that these two dudes came to court, neither of them come off smelling like roses. They both look worse than when they started this, and this is not the time. They are reading the room wrong if they think this is the time to be perpetuating more negativity around this industry that they are both so fiercely competitive in. I just think the AI industry is so consumed with each other that they are not looking around and realizing that it’s getting kind off rough out there for you guys. I got to believe Sam Altman understands now that he’s had Molotov cocktails thrown at his home, but I don’t know. I just feel like they’re not really locking in on how much people hate this right now.

[00:20:02] Beth: So here’s a data point about that from the Silvers household. On Sunday we went to church, and then we went to see Suffs, and I was thinking about that song The Young Are At The Gates. And the young are at the gates in my house. I spent the ride home from church talking with Ellen, who is 10 and about to, thank God, finish fifth grade. Fifth grade is the worst, man. Ellen was very upset about seeing something that she believed was AI-generated at church. Just felt awful to her, and I was so fascinated by that and really wanted to interrogate why, and it was just the two of us in the car, so I had her all to myself to ask questions. And she ultimately said to me, “Mom, I just think AI is okay as an assistant, but not as a creator.” Which I thought was a really good summary, but we get home, and she tells her sister about it, and Jane loses her mind because Jane already hates AI. She hates that I use it for anything. She’s mad that I have Cowork downloaded on my computer. She just thinks it is the worst, and not really because of any of the things that hit the headlines. She doesn’t talk about the environment. She doesn’t talk about it replacing jobs. She just thinks it’s stupid and lazy and that people are giving their brains over to it in a way that doesn’t make any sense. So then I pull up the video of the commencement speaker who over the weekend said to a graduating class that AI is going to be the next industrial revolution and gets booed, and Jane was like, “Oh yeah, we’ve all been sending that around. I already saw that.”

[00:21:38] Sarah: It’s not one commencement speaker; it’s three commencement speakers. Gloria Caufield at UCF, Big Machine Record CEO Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University, and then Eric Schmidt from Google at University of Arizona. Three of them got booed.

[00:21:54] Beth:  The young are at the gates, man. That’s where we are.

[00:21:58] Sarah: That’s same in my household. And look, so Griffin and I have also had very many passionate conversations, and I’m pretty supportive of his what I would describe as a pretty reductive stance about AI. I wish the support flowed in both directions, but alas, it does not. Which is that he needs to protect his critical thinking. That’s where he’s coming from. I have to learn to think before it can help me think, and I think he’s 100% correct. I don’t usually support teenagers’ reductive conclusions, but I think that’s the right one. He’s like, “I know it’s everywhere. I try to avoid it.” He doesn’t really even like to use it as like a tutor or to help with that kind of stuff because he’s like, “I can’t formulate my own voice, I can’t formulate my own thinking if I start depending on this too early.” I think he’s 100% correct. Now, all three of them are kind off getting on my nerves because if something is highly produced, then all of a sudden it’s AI. And I’m like, “Okay, everything you’re calling out as AI, I do not believe is AI.” I understand some things, and you’re right, but it’s like it’s become this shorthand. It’s become like anything that’s produced at all is AI. And I’m like, I don’t think that’s quite it either. They’ve almost like over-corrected. But look it is wildly unpopular among particularly young people, but they’re using it. They’re saying they hate it, but they’re using it. And it’s definitely got a worse reputation among younger people. But it’s a cross-generational bipartisan situation here where people are like, “It’s going too fast.” Again, to me these tracks are what we used to think when you started a conflict, people would wrap themselves in the flag, and we’ve shown that’s like completely not been true. And I think if you had asked us like six months before ChatGPT came out, you and I would’ve said “Oh, people love to adopt a technology and be positive and ignore the risks,” and that’s also been shown not to be true this time. It’s such a different reaction than I expected.

[00:23:52] Beth: I think about the different age groups and how they’re reacting to this because I do think that Trump is quite representative of older people. Older people do seem to be amazed by what can be created. And I get that. If you see this rapid development of sophisticated technology in your lifetime, I understand how some of what gets created with AI blows your mind and feels like wonder and awe. Our kids don’t feel a lot of wonder and awe. Everything seems possible to them and obvious to them, and way overdone. And I wonder sometimes when my girls, who do the same thing as your boys, when they’re saying like, “Oh, that’s AI,” if they’re just using that as a shorthand for “God, I’m sick of everything. I’m sick of everything in this world of slop and marketing, and I think there’s an agenda behind everything that I see,” which is something we’re going to talk more about later this week. I just wonder if that’s their shorthand for it. I feel like people closer to our age kind of riding the middle of those two groups have both pieces to us. We see that technology often can make life a little bit easier, and that it can often make life a whole lot worse. So I feel like if you’re sitting around with a bunch of people in early midlife, you’re going to hear more bitching and moaning about two-factor authentication and passwords, and another app because this team can’t use the same app as that team. We’re just in the muck of the annoyance of all this technology, and we can’t imagine going back to a different way of communicating, like a paper coming home from school to give me a calendar. I just can’t fathom that anymore.

[00:25:40] Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s worthwhile to talk about our own usage because it mirrors a lot of what we heard in the chat when we asked on Substack, how people were using it. Some are enthusiastic users. Some are still skeptical. There’s a couple that are just refusing because they feel like it short-circuits their own analytical processes, which I think is right. I will say that my usage of artificial intelligence has exploded. I’m just going to be really up front about that. The first thing and I’m saying this only half-joking because I do think it’s like reflective of the way it shows up, and then you’re like, “I’m not going back.” I just spent a whole lot of my life, probably like for 15 years, writing blogs, working on this podcast, working on the News Brief, filling in hyperlinks. I don’t really want to look back over the last 15 years and think how much of my wild and precious life I spent selecting text and right-clicking and saying, “Add link.” But it was a lot, okay? And I don’t have to do that anymore, and I am not sad about it, and I don’t want to go back to adding hyperlinks ever again. But it’s crazy in the production of the News Brief, from literally a year and a half ago how I would spend so much time finding the stories, adding the link, creating this. And it was, like, not even a good written show notes. It was just literally four or five links to the stories. To now using, AI to say, “Okay, here are the stories I want to cover. Take my transcript, put the links together.” I’ve created such a better product and something that took me or used to take me like an hour and a half, and now it takes me, I don’t know, four minutes. So just that so much of our work is taking an enormous amount of information and trying to make it digestible to people, and I have found that AI is just really good for that. Like, when you’re looking at analytics and you’re looking at like instead of scrolling back and forth from a spreadsheet and trying to figure out what it says or taking a bunch of... I would just dump notes. Like when I would prepare for the News Brief, I would just dump notes or clips or quotes or analysis that I thought was really interesting, and then I would have to spend time reading trying to decide how to put it in a way that I could read it quickly through the video. I don’t think it made the News Briefs any better for me to do that sort of like just organization intention, because I’d already read all the information. I knew what I wanted to talk about. Having AI just summarize it and put it together for me has really changed my work process in a positive direction, for sure.

[00:28:12] Beth: I also use AI every day now, and that became true for me when Anthropic released Cowork. So I was not impressed with what any kind of large language model chatbot working on the web could do for me.

[00:28:27] Sarah: Yeah, no, I kept trying to go back to it, and it just wouldn’t do anything worthwhile.

[00:28:31] Beth: No, it just doesn’t work. But Cowork is the thing that I have been wanting since large language models came onto the scene. I want to be able to build Bethapedia. Okay? Take my work that I have created and tell me what all I’ve made because we’ve been doing this for so long now. And the product that I create by myself for our premium members, More to Say, I have done so much extensive work that all exists in a database. Just searching through that database is a really clunky, time-intensive process. So I love being able to have Cowork Access that database. And I tell it, “Do not go outside this. I don’t want you doing research, I don’t want you on the internet using other people’s work, I don’t want you thinking your own thoughts, okay? I want you to look at my work and tell me what I have told people about this.” Just as a really concrete example, I was thinking about an episode on Cuba, and so I said, “Tell me every time I’ve talked about Cuba, and give me a summary of what I said so I understand what knowledge I’ve already communicated and where I need to start to pick up and move on to the next iteration.” And that’s just extremely valuable to me, and I don’t feel like I’m outsourcing creativity. I don’t feel like I’m stealing someone else’s work.

[00:29:57] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:29:58] Beth: I feel like I am just employing a tool in service of expanding what I’m capable of offering to people.

[00:30:06] Sarah: Yeah. I think the expanding what I’m able to offer to people is really what AI offers small businesses. I just think there’s just so many tools and a level of-- I wouldn’t call it expertise, but just a sort of head start. How often have I just wanted a shitty first draft of a marketing plan? And I could hire a marketer, but we don’t have the budget for that. We’re a very small team. We can’t have a full-time publicist and a full-time marketing expert and a full-time brand expert. That’s just not reasonable. It’s not within the plans for Pantsuit Politics. And being able to say “Does it make sense to go on YouTube? And if we are going on YouTube, what should we put in the show descriptions?” Yeah, I could spend eight hours watching YouTube videos explain YouTube show descriptions to me and what I should be looking for, but I find just asking Cowork “Act as this expert and just give me the high-level one-on-one on what we should be doing.” It’s just really accelerated what I can do as far as the business of the show. Which because we’re churning out two shows a week and the News Brief and Spicy and More to Say there’s just not a lot of time, even if we had all that staff, to meet with them. And I think I can see this for a lot of small business owners. I want to expand. Help me make a plan. I want to write an email to my customers. Just write a first draft. Even if I hate the first draft, just having a first draft there is really helpful.

[00:31:43] Beth: And my use might be Very unique to our business, because the other thing about Pantsuit Politics is that you and I have to wear all of it. It is an extension of who we are, and what I have liked about using Cowork is that I spend the bulk of my time with it telling it who I am. I update my instructions for it constantly, because I want it to understand. I don’t want generic advice about what to post on YouTube. I want advice that feels like me. I don’t really want it to adopt my voice. Even as it tries to do that, it never gets it right. It... No.

[00:32:22] Sarah: No, it doesn’t. It just uses y’all a lot, which I find insulting.

[00:32:28] Beth: Anytime it tells me, “That’s a real Beth move,” I give it the middle finger. And so those are, like, some of the guardrails that I put in place for myself, too, because I don’t want to think of this as an affirmation machine. I don’t want to think of this as an expert. I want to remember that it’s a tool, and so sometimes if it is giving me feedback on a draft, I’ll write my whole More to Say, there’s no use of AI for me until I have a draft of More to Say. I do all my own research. I do all my own writing. Then I stick it in to Claude, and I have told it, “Here’s what I’m looking for.” So it coaches me, but only around the things I tell it to coach me on. And sometimes when I’m reading that feedback, I’ll picture it in a really bitchy voice, because I do want to remember, these are my decisions. I don’t need to change that because it told me to change it. It’s just a prompt for my own thinking, and when you work alone most of the week, a lot of my week feels like I’m sitting in a library by myself, and I love that. I’m not complaining. But it is really valuable to have on demand something to bump up against. And something that has no feelings. So if I ignore everything it says, it doesn’t matter. But it helps me get clearer on what I’m trying to create and why. When I get challenged on something, even if I say, “No, I’m going to leave it the way it is,” I go through a little questioning process that’s valuable to what I ultimately am making.

[00:33:57] Sarah: And I just think what’s so different than if you’re talking about a student. Some of this, my journey, especially the last few months with using AI, feels a lot like social media. You start using it, you’re using it all the time, and you’re like, “This is amazing. Look at the possibilities.” And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Why do I want to cry? Why do I feel like crying?”

[00:34:16] Beth: This is exhausting.  it’s annoying.

[00:34:18] Sarah: It’s exhausting, because Claude can churn out those plans, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “I have to do all these plans,” and the plans are so long. And then you start looking at the plans and you’re like, “There’s a lot of filler in this plan.” You know what I mean? It can feel overwhelming in that it can churn out an enormous task list for you very easily as a small business owner. And I think that felt like in the beginning days of Facebook marketing. When I was running my campaign, it was in 2016, in the very early days of Facebook marketing. It felt incredible and it also felt like I could be doing it all the time, which is definitely how AI feels, too. I notice this flow of figuring out. And it’s more intense because the cycle has been faster. This cycle of experiencing it, being overwhelmed by it, has been way faster than social media, which probably took place over five years, as opposed to this taking part over five months, right? But if you’re a student and you don’t have the life experience to understand this flow, and I think their definitive experience as young people has been the... And I think this is true across generations, but particularly for young people, it has been the negative experience of social media, the sense that all it does is take. And so any part of that they recognize from that previous experience I think just gets amplified. This is extractive, it’s only going to take. So that’s why you have somebody standing up and saying, “It’s a tool, it can be really powerful,” and getting booed. Because I think their experience as digital natives in a totally new way than we were. They don’t have the life experience of, to see that sort of whole life cycle. Or if they have seen it, it’s been a primarily death cycle of this killed things, this killed my friend group. Especially in COVID. It killed class, it killed college, it killed... it just was so negative. So it doesn’t surprise me that particularly the younger you get, they can’t recognize or maybe they’re right. I don’t know. There is going to be so few neg- so few positives and only negatives.

[00:36:11] Beth: If you and I feel burnout by a lot of technology, imagine using it at school from the beginning of your school career to the end. Part of the reason fifth grade has been so miserable for both of my daughters is Dreambox, this math program that they have to do so many lessons of every week. It is rolled out to them as these are your goals for the week, and those goals are a certain number of lessons that get harder and harder, and for both of my girls eventually bypassed the curriculum for their grade level. So they’re having to complete these lessons without any instruction on how to do it, and they hate it. We’ve had the most intense hatred of Dreambox in this house with both of them.

[00:36:56] Sarah: And the other thing I recognize in this pattern of the negative reaction to tech, the negative reaction in the life cycle of social media, is the promise of productivity. I’ve sat in front of Cowork, and I have had the same exact reaction and the same feeling in my body that I used to have in the early aughts when I would download like six different stupid to-do list apps and just know that the next one, when I really locked in on the tagging and the filing, it would be the answer to all my problems. I do think that this is a totally different thing. I get that an agent versus a productivity app is light years apart. But it takes so much work, and it’s so frustrating to set up, and it’s never quite right. But I can feel myself falling for that cycle, too. That’s the promise of it’s going to change your life and make everything more productive.

[00:37:42] Beth: I constantly have to tell myself when I’m using Cowork just because you can doesn’t mean you need to. You’re not failing if you’re not moving at this pace because this isn’t a thing. As much as they try to make it sound warm, it’ll say, “Beth, that was genuinely funny.” And I’m like, “No, that’s not a thing for you. Stop that. Stop patronizing me. I hate it.” So I have to remind myself that this is here to help me, not to put pressure on me.

[00:38:09] Sarah: It’s hard for me to stop that cycle. It feels like an enormous amount of pressure.

[00:38:13] Beth: So I understand why people avoid it. I understand people worrying about the ethics of these models being trained on people’s work without their consent. Our books are in there. Our podcast transcripts. Nobody asked us. Nobody paying us. So I fully appreciate people who are worried about that. I appreciate people who are worried about the environmental cost. I am curious how you think about this, Sarah. I’ll tell you that I made an episode of More to Say probably a couple years ago now about the cost of a Google search to the environment, and it really helped me remember what I already know, which is that everything has an environmental cost. Everything. And There are ways in which I can get myself into a space of guilt about that, that are actually destructive to the cause of trying to care for the planet in a healthier way. I could make the argument that we should all work from home so that we avoid all of that traffic on the road and all that fuel burned, and I just don’t think that’s right. So I don’t feel guilty about using AI. I do try to think about whether I would want a data center anywhere near me, and where my hypocrisies lie around that because I think there are some concerns about these things going into communities without community consent, without clear agreements about where the power is coming from and where the water’s coming from. And I think these data centers need to be approached the way any other economic development needs to be approached, which is not just this is a gift to this community, it is also a burden on this community, and how can this be mutually beneficial and agreeable to all of us? But I’m curious how you’ve been thinking about that side of it.

[00:40:00] Sarah: I think that the most likely path for artificial intelligence, assuming, some model doesn’t come out that empowers bad actors to take out the species. Big if, but I’m counting on us surviving. The most likely scenario for me... what’s frustrating is, I’m going to say this, understanding that we have literally no one in a position of power within the Trump administration who is keeping an eye on this, thinking about this, trying to get us closer to this, but they won’t be in power forever, is a utility model. I think if it’s a utility model and it got trained on all our work, that doesn’t bother me. If it’s a utility that every American gains access to, and I think that’s a different issue. I think if it’s a utility that every American gains access to, the issues around energy consumption and resources become a different analysis, a needed one, and I think that we have built a narrative that we can continue to progress without costs, that we can build a process where everybody has a voice and a veto, and we can continue to improve everybody’s lives. That’s not true. I don’t know how to say it any more clearly. It’s just not true. To improve people’s lives has costs. It just does. There’s no utopia in which we expand housing, and healthcare, and small business development, and education, and improve the quality of people’s lives without some cost being extracted from certain communities, certain populations. I’m not talking about oppression. I’m not talking about exploiting populations. I’m just saying you don’t get change without some people not liking it. You know what I’m saying? Change comes at a cost, and the status quo is not going to sustain itself. No, there is no such thing as a static situation, and that’s what I just try to remind myself. I feel like people just want to stand still when it comes to AI. That’s just not a thing in human history. We just aren’t going to stand still, and there will be costs and benefits. And I would like to elect people and to have people in charge that are making thoughtful, wise decisions when it comes to that. I think we’ll probably get there eventually. But we’re not there now, and that’s why everybody’s so angry and freaked out because instead of saying “It doesn’t have to be a war for resources. It doesn’t have to be the kings of AI become rich like gods, and all the rest of us are scraping by on the bottom.” There is a path forward in which this becomes, like I said, a public utility or a public good and can maybe help us solve some of the problems. I can see that. I can’t see us getting there with the current leadership, but I can see that in front of us if I squint.

[00:43:03] Beth: I feel like I’ve been all over the place on this, and I may be in a totally different place the next time we talk about it because I do feel a sense of humility. I have no authority on this topic. I’m trying to learn. I recognize that I am also operating from this deep psychological fear I have of becoming obsolete in a number of dimensions. So I’m just trying to share kind of my experience. I was pretty hair on fire about this because I felt like it was happening to us instead of for us and that there was no agency around it. I’m so glad that there are people who are saying, “No, I don’t want any part of this.” I’m so glad that young people are completely unimpressed by it. There’s friction in the process now which gives me more confidence that we might get to that place where we’ve decided, for the most part, how we want this to be used, and for what, and by whom, and to what end. And that is a real shift for me, just in the last few months even. Because before that, I did think the attitude, and the flow of money, and all the market signals were like whether you want this or not, it’s a tsunami that’s coming for you. It’s going to change everything. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, and today I feel a little bit more agency. And a little more everybody’s learned. We’re learning how to adapt to these tsunamis that are going to keep coming from technology, and we’re learning that we can stand up and say, “Wait a second, this seems wrong. This hurts too many people. This cost is not worth the benefit. And here the cost is well worth it.”

[00:44:45] Sarah: And also the product is crap. I just think sometimes it’s going to change the way people write. It already has. And then people are going to go, “I don’t like this,” and so people are going to change the way they write again. The music’s going to change. It already has, and then people are going to go, “I don’t like this,” and it’s not going to sell, and then that will change. These companies that are churning out 4,000 podcasts a day or whatever that crazy-ass reporting is. Like they’re going to do that. They’re going to spend a lot of money doing it. It’s not going to produce any real market share outcome, and they’re going to go guess we won’t do that anymore. Again, the sleepwalker bias, I think, is what we have to be really careful about. It will change things, and then people will decide if they don’t like it. Or if it creates consequences they’re not okay with. Even to the Trump administration, they were going to be hands-off remember? Hands off, full steam ahead, AI gets to do what it wants. Now they’re coming out with executive orders saying, no, they have to have new models approved by the federal government. You can see the changes even with them in real time where people go too much, too fast, don’t like the outcome.

[00:45:47] Beth: One of the ways that I use AI is to push my own writing. After we record our episodes, my post-production job is to write a little blurb on Substack about the episode. I built a skill in Claude for Claude to do that for me, and what I have discovered is that gives me an example of exactly what I do not want that note to be. Because it is super generic and feels like AI wrote it and feels like marketing speak. It’s cringey. My kids would say it’s cringey, and that’s great because then I look at that and go, “Okay, I got to do better than that. It is my job in this world full of slop to produce something much better than that and something that’s distinctive, something that only could be written by me about this episode that I helped create with you.” So I love having that yardstick of this is the average, and I don’t want to be average. I, again, kind off worry about that for my kids and for young people in general who haven’t had enough life experience to develop their voice before this tool came out.

[00:46:55] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:46:56] Beth: There’s always something to worry about, though.

[00:46:59] Sarah: There’s always something to worry about is an excellent conclusion for a conversation about artificial intelligence. Up next, we’re going to talk about the summer. So Beth, we have America 250 Summer. I have an RV trip across America planned with my family, so I’m really leaning into the theme here. I got kids going to camp- several different camps. It’s pretty tightly scheduled. I’m going to Philly. I’m going to lean into America 250 there. But I have it all so tight, and I’m excited about all these things. But school ends on Thursday, and I’m looking at my calendar, and I feel like summer’s already over. Why do I feel that way?

[00:47:49] Beth: I can’t tell you why you feel that way. I can only claim solidarity, even though I have an entirely different summer than you do. I’m not going anywhere this summer.

[00:47:57] Sarah: So it’s not the fact that mine’s scheduled. That’s not it then.

[00:48:01] Beth: I think it is the fact that it’s scheduled, and I think that no matter what the schedule is, the schedule can create that feeling. I’m not traveling this summer, but my summer is very scheduled because Jane is working. Jane can drive with me in the car, but not without me now. So many of my days are going to be about taking Jane to work and then going back to get her at the end of her shift, while Ellen is doing a variety of day camps and programs and hanging out with friends. Both of them, I said, “This is hangout summer. We’re going to hang out a lot more, okay? I want you to be with kids more.” Because I was with kids so much more than they are when I was a kid, and I think that those days on a trampoline, at a park, at the pool, watching movies, whatever, are so important, but that is a lot of transportation for me. And I told them-- because at one point I think I kind off hurt their feelings. Chad and I were talking about how intense it is to get them everywhere they’re going, and I said, “Look, I love this time in the car with you. We have such good conversations. I think everything you’re doing is wonderful. It is just the schedule it is the feeling that I have to have you to a place and back at a certain time, and that means that there’s this teeny window for me to do every everything else that has to be done.” And when you look at the summer and the camps and the birthday parties and whatever milestones, the trips, whatever is on there, I really approach it all as this big chunk between school years, and it’s like everything has to happen in this chunk of time, and it’s that sort of scarcity of creating a window like that makes me feel like there’s no time for anything.

[00:49:47] Sarah: It used to be summer filled me with such dread because it felt Long and unscheduled, and I had all this time where I had to figure out what people could do and where they could go and what they were doing, and filling them with random day camps, and pickups and drop-offs, and all that. And it’s the opposite of now. Griffin’s going to be a counselor at camp. He’ll be gone for a month. Amos has four weeks of camp scheduled. Felix has four weeks of camp scheduled. They’re hanging. I don’t have to drive them anywhere, which is my favorite part about that. But I went from one extreme to the other, to where it felt like it was too unscheduled, and I dreaded it and it felt too long, and now it’s too scheduled and I feel like it’s already over. Where’s the happy medium? Where’s the Goldilocks summer? Where is the Goldilocks summer?

[00:50:30] Beth: I would like to hear from people who feel like they’ve experienced a Goldilocks summer. I think some of this too just depends on what else has to happen in that window. When I am not working in the summer, we take a break, and during that time, I feel about Goldilocks. I love running them to whatever they have, and reading a book, and doing chores around my house, and puttering. I love to putter of my own hanging with friends. Those feel like Goldilocks days to me. When we’re working it’s brutal. So I think the age of the kids makes a difference. Your obligations make a difference. The weather makes a difference. A rainy day in the summer is a long day. If people feel like they have achieved a consistent Goldilocks summer, I’m interested in how they’ve done that.

[00:51:21] Sarah: It sounds like they were independently wealthy and they don’t have to work, to me.

[00:51:24] Beth: That must be it.

[00:51:26] Sarah: Maybe there’s other solutions out here. We’re all ears.

[00:51:28] Beth: I’m sure that if Elon or Sam were here, they would tell us that’s what AI’s going to give us, the Goldilocks summer. That’s the promise.

[00:51:34] Sarah: Yeah, I look at their lives and think they look real Goldilocks to me. Yeah, definitely what I’m picking up from those two bozos. All right. That’s it for today. Quick reminder, the Minneapolis hotel rooms and conference spots close June 12th. The link is in the show notes. Whatever your summer holds, I do know that this event in Minneapolis will be an excellent finale, so you should join us. Plus, make sure you’re a member of our paid Substack community so you will get all the America 250 fun we have coming your way in the next few weeks. Thanks for listening to Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in your ears on Friday, and until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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I was thinking about that as we prepared to talk with our current Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman. She is running for governor, and we’re excited. Sarah goes way back with Lt. Gov. Coleman to Emerge Kentucky (a program for Democratic women considering running for office). I’ve met her several times and like her, and I particularly like her staffers. So we were at a real risk of doing an influencer interview: “You’re awesome, no you are, ok we all are, yay.”

We thought a lot about her questions and how we could have this conversation and learn something about her. When we wrapped up, we met that mark for me. I learned about how she thinks about going from speaking for Gov. Andy Beshear to speaking for herself. I learned about how she decided when and how and why to disclose that she’d had a double mastectomy during a re-election campaign. I learned about her confidence in the face of criticism (and will be holding onto “dogs don’t bark at parked cars” for myself).

I know our audience is not primarily Kentucky-based. Hearing a woman who got tapped to be a running mate while on bus duty is potent no matter where you are. I want more than the Pinterest board of women with babies in office; Coleman talked about sweating at a podium while holding a six-month-old who’d just been vaccinated. This is the kind of interview that I want to do more of: tell me who you are and what you care about. Tell me something real about you and hear something real about me. Meet me somewhere. -Beth

Episode Resources

• Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman (State of Kentucky)

• Jacqueline for Kentucky Website

Episode Transcript

[00:00:24] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:25] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We have a very special guest today. Kentucky’s Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman is here for her very first podcast appearance as a candidate for governor. We sit down with her in person in Louisville, and are so excited to share this wide-ranging, candid discussion with you. You’ll hear about her teaching experience, her imposter syndrome, and the very raw moments of life she’s lived while in office, like having a baby and going through a double mastectomy. And Outside of Politics, you will not believe her TV guilty pleasure.

[00:01:04] Sarah: It was shocking to me, and I know her pretty well. Thank you to everyone who voted in our Good Neighbors T-shirt design contest. I will be announcing the winner on the Good Morning news brief on Monday morning, so that will be the first place to get the news. Make sure you’re subscribed there if you’re not already. We’ll have the winning shirts available to order soon.

[00:01:22] Beth: Up next, Lieutenant Jacqueline Coleman.

[00:01:35] Sarah: Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman, welcome back to Pantsuit Politics.  This is not your first time here.

[00:01:41] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: This is not my first time here, but this is my first podcast since I announced my run for governor of Kentucky, so thank you all for having me.

[00:01:48] Sarah: We are honored.

[00:01:49] Beth: Thank you for being here.

[00:01:50] Sarah: And we would have been offended had you chosen someone else just for the official record. Speaking of the official record, when I was getting ready for this episode, I found a letter that you wrote to your basketball players at East Jessamine when you decided to run in 2016. And it said, “Just like you, I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up. Maybe I’ll get back into coaching. Maybe I’ll be governor one day.” So what I want to know is what would Jacqueline Coleman of 2026 write in her letter today?

[00:02:19] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: First of all, I would tell my players how proud I am of them. Part of my launch last week, I had former players introduce me at different places, and it made me tear up, and I joked with them that I teared up for different reasons than I used to tear up because of them. But they’re all growing into young women with families and careers, and it’s amazing. And so I think, first, I would tell them how proud I am of them. And second, I think I would tell them to never say never because you just don’t know what opportunity is around the corner. You don’t know what that next right step could be and where it can take you, and so never say never is what I would tell them.

[00:02:58] Beth: So everyone probably knows that you are a teacher. You’ve said you’re the highest elected teacher in Kentucky. We would love to hear about a specific classroom memory that walks around the halls in Frankfort with you.

[00:03:09] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes. So I think my specific memory that definitely walks around the halls of Frankfort with me is my first year teaching at East Jessamine High School. I had a full classroom, first of all, and about three-fourths of it was boys. And they were juniors, and they were bouncing off the walls. And it was like they were so endearing and charming, and I just adored them, and also they drove me nuts. And that’s like the typical like first year class you get when you’re a first year teacher. You kind of get stuck with a classroom full of 75% boys. But they taught me patience. And you learn that you have to be, a compassionate educator, but sometimes you have to be a little tough on them too to get them to settle down and pay attention. So that is a classroom memory that I carry with me, is that first class at East Jessamine that was mainly boys.

[00:04:00] Beth: That does sound like good preparation for dealing with the Kentucky State Legislature.

[00:04:03] Sarah: That’s exactly what I was going to say. Exactly. Classroom management is a valuable skill.

[00:04:07] Beth: Three-fourths boys makes it tough occasionally.

[00:04:08] Sarah: For sure. So we’ve heard the story in Kentucky, but I want our broader audience to hear the story of you in the bus line when Governor Andy Beshear called you. Because You were a teacher. It’s not like you were running for office. It’s not like you’d served. Tell us that story.

[00:04:22] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah, so in the spring of 2018, I got a phone call from this guy named Andy Beshear, who happened to also, he was the attorney general in Kentucky at the time, and we knew each other. It was small circles. But he called and asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee with him sometime. And I thought, “Okay yeah, we can work that out.” And we kept going back and forth to try to find a time, and we never really could work it out for, at first, because I had bus duty. I was an assistant principal, and so I had to wait till the last bus left the parking lot before I could go grab a coffee with him. And so we sit down, and the whole time I’m thinking, “I wonder what he’s going to I wonder what this is about. There’s obviously something going on. I bet he’s going to run for governor, and I bet that’s what he’s going to talk to me about.” And so he starts telling me he’s going to run for governor, and I’m like, “I figured, but also I don’t know why I’m here,” and he says the first decision I have to make is who I want my running mate to be.” And he paused, and I know I had a shocked look on my face, and he said, “What? Is that not what you thought we were going to talk about today?” And I said, “No, Andy. Just left bus duty. Of course, I did not think we were going to talk about me running as your lieutenant governor.” But I think that’s a testament to the power and the diversity of what teachers can do. Still to this day am so thankful to him for that opportunity, and it was just a really interesting conversation to be a part of after just having left bus duty one day. And then I had to go home and explain to my husband “Hey, guess what?”  

[00:05:51] Sarah: That was a whole ‘nother journey. I’m sure you had those moments, though, as you moved from being a teacher to being a candidate, like that sort of first classroom moment where you were like, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” What were those like?

[00:06:04] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I was a government teacher, so the process of how to get things done and ensuring that government works for you is what I made a living doing, is teaching young people that. But I have to say, a campaign is a thing of its own, and certainly once you get inside of the system of government, that’s an interesting place to be, too. And so I do remember on the campaign, sitting through a lot of meetings with consultants and people who’d done this their whole life, and that’s all they do. Shooting the first TV commercial.

[00:06:34] Sarah: That’s a long way from bus duty.

[00:06:36] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: That is a long way from bus duty, but it was at a school. I will say that. It was at a school. And you go from that to especially as a lieutenant governor, it’s an interesting place to be because your job is to speak on behalf of someone else but not speak for someone else. And so I will credit my experience in coaching and as being an assistant principal to helping me to fit into that role in a different way. You have to be able to prove that you can lead but also know that you got to stay in your lane. And so it’s a delicate dance, and I can see how it would be difficult for some folks to do. But I can remember the first meeting I was in the governor’s office and walking in and thinking, “Oh my gosh, what am I possibly going to bring to this conversation?” The whole imposter syndrome that women have. I’m sitting around these people who have been in state government their whole life. There’s attorneys. There’s people who had led departments, and me. And what I realized really quickly is we all had our lane. Mine is education, and it was very soon after that I realized now wait a minute, I do belong here because the largest part of our state budget is public education, and I know more about that than anybody else in this room does because I’ve walked the walk. And so it’s a reminder that as odd as those new experiences may be, you’re there for a reason. Yeah. And I have to talk myself out of that imposter syndrome every day because it’s still something that I think women deal with a lot.

[00:08:03] Beth: How quickly did you feel that lane expanding, though? Because I bet you soon realized, “I have things to talk about other than just education here, too.”

[00:08:09] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I think during the campaign I was the teacher on the ticket. I was the teacher. When I became lieutenant governor, it was a little bit more like all the challenges that we face in Kentucky, I see through the lens of education. So I believe it is the solution to a lot of the challenges that we face. When we’re looking at data and statistics and spreadsheets, I don’t see numbers on a line. I see the families of the kids in my classroom. So it makes it more personal to me in that way. And so I went from being, I think, identified as a teacher to being someone who uses that experience to see the rest of the world.

[00:08:50] Sarah: Because you are inside a system in public education, but you are also in such a personal-- like even physical, the few times I’ve just subbed it’s just such a embodied experience being in a classroom, being in a school, and you have to live in both of these worlds, like the high-minded, institutional, systemic, administrative, all these different constituencies. There’s a lot of politics in being in a school, for one thing. We’re talking about how it’s relevant to politics, but politics is relevant to that, too. How do you hold both of those; the physical reality the lived experience, but also bringing that systems analysis that you have to do when you’re looking at policy and when you’re looking at laws and you’re looking at budgets?

[00:09:29] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah, so nobody succeeds in a vacuum, right? And within these systems, you need so many different parts and pieces to make it work. So the way I think about it is as a public school teacher-- I taught high school-- I had to try to connect with and teach every kid that walked through my door. I didn’t get to pick who walked through my door. And I certainly didn’t get to choose their circumstances. But I tried my best to find a way to relate to every kid in my classroom in some way. Some of those relationships were easier to build, some were a little bit more difficult, but I always made an effort because I felt like at the end of the day, even if it wasn’t overly successful, they would know that I was trying. I think the best compliment I ever got as a teacher was, “Ms. Coleman, I hate social studies, but I love your class.” It was just like, “Oh, that’s so great because you like being in here.” But I take that experience and I transfer it to this role, and I genuinely don’t care where you come from, who you are, what letter you have by your name. I see a problem and I want to solve it. And there are a lot of people who run for office or who serve, and they say, “People over politics,” and then they go out and they act very political and partisan. And I consider working with the state legislature or working with people in state government the same way as I did with the kids in my classroom. You’re different than me. I may not be able to relate to you directly, but I’m going to try. We may not see eye to eye on everything, but there’s going to be sometimes where we can break through. But it’s ultimately about relationship-building to me.

[00:11:07] Sarah: Yeah. I was thinking when you said that there’s a lot of politicians that could hear you don’t get to pick your constituents. They are who they are. They are who they are, especially statewide. That’s really important.

[00:11:15] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: It’s such a diverse group of people, geographically, culturally all of those things. To me if the most significant thing about you or the most interesting thing about you is the letter by your name, that’s a problem. To me, it’s everything else that matters.

[00:11:29] Beth: Yeah. I got a lot of good teachers in my life, and I think being the lieutenant governor would be very hard for them because they operate like CEOs in every space. You can tell. They run a classroom. It’s their place. It’s their deal. They set the tone; they set the agenda. They communicate everything important. I can imagine that this has been a frustrating experience in a lot of ways, and I wonder if stepping into your campaign for governor feels different to you. Do you feel like a return to something, or like you’re stepping into a new space, or both? How’s the experience? There’s some people you want to give grades to.

[00:12:01] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes. That is a great point. And it’s so true because especially as lieutenant governor, you are somebody who is in a little bit of a difficult situation sometimes. Because, again, I speak on behalf of someone, but not for someone. And the governor and I have different people that are around us. There are different life experiences that we have. We’re very different people, but we’re working towards the same mission. And that can have its moments, obviously. There are some stories from my colleagues around the country that are quite interesting. I feel very fortunate compared to some of those stories. But it’s one of those situations where you have to know who you are and what you bring to the table, and even try to complement the other. So I’m not Andy Beshear, but there are things that I can do that can fill maybe a void for him just the same as he does for me. And so I think finding that niche is important. It took a minute because it can be hard. But you’re right, going from running a classroom to all of a sudden you have to run something through 10 different people, for both of us to be able to go out into the world is a very different experience. I often say, “ So this is why government moves at the speed of snail.” Now I get it.

[00:13:17] Sarah: So something else happened during that campaign, which is you became a mom. This is how our friendship blossomed as I was putting you on my Pinterest board of women bringing their babies to legislative experiences and executive experiences. It’s my favorite image in government. Tell us what that was like.

[00:13:33] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. We were running in our very first campaign, and we were running against an incumbent. It’s really hard to beat an incumbent, no matter what you’re running for. And so I ran in the general election pregnant. And Andy would always joke with me that he would just be about to say, “Gosh, I’m tired,” and then he would look at me and be like, “I can’t say that. You’re doing this and you’re pregnant.” I’m like, “ You’re smart. Thank you.” But it was a unique experience, and people ask me how hard it was, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” Because that was my first pregnancy, and it was my first statewide campaign. So, to me, that’s all I knew. I didn’t know if it was hard or not. I didn’t have anything to compare either one of those experiences to, and they happened together.

[00:14:13] Sarah: I’ve done them separately. That’s hard.

[00:14:14] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes. No matter what you do. We were elected in November. We were sworn in December. I had Evelyn in February. And the pandemic started in March.

[00:14:25] Sarah: Oh, my lord.

[00:14:26] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: When you talk going from running a classroom and living your life by a schedule, and every time the bell rang, you moved, and now it’s like what in the world are we all going through together? But I will say this. You had to find silver linings in tough times. I will say this. If it weren’t for that, I would not have been able to spend near as much time with Evelyn. She probably wouldn’t have been so prominent in pictures of me at the Capitol and things like that. So it did create this opportunity that I didn’t know was going to be there. And so it came with its own set of stressors too because, as you guys remember, every two weeks we were like, “Oh, so we still can’t go anywhere. Oh, so this is getting worse instead of getting better.” And we were all isolated and uncertain and all of those things. That’s hard to do with a newborn obviously. But it did give me the opportunity to be with her more than I would’ve, and so you just kind of have to take the challenges and the wins as they come.

[00:15:22] Sarah: And you had big kids trying to navigate that too.

[00:15:24] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. It was harder with the big kids. I could control the little one, right? I was holding her in all my meetings. But so I have an adopted daughter, Emma, who is 28. She played basketball for me. And she moved into our home, and eventually we adopted her and she’s my oldest daughter now. And then I have two bonus sons, Will and Nate, who are 24 and 22, and Evelyn is six. It is the most blended family you can possibly have. Yeah.

[00:15:51] Sarah: Yeah, so you were navigating a lot. Where did you show up in a room once she was born and think, “Oh this space is not designed for people like me.”

[00:16:00] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I will tell you I think it’s from the picture that you’re talking about of me standing behind the podium. I meet women across Kentucky, and especially moms, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. That picture means so much to me. I’m so glad you did that.” And I’m like, “I did not do that on purpose.” No one would plan that. So here’s what happened. I took Evelyn to go get her vaccinations. Six months old, I think, is how old she was. And the plan was my husband and I were going to take her to the doctor, get her shots. I was going to take them home, and I was going to go to the Capitol for our COVID press conference which was out in the rotunda, so it’s big open space. And the doctors were running behind, all of those types of things. Evelyn reacted to these vaccines worse than any other, and she squalled and screamed and cried the whole way home to the point where I was sweating. I was stress sweating. So you guys are, like, nodding your heads.

[00:16:51] Beth: Yes. Been there.

[00:16:52] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. So I’m like, “We don’t have time to drop you off, so we’re just going to take her. You guys can just go to my office, and I’ll go to the rotunda.” We walk in the Capitol, guess who fell asleep in my arms? And we’ve been through this for 45 minutes. I cannot do anything. So I was like let’s just go sit down. So we go sit down and I’m holding her, and Chris is sitting beside me, and I can see the governor getting ready to cue me. And I’m looking at Chris and looking at the governor, and I’m like, I’m just going to try this. Because I thought, “If I hand her off, she’s going to start crying.” So I was like, “Okay, here we go.” So I just went up to the podium, and my notes were up there, and I held her, and she didn’t move. And the women that I hear from today still are just so grateful for that image. And I’m like, “I’m glad you guys are because I was stress sweating in that picture.”

[00:17:34] Beth: Yeah, it costs you a lot.

[00:17:34] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. And so but it was in that space that I thought, “Man, this just wouldn’t happen to just anybody.” But also, I wouldn’t be in this role and able to do that if it weren’t the women that came before me that blazed that trail because they would’ve never been able to have a child while in office and still be considered a servant leader who could handle the job, right?

[00:17:55] Beth: I think that’s so important. And the blended family, that’s just how a lot of Kentuckians live. You want that representation in government even though it’s hard and takes a lot from people. I wonder, so you’ve had this experience. You’ve been our lieutenant governor. What have you seen about Kentucky that you wish every Kentuckian could see?

[00:18:12] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: The goodness. We have so many challenges. There’s so much negativity out there. It’s so easy to get down about certain aspects of maybe a community or the state or just the country at large at times, right? But when we go to especially I’ll point to natural disasters. We’ve had 15 federally declared natural disasters in Kentucky since the governor and I took office. And two of the biggest in our state’s history in West Kentucky with a tornado that was on the ground. It was an EF5 for 220-something miles straight. And then we had the flooding in Eastern Kentucky that was absolutely... The houses were picked up off their foundation and floated down the road. It was two of the most devastating scenes I’ve ever witnessed. But when I went to check on a specific family or went to see how people were doing, I watched a caravan of trucks pull up with farm equipment and equipment for cleanup, and they got out of their truck and they walked up to the homeowners and they introduced themselves and said, “How can I help?”

[00:19:18] Sarah: Wow.

[00:19:18] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: And you could just see the homeowners’ sigh of relief because they were looking around thinking, “How are we ever going to do this?” We had a former state representative actually who works in our administration now in Eastern Kentucky who was literally kayaking from house to house in Eastern Kentucky, getting out of her kayak onto roofs, pulling people in with her and taking them to safety. In the dead of night. It was dark outside, and I can’t imagine how eerie that would have felt. So just those are two very, memorable examples for me. But that happened all day every day whenever I was in a place after a natural disaster. And so that was a reminder to me of nothing else matters.

[00:20:03] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:20:03] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: When you go to the partisan politics of it all and the things--

[00:20:06] Sarah: Nobody was asking what your party affiliation was.

[00:20:08] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Nobody cared.

[00:20:09] Beth: And that is honestly in much more benign situations my experience of Kentucky culture too. Where I grew up, my dad and I would go four-wheeler riding. If somebody was putting up tobacco, he would stop, and he would help until they were finished. And now when it snows, my husband takes his four-wheeler and shovels everybody’s drives out for them. You know what I mean? I just think that’s how we roll here. And I like that you highlight it because I think we forget that sometimes especially in campaigns.

[00:20:33] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes, and I also think not that it doesn’t happen in larger places, but I also think that’s the beauty of a small town. Yeah. I think we’re all three from kind of small towns, and your neighbor. And even if you don’t, you feel some sort of responsibility to show up for each other just because you share that space.

[00:20:50] Sarah: And I think it’s a little bit to the embodied experience of teaching. You’re not lieutenant governor from behind a screen. You know what I mean? Your experience of Kentucky is not what people write on Facebook. Your experience of Kentucky is in the rooms with Kentuckians, and I just think that’s really important. And I’ve got to imagine, though, you still have probably that disjointed experience of seeing what’s going on online and then experiencing actual Kentuckians in the room. Which brings me to my favorite topic that I talk to you all about, putting the teacher part and this part together. because I know you care about this for your campaign, I know we’ve talked about it a lot, which is how that’s affecting our kids. That disembodied experience of social media and that portrayal of the world and the negativity and the distraction and the numbing, and the lived experience, the embodied experience of being a human in the world. So how are you thinking about that?

[00:21:42] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. I am very worried about our kids because I think technology can be useful, and it can help us be a little bit more effective and efficient in some ways. But just like anything, too much is not a good balance, and it takes you out of that reality. I think about young girls and the issues that they have on social media with body image. We all grew up in the same time period, like late 90s, early 2000s.

[00:22:07] Sarah: The magazines were bad enough.

[00:22:09] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: That was hard enough. Yes. Now imagine it following you everywhere on social media. And there’s a reason that we have a mental health crisis in this country, and especially with young people. And so some people want to want to depend on it for everything. Some people want to just completely shut it out. I don’t think you can do either one. But I do think that the key there is for us to teach kids how to balance and what reality is versus when you can use these things and it’s beneficial, versus when you might use them and it’s actually detrimental. And I don’t know that we know that yet. That’s the challenge, is that- we’re all trying to find that way and figure that out. But everybody from my big kids who they don’t watch TV. They sit on a couch, and they watch their phone. To my six-year-old who we have had to make sure that she understands that you can only use a device for so long, and you can only do certain things on it. Because it’s that addiction of hitting those buttons and getting that dopamine hit that it’s like you just have to be ready to create some rules and some boundaries around it. I don’t know what those are, and I don’t know what’s right and what’s not, but I’m trying to figure it out.

[00:23:20] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:23:21] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: And then you think what if I was 12? How can they possibly know? So it’s an experiment that I think continues on. But I worry that we have such a huge reliance on it right now, especially our kids.

[00:23:32] Sarah: Yeah, and we have this new one coming, this artificial intelligence coming in classrooms with tutoring. My friend was telling me the other day her son’s in college, and one of the fellow students just took a picture of the exam, let ChatGPT fill in the answers and then just wrote in the entire exam. Got a 98.

[00:23:50] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Wow.

[00:23:51] Sarah: I just think it’s like this Wild West. I do feel like the reaction is different, which is encouraging to me because I think we’re too fresh off the social media experience. And especially, I think, not just social media, but the presence of screens in education. Like, how much of that was in the classroom when you were there?

[00:24:06] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: We were not as dependent upon it as I think we became, especially during COVID. It was more of a technique than something that you would rely on every single day. But there definitely was a push for it, right? Now that I am where I am, I see, oh, okay, so all these companies were going to all these-- now I see how it’s working behind the scenes, and what I hate about that is our kids were the experiment. But yeah I actually said in my speech when I launched my campaign for governor that we are entering an era of AI that we don’t understand before we’ve ever held these decades-old social media platforms accountable. It’s just started in New Mexico and California because it’s been proven that their design is intended to addict kids. This is a big tobacco moment.

[00:24:54] Sarah: Yep.

[00:24:54] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: This is a big pharma moment. And now we’re going to having our big tech moment. And so I tend to think that we’ve got to have some folks who are running for office and in office who are brave enough to take on big companies like this and these CEOs that are just making an ungodly amount of money off of essentially abusing our kids.

[00:25:17] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:17] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: We can’t let that go on.

[00:25:19] Sarah: I don’t even think money’s the right word for it anymore. I think we need a bigger word than money for what they are collecting.

[00:25:23] Beth: It’s mining. They’re just mining us for how does your brain work, what holds your attention, what keeps you on the screen. You mentioned that we’re all from smallish towns. I feel like what I’ve heard about education my whole life is that place is a barrier. That place is what we’re trying to overcome through the use of technology. We make sure that you from little Livermore, Kentucky, Beth, get something comparable to what’s happening in Lexington and Louisville. I think we’re moving into an era where place is a distinct advantage where the ability to understand your place and its history and its resources and its physical landscape is a superpower. But I don’t think we’re doing much to tap into that right now. So how do you talk about that? You’re on the national stage a lot. I’m sure people see Kentucky as a place, as an obstacle instead of an asset. How do we flip that dynamic through policy?

[00:26:27] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah, I would say this, and I’ll tie this back to coaching as well, because I think about as a basketball coach, I built one program from the ground up. And so I recognize that while you’re looking down this tunnel and that light at the end of the tunnel seems like a million miles away, you have to put one foot in front of the other. You have to get a little bit better every day, right? And it seems like it takes forever. You face a lot of setbacks. You get frustrated. Sometimes you lose hope. But as long as you walk in the next day and you think, “Okay, we’ve got two hours to get better today,” that’s what you’re up against; is you the day before. But I’ve also been a coach of a team that I got to take to the Sweet 16, and so what I also recognized was I couldn’t allow players that were as talented as they were to become complacent, or they would never live up to their potential. So they had to get better every day, too. That looked different in one place than in the other. And so whether you’re talking about the most rural places in Kentucky or the biggest cities, there are challenges. And I will tell you this: they’re not all that different. When you look at whether it’s the eastern part of Kentucky and the mountains or the west end of Louisville. It looks completely different in one area than it does in the other, but if you ask them what their challenges are, they’ll tell you the same thing. And so not to say that the solutions are the same because they’re in different places, but I think it’s a reminder if you take an issue like affordable housing. I’ll give you this example. No matter where I go, whether I’m in Livermore or Louisville, that is the number one issue that local folks want to talk to me about. Now, in small communities, it’s because they don’t have a lot of financial ability. There’s lots of land. There’s lots of possibility. People want to live there because they want to raise a family there, but there’s just not a lot of financial resources, right? You go to Louisville, and there’s all kinds of financial resources but they don’t have the land, or they don’t have the room, or there’s too much maybe local bureaucracy around building. And so you see how the two issues in two different places maybe sound the same but don’t look the same. And so it truly is, to me, about going to every place that you can and sitting down and listening. Because for so long we’ve just had so many folks who waltz in, do a press conference, pretend like they have all the answers, and then leave town. And there’s just nothing good that comes from that. And so I wouldn’t know about-

[00:28:54] Sarah: what comes from that is cynicism.

[00:28:55] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes. So I wouldn’t know about the details of the affordable housing crisis in rural Kentucky versus urban Kentucky if I didn’t go and listen in these places and help to try to solve those problems.

[00:29:07] Beth: I feel like that’s so important because so much of what our current legislature has done, to me reads like model legislation that’s been drafted by interest groups for wherever, for generic state in the United States, right? And I think, who is this for in Kentucky? How does this address challenges that we actually have on the ground here?

[00:29:25] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: That is really frustrating to me, too, because again you go back to being a public servant, and there are some folks who either get an ounce of that power and feel like they can do anything and they don’t have to be held accountable. And then there are people who’ve been there for a really long time, who have lost touch with what’s really going on in communities, and none of those things serve the families that you’re actually supposed to be serving.

[00:29:50] Beth: It also just feels lazy. Write your own bill.

[00:29:52] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes.

[00:29:52] Beth: Come on.

[00:29:53] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes.

[00:29:54] Sarah: Okay, so we talked about the experience after your first swearing in. You had a very different experience after your second swearing in. Still embodied, I would imagine. So tell our listeners about that experience.

[00:30:06] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. Andy and I were running for re-election. This was in the ‘23 campaign, and I was 40. And I’m not a good person about going to the doctor or doing any of the things I’m supposed to be doing, I avoid it. That’s how I am. But I have a pretty serious history of breast cancer in my family moms, aunts, grandmothers, cousins. It’s just there. And so I was aware of that and knew that I’m going to have to make sure I stay on top of this. And so at 40, like I’m supposed to, I went and I got my very first mammogram. It was in September. Our election was in November. And I got some raised eyebrows. So I had to go back.

[00:30:46] Beth: During the mammogram?

[00:30:48] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah.

[00:30:48] Sarah: They’re supposed to keep a straight face.

[00:30:50] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I know. I’m good at reading people, Sarah. I try to be good at reading people. And they called me back in and they said, “It’s probably nothing. You don’t have a baseline test, so maybe it’s...” And I just knew. I just knew. And I was like, okay. So I go back for a more invasive exam. Now we need you to come back and do a biopsy. So I go back. So all of this is happening in September and October, okay? And at the end of October, we started our bus tour around Kentucky, and I got to give the governor some credit for this because I told him, I said, “I don’t have an answer yet, but I’m concerned about where this is going.”

[00:31:23] Sarah: And Evelyn is how old?

[00:31:25] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: She would’ve been two. Though which made it a whole nother layer to this. And he said, “Listen, I can handle the bus tour. This is nothing I can’t not do on my own, and you need to take care of yourself.” And I really appreciated that, but I was also like I kind of also need this distraction. I’m going to be honest with you. And after the biopsy, I got called in, and it was like we can do this or this. And I want you to know that between the last of that biopsy, that last appointment, and meeting with the doctor to know what I could do, was probably the most stressful time I’ve ever had because I just want answers. I just want to know what is wrong and what can I do about it. And again, I go home, and there’s a two-year-old running around the house, and I’m like, “The people that get this news and still have to go to the grocery and still have to take the kids to school and still have to do their job, and it’s in the back of their mind the whole time, I just don’t understand how people manage that.” And it was hard. So ultimately, I was given the option and decided to be as aggressive as possible. I kept it completely under wraps the entire campaign because I thought, that is all we need is a distraction. And I also didn’t have the answers yet, so I didn’t want to give people the news and not have a solution. We got inaugurated in December, and the next week I underwent a double mastectomy. And once I was through and we all knew everything was okay, that’s when I made sure everybody would be able to hear the news. And I was one of the lucky ones. I caught it early. I was aggressive and wanted to make sure I was around for Evelyn. But also the outpouring of stories that I heard from women, not just across Kentucky, but across the country, who heard the news and said, “I’m a breast cancer survivor of seven years. I am of 10 years. I just got diagnosed last year. I signed up for my first mammogram because of what you said.” Oh my gosh. I had a friend quit smoking because of it.” It’s just a reminder of the community that you can build when you are willing to be open enough about something that’s hard to talk about. I was never sure how I was going to talk about it, or if I was. But then I thought When I hand out this trophy at the Oaks, and we do the breast cancer survivor parade, I want those women to know that I’ve been through a similar situation as them. Not the same but similar, and that was always important to me.

[00:33:49] Beth: That decision-making as a public official seems very hard to me. To know what to share, when to share it, how to share it. To what extent do people feel entitled to know about what’s going on with you. And what is responsible on your end. So how do you think about that?

[00:34:04] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Really had to sit down and think through what is it that people need to know, and what is it that I want to maybe keep between myself and my family. And so I didn’t share a whole lot of details, like medical details along the way. But I shared a timeline and my decision-making. because I think that may help other people,. And that’s what ultimately I decided to do. But you’re right, it is tough because I just wanted to be able to tell people once I knew I was okay.

[00:34:31] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:34:32] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: If I had to tell the state before I had an answer, I would’ve never slept. So I just needed to fix it. That’s how I felt. I need to fix this, and then I’m going to share with you so that you can learn from it, and that’s kind of the mentality that I took from it. But I never had anybody press even the media. They would ask before they would do an interview, they’d be like, “Okay, listen, if there’s anything you don’t want to answer, you just tell us you don’t want to answer it.” And I didn’t have to do that. So it all went the way that I think it was supposed to, even though I felt like I had no idea what I was doing along the way. I don’t know how anybody could know what they would feel like that.

[00:35:05] Sarah: What sets my hair on fire is when you hear those stories from Europe where they’re like, they get the results, they walk them down the hall for the biopsy, and then they have the results, and i’m like why can’t we have that? Why do people have to hang out for weeks trying to figure out what’s going to happen? It’s so stressful.

[00:35:17] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: This was my third appointment, and I walk in a room and they’ve got you sitting in this secondary waiting room with all of the patients. The number of women sitting in that room blew my mind. And all of those, all of us were there for follow-up appointments. That was not the first.

[00:35:36] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:35:36] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: We had been told something could be wrong. And I just remember looking around that waiting room and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I cannot believe all day, every day, this is what women are dealing with in the back of their mind. Or patients of any kind are dealing with in the back of their mind on top of everything else they have to deal with.” It was not that I have ever not felt compassion for patients, but that gave me a sense of empathy I would’ve never had otherwise.

[00:36:01] Beth: So you’ve been living this very real life while you’ve been the lieutenant-governor.

[00:36:04] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes, I have.

[00:36:05] Sarah: Very embodied. That’s our thing, very embodied life.

[00:36:07] Beth: A lot of real life facing the kinds of challenges that regular people have all day, every day. Why do you want to be the governor?

[00:36:16] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: That’s easy after all this. I thought about it a lot as lieutenant governor, and I obviously have a unique vantage point, both as an educator, but as lieutenant governor, and someone who was a part of an entire administration for two terms, two statewide campaigns. And ultimately, I think we make things more difficult than they need to be sometimes. But it’s very simple for me. I want to be the next governor of Kentucky because I believe that every Kentuckian, no matter their ZIP code, deserves a fair shot at a better tomorrow. One that’s better than today, not one that’s perfect or one that solves every problem in the world. But it’s a chance for us to get better tomorrow than we were today, especially our kids and our grandkids. because if we’re not out here working for them and fighting for them every day, what are we doing?

[00:37:01] Sarah: Yeah. Evelyn’s old enough to know what you do now. What do you tell her about all this?

[00:37:05] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Here’s a funny story. So she was at the launch with me. So after that I got in the car and I went to Paducah, and my parents took Evelyn to school. And when she got to school, she told her teacher that her mommy was running for president. Of course, her teacher knew that wasn’t true. She knew what I was doing. But it was just so funny because I thought maybe we need to go over some details with her about this.

[00:37:27] Sarah: Pull out some of those little lesson plans.

[00:37:29] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yes. I don’t know that she really truly understands. I think she recognizes that mommy has a very public job. And she’s a very private kid. When we put her in sports and stuff, she doesn’t like anybody looking at her.

[00:37:41] Sarah: That’s hilarious

[00:37:42] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: it’s a very funny thing. She gets embarrassed very easily. But yeah she’s kind of figuring out that mom’s doing something that involves the word governor. But also she’s known Andy her whole life.

[00:37:52] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:37:52] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: He’s Andy. She’ll run in the office and be like, “Andy.” And there’s all these adults in the hallway that are scared to talk to him. So in that sense, she has no fear.

[00:38:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:38:01] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: But it’s got to be a weird life for her, that she’ll look back on one day and go, “Oh yeah, that’s what was going on.”

[00:38:07] Beth: When you think about what you want for the state, I love that vision. I also can imagine, though, I feel this way about politics. I hope somebody else can get us there because it’s such a mean, tortured, frustrating process. And I’ve watched some of the reaction to your announcement. They’re already rolling out; the sexist, mean dismissive remarks. So why you? What is within you that you think, “I’m the person to bring this vision to life, and I’m willing to endure the cost of that.”

[00:38:37] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. So what I’ll say first about the negative comments, from the other side, usually men, is dogs don’t bark at parked cars. So there is that. But yeah, again, I think Kentucky and Americans in general, are looking for a fresh perspective of someone that has lived a “normal life,” and walked in their shoes, and understands what they’re going through, and maybe even have been through it with them, right? Again, I go back to teaching, I go back to coaching. You are as much a member of that community and a leader in that community as elected officials are. My players were calling me in the middle of the night when they needed something, not the mayor. The families that struggled would have sidebar conversations with me, not the superintendent. And so it’s a very personal place to be. You still have to be a leader, and you still have to be able to connect with people. You have to work with people whether you like them or they like you or not. It’s your job. And so I honestly think for the ugly politics side of it, that’s why it’s kind of water off a duck’s back for me. I credit it to coaching because I’m like, if you have to go into a job every day, and there are people who pay $5 to come sit in a chair and watch you do that job, and then they’re yelling at you at the back of your head while you’re doing that job, all of a sudden the insults don’t matter. You just stay focused on what you’re supposed to stay focused on. Yeah. And so I think that’s why the politics doesn’t bother me. I don’t have any interest in being a part of it. I don’t like to be treated that way. I don’t plan on treating anybody else that way. But it may take somebody like a, I don’t know, a mom of a six-year-old to put these people in their place.

[00:40:20] Sarah: What do you say to the people who trot out the line, “I just don’t think Kentucky’s ready for a woman”? Do you first educate them on Martha Layne Collins or what?

[00:40:28] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: What I would say is that question was asked and answered 40 years ago.

[00:40:31] Sarah: Yeah. That’s such a good answer. I think you’re in a unique position, and I wonder how you think about this because the administrations have been popular, but not perfect. So how do you think about when people say, “Oh is this just a continuation? Is this more of the same?” What would you change? What’s your unique observation? Particularly I think about with working with a legislator that just loves to strip the power away more and more every year.

[00:40:54] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. I would say this. I think the next administration should be what Kentuckians need. And so for the things that are working, the job creation, the economic development, the focus that we’ve had on where families are, I think it’s something we absolutely have to continue on. Are there things that may need a fresh look or may need a different perspective? Sure. And I don’t think that anyone would agree with that because no administration can do everything, and certainly no administration can do everything perfectly. And so we focused on what we were able to get done, and there may be other things that as I listen to Kentuckians along the way really bubble up as an issue that we need a newfound focus on, and that’s why I think it’s so important to show up and listen and deliver results for people and make sure that you are the kind of representation that is reflective of them, not adversarial to them.

[00:41:48] Beth: When you think of education as your primary lens on Kentucky’s problems, what’s one thing that you would love to see during your term change in our educational systems in Kentucky?

[00:42:00] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I would Love to see us finally deliver on teacher raises. Here’s the thing. We’ve delivered on raises for law enforcement, state employees, and social workers. All of those are well-deserved, long overdue, right? The only group that we included raises for in our budget that got taken out were educators, and I think not only is that disrespectful, but I think it is a deterrent for young people who might want to enter the profession. Now, I did not become a teacher because I thought I was going to be rich at all. However, I do think there is something to be said about showing people that you value their work because the reason that we raised salaries for social workers and state employees and law enforcement is because we saw the numbers dwindling. Guess what happened after we did that. All of a sudden, we’re filling state police classes. All of a sudden we’ve got more social workers that are hired. All of a sudden we’ve got competitive applications for state employee positions. So it works. And if it can work for them, then it can work for educators as well.

[00:43:05] Sarah: And not for nothing, we’ve asked teachers to become police officers and social workers and bureaucrats.

[00:43:10] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Thank you. Yes. That’s a great point.

[00:43:11] Sarah: We have expanded that job and expanded that job. I’m sure you experienced it in the school where it’s just you’re asked more and more, to do more and more. So you should get paid more. We’re going to take a hard turn as we always do on Pantsuit Politics, and I know you know that because you listen.

[00:43:25] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I do. I am an avid listener. Yes.

[00:43:27] Sarah: Yes. We’re going to talk about Outside of Politics. We talked to you about what you wanted to share. You shared a truly shocking- We both went, “Ugh.” Tell the good people your guilty reality show pleasure.

[00:43:45] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. My guilty reality show pleasure is a long one, and I’ve been with this family through two networks now. And I’m with them because I’m just invested now in in the third generation of this family. But it is Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

[00:44:01] Sarah: I have never seen a single episode.

[00:44:03] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I don’t know that I’ve missed one. But here’s the thing. It is like you guys know when you’re watching reality TV, sometimes you’re doing two or three other things and you need something in the background.

[00:44:13] Sarah: It’s like they’re your roommates.

[00:44:14] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: That’s a good way to say that. Yeah. And so it’s more of that than it is being just heavily invested in what is happening in this episode, but I do think it’s fascinating. It’s a fascinating world.

[00:44:23] Beth: Tell me your Kardashian sister power ranking.

[00:44:26] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: What do you mean power ranking? Who’s my favorite?

[00:44:29] Beth: You could do favorite or just who do you think is the sharpest businesswoman of the bunch? Because they’re businesswomen, right?

[00:44:34] Sarah: They are businesswomen.

[00:44:34] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: They are. Yeah. I think the sharpest business woman got to be Kim.

[00:44:37] Sarah: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

[00:44:38] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: She’s like a mogul.

[00:44:40] Sarah: Yeah. Extraordinaire. I don’t know about those younger ones with the makeup and the Kylie. They’re coming up.

[00:44:44] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Kylie is like a little Kim junior, I think. But Khloe’s my favorite.

[00:44:48] Beth: Okay. Why is Khloe your favorite?

[00:44:49] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Because she’s just so funny, and I feel like she’s a genuinely good person. She is fun and seems like she’s such a good mom, and she’s there with her kids all the time, and she tries to be a good sister and daughter. And I just think she’s fun.

[00:45:00] Sarah: I love it.

[00:45:00] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I know.

[00:45:01] Sarah: You are a dedicated viewer. You also told us you’ve watched The View since you were 16 years old and you’re in.

[00:45:07] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: I’m in. I’ve watched The View since it came on when I was little. And I want you two to think about this because this involves you, too. So I grew up in a small town. I was raised by my dad, and all of a sudden this show comes on TV where I get to hear the things that are going on in the world, and I get to hear the perspective of different women. And all of a sudden I started looking to what their opinion was or what their take on something was, or to hear a take that was different than mine, right? And so that was very powerful for me. But you guys are that in this podcast space. So remember that you guys have come from different places with different backgrounds, and your voice and the things that you talk about and the way that you talk about it, whether people agree with everything you say or not, is impactful. It really is.

[00:45:57] Sarah:  You know who mine were? Mine were the Sugarbaker sisters.

[00:46:01] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Oh, absolutely. You are Julia.

[00:46:04] Sarah: Thank you. You know she was conservative in real life. It was a trade-off. If she had to do a liberal tirade, they gave her a solo. She got to sing. That was like the trade-off. Dixie Carter’s trade-off.

[00:46:15] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. That’s amazing. I did not know that.

[00:46:16] Sarah: Yes. And I cried about it one time on the show when we were talking about the treatment of CBS News of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and all this stuff. because I thought like it did, it gave me an example of like I could care about politics. And it was like Southern women who loved like beautiful things and life and all the things I loved, but also had some really strong opinions. That show was doing like the AIDS crisis and all this stuff way before anybody else. And it was just a powerful example of I can be a woman and I can be in this area that has traditionally belonged to men, and I can have opinions, and they can be forceful, and that’s fine. And it was a really powerful example. Yeah.

[00:46:52] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. What about you, Beth?

[00:46:53] Beth: It was a good one. I watched a lot of Golden Girls and Designing Women, for sure. I loved A Different World very much. I loved Just the Ten of Us, a whole bunch of sisters on that show who liked to sing.

[00:47:02] Sarah: Weren’t you a Murphy Brown person?

[00:47:03] Beth: I watched Murphy Brown. Look, we watched a lot of TV in my house growing up. We really did. I think in terms of somebody that I admired, it was like Diane Sawyer. My parents loved news and had news on all the time. And knowing that she’s from Kentucky and like here she is and everybody takes her seriously. I think that’s what I have always wanted. I have always desired to be taken seriously the way that Diane Sawyer was taken seriously.

[00:47:24] Sarah: Do y’all remember when they all came to Murphy Brown’s shower? Does anybody remember this episode? She had a baby shower, and all the other like real-life newswomen came to the baby shower. I still remember it.

[00:47:32] Beth: Aw. That’s very fun.

[00:47:32] Sarah: Yeah. Mine was obviously also Oprah. Oprah raised me. I call her my second mother. I watched her every day at 4:00. And again, and I think about her, I think I learned listening from her watching that show. As a part of Pantsuit Politics and understanding that like exactly what you were talking about, being in the rooms. People want to be heard. And when you listen, you learn a lot. You learn so much. It’s the teacher to student kind of transition. And I think that so many politicians they are just waiting for their opportunity to talk but I’ve never felt that way with you. I Think you do listen to learn, and I think you’re going to be a great governor. Yeah.

[00:48:04] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And thank you guys for having me.

[00:48:07] Beth: Thank you for doing your debut gubernatorial campaign podcast with us. We hope that it won’t be the last time that we chat with you.

[00:48:12] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Hopefully not.

[00:48:12] Beth: And I would like to say I always like to shout out the teams of people who make things happen. And you do have my favorite team in politics. Which I think says a lot. It’s important to have a nice team. Yes. I cannot say that about everyone we work with.

[00:48:22] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Yeah. I know. I get that.

[00:48:23] Beth: You are my favorite people.

[00:48:24] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: Thank you.

[00:48:24] Sarah: And thank you to the awesome team at La Land Studios, and Sage for helping us put all this together. We really appreciate it. Yeah.

[00:48:30] Beth: Yeah. And thanks to all of you for listening.

[00:48:32] Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman: All right. Thanks, everybody.

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.

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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.

The first act begins at the beginning of Genesis and takes us through the end of Adam’s and Eve’s life. Act II is the story of Noah and the Ark. These are stories I grew up with, presented in ways that provoked completely new interpretations and emotions in me. Without dragging you into a theological workshop processing this show (which I neeeeeeddddd), I left the theater thinking that maybe these stories are about what it takes to be part of a family: the excruciating choices, the loss, the willingness to look for joy in expected places when the world tells you it’s cliche.

There’s been a barrage of reporting for the past several years about falling birth rates, fewer people getting married, a “sex recession,” and a general macro-sense that the family is no longer the center of life. This is not something I lose sleep over, but I’m interested in the fact that countries across the world–western and eastern, wealthy and impoverished, individualistic and collectivist–are seeing similar trends. These countries are bringing a diverse array of policy tools to the table, and they aren’t making a demographic dent. All of that makes me wonder whether this is a policy issue at all and what thread is running through disparate cultures to cause this shift.

You’ll hear me searching for words today. I feel uncertainty about the topic. I feel intense emotions about my own family. I feel acute awareness that everyone else does, too.

Near the end of Children of Eden, Noah sings:

“And it’s only in Eden grows a rose without a thorn

And your children start to leave you

On the day that they were born

They will leave you there to cheer for them

They will leave you there to mourn ever so

Like an ark on uncharted seas their lives will be tossed

And the deeper is your love for them

The crueler is the cost

And just when they start to find themselves

Is when you fear they’re lost”

The only thing I know for sure is that I find tremendous purpose in my attachments. Whatever else you think about today's discussion, I hope that’s a thread that runs through this community. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Gerrymandering Battles in Virginia and Tennessee

• Iran and Ukraine Challenge Our Assumptions of Winning and Losing in Modern Warfare

• Demographics and the Luxury of Family

• Outside of Politics: Mother’s Day and Celebrating our Villages

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Episode Topic Resources

• Two Ways Out of the Gerrymander Trap (Pantsuit Politics)

• Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases (The New York Times)

• The End of Children (The New Yorker)

• Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. (The New York Times)

• The Cost of Raising Kids 2025 (American Family Survey)

• The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable (The Atlantic)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:31] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

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

[00:00:33] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We’ve got a lot for you today. We’re going to catch up on three big stories: the gerrymandering fight and why Democrats are despondent, if Trump is looking to walk away from Iran, and how Ukraine is actually winning on the battlefield even if nobody’s talking about it that way. Then we’re going to spend some real time on a conversation we’ve been wanting to have for a while about what it means if having children and getting married in America is increasingly becoming something only certain people can afford to do. And we’re going to close out by talking about Mother’s Day and whether it’s become a holiday that can actually hold all that we’re asking it to hold, or we’ve just buried it in a bunch of brunch and flower arrangements.

[00:01:20] Beth: Before we start, we need to talk about our T-shirt. A few weeks ago we asked you to submit designs for an America 250 Good Neighbor shirt. We were blown away by what came in. You all are so talented and generous with your time out there. Thank you so much. So we went through everything. We made the excruciating cut to two finalists, and then we couldn’t cut anymore. Sarah and I were just done. We said, “This is too hard. Amelia and Bethany’s designs are impossible to choose between.” So it’s up on Substack. We have a poll on our Instagram stories. We would like you all to vote, please. Your country, or at least the two of us, are counting on you.

[00:01:59] Sarah: And everybody’s just saying both, Beth.

[00:02:01] Beth: I know. Listen, this is a persistent thing with our community. We say, “How about this or this?” And they’re like, “But why choose?” And I like that spirit of abundance.

[00:02:10] Sarah: That’s what happened to you today on More to Say.

[00:02:11] Beth: It’s what happened to me. I said, “Tariffs or UFOs?” And it was, like, 50/50. It was basically a tie, and then Caitlin comes in and says, “How about both?” And so that’s what I did. So I’m making the problem worse.

[00:02:28] Sarah: We do have a spirit of abundance here on Pantsuit Politics. Okay. Next up, let’s at least start with this gerrymandering death spiral. Beth, the Virginia State Supreme Court has struck down the redrawn map that was going to give Democrats at least a fighting chance in the war that Republicans began

[00:03:01] Beth: I have not yet read this decision. My understanding of it is that they said not that the map is wrong, but that the process through which the map was created was wrong. The process that involved taking the idea to voters at this moment was incorrect. And I think that’s important to say because it’s very confusing to live in a world where the Supreme Court says, “Pretty much all maps are okay. We have no thoughts about maps. Maps are political documents that we aren’t going to weigh into,” and hold that alongside this decision.” So this is a process decision. Bad and confusing for the justice system when they say the process was wrong after the fact. Much more helpful for the process to be declared invalid before the voters weigh in and the new maps are created, and it’s May of an election year.

[00:03:51] Sarah: And I just think this is starting to stack up, that you have blue states going to their voters, like in California and Virginia, in the same exact week that you have Tennessee just taking it to the state legislator and saying, “We’re done. We’re not going to have this Democratic district in Memphis.” You’ve got protesters, you’ve got their colleagues saying, “No, we don’t want this,” and they do it anyway. So you have red states just plowing forward not putting it up to voters at all. You have a blue state putting it to voters. The voters say, “This is what we want.” I’m not saying it was a close election, but it won the election. And here we are. Here we are saying, “Nope, not good enough.” And if you are just going on the sort of previous assessment of how people vote and how they carve up these maps, it’s easy to get despondent as a Democrat because we brought as much fight as we could, and it looks like despite an historically unpopular presidency and historically low congressional approval ratings, they’re stacking the cards in their favor.

[00:04:54] Beth: May I give everyone a pep talk?

[00:04:55] Sarah: Please.

[00:04:56] Beth: Point number one, despondence is unattractive in a political party. Okay? It’s an election year. We’re getting close. November will be here before we know it, and despondence is a bad look. That doesn’t look like leadership. That doesn’t look like a party that can pull us out of the muck that we’re in politically right now. The world’s got big problems. Don’t be despondent over the maps. Despondence also sounds like you don’t trust the public. Every message that the Democratic Party ought to be focused on right now, in my humble opinion, is, “We can do it, but we need you.” Okay? We can do it. We have ideas. We have thoughts. We have principles. We didn’t want to be in this dumb gerrymandering fight anyway. Fine. You know what, we always knew this was wrong. We were just trying to do it to make things a little fairer, but if it’s going to be unfair, no problem. You, the American people, can fix it and we need you to fix it. We need you to get out and say, “This is unacceptable to us.” And I would just remember the lessons of history. I wrote about this on our Substack last week. In the very first Congressional election, there were attempts at gerrymandering. Okay? Anti-Federalists in Virginia... Feel your history, Virginians. In Virginia, Anti-Federalists tried to keep James Madison out of Congress by drawing a district where he had to go up against James Monroe, and James Madison won anyway. They cannot take all of our power if we exercise it collectively in these elections. So I just want everybody to put their game faces on, be pissed about this in private. Complain to your group chat, okay? But do not have reports from Politico and Axios and everyone else saying that you’re just sitting around going, “God, life is unfair,” because that doesn’t sound like a group of people who can lead us forward.

[00:06:40] Sarah: The good news is most voters aren’t reading Politico or Axios, so you can even report about it. You can talk about it on Punchbowl all you want. It’s not going to break through to the American public. So at least there’s that. That’s basically a private group chat as far as most of Americans are concerned. And the Democratic voters have to go somewhere. They’re not erasing them. It’s, though, frustrating because gerrymandering has been around that long because it does work. The reason they keep doing it is because it works. It’s the same argument I have about advertising. Yeah, I bet you think advertising doesn’t work on you, but you think it’s continued as a billion-dollar industry because it’s ineffective? No. My moment of hope is more long-term, which is I have never heard so many mentions of Uncap the House before. It’s feels like every time I turn around, someone is forwarding me because I’m the Uncap the House girl. I’m happy to have that title, and it seems that momentum is building towards the idea that this bottoming out of Congressional approval and fewer and fewer Competitive House districts cannot co-exist. Something’s got to give. And if they continue to control the House in the face of rising discontent, I do think something will give. I do think people will say, “Okay, this isn’t working, so let’s try something different.” There is lots of moments in history where that became true as well in America, where people just had enough and said, “Okay if we can’t get the change through the process, then we will change the process, period.” So that’s my moment of hope.

[00:08:20] Beth: Uncap the House is a very big idea that feels hard to people, and it is. I’m for it, and I think we can do it because I think we can do big things. If you are looking for more medium steps, though, something can give out of this in pretty short order. We could have Congress just pass a law that says you can’t change the map for a federal election in the year of that election. I would take that step. There are many ways for us to express our unhappiness with people who say, “Gerrymandering works for us, so we’re going to keep doing it, but it doesn’t work for you.” And I think that’s the message around this, and I think that’s still low on the priority list for these midterm elections. We’re about to talk about the war in Iran and the many effects of that. There are so many higher priority items for people who don’t follow politics closely. So focus on those, get your game faces on, keep going here. All is not lost around this. It’s bad, and it’s ugly, but all is not lost.

[00:09:21] Sarah: Let’s talk about Iran. You could be forgiven, even as a highly informed news and politics person, for struggling to keep up with the daily narrative, facts, updates, reporting on this war. I think that if there hasn’t been a conscious decision from the Trump administration to flood the field with confusing statements around this conflict, then they’ve done it subconsciously. I think that reflects his discontent with where he’s stuck, which is in a very bad place, with a ceasefire that involves strikes, with a negotiation that is seemingly going nowhere, and I just read this morning that he is asking for risk assessments from intelligence and military experts about declaring victory and walking away.

[00:10:21] Beth: It’s really tough to be honest with yourself about the fact that him declaring victory and walking away might be the best-case scenario at this point. I have a really hard time, as, as much as I can envision many paths forward out of this gerrymandering situation in the United States, I have a really hard time coming up with paths forward out of the mess that he has created in Iran. He is complaining openly this morning, on Monday, as we’re recording, about the people in Tehran being crazy and unreasonable and they can’t make a deal for anything. First of all, who are those people? It’d be good for the world to know. And secondly, that’s your fault. You killed everybody else and didn’t have a plan for what comes next. And so what are we going to do? Iran is acting like the party with the upper hand in these negotiations. Iran is saying, “The United States should pay us reparations for what they’ve done to our country. The United States should recognize our sovereignty. The United States should get out of the Strait of Hormuz and realize that it’s ours and we control what flows through it.” That does not seem like a country that is scared to death of what comes next. He can threaten all he wants to in terms of military action, but Iran doesn’t seem very scared. And I don’t know what to make of that, especially because Iran is not a reliable narrator on the world stage. And again, I don’t know who’s narrating right now. I don’t know who’s in charge. But this situation feels so intractable to me that there’s a part of me that thinks maybe he should just hang a banner and say, “Mission accomplished,” and we can all know that it’s false, but not make it worse. It feels like all he does right now is make this worse.

[00:12:07] Sarah: And this is in combination with the reality that he’s an unreliable narrator and the United States has been an unreliable narrator from the beginning. There is reporting from The New York Times that the damage to our bases is far beyond America’s understanding of what went down, particularly in the beginning of this conflict. And that’s the thing; I don’t know how I feel about him declaring victory and walking away. I guess what I want is competency, which is just not on the menu right now, sadly. I don’t know if that is the lowest impact option right now, is just to stick the world with this new reality that we have created. Even the really high-level analysis you read from the war institutes is in conflict. Some people say Iran is at a breaking point and yes they’ve understood this, but they can’t coexist inside this blockade for much longer. And then you hear “Yeah, but the stakes for Trump are worse because if a single strike gets through a ship that we are saying we’re accompanying through this path, then that is all it takes. We’re talking about primarily like private business and insurance, and maybe the global economy can figure out another way to supply the commodities we all depend on that flow through the Strait of Hormuz. But I am worried that whatever future that might be would take a very long time to get here, and the process would wreak a lot more havoc and suffering. I will say that this is maybe a good way to begin to talk about Ukraine because what I have seen, and I’m interested in your take, is that the narrative about Ukraine and the end of America’s support was pretty dire, right? It was dire. They’re going to lose, and it’ll be bad for Europe, and it’ll be bad for the Western world. But that’s not what we’ve seen. Just like the assumptions about Ukraine at the beginning weren’t true either. Russia is losing. They have suffered a net loss of one hundred and sixteen square kilometers in April, the first time it lost ground since the summer of 2024. I’ve reported on the news brief there’s a general in Ukraine who’s using drones to basically kill more Russians than they can recruit and has been doing that successfully for months. They have now gone to the Gulf states. They’re going to be the future of war, at least in the short term, for the globe for a long time because they’ve been fighting it, and they’ve been learning, and they’ve been developing technologies that the rest of the world is going to want. It’s going to be really profitable for them, and I’m sorry if that’s dark, but it’s the reality. I think we’re seeing that the narrative that the United States props it all up and if we all walk away it’s going to fall apart isn’t always true. And I think that we’re going to see that with Ukraine. I think we’re already seeing that with Europe and defense and military spending. I just don’t know what that looks like in Iran. I don’t think it will be the end of everything, but I don’t think the people in charge right now are capable or competent enough to understand, much less prepare, for a future where the world doesn’t need us, and that makes some people stronger. Some people we want to be stronger like Ukraine. And then sometimes maybe it’ll make people stronger who we don’t want to be stronger like Iran, who’s now learned that the Strait of Hormuz is their ultimate weapon

[00:16:08] Beth: The reason that I think that the best case scenario for the world might be Trump walking away and letting the world figure out what happens next is because Trump wants to do everything alone. He does think that America is the sum and substance of what happens in the world. It’s confusing because at the same time he loves to say, “Not our problem”

[00:16:29] Sarah: Yep

[00:16:29] Beth: Ukraine has survived in the most basic sense of that word through partnerships throughout the world, through diplomacy, through transactionalism, through obsequience when it’s been called for. They have done what they have needed to do to get other players on the global stage to have a stake in their war, and deftly from the beginning have said, “We’re not asking you to fight this fight for us. We’re asking you to help us have some chance in this fight.” That’s exactly what Trump has failed to do around Iran. When I read that analysis that you talked about where you get these conflicting takes even from foreign policy experts about what can and should happen next in Iran, I struggle with knowing how to interpret them because, like my own opinions, they all seem to rely so much on their feeling about whether he should have started it or not to begin with, right? It’s really hard to just accept where we are now without saying, “This was a good idea from the beginning, and therefore I can see my way through it,” or, “This was a terrible idea from the beginning, and therefore I cannot.” I really would love to find someone who would come on our show and say something like, “I thought this was wrong from the beginning, but here’s what I think could come of it that’s good,” or, “Here’s how I think the United States could navigate a path forward.” Difficult to find that kind of analysis. My understanding as of today is that one of the reasons the ceasefire is falling apart and this memorandum of understanding is on life support is because it assumed that Saudi Arabia would provide access to bases for US troops, that Saudi Arabia said, “We weren’t consulted about this, and we’re not going to.” And what I read this morning is that Mohammed bin Salman is furious about this. That is a mistake that Volodymyr Zelensky would not make. And that’s why I think that Ukraine has a really different opportunity, despite not having the size and the might, an opportunity to continue to survive and even thrive on the other side of this that I don’t see for the United States in Iran right now.

[00:18:52] Sarah: My red flag in the analysis is not necessarily even where people start. It’s that so many of them are like, “There’s two options. There’s three options. It’s this or that. If he doesn’t do this, it’s over. If this happens one time, it’s...” And I’m like, “That’s a red flag for me.” I think that involves a really high level of confidence in the facts you have in your just ability to predict the future, and I don’t know how anyone is confident in their ability to predict the future.

[00:19:22] Beth: Especially when there are this many people with such high stakes involved.

[00:19:27] Sarah: Yeah. And when you’re assessing Iran’s motivations or decision-making when you don’t know day to day who’s going to be making the decisions. The battle between the politicians and the military right now inside Iran is real. So that’s a very hard thing to build into any sort of future analysis because it could shift day to day, one general gets taken out, or one parliamentary member gets taken out by the next strike, and everything’s different because it’s rising and falling so much day to day based on God only knows what. I don’t know. I’ve never been inside one of these situations where there’s a battle between the politicians and the military. And that’s just what bugs me about so much of this analysis, even though I can read some of these and be like, “Yeah, that makes sense,” if he-- if one boat gets a strike. But it also made sense to me when the head of the Los Angeles port was saying everything’s going to fall off a cliff before the tariffs, and that didn’t happen. It also made sense to me when everybody was saying there’s an AI bubble, and the stock market is too pumped up, and that hasn’t happened. And so the parts of my brain that go that seemed obvious, and it didn’t happen, are getting stronger by the day. And so I’m just trying not to assume that I know or that anybody else knows what happens if he sticks in this quagmire for another six months or what happens if he walks away tomorrow.

[00:20:48] Beth: I think that prediction capacity that we have that goes into these very binary directions is useful because it gives us a glimpse of what might occur, but then we have to hold it alongside how adaptable we are. So if you look at Ukraine, it’s not that America is unimportant to Ukraine at this point. It’s that America is unreliable to Ukraine at this point, that America has been disrespectful to Ukraine in every possible way, and that’s probably the lightest word that I could use for it. And because there’s so much at stake, the rest of the world has rallied around. Ukraine still really needs our intelligence. It’s going to be touch and go, I think, about whether they get it, because the more you have The New York Times writing pieces about Zelensky criticizing the Trump administration, looking for other partners. I could see the president just being petty and saying, “We’re not going to share anything else with them for a while.” It is hard to imagine who could foster a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine if not the United States, but we’re not going to do it. That peace process is dead right now. Could come back to life, but it’s dead right now. I don’t want to make those kinds of predictions about the future, because we just see that we don’t know. I think with the Strait of Hormuz, it seems like this or that, and both choices seem very dire. At the same time, talking to my dad, who’s trying to plant his crops right now, and the price of fertilizer, the price of fuel the adaptations he is having to make on a small farm to get a crop of soybeans out tells me that something will give here because it has to. There’s just too much at stake. So I think the possibilities that help us understand America is important, but not everything are good, and they’re always going to be incomplete.

[00:22:54] Sarah: We wish we had a more satisfying conclusion than that but I think that’s right.

[00:23:00] Beth: Always.

[00:23:00] Sarah: And next up, we’re going to talk about something else even more complicated and nuanced and difficult, which is demographics. I want everyone to listen to me as carefully as possible. If you take nothing away as we move forward, please take this. We’re going to talk about the most personal things: having children, when and if to have children, getting married, when and if to get married, and I know it’s going to be hard, but I need everyone to repeat after me. Sarah and Beth love me, and they are not judging my personal decisions. This is a macro conversation and not a reflection of their personal judgments about me and my life choices. If you could repeat it out loud, I think that would be helpful. If you could repeat it about three times. If you could repeat it three times, I think that might even be more helpful. I just really want to emphasize that before we start having this conversation.

[00:24:11] Beth: That disclaimer helps me too because I do feel myself get tied up in knots. I don’t want anyone to feel personally judged by anything that I say. I know that everything I say today is going to be colored by the weekend that I had- where I had some really intense feelings about family. And so I have intense feelings, you have intense feelings, everybody listening does. It’s good for me to hear that disclaimer. I’m going to hold my hand up to the sky and repeat it to myself too so that I can be honest and we can say things that are initiators of good conversation, which is all we’re ever trying to do, not convince you of anything, but start good conversations in your life.

[00:24:50] Sarah: So at this point, we have all heard the statistics. The US birth rate is at a historic low of 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. This is not unique to the United States. South Korea’s is at .75. I read this really long piece in The New Yorker called The End of Children, and he spent a lot of time in South Korea, and it’s like schools where there are no kids, schools where there are two students per grade. It’s wild. It’s wild out there. And, look, it’s not just wealthy Western countries. It is countries with great family support like Denmark. It is countries with where women have low labor participation like Tunisia. It is countries that are not wealthy at all like Nepal and El Salvador. And we see similar statistics around marriage. It is in a global decline.

[00:25:50] Beth: We’re going to walk through the ways that experts are trying to make sense of this. There are a lot of different theories. What I came to as I was reading about it to prepare for this show, my umbrella theory, is that the more we can control as people, the more we try to control, and the more we believe needs to be controlled. And I think that is the only way that I can make sense of all of the disparate places and reasons people give for this macro trend. I fully understand at an individual level how people get where they are. And when I look at my life and the people I know who are not married and/or don’t have children, what I realize that isn’t reflected in the writing about this is that those people are still quite committed. People who aren’t married but still have deep commitments to other. People who don’t have children but are very involved in raising lots of children in their lives. And the writing about this seems to be about someone else, not like the technical decision, but the people who really don’t want to be committed in any particular way, who really find other people to be a burden and a risk that they can’t take and a responsibility that they can’t fulfill. And I don’t know a lot of people in that space. So there is that real disconnect for me between the experience of talking with folks about this and the macro trend that’s being reported on.

[00:27:31] Sarah: I think there’s a lot going on when we talk about it that we don’t grapple with. Even for myself, I’m not good at math, and so I had spent a lot of time thinking about what this means as far as like economically. We’re already struggling to pay for the social safety net because it’s not a savings account. The people working now pay for the people retiring. If we are having fewer and fewer children, obviously that’s going to come home to roost in a way that even immigration can’t fix because, again, this is a global problem. So eventually there will be no place left on planet Earth with enough people to distribute the labor equally across the globe. And also, I was just reading a piece that was like if we keep this up, if the trends continue, there won’t be a species. There won’t be enough humans left. Which I guess I hadn’t thought of. I was like so preoccupied with the more present day issues. And then I think there are just bigger emotional cultural issues. I was reading about how middle children are becoming like an endangered species. We won’t have enough kids to create middle children. I thought reading that piece about how people are having children later and later in life, like at 45, and I thought let’s just say plainly what that means. That means like no grandparents. That means a world where people are growing up without grandparents. Grandparents have been enormously important in my life. I grew up with great grandparents, like a lot of them. I’m 44 years old; I still have three grandparents. So just like trying to think about all the ways this plays out, and I think what it gets reduced down to is these emotional cultural issues. So you have Republicans pushing the cultural issues, Democrats pushing the economic issues. Like it’s one or the other. And if you can get to the one, that’ll fix it. And I just think of the way it gets reduced down to this bifurcated two-dimensional debate; like you can’t be a feminist and talk about this. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation on the other side of an abortion conversation we had on Friday. You can hold both things. I promise, I do it every day. You can have anxiety about the state of reproductive rights in the United States and be pro-choice, and also be really concerned about what’s happening around families.

[00:30:02] Beth: I don’t worry about the species not surviving. I kind of put that in the space that we talked about with foreign policy. It looks like the world’s going to end. We’ll figure something out. It won’t. That’s how I feel about those kinds of very long-term predictions as I take in demographics.

[00:30:22] Sarah: Important to note, 20 years ago it was overpopulation where people were saying it’s going to be the end of the species.

[00:30:28] Beth: Exactly. Again, I think control is my key word in this conversation. I don’t want to control what I cannot control, and that’s most things. And I don’t want to grasp for control through those kinds of dire predictions or other otherwise. Obviously, I have not let concern about this govern my life choices, one, because when we were in our 20s there was conversation about how we’re having too many people on the planet. And two, that’s just the way my life shook out. We had two children, that’s what we did. And I think that’s how most people live. This is what I did. And you get to this place in your 40s or 50s, maybe later and later for other people, where you think that’s what we did, and this is where we are, and we’re going to keep living.” I am really interested in what feels like a root cause of this to me, and that is the sense that other people are burdens or responsibilities that we can’t meet. And I worry about discussing it purely in those economic terms, in those social safety net terms, because I think that just reinforces the sentiment. I don’t want to look at children as a burden or a responsibility that we can’t fulfill. I don’t want to look at aging people as a burden or a responsibility that we can’t fulfill. What I believe is that, yeah, people are burdens, and being burdened by other people is our purpose for being here. That’s what life is about, and I don’t want to live under any political or ethical or religious framework that says otherwise. But that’s deeply personal to me, and I can’t control how other people see that either. So how do you have this conversation in a really inclusive way that respects that people bring a lot of different religious, ethical, and political frameworks to it? I think that’s really tough. That’s the reason we have our disclaimer.

[00:32:26] Sarah: That’s the first one I want to scratch at, is the it’s too expensive. So 71% of Americans now say raising children is unaffordable; a 13-point jump from just 2024. Here’s the thing, though, it is not correlated with income. So people report this no matter how much money they make. Okay, so what’s going on there? Now, you will find families with more money tend to have more children. And that, I think, is really what concerns me. I think when you talk about marriage and kids as like a capstone instead of a cornerstone like a milestone that everybody or most everybody pursues, as opposed to a luxury good you get after you’ve figured everything else out, it concerns me. Derek Thompson wrote this great piece about how he called it workism, and how we’re prioritizing our values around work and career instead of family. And I think there is that underlying narrative assumption when people even talk about their most personal choices. It’s this is something you culminate into when you don’t have to sacrifice anything else. How many times have I read or heard someone talk about having kids in relationship to vacations and a standard of living as if children are like a consumable good? And this has happened in so many other ways, right? Economic values have become the values, and I think this is one more manifestation of that because you see one of my favorite studies around this is around the fracking boom. Okay if people aren’t doing it because they want to have more money, then you get an influx of cash in a community, like with a fracking boom, then do we see these decisions shift? We don’t. You don’t see marriage rates increase when men have higher earning capacity because of a boom. And if you’re seeing this, even when people have a lot more money, they’re saying the same things, then I think we’re in this Venn diagram of culture and economics. I’m not saying economics are false. I’m not saying people have fooled themselves. We’ve done entire shows on the daycare crisis. But something else is going on here because, again, even in countries where you have an enormous amount of support, subsidized daycare, long parental leave policies, it’s not moving the needle, and I think it’s because we’re treating it as this luxury good to pursue at the end, and there’s some real barriers that come with that mentality.

[00:35:27] Beth: I think that’s probably been true for a long time. I had many conversations with my grandmother, “When’s about the right time to do this?” And every time she’d be like, “There is no right time. You just do it when you do it and it’ll work out. And that’s fine.” I don’t hear almost anyone say things anymore that sound like, “It’ll work out fine.”

[00:35:50] Sarah: Me, and I get yelled at on the internet. All the time.

[00:35:54] Beth: I think we have lost a lot of the vision that things will work out fine. I think even in those countries-- and I can’t take credit for this; I’ll link an article that talked about the vibes theory of demographics that feels close to right to me. And the author of that piece said, even in those countries with a whole lot of support, there’s a sense that you never reach the capstone where things are settled and done. People believe that the world is precarious now. People at all income levels believe that the world is very precarious now. And so you don’t feel like you arrive at that place where you know that for the life of a child, you believe that things will work out okay. There’ll be some hard times, there’ll be some good times, but things will work out okay. I talked to someone recently, I had a really interesting discussion with this person about the government shutdown, and they were telling me about a member of their family who is really dependent on WIC, the economic situation for this family makes SNAP pretty unhelpful to them, but WIC, the government program that provides nutrition assistance for some families, basically is where all the calories for the child that this person was telling me about comes from. And this child is loved clearly by a large number of people. That is a precarious situation, though. When the government opens, closes, opens, closes, when something that’s been around as long as SNAP or WIC doesn’t feel reliable, I get why a lot of people think, I don’t know. I get why a lot of people... My whole life we’ve been looking at Social Security being like, “I don’t know if you’re going to get that. You’re going to pay into it, but I don’t know if it’s going to be there for you.” So we’ve kind of practiced maybe it won’t work out instead of maybe it will work out. And I feel like that has taken root in me pretty deeply. There are a lot of times when I need to go back to my grandmother saying, “ You’ll figure it out one way or another,” because I can kind of spiral.

[00:37:54] Sarah: Yeah, it’s so interesting, though, that in other points of American history in particular where things were very unstable, you didn’t see this reaction. The Great Depression was pretty scary, I can only imagine. You didn’t see marriage rates and reproductive rates fall off. There’s no indication of that. Because we still saw the pursuit of kinship, family, as the reason we were here. And there’s these really interesting anti-capitalist, anti-fascist writers who are like, “This is what they do.” This is the plan, right? You pick apart this fundamental understanding of what keeps people together and what makes life worth living, and you put it all in people’s pocketbooks. And I feel like it’s a self-fulfilling process. You say what makes you happy is being economically stable, and so that if you’re not economically stable, you feel unhappy. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s just this instead of finding places, third places that aren’t your work, that say “This is what we’re doing here. This is why we’re here.” And I think as those have fallen away, we have left people with one choice. And if it was working and I felt like everybody was great living their best life, maybe we could talk, but that’s not what I see. That’s not what I see. And what really gets in my heart as someone who still considers themself progressive, is this is not playing out equally. I think that what bugs me the most is that you have people who define the cultural narrative, highly educated, highly resourced people who are still pursuing marriage and family, and for the most part getting it. Getting that capstone. When at the lower income level, marriage and children produce stability. It is not something you get once you find stability. It plays out differently in different portions of the American population. The bottoming out of marriage rates at the lower income ladder in America has been very detrimental to children, to families, to everyone. And that is not saying that I want to go back to when American women and wives couldn’t hold a credit card and had no rights. That’s not what I’m saying. But you also have this narrative that a world without marriage is really what we’re pursuing. You can see it. I hear it. I feel it. I read it. I was reading in this piece where somebody was like, “The marriage rates are bottoming out. The fertility rates are bottoming out,” and there were all these tweets that were like, “Hold the line, ladies. Keep going. We’re almost there.” And I’m like, “What is this?” You really think we’re going to opt out of the most fundamental form of human relationship, which is the family? I don’t know, guys. I got some questions.

[00:41:23] Beth: I think that if you approach it as a capstone, that will lead to opting out because it is the truth that committing to other people will produce tremendous instability in your life. It is also the source of stability. So as you said it is where you get the capacity to handle instability. It’s where you get the capacity to be motivated to problem solve. There is tremendous purpose and fuel in being burdened by other people and allowing yourself to be a burden to them. Both things are true. It is the source of instability; it is the source of stability. I was really down for a lot of this weekend because I planned to go see my mom on Mother’s Day. She has had several surgeries recently, and she just was not up for it. She still feels really bad. And I went down this road in my mind of just looking for someone to be mad at about that. Maybe I can be mad at our healthcare system. Maybe I can be mad at an economic system where I didn’t ever feel like I could live near my parents in my hometown as an adult. I went through a long list of everyone that I could be mad at, really from a political angle, because that is where my expertise lives now. And the bad news is that I really couldn’t find anyone to say, “I’m so mad at you, and if you had been different, none of this would be true. There’d be no suffering or pain in this situation whatsoever.” That’s what it is. You love people, and it’s hard because they will suffer and you will suffer, and it’ll be hard on both of you at different times. And we can try to enact policies that would make things better for them. But there are lots of things in the healthcare system that would make my mom’s life easier. But there are no political moves or policy moves or governance moves that would end everything that is ever going to hurt her physically or emotionally or otherwise. And I know that she wishes that she could have those things for me too, and they are not to be. And so I kind of struggle when we talk about this with where we want the conversation to go, because I don’t see ways in which the government Can change what we feel in our hearts that leads us to commit to people or not. I think the best I can do is say that I am not a person who dreamed of getting married and having kids. I dreamed of having a career, and everything good in my life has come from family, my family of origin and the family that I’ve created with Chad now, and our friends. And if I could go back and tell my younger self “Hey, just don’t put all your eggs in that work basket,” that would’ve probably saved me a lot of sadness. But I am proud of my professional life, too. I’m searching for a, “And here are my three bullet points about where this conversation should go,” and I don’t have them, but I do think it’s good to just share in the world that loving people is hard and worth it and being a burden is just part of being human, and that’s okay.

[00:44:54] Sarah: I do have some bullet points, Beth. Great news.

[00:44:56] Beth: Great. I’m ready.

[00:44:57] Sarah: First and foremost, I’m just changing my own language, and I’m really pushing when I find myself in conversations that I think represent a very limited view of what a good life looks like. Actually, let me say this. I think it’s about what a sophisticated life looks like, and so I’m pushing really hard in those places because I do not want family to become a class privilege. That is not what I want for my country. It is not what I want for my children, and it’s not what I want for anybody’s children. So I’m pushing really hard on some places that I hear come up all the time, which is that it is foolish and problematic to marry young, that of course you’re not going to marry your high school sweetheart. Of course, you’re not going to marry someone you meet in college. You should really keep playing the field and figuring out what’s out there. Now, again, if you got married at 45, I’m so happy for you, but I am not going to tell my children, “No, you’re not going to marry somebody you meet in high school.” They might. They might find a lot of happiness meeting someone they met in high school. I’ve been with Nicholas since I was 19 years old. That was great. And I put off having kids for too long. I wish I had another child. If I’d started sooner, I think I would. And I tell my boys that. I tell them, “I don’t regret one day of going, “Yep, this is the guy. Let’s do this.” The only thing I regret is not starting having you guys sooner. I tell them that. I articulate that, and I push on places where all parenting is that heartbreaking burden. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m obsessed with my children, completely obsessed. They have made me better in every way. I would not be good on this show if I did not have my boys. I would probably still be the 20-year-old who thought she had every answer figured out. Maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d be better. I don’t know. I just think roll the fucking dice, man. I think that control, that idea that we will orchestrate it, that you can protect yourself from heartbreak when you cannot, ever. I don’t care what choices you make. I just think it’s in there, and it’s all wrapped up in this is how sophisticated people act. They don’t get married young. They don’t have kids young. They have the career or whatever, and I’m really trying to throw a bomb into that and saying no. Maybe I would have 10 times the career, and maybe I’d be 10 times the happy. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe my life is so much less because I didn’t have that fourth child. Maybe it would’ve been a girl, and I’d be a real different person right now you know? I just think we got to... Life is full of risk, and the lie of capitalism is that you can remove it with economic choices. And until we release that death grip, no, I don’t think any of this is going to solve the global population decline, but I do think we’d be having more honest conversations. And I actually think in pursuit of that idea that we want to just make everybody individually okay with their choices, what we’ve done is create an environment where no one is okay. And we think we all have to put all our eggs in one basket instead of saying, “Maybe there’s another basket out there. Who the hell cares? Great. I rolled the dice. I lived. I took the risk, and aren’t I glad that I did?”

[00:48:23] Beth: As with many things, I think my grandmother Joy had this about right. She didn’t try to control anybody else or the universe, but that sense that we do what we do and we figure it out, that’s what I want to pass on to the next generation, that you will figure it out. Whatever it is that you do, you’ll figure it out and there’s a happy life available in it. And you don’t have to be limited in your choices by what feels cool or sophisticated or even responsible. There is a drumbeat that tells people the world is too bad, the world is too fragile for you to bring people into it, and I don’t think that’s right either. I think we do what we do, and we figure it out, and that is ultimately contributing to something good.

[00:49:12] Sarah: My grandmother looked at me and said, “We are not a fearful people.” That was the e Meemaw advice that lives in my bones. We’re not a fearful people, and that’s what I’m just trying to instill in my boys. I don’t want them to make this call, whatever it is, from the idea that they’re going to get it right or wrong. It’s going to be both. Always. It’s going to be both. You’re going to make a choice. Inevitably, that choice requires loss. It is the bittersweet reality of life. It wouldn’t be worth it if it didn’t include loss and regret, and an inevitable conclusion that comes with age that you chose a different path, and that path is now foreclosed to you. I guess what I really worry about is the capstone, the narrative of the sophisticated life, is that people don’t realize the path is foreclosed until it’s too late. Because even though we have, to our incredible benefit as a species, exploded the reality, particularly for women, of bigger, wider, more expansive life choices, the rates of people who say they want children really haven’t changed that much. Most people say, “I want this,” but when we make it a luxury capstone, people want it and can’t get it, and I don’t want that. That’s what I don’t want, and if there are policy or strategies, cultural, economic, I don’t care. But if people want it, then in a country as big as ours or in a globe as diverse as ours, that’s going to look a lot of different ways, and I just think we’ve painted ourselves into a corner where we’ve said there’s one way. Again, in pursuit of diverse options, it’s become less diverse. It’s become like this is how you do it. You wait. You wait until everything is perfect.

[00:51:46] Beth: Less materially or financially, I would just like to offer that if you talk to yourself about decisions like this as though you have to earn them, that’s a pattern worth reflecting on. How do I know?

[00:52:02] Sarah: Ask me how I know.

[00:52:04] Beth: When you think that you have to earn the right to get married now or to have kids now, the right to take a nap this afternoon, the right to do something that’s pleasurable, you’re always going to measure up short because you’re always going to keep lifting the bar for when you’ve earned that, especially when the world feels uncertain. So I think whatever brings you to the life choices that you make and figure out, it’s worth watching where you’re creating a yardstick for yourself in all things that leads to a lot of unhappiness because you decide that you’re never worthy of those things.

[00:52:49] Sarah: In the big picture, both economic and cultural angle, there is a system set up to keep us in a place of scarcity, to keep us in a place that we think we have to work harder and hustle harder and buy XYZ product to earn that, to earn the decision, to earn the nap, to earn the spa day, to earn whatever, and that’s bullshit, man. That’s where I start to really sound like my college leftist self. No, I don’t have to earn that shit. All of humanity, all of human history is full of people just stumbling into it, and somehow we all are here, still here. No, I wasn’t ready to have a kid. Of course, I wasn’t. You know what makes you ready to have a kid? Having one. It’s just not something you can intellectualize into understanding what it’s going to be like, and I’m so glad that despite being a control freak and an Enneagram One and all the personality tests, fill in the blank here, I was just driven spiritually. It’s what I wanted more than anything. I’m all the way on the other end of the spectrum from you. I always wanted to get married and have kids. I had that stupid board game where you planned your wedding as a preteen. I collected People Magazine celebrity wedding editions for years. That’s what I wanted. I wanted it, and I probably couldn’t have even told you why but I’m so glad I did. I’m so glad I was just driven beyond all reason to want these things, and I think part of it is I just grew up in a place that prioritized it. I grew up in a place where you didn’t ask what people did for a living. You asked if you had kids and where you went to church. It was just a different orientation to what a good life meant. And I understand that for some people to exist inside that, my community was probably very painful. I’m not downplaying that. But I also think it’s really painful to... I know because I’ve existed in the places where everybody just asks you what you do the second you meet them. Can we split the difference? Can we find a happy medium?

[00:55:05] Beth: And look, for people who have desperately wanted children and have not been able to have them for one reason or another, it’s painful when this gets prioritized, right? We don’t get to escape in any universe moments that are awkward and miserable and that push us down a path that we feel like we didn’t set for ourselves. And when you said there’s a system that makes us feel like we aren’t worthy, there are numerous systems. There are so many systems. All the systems in some way are there to tell you not enough.

[00:55:38] Sarah: Yes.

[00:55:39] Beth: Even the great religions of the world have components of them that cause people to feel that they’re unworthy. So in my mind, that’s the value of talking about demographics. You can just sit for a second and realize people are good, and people are a struggle. And just by the fact of your existence, you are entitled to be both. That’s your birthright. You get to be good and a struggle. And if I’m looking for a takeaway from this conversation, it reinforces to me something that I try to practice with my daughters when I ask them about their days. That’s a hard thing, to come home from school and be asked about your day for a kid. And so I really try to ask them every day, “Who was great to you today? Who was really kind? Who gave you a hand? Who made you feel special today?” Because I want them to be on the lookout for ways in which they can be committed to other people and inspired by other people and know who is committed to them.

[00:56:47] Sarah: Let’s wrap the way we started. A reminder. We love everybody.

[00:56:54] Beth: We do.

[00:56:54] Sarah: This is not a judgment on any personal decisions anyone has made in their lives. Whatever has gotten you to this point where you are listening to the sound of our voices, I am thrilled with, truly thrilled beyond measure. And what we do here at Pantsuit Politics, try to talk about policies, realities, demographics, and what that means in the broader context of a good life, and I hope we’ve had that conversation here about this. Okay, we’re going to move to Outside of Politics now, Beth. We are having this conversation coming off Mother’s Day weekend, which seems appropriate. Seems appropriate. We’re really going big here. The Friday before Mother’s Day, we talked about abortion. The Monday after Mother’s Day, we’re talking about natalism. Let’s go big.

[00:57:55] Beth: We might need a disclaimer for this section too because people are testy about Mother’s Day.

[00:57:59] Sarah: Here’s my disclaimer. It was a political act to begin with. So the idea that it’s going to be deta- we’re putting it in Outside of Politics, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Anna Jarvis founded it as a political act, and then spent the rest of her life trying to abolish it because she hated the way Hallmark got involved. So it’s just always been this Mother’s Day thing.

[00:58:18] Beth: I want to know how much Mother’s Day has evolved for you as your kids have gotten older.

[00:58:23] Sarah: I’m a traditionalist. I love a tradition, a routine, and actually, this is the first year where they did not bring me breakfast in bed, although they claim they’re going to do it next Sunday. That’s been our Mother’s Day tradition, even since they were, like, babies. Nicholas for many years, and then last year Griffin made pancakes, and they brought me breakfast in bed. And it kind of made me a little weepy because of teens. They sleep so late. But we have another tradition where I have a mother’s book, which I highly recommend. This was, like, a thing I read in Real Simple many years ago, where you just get a big-- I think mine’s eight-and-a-half-by-11-- just a blank paged book. And so if they make something in preschool, you just stick it in there. My kids write letters to me in it every year. So it’s just, like, all in one place. So I can see that evolution from fingerprint art to fully formed letters. But I don’t know if it’s changed that much. It’s still breakfast in bed. We go to my mom’s for lunch. We go to church. It’s pretty similar, even from when they were itty bitty

[00:59:25] Beth: I feel really differently about it now than I did when they were little. When they were little, I badly needed those sheets to come home from preschool that said funny things that your kids think about you. My friend Hannah posted a picture. She is very blonde, and her son had done, “My mom’s hair is black,” and she was like, “Here I am, just with my black hair,” and it was amazing. So I really needed those.

[00:59:49] Sarah: I was always so proud because Griffin’s never said “My mom likes grocery shopping.” No, they don’t, guys. No, they don’t. His was like, “My mom likes reading by herself.” That’s right, boy. That’s exactly right.

[01:00:00] Beth: I will never forget the year that one teacher captured lawyer as liar on mine. My mom is a liar. So I needed those. I thought that in the trenches time of parenting in that really physical way was so hard that I needed sort of the celebration. As my daughters have gotten older and I don’t feel so exhausted by it, it’s still very intense, for sure, and consuming, but there’s more of a flow I find for myself in this stage of it’s rewarding every day in a way, just as it’s trying every day in a way. So now I think more about Mother’s Day as a time to reflect on my mom. I also really do want to continue to show our kids these things are important, so I don’t want to blow it off either. I could kind of personally blow it off, but I don’t want to do that because I want them to know that this matters, and I want them to know when they need it, they should be honored in some way. And I felt this year particularly like I really wanted to be with my mom. I was sad that I didn’t get to be. I also did not want this to fall on Chad. We’re a very egalitarian household here. Chad does a ton around our house. We both work from home. Our division of labor is just not traditional in any way, so he’s busting it just as much as I am around the kids and our house, and I didn’t want him to feel obligated to do a lot, especially at the last minute because our plans changed so significantly. So I don’t know. I just reacted to the whole holiday quite differently this year than I have in past years.

[01:01:36] Sarah: Yeah, I don’t know if I don’t feel the shift to my mom as much because my mom is still alive. My grandmother’s 90 years old, so she is still celebrating her mother. And I think I still feel very in it with my boys, and I am, let me be clear, actively training them how I feel about Mother’s Day. They know. A week before I was like, “Mother’s Day is next week. Everybody got a plan? Just remember. I need a plan. Presents will be required. Acknowledgement is mandatory.” I was joking with them last night. I’m like, “How are you going to fill out the mom book in college? Y’all got an idea? You going to send a card? I just want to make sure we’re strategizing here, boys. This is important.” And I feel the same way about Father’s Day. Nicholas says he doesn’t care, but I do. I want them to understand moments where there’s this cultural, “ This is important, let’s celebrate it,” they’re just getting more and more rare. And so I kind of want to protect the places where it’s a reminder of, no, people deserve to be celebrated. Do I wish Mother’s Day and Teacher Appreciation was not in the same month? I do. Yeah. I think that’s shit planning and feels a little sexist to me. But I that doesn’t mean you get an out. You still got to take the moment. Look, we all want to be appreciative and grateful all the time, but we’re not. We get busy. We get distracted. Life is a lot. And I do teach my boys the moments where we’re going to take a minute and say, “Hey, what you do really matters to me,” yeah, we’re going to take them.

[01:03:04] Beth: So my big win from this Mother’s Day is that Jane wrote in the card. Often, Jane will just give you a card and sign it. It’ll just say Jane with a dash. And she actually wrote something in the card. It was funny. It was not super sentimental and cheesy. But she wrote in the card, and I felt okay, we are advancing as a family here. We are moving forward.

[01:03:24] Sarah: Oh, my favorite was-- Griffin always writes me a letter that is incredibly thoughtful. Griffin brought me warm chocolate chip cookies as I woke him from a nap, which was, like, really next level, on a little tray he bought for me. But Amos wrote something that was along the lines of, “When we’re right, you stick up for us. And when we’re wrong, you come down hard like we deserve,” or something along those lines. And I was like, winning, yes. What bugs me is this idea that I must celebrate every mother in my life. I hope you are not offended that I did not text you Happy Mother’s Day.

[01:04:08] Beth: It didn’t even occur to me that you might.

[01:04:09] Sarah: You are not my mother.

[01:04:10] Beth: And I did not text you either.

[01:04:12] Sarah: But you know why? Because we’re not each other’s mothers. It’s not that I’m like I resent these group texts that are like, Happy Mother’s Day. I don’t. I get it, but I don’t know it feels like this hustle we’ve created for ourselves that it can’t just be between... it’s enough, honestly, for it to be between me and my kids and me and my mom. That’s a lot. That’s a lot, and often I feel like I’m not getting the balance quite right, just as being a daughter and being a mother. And so then I’m like...

[01:04:36] Beth: that’s so hard.

[01:04:37] Sarah: I know.

[01:04:37] Beth: I think that balance is impossible.

[01:04:38] Sarah: It’s a hard one. And so then if, on top of it, I have to think I must effectively and sufficiently celebrating every mother I know? Listen, all my girlfriends are killing it. They’re great mothers, and I love you guys so much, and I wish there was a “celebrate who you’re mothering along with” day. I just think it’s a little much to pile it on Mother’s Day too.

[01:05:02] Beth: Yeah, I didn’t get a ton of that this year, and the messages that I did get meant a lot to me, maybe because there weren’t a ton of them. My sister sent me a really kind text message about the kind of mother that she sees me being and it really did mean a lot to me. So I don’t want that obligation to be out there for anyone, but I think what you’re naming that I do want to be more intentional about is saying thank you to the people who are in it with me. Just a few days before Mother’s Day, I had a long conversation with my friend Maggie over voice text, of course, about a parenting issue that I was struggling with and she workshopped ideas with me, and we went back and forth. But she always says at some point “You’re killing it. You’re doing great. You’re a great mom,” and it’s so helpful and valuable. So I would love a holiday devoted just to those people who make you a better parent.

[01:05:49] Sarah: Listen, we can be the committee, guys. Let’s pick a month that doesn’t have a lot going on, maybe I don’t know, March 18th, just picking one out of the clear blue sky. March is low-key. There’s not a lot going on in March.

[01:05:59] Beth: It’s the day after St. Patrick’s Day.

[01:06:02] Sarah: Okay. But St. Patrick’s Day is not a lot of work, you know what I’m saying?

[01:06:05] Beth: Yeah.

[01:06:06] Sarah: All right. So we’ll make it before St. Patrick’s Day. March 10th. March 10th, everybody, is new celebrate the mothers you’re mothering with. The listeners who write and say I got some messages when I posted on Mother’s Day “Your fearlessness about motherhood makes me more brave.” And that’s really the connector between the previous conversation. I just want to put as much of the take the ride, man. It’s okay. Even when it’s not okay, it’ll be okay. Like, when people say that back to me, and when my friends... one of the most encouraging messages I have ever gotten about mothering was from a friend who does not have children, who said, “Look, I work with kids. Your kids know they’re unconditionally loved. That’s it. That’s the ballgame. The rest is gravy. That’s where you fuck up a kid is where they think that your love is conditional. Yours don’t think that. Move the fuck on, man.” You’re good.” Yeah. So maybe that’s our March 10th holiday. Text your girlfriends, your friends, or text your male friends. Text all the parents you know. Your kids know you’re unconditionally loved. You’re slaying. Move on.

[01:07:05] Beth: I’m going to have to do some of this before March 10th, Sarah, because I’m sitting here thinking about my friend Janet who has raised her kids and has children and grandchildren, and I think a great-grandchild now. I asked her if she would spend the night at my house with my girls while I was out of town. And she said, yes, and she treated them like her own grandchildren, was wonderful to them. And I want to celebrate that. Just the people who make it possible for you to have a happy family life by being willing to love your kids and observe what’s good in your kids and observe what you’re doing. I have a lot of cards to send out, I think.

[01:07:40] Sarah: Listen, though, you got to keep it tight. This is the critique of Mother’s Day. March 10th is just the girlfriends you’re parenting besides.

[01:07:46] Beth: Okay.

[01:07:46] Sarah: Or just the friends you’re parenting beside. Let’s keep it tight, and then we’ll create another day in a low-stakes month, perhaps late September.

[01:07:55] Beth: Okay. September could use something else.

[01:07:57] Sarah: September, this is where we’re going to celebrate all the people that are contributing to our kids’ lives. The aunties, the adopted grandparents, the lovely neighbors. That’s where we’re going to say, “This is the village.” The village day

[01:08:15] Beth: I love that.

[01:08:16] Sarah: Village Day, late September.

[01:08:17] Beth:  God, we have a huge village, which is really a blessing.

[01:08:21] Sarah: This is what I’m saying. Again, I want the village. We cannot let postmodern capitalism push us out of the village, guys. We have to dig in. We have to grab it. We have to keep it. I have been to Japan where the replacement rate is low and the vibe is off, guys. I loved my visit. It’s an incredible country, but there were moments where the vibe was off, okay? And so just protect... if this is a vibe issue, then we got to protect the vibe where it is. So we’ll have the March 10th, loving the people you’re parenting alongside, and we’ll have late September village day. We did it.

[01:08:53] Beth: I’m in. Good job.

[01:08:55] Sarah: Yes. Okay. It was a lot. We told you at the front it was going to be a lot. I feel like we kept that promise. All right. Don’t forget to head to our Substack or Instagram and cast your vote for the winning Good Neighbors t-shirt design. We will be back here again 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.

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That simple sentiment gets tangled up quickly in post-Dobbs abortion debates. Today, we’re talking about recent fallout from the Supreme Court “returning abortion to the states.” The state of Louisiana wants federal courts to find that mifepristone, an abortion medication, should not be prescribed via telehealth appointments and mailed to patients. Louisiana says that the FDA’s authorization of this practice interferes with its sovereignty. The Supreme Court will have to take some action on this next week (it temporarily halted an appellate court’s order that would require in-person visits for access to the drug). It can be hard to decide where rights begin and end in this conversation, especially since the Supreme Court announced that we do not have a federal right to abortion access.

We talk about the Court, the politics, and the people caught in the crossfire today. Outside of politics, we share our “personal Pulitzers”--the long-reads that lodged in our minds and hearts for years. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Mifepristone, the Courts, and the Mail

• Trump, the GOP, and the Abortion Trap

• Outside of Politics: Our Personal Pulitzers

Episode Resources

Abortion

• Mifepristone legal battle returns abortion to political spotlight (The Washington Post)

• Supreme Court temporarily restores mifepristone mail access (CNN)

• The Supreme Court may force Trump to take a position (CNN)

• Medication Abortions Accounted for 63% of All US Abortions in 2023 (Guttmacher)

• #WeCount Report June 2025 (Society of Family Planning)

• Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs (KFF)

• More than 26,000 self-managed abortions post-Dobbs (Missouri Independent)

Our Personal Pulitizers

• Prize Winners and Finalists | The Pulitzer Prizes

• The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty (Texas Monthly)

• The Sorrow and Shame of the Accidental Killer (Alice Gregory in The New Yorker, September 2017)

• The Itch (Atul Gwande in The New Yorker, 2008)

• It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2022)

• “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart” with Jennifer Senior (Pantsuit Politics)

• Why Can’t Americans Sleep? (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2025)

• What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2021)

• “Fatal Distraction” (Gene Weingarten in Washington Post, 2009)

• The Innocent Man Part 1 and Part 2 (Pamela Colloff in Texas Monthly, 2012)

• The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker, 2015) t

• The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, 2014)

• The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God? (Christian Wilman in Harper’s, 2025)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:28] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

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

[00:00:32] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we’re talking about abortion rights. Where is the debate? What is the legal reality? And does Donald Trump care? Outside of politics, the Pulitzers came out this week, and we’re going to talk about our own personal Pulitzers, pieces of journalism or writing that are still sticking with us years later.

[00:00:52] Beth: We’re doing something fun this week. We need your help making a decision about something we’ve been working on for the summer. It’s a very special project, so head over to our Substack and subscribe for free so you don’t miss it, and so you can weigh in. Okay. Let’s talk about abortion. Beth, it feels like we don’t spend a lot of time talking about abortion these days. Isn’t that weird? It is weird. It’s weird, and it feels like it’s happening by design because the people in charge got everything they ever wanted around abortion, and now they kind of hate it and we all hate it, and it’s very stuck.

[00:01:36] Sarah: There was some movement this week. We had a court decision from the Fifth Circuit. Louisiana sued the FDA, arguing that mailed abortion pills undermine its state ban. It’s a new legal theory called sovereign injury. It feels like it came out of some sort of Samuel Alito wet dream. But this is what it means. So we are currently in a reality where over two-thirds of abortions in the United States are medical abortions using mifepristone, the abortion pill, and many, many, many of these are mailed. The FDA relaxed restrictions on mifepristone several times since it’s been approved. In 2016, they deemed it safe to use to terminate pregnancies up to 10 weeks. In 2021, they removed a requirement that it be prescribed in person. In 2023, the FDA changed its risk evaluation and mitigation strategies policy around mifepristone, and so now you don’t even need an in-person visit at all to access the drug. So in practice, that meant that people in pro-life states Could order the drugs online from pro-choice states. And, you know, some of these states tried shield laws to protect in-state medical providers. That’s largely worked. Um, the pro-life states have challenged those shield laws, but first they went after the FDA.

[00:03:02] Beth: These cases are extremely frustrating to read. That’s always been true because when a court is considering anything about abortion, you have, like, several verticals functioning at one time.

You have what is real standard of care medical practice in one vertical, and courts do not have the expertise to weigh in on that- ... so they largely ignore it, but that is where the rubber meets the road for all of us living out here in the world.

[00:03:27] Sarah: Right.

[00:03:28] Beth: And then you have the bureaucracy layer. Is the FDA complying with the Administrative Procedures Act when it does what it does? The way the Fifth Circuit starts this opinion is by telling us the supreme Court said that states now get to regulate abortion again. They returned abortion to the states, and then the Biden FDA hastily decides to build this workaround by letting people access mifepristone through telehealth and mailing the pills. And the courts like to explore this path. Was that FDA decision rushed, complete? Did it comply with all the rules that you have to comply with as an agency? Then you have a political dimension always and forever. Very present in this case because unlike previous mifepristone challenges, it is now the Trump Justice Department defending the Trump FDA and not really trying to argue that what the FDA did in twenty-twenty-one complied with the Administrative Procedures Act. Their argument is, “We need to review everything. Just give us a minute. Just hold up. Give us time to review everything.”

[00:04:39] Sarah: They want to hold up permanently. We’ll get to that in the political reality later.

[00:04:42] Beth: Then you have this other vertical of just classic legal issues. So you mentioned sovereign injury. I don’t think that’s a new theory. We’ve seen that theory supercharged really under Trump one, the idea that states can go into federal courts as plaintiffs and complain about federal policy on a number of dimensions, and I think this is something that we all want really. We want states to be able to challenge what the federal government is doing on immigration or the environment or healthcare policy, and that’s part of what Louisiana is saying. The federal government, through its policymaking, has intruded on our sphere, and that has caused us injury both in just our sovereignty and financial injury because a couple of women on Medicaid, two in 2025, had to be treated for complications related to taking mifepristone that they got by mail. It cost the state about $92,000, which is another red flag about our health systems. But that is our financial injury. And so you have all these verticals happening at one time, and no court wants to be honest about that because when you separate it out, you realize this is a mess that judges are not well-suited to navigate. The Fifth Circuit, though, has considered that mifepristone order three times now, and for the third time it has said, “We think the FDA was wrong.” So this wasn’t surprising at all, but it’s going to reach the Supreme Court now that both gave us abortion as returned to the states and has told us they don’t like lower courts imposing nationwide bans on anything. So just a lot of factors to hold in just your legal hand.

[00:06:32] Sarah: So to the verticals, I think the medical reality argument is very strained. You hear some women have complications. Maybe some people use it fraudulently. Some men trick their wives or girlfriends into taking it. Definitely that happens, but that’s a fallacy. People kill people with antifreeze, and we don’t enforce all these extra restrictions on antifreeze. So the idea that some people abuse mifepristone medically does not mean that it is not safe for the majority of women to take via telehealth. All of a sudden pro-life activists are concerned with ectopic pregnancies? Give me a break. No. These are medical realities that not only the healthcare system in the United States, but the healthcare systems in Europe and Canada have dealt with. They are largely deemed safe, okay? So I’m I don’t want to hear feigned concern for women’s healthcare. To the bureaucratic vertical, I think they have some real conflicting arguments and motivations because of what you just said, right? The FDA moved too fast. The same FDA, the same Department of Health and Human Services who you want to speed-boat through every vaccine recommendation we’ve sat on for decades? Give me a break. And I’m not sympathetic to that argument not only because I think it’s hypocritical, but because I think this needs reevaluation all the way across the board. The medical breakthroughs, the specific gene therapies that we are looking at biomedically through advances in artificial intelligence are going to skyrocket. And so we don’t need court decisions slowing down FDA processes. We don’t need more bureaucracy. This is a safe drug. You know it’s safe. You’re using the bureaucratic angle, and you better be real careful with that because you might slow some other things down that you don’t want to slow down. So I don’t buy that either.

[00:08:31] Beth: People don’t run for Congress saying things like, “I’d like to rewrite the Administrative Procedures Act.” But that does need to happen.

[00:08:37] Sarah: But they should.

[00:08:38] Beth: They should do that. I mean, that would be one of the most impactful things that a new Congress could do, to grapple with things like artificial intelligence, to grapple with the way that is affecting healthcare. There are so many places where the federal government is built to be slow, and there are benefits to that slowness. There are problems with it, too, and as miserable as the Administrative Procedures Act is, and it is. Administrative law was the worst class by a lot that I took in law school. It’s horrible. It will put you to sleep faster than anything else. And it’s where so much of the things the federal government does that actually affect people’s lives, that body of law, and it needs a refresh.

[00:09:24] Sarah: Now, to the sovereign injury vertical. Look, it is true that the Supreme Court said states get to decide, and as they do in so many cases, they ignored the lived reality that is all but impossible. It’s like they get in their narrow, cordoned-off ideas of reality, and they say, “Well, this law’s no good, and we don’t really care what happens next.” They did it with the tariffs. They did it with online gambling. They did it with election financing. They don’t care. And I think it is a big reason that the validity and legitimacy of the Supreme Court is tanking with the American public because you’re going to sit up there, you’re going to act like legislators, you’re going to pass decisions that basically act as laws and change the lived reality of Americans, and then when it’s a shit show, go, “Rah, rah, rah.” Because that’s what this is. You said states get to decide. Have you heard of the mail, friends? Have you heard of the internet? We don’t get to make America first by cordoning off the borders any more than Louisiana gets to control its citizen without a shadow of a doubt within its borders. This is a federal system. We live in the age of transportation, open communication, the mail, which has existed since the time you like to talk about that you’re such experts in. It’s just so stupid. Like, what did they think was going to happen? Like, the telehealth rose 63% post-Ops because people went, “Fine, I’ll just get it through the mail.” Again, y’all just put on blinders and you decide that what you write on paper is all that matters. But those decisions go out, and they have real consequences. I don’t think this court has an answer for the fact that telehealth is going to continue to exist when it comes to abortion, whether they like it or not.

[00:11:17] Beth: If you go to the court thinking that Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided and that defines the terms of the debate for you, you are living in a very different reality than the one that we all inhabit. This is a federalism powder keg. You briefly mentioned shield laws. I want to make that extremely concrete. Louisiana has criminally indicted a doctor in New York and a doctor in California for prescribing mifepristone through telehealth to people in Louisiana. The governor of Louisiana has enthusiastically signed extradition orders saying those people need to be hauled from their homes into court in Louisiana to be prosecuted for facilitating crimes under Louisiana’s law, and the only reason that they haven’t been is because their governors have said, “No, our state legislature has chosen to shield people from extradition, to shield doctors from this happening.” That story really needs to be told. Americans need to understand the stakes involved here. Can you imagine the way this country would blow up if a doctor from New York were hauled into a criminal court in Louisiana, tried and convicted and jailed in Louisiana for putting some pills in the mail? I think most people, the vast majority of people, even people sincerely opposed to abortion in their hearts, do not want that reality for the United States of America. But that is the reality Louisiana is pursuing in every way that it can pursue it, through criminal laws, through Supreme Court litigation. Louisiana wants to be able to control what doctors outside of Louisiana can and cannot do for citizens of their state.

[00:13:03] Sarah: I don’t understand on lots of levels why the medical profession is not hair-on-fire about this. People are suing doctors in Texas, trying to revoke their licenses and suing them for medical malpractice because they did not perform abortion procedures on women that were going toxic, women that have all kinds of health procedures because they were scared of the Texas law. Like, they’re making you guys the villains. I don’t know why the AMA, I don’t know why the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians is not using all their lobbying power and money to say, “This is unacceptable. You’re making us the villains. You’re putting doctors in an impossible position.” The Supreme Court put all of us in an impossible position. These doctors in California and New York, it might sound theoretical. Well, no big deal, they won’t go to Louisiana. They won’t go to jail. No, they can’t leave the state. Like when you have criminal charges against you, that’s a big deal that affects all kinds of things about their lives. These doctors are taking enormous risks because they believe women have the right to access this medical care. And Louisiana, Texas, these states saying, “No, we get to decide how women access this reproductive treatment.” No matter what, you can’t go into another state. Don’t go into another state, do it, and then try to come back. We’ll arrest you. People are getting arrested. People are going to jail for miscarriages, much less crossing state lines to have abortions.

[00:14:37] Beth: I can imagine the doctors just feel like they’re under assault from so many angles that it’s hard to break through on any one of them. I was just reading an article about how many doctors are being deep-faked as though they are endorsing wellness products.

[00:14:52] Sarah: Oh, my gosh.

[00:14:53] Beth: And this is apparently so commonplace, like the article quoted one doctor saying, like, “Pretty much everybody I know has had a situation like this happen to them.” So it is wild for people who work in healthcare in so many ways. This is a big one, and in similar context, Americans have made it clear that we don’t like this kind of situation. Like, you think about marijuana; Americans have not liked states making it legal and it being illegal federally, so the banking has to be all weird for businesses, and it depends on what side of the river you’re on where I live if it’s legal or illegal. We have said, like, there is a reality to being in a country where we have said in some places you can do this, and when we have said you can do this in some places, it’s hard to say in other places that you can’t. We are going to figure it out one way or another.

[00:15:45] Sarah: Well, to me, it’s just exposes the fact that this was never about states’ rights. This was about red states’ rights. It is clear that particularly those in the pro-life movement who are their hair on fire about these pills, I can tell you that much, they don’t want to let the states decide. They want to end abortion. Some of them want to end birth control. So that’s the goal, and the Supreme Court, when it trots out something like, “Let states decide,” or, “No, what we really mean is, like, that Congress needs to decide,” that no, you want to do what you think is right. You want to enforce the politics that you think are right. D- John Roberts this week saying, “We’re not political.” You are the last person on Earth who still believes that, dude. Someone should tell you the truth. Do you not have any friends? Clearly not. You don’t have anybody telling you the truth. The reality that you have created in your head that this is some institution that’s above politics, no one believes that anymore. You came in and erased precedent because you thought abortion was wrong. And now you are facing the lived reality that didn’t get to wipe out abortion, and so people are still going to be knocking at your door. I don’t know if they thought Dobbs was going to end it. I don’t know if they were, like, that detached from reality. I don’t know. But I don’t know what they’re going to do. They’ve issued the stay. They have like two weeks to prepare briefs?

[00:17:24] Beth: It’s stayed until May 11th, so we’ll see something next week on this. I don’t know if you get to five justices who think that mifepristone should not be available through the mail. They’ve had this case in front of them, a version of this in front of them several times. I don’t know if you get to five.

[00:17:46] Sarah: And what are they going to do, just ignore shield laws too?

[00:17:50] Beth: That’s clearly going to make it to the Supreme Court at some point. There are so many dimensions to Dobbs that are going to be in front of this court again. They are going to have to keep working on it. I want to say about the politicization of the court, when you read cases that don’t make headlines, the compartmentalization, the fictions, the carefulness, the way the court tries to live in a vacuum, you can still see the value of that in a lot of context. In the kinds of cases that courts are good at, you see that value, regular contractual disputes, IP issues, a number of criminal cases. It takes a lot of fiction and a lot of compartmentalization to prioritize the rights of defendants within the justice system, notwithstanding sometimes really heinous facts. There’s still value in what the court exists to do. I think the trouble in the abortion context specifically is that this has been sold to us by politicians and within the legal system as a fight about states versus the federal government, or a fight about morality, and it’s definitely both, and I think it’s also a third thing. When the court said, “This is a policy dispute, not a matter of rights,” it opened the floodgates in the whole arena. If it’s just policy, then why can’t Louisiana do what it’s doing? Most of the cases where I see the court breaking down six-three, a clean split of conservatives and liberals, the conservative justices are saying, “We think that there are very few rights guaranteed to Americans. Those rights that do exist are sacrosanct. We interpret them so broadly that you can’t intrude on them in any way, and everything else can be intruded on in every way.” That’s the conservative legal perspective on this court. Very few rights that are completely sacrosanct, everything else open season. And I just don’t think that’s where most Americans live now. I think most Americans believe that, yes, we have rights, we have lots of rights, in fact, and we should be able to intrude on those rights to some extent in ways that make sense to us. And there are very few things that we think should just be open season in terms of policy, because we don’t see our legislatures doing a great job setting policy, and we want courts to come in as a check. We almost are asking the courts, begging them, to be a little bit more political, to have places where they take the blinders off and they deal in the lived reality, whether that’s what standard medical care looks like or what common sense looks like, what the average American would want. And I think it’s that conceptualization of rights versus policy areas that are up for grabs that is at the root of a lot of the debates we’re having about the Supreme Court right now, but we’re not announcing it that way, especially when we think about abortion.

[00:21:04] Sarah: I’m not opposed to that approach to legal interpretation. I don’t think nine people with lifetime appointments can do it. I’m not saying we should abandon this is the way judges should act. I’m just saying these nine people, or just any nine people appointed the way they’re appointed with lifetime appointments, it’s not working anymore. Needs to be more people. They don’t need to have lifetime appointments. There need to be checks on them because maybe it was a fiction we existed within always that interpreting laws had nothing to do with policy, that interpreting the application of laws that are an expression of policy could be done separate from judgment, prioritization, or strategization around policy. Maybe we’re just making that all up to begin with, and so especially when it comes to constitutional matters, I don’t know, maybe Marbury versus Madison was wrong the whole time. Who knows? Maybe this is not what they should be interpreting because I just think that the idea, it doesn’t read as this clean distinction between rights and policy to Americans. It reads the rights you care about. If you were just to go read the Supreme Court’s decisions on freedom of religion, you sure wouldn’t walk away thinking that they have an aggressive restriction on the understanding of rights, constitutional rights, right? They have a real robust understanding of that one.

[00:22:35] Beth: Well, that’s what I mean. They think there are very few, but the few that exist, don’t touch. Don’t tread on me around those few.

[00:22:41] Sarah: Yeah, but it’s like the few that exist that any person, layperson reading the Constitution around your rights around the criminal justice system, they don’t think those are robust. They will chip away at those left, right, and center. So I don’t. I definitely know how they feel about the right to privacy, but I just think that their ability to continue to blow up the reality of Americans’ lived existence and then just be like, “I don’t know. Tough out there, huh?” It’s not sustainable. And I don’t think it’s sustainable politically either, so let’s talk about that up next. Don’t you know that Donald Trump is so sad about this?

[00:23:30] Beth: Oh, yeah. Just make it go away.

[00:23:32] Sarah: Make it go away. So he basically bullied the pro-life movement in 2024 and was like, “You got what you want. Don’t even think about coming to me or participating in this campaign or making this a priority in this campaign.” He Silenced them. I think they’re done being silenced. I think they thought they were going to get RFK and he was going to go in there and review mifepristone authorization and undo it, which he has not done, and has been dragging his feet about. And so they’d solve their telehealth problem and ban abortion for everyone nationwide because Trump has been pretty clear he’s not going to do a nationwide ban through Congress because it’s very unpopular politically, and I don’t think he gives a shit about abortion, pro-life or otherwise. So they’re mad. There’s some crazy quotes out there from leaders of anti-abortion groups like the Susan B. Anthony group where it’s like, “He’s the problem. Trump is our problem right now.”

[00:24:27] Beth: I’m really curious where this issue goes as we get into 2028, as we’ve talked a little bit about who the future of the Republican Party is. This is a fissure within the Republican Party now, and it’s a fissure that gets to the heart of that sense that we want authentic, tell it like it is, strong, tough leaders. Because you have the people like Josh Hawley, like Mike Pence, who are right in with the pro-life movement and know that that’s a great fundraising opportunity for them and a constituency that could propel them to some level of name recognition and get them somewhere through the presidential nominating competition. And then you have a lot of people who would rather not talk about this again ever, for any reason.

[00:25:18] Sarah: Like Donald Trump.

[00:25:19] Beth: Probably in their heart of hearts think that abortion should be legal and safe and rare, like the total Hillary Clinton formulation of the issue is probably where most of them land. But they don’t want to say that out loud, and so I think the way that they’re going to navigate it is by saying, “ This is just not a priority right now. This isn’t the top of the agenda. The Supreme Court spoke. It’s decided. The end.” And I don’t think that’s going to cut it with the public, especially when you see people like Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, willing to stake out a maximalist position on it. The issue’s going to be forced, and so how are they going to deal with this when the terms of the debate have moved so much because they got what they wanted?

[00:26:05] Sarah: Yeah, it’s such a lopsided issue between the parties. You have an incredibly engaged base that’s, like, I don’t know, 60% of the Republican Party with evangelicals who care deeply about this issue, and Catholics. Then on the other side, you have the Democrats who are representing, like, 60% of the voting public, not 60% of their engaged base. Sure, of course, the Democratic Party has a highly engaged pro-choice base, although honestly, the way Planned Parenthood is limping along out there, I’m not even really sure that’s true anymore. I certainly don’t see a lot of really engaged activism beyond the state levels when it comes to abortion rights. That being said, the Democratic Party’s position is represented by most Americans who think medical abortion access should be available. Two-thirds of Americans oppose a nationwide ban on abortion. So you got a real imbalance where a huge part of their base moves the party, but is not representative of Americans. And Trump knows that. He knows it’s a loser. He knows it’s a loser of an issue. It’s why he tries to stay away from it. But I think the reality of the Dobbs decision and this upcoming decision is that you can’t just avoid it. It’s going to become a salient issue again, especially if the Supreme Court disrupts the status quo. If they don’t, if you’re right and you can’t get the votes, well, then the pressure from inside the party on Kennedy, on the FDA, on Congress to do a nationwide ban on another way to stop these telehealth abortions is going to be enormous. It’s going to be enormous.

[00:27:56] Beth: And that feels so silly. When you think about the fact that mifepristone is the standard of care now, 90 plus percent of abortions involve mifepristone and misoprostol. Louisiana, in its briefing to the Fifth Circuit, said that 1,000 women a month in Louisiana receive prescription abortion medication through the mail.

[00:28:24] Sarah: That’s the reason we have more abortions post-Dobbs than we had before Dobbs.

[00:28:28] Beth: Yeah, I would like to note again that Louisiana also argued that it was financially injured by two women in 2025 having medical complications who were on Medicaid. When you put those statistics beside each other, I think that tells the story about why this is the standard of care. So to have an FDA tied up in knots about whether this medication is safe and effective when doctors and patients across these United States are using it so prolifically feels like an incongruity that can’t withstand much stress testing in the political sphere.

[00:29:02] Sarah: No, and even in the legal sphere. Like geography is not going to contain this. Donald Trump just wants to say, “We’ll just leave it up to the states,” just like the Supreme Court wants to create a reality that does not exist. We can’t just leave it up to the states. Stop pretending otherwise. And I don’t know if anyone, including the average American who holds a sort of centrist view on this, faces the reality that this is not something we can legislate our way out of, that we can have a Supreme Court of our dreams fix it for us. The reality is always going to be that some people find abortion acceptable, and some people find abortion murder. And I don’t really know-- we bust on Roe v. Wade all the time. And in some parts I want to say like, man, it created a reality that we coexist, but is that true? Because you have this incredibly energized pro-life movement. You have the murder of abortion doctors. You have all these issues like I don’t know. I don’t know what the status quo looks like. I don’t know what a sustainable status quo looks like.

[00:30:21] Beth: And I think what a sustainable status quo look like- looks like depends tremendously on enforcement decisions. I think the reason that we don’t see a hugely engaged pro-choice movement right now is because this workaround works. People are still getting abortions. They’re getting more of them. They’re getting them through the mail. It’s more discreet. They’re not having to walk through protesters at a clinic. A lot about this current status quo works for people. It’s not great. It’s not perfect, but it works. It’s okay, I think, with a lot of people to have laws on the books that are stupid or that don’t reflect their views, as long as those laws aren’t vigorously enforced. What Louisiana is really pushing, and again, I think the criminal context is the most significant side of this, is to enforce those laws punitively, harshly, frequently. And that is the unpopular place. That is the place where you do reactivate people around the issue. So that’s something to keep in mind, I think, as you try to assess political strategy around this. It’s not just what does the governor say or what does the presidential candidate say, it is what are attorneys general doing? It is what are county prosecutors prioritizing? You can look at what’s on the books in red states, but figuring out whether that’s symbolic or real and oppressive depends so much on what is happening in court.

[00:31:58] Sarah: Well, here’s the thing. To me, the issue, if you scratch at it long enough, going back to the Supreme Court and rights, I think most Americans’ fundamental understanding of living in a huge multicultural democracy built on individual rights is I have my rights until they interfere with yours. The problem with the pro-life movement is that’s all they want to do. They don’t want to have the right to believe that abortion is immoral. They want to stop other people from believing that and certainly from acting on that. They want their religious freedom and their right to believe that to continue into, and you don’t have the right to have it, right? That’s the imbalance. They think it’s one thing to believe that a right is wrong, but you want to stop other people from believing it and exercising their right. And so they tried, “Well, you don’t have the right to an abortion.” Okay, but do I have the right to even believe that abortion is okay? Because I feel like they don’t think that either. Your belief is in conflict with many, many Americans, and you want that belief to exceed the boundary of belief. You want it to become action, laws, policy, reality. And as long as that is a political opportunity to the Republican Party, I don’t see it changing. In the same way they have accelerated the use of mifepristone dramatically, and in fact, expanding the abortions provided in the United States. Someone should look at the leader of Susan B. Anthony and say, “If you continue to push this, then you will also accelerate the political reality in which you are not a worthwhile political constituency to exploit because all you bring is political liability,” which I think is what’s happening with Trump. And that’s why she says if how Trump feels becomes the reality, we’re cooked. And she’s right. So I don’t know if the next iteration of MAGA or the next version of the Republican Party post-Dobbs sees the pursuit of a wildly unpopular abortion ban as a political win. I think that in the primary, telling these people what they want to say is still a political exploitation worth taking, but if you’re running nationwide, I don’t know.

[00:35:01] Beth: It depends a lot on who the core constituency of the Republican Party post-Trump is. This issue remains salient despite its unpopularity because it did form a base that could propel people to office in their districts and their states. Will that still be true in 2028 and beyond? I don’t know. I always talk about how politics is a game of addition, but the gerrymandering fight that we’re having right now says otherwise. It seems like a lot of people in office believe that politics is a game of subtraction or finding the greatest common factor or something. The place, this core constituency of people who have enough money and enough time and enough enthusiasm to get you where you need to go. And I think that’s just going to be really interesting to observe heading into 2028. You can see the lesson has taken hold in the party because this is why they wanted to elevate transgender rights. They get to be on the other side of that. They’ve said, “Look, the left doesn’t just want you to live and let live. The left wants everybody to embrace gender as a spectrum, and all of us to use the pronouns, and everybody to play any sport they want to for any reason. The left are the ones who are intruding on your rights with what they believe theirs are.” So they know that’s the more desirable position to be in on an argument. What they do with that, especially if the Supreme Court were to uphold this from the Fifth Circuit, which would be a complete disaster for Republicans and a gift to Democrats electorally and terrible for humans just trying to live their lives. I don’t want that to happen, but I’m so interested to know how they would respond if it did.

[00:37:02] Sarah: This gerrymandering fight, MAGA in general, I think there are so many places where some people within the movement understand that the terrain is changing and some people refuse to see that. I think this is another place where our assumptions about even the most explosive culture war issues are no longer true. And in the same way I see Democrats’ refusal to release their death grip on identity politics-- some Democrats-- despite the fact that America has changed and America’s perception of identity politics and discrimination and all these issues has changed, I think this is the mirror image on the Republican Party. I think you see it in both parties when it comes to Israel. You can just see the people who sense and respond accordingly that things are changing, including in this example, Donald Trump, and the people who refuse. And that’s because so much of the pro-life movement is not playing politics. They’re not just trying to amass power. They have an objective. It is to end abortion in the United States, period. They don’t want any more abortions ever. And so when that bumps up against, “I’m just looking to amass power,” you have a situation like this, which is a mess. It’s a total freaking mess. And like you said, normal people get swept up in the fallout. All right, Beth, Outside of Politics, the Pulitzers were announced this week. Public Service Prize, one of the most prestigious awards, went to the Washington Post for Hannah Natanson’s reporting on the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal workforce. Does that name sound familiar to everyone? That’s because they raided her house. And she still won a Pulitzer for the same body of work. Julie Brown got a special award for her work on the Epstein files.

[00:39:09] Beth: I’m so happy that she was recognized, yes.

[00:39:12] Sarah: Yeah. So it got us thinking that deep reporting is important. It can cost a lot of people, including the reporters themselves, a lot in their personal lives. And so we wanted to bestow our own personal Pulitzers pieces of reporting that we have not been able to stop thinking about years later. So what are yours?

[00:39:36] Beth: The first thing that came to mind for me was a piece that you sent me back in 2017 from The New Yorker. It’s Alice Gregory. It’s called The Sorrow and Shame of the Accidental Killer. I won’t reiterate my whole personal backstory here, but this resonated deeply with me. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone in a journalistic capacity speak to what it’s like to have been in a car accident that causes someone’s death. And it was beautiful and important. Just giving me the phrase accidental killer was really meaningful. It’s like the first time I had a label to put on this life experience that has been so formative for me. I thought that she did a beautiful and sensitive job describing the way people who’ve been through this tell that story, and it’s just stuck with me all these years.

[00:40:28] Sarah: Mine is one that actually won a Pulitzer, so I don’t even know if these counts. But the Venn diagram is a crossover, and this is a piece from 2009 called Fatal Distraction by Jeanne Whitegarden, and it was about people who leave their children in hot cars. It’s an incredible piece of writing. Now, 2009 is when I had Griffin, so not surprising that this piece had a lot of impact on me. But I still think about it all the time, even though we put a lot of protections in place, and it’s not that it never happens. But there was a moment when it was happening, like, a lot. And the stories are horrific, just horrific. I’ll never forget about a part in the piece where this man left his daughter and she kept setting off the alarm, and he’d look out the window and turn the alarm off. There was one woman who I think about all the time where it was the confluence of events. It wasn’t one thing. It was 16 things that had to line up in order for her child to die this way. And I just thought when you become a parent and you’re so afraid, you want to keep them safe. And I think it was something about this piece that said, if the unthinkable happens, and it can and does happen, it doesn’t mean you didn’t love your child. And it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person or you wanted to harm them. Because people were getting charged, and this piece was really unpacking, like, why are we charging people for this?

[00:42:03] Beth: When they’ve been sentenced to the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

[00:42:06] Sarah: The worst. And I just think it’s linked in my mind to the moment on Oprah I talk about all the time, where Dr. Robin looks at this woman who fell asleep at the wheel, and her children died in the car wreck. And she said, “You got caught. We all do it. We all make these choices. We’re moving through life. It involves risk, it involves chance.” This piece was probably a foundational text in my coining of the phrase chaos lottery. Like you pull a ticket sometimes in the worst imaginable ways. You can’t protect yourself from the chaos lottery, right? There’s no ways that we think we can control and prevent. We try so hard and some of those efforts are worthwhile. But ultimately, what this piece taught me is not I would never do that, which I think is what people’s reaction was. I would never forget my child. And instead to think, “I could do this, so how should I act accordingly?” Instead of telling yourself, “I love my child, I would never hurt them,” understand that you are human and you are fallible, and you could hurt this person you love most in the world. And I just think it was like one of the most valuable things to come into my life, especially as I was beginning parenthood. It’s an incredible piece.

[00:43:24] Beth: I also would give a personal Pulitzer to Atul Gawande from 2008, his piece in The New Yorker called The Itch.

[00:43:31] Sarah: Oh, I remember that one. This piece gives me anxiety. That’s how I think about it all the time. It makes me so anxious.

[00:43:39] Beth: You opened talking about the cost to the writer. And I think this piece had a cost to the writer because here is a doctor, an expert, saying, “Let me tell you everything we don’t know.”

[00:43:53] Sarah: Yes.

[00:43:54] Beth: We don’t know why we itch. Here’s the incredibly compelling and, like you said, haunting story of a woman whose scalp itches so much that she has torn through it with her fingers. And the part of that piece that I never stop thinking about is when he talked about phantom limbs. About people who lose an arm or a leg and still experience pain there, and how they do mirror therapy to just convince the brain that it’s gone. I probably still think about this piece once a week, and it came out in 2008. It just puts so much together for me about medicine and about science and research, and how what we can say with confidence always has to be viewed against the background of the human brain and all that is unexplored in it. And it’s been a remarkable contribution to my life.

[00:44:54] Sarah: Yeah, the reason it gives me anxiety is because basically what he’s saying here, I think about this with Jennifer Senior’s piece about insomnia, is like your brain just gets a story. It just latches onto a story at a moment in your life, and it gets stuck. And it’s very, very powerful.

[00:45:14] Beth: Yes.

[00:45:14] Sarah: And I’m like, “Oh no, if I never think about itching, then I will not end up like this lady with my brain deciding I’m itching when I’m not itching.” It’s so scary.

[00:45:23] Beth: And it’s very complicated to teach your brain a new story, and it is possible to teach your brain a new story, and just all of that, so good.

[00:45:32] Sarah: Well, it’s so funny because I feel very empowered around pieces and that I’ve heard. Like the pain lady that came on Ezra that time and talked about the person who thought they’d shot a nail through their foot, and they took off the shoe. They took him to the emergency room. The person was in all this pain, they thought they’d shot a nail through their foot, and they took off the shoe, and it went between his toes. Pain is the same way, but to me that feels more empowering that like your brain is very powerful when it comes to pain, but that also means your brain is very powerful when it comes to pain. I don’t know why the pain part of that doesn’t freak me out as much as the itching part, but here we are.

[00:46:05] Beth: Here we are.

[00:46:05] Sarah: My other one I think about a lot because I have a lot of people who I love that live in California, is The Really Big One by Katherine Schultz. It was about earthquakes and tsunami and the very particular risk that exists for those on the entire Pacific Northwest. And it was just a reminder that we all live with this risk all the time. And I live on a fault line as well, but not next to an ocean. I remember hearing a story like somebody moved. Like they read it, and then the friend checked over them like a month later, and they’re like, “I’m moving. I’m leaving. I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s not worth it. I don’t want to live here anymore.” But I think it’s an example of what the theme we’re finding here, which is when someone takes something we all know and puts it together in a way we can see it clearly. To me, that’s what’s the power of these pieces is, that they put together something we are following or we know exists or we understand as a risk, and they put it all together in a way that’s either freaky empowering but always illuminating,

[00:47:16] Beth: and to the hot cars piece, the accidental killer piece, sometimes a person just finds words for exactly where you are in your life. And when they are able to do that and bring all that context and perspective and texture that moves you beyond exactly where you are in your own life, that’s gold. Not exactly what the Pulitzer committee is looking for, I don’t think, but I am so grateful for some of these pieces, for sure.

[00:47:49] Sarah: Well, I know Jennifer Senior, it’s The Friends Who Break Your Heart. I think all the time about the one she won the Pulitzer for about grief in the family post 9/11. I think about where the therapist told them we’re all going to climb this mountain, and we’re going to reach it at different times, and we just have to remember that we’re on different parts of the mountain. I thought that was, like, just such a gift. She’s incredible. The insomnia one, the friendship one. That’s why we had her on the show because she’s just the most incredible writer. The last one that I was thinking about was Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, which is about Michael Morton’s wrongful conviction. It was in Texas Monthly in 2012. And despite the fact that Sister Helen Prejean came to college, our college, when I was an undergrad, and convinced me fully that the death penalty is neither moral nor ethical, and I think part of that, I guess, maybe subconsciously or even consciously, was the understanding that the system is fallible, and it existed as a what if that we have executed innocent people. And then this piece said, no, this person. I think it was the first time I read like, oh no, we are proving now that this person didn’t do it, and they were executed. We executed an innocent person. And it just locked it in for me. Like, beyond just what is an appropriate punishment for a heinous crime, it was we can’t, with 100% certainty, assure that we are not executing innocent people. In fact, we have executed innocent people. Is that a cost we’re comfortable with? And for me the answer is absolutely not. Absolutely not. And this piece is so good. This is also, I feel like, the first piece that I started understanding that all these things that had been presented to us on Law & Order as science are not.

[00:49:49] Beth: Just people.

[00:49:50] Sarah: Just arson or the tracks of the flames, whatever bullshit they would make up, blood splatter shaken baby. This is a list we’ve had on our shows for a long time that, like, all these things we understood as criminal science are not. There’s some real problems with them, and this piece was one of the first times I realized that as well.

[00:50:12] Beth: That really sits alongside a more recent piece that I’ve been thinking a lot about. I did not put it in my list, but I will track it down for our show notes. It’s also from Texas, and it’s about a woman talking about her experience on a jury where she finally gave up and voted with the majority on the jury to convict someone who she believed was innocent.

[00:50:29] Sarah: Oh my God.

[00:50:30] Beth: And she had an opportunity to meet that person and apologize to him, and she spoke very honestly with the writer of this piece about the extremely human process of putting people in a room and telling them that they have to stay there until they agree. And it’s beautifully written, and heavy, and haunting in a lot of ways, but also has an arc of redemption that I think is important and worth continuing to build on in future journalistic efforts too.

[00:51:01] Sarah: The last one I will list is one I read recently. I found somebody’s list like this, like long reads they couldn’t stop thinking about. I don’t even remember whose list it was, but on the list was The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God? by Christian Wilman. I don’t know how to explain this piece to you. I don’t know how to talk about this piece. I just know I read it and was like, “Yep, this is what I think. I couldn’t put all this together.” But especially post consciousness conversations we’ve been having around, like, the telepathy tapes, and religion, and animal consciousness, just all of this, the way this writer put it all together, this was for Harper’s Magazine, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. Again, you’re like, “I want to talk to everyone about this, but I don’t know what to say.” Maybe everybody could just read it and we could just look at each other and nod. I don’t know what else to say beyond that, but again I think that’s the power of these pieces. And I love books, but man, do I love a long read that does this. And that’s the thing. Some books are like, “This could’ve been a long read. This is a more powerful form of the argument you’re making.” Because when it is done well, I mean, think about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. When it is done well, when it is connecting dots for people in a fresh way, it can change the world.

[00:52:24] Beth: I do think the constraint of having to put something in a magazine or a newspaper versus the open field of a book forces a lot of clarity and precision in writing that’s really valuable.

[00:52:40] Sarah: I was going to say I’m so excited to hear all of yours, but I’m excited and also like, “Oh, no. Now I’m going to have 15 things I need to read.” This is going to explode my Instapaper. I can feel it coming. That’s okay, though. I’m up for it. So please share your personal Pulitzers in your own life. We want to hear them. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. Again, remember to subscribe to our free Substack so that you can be a part in helping us make a very important decision next week. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday, 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.

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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.

Everywhere I look, I see signs that we’re all a little out of balance. I once read a description of trying to put clothes on a young toddler as wrestling an octopus. That’s about how I feel with the news right now.

The Voting Rights Act and our fiscal health are so complicated, so laden with history and expectation, with emotion and with data that doesn’t always match the emotion. Discussing these things in a way that generates progress takes a tremendous amount of precision and sturdiness. In this climate, it just feels like wrestling an octopus.

Just as I kept putting clothes on my toddlers, I want to keep talking about important issues. Tending to our country doesn’t just happen in the grand moments. It’s more than elections, landmark cases, and legislative packages. It also happens in the moments when we sigh or yell or cry and say, “me, too, friend.” - Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act

• The Federal Budget is Ballooning

• Outside of Politics: Prom and the value of leaving our comfort zone

Episode Resources

• Every Black Republican Is Leaving the House, Erasing Diversity Gains (The New York Times)

• Some Voters Say Congress Is Too Old. These Black Democrats Aren’t Leaving. (The New York Times)

• Why Stocks Keep Going Up (The Atlantic)

• ‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds (The Guardian)

• More to Say About the Voting Rights Act (Pantsuit Politics Premium)

• Opinion | Abundance and the Left (The New York Times)

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:31] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we are going to discuss the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and the gerrymandering arms race that this decision just supercharged. Then we will turn our attention to the economy. When President Trump ran for his second term, he promised to bring prices down and get our nation’s fiscal house in order. We’re just going to check the receipts on that, see how we’re doing. Outside of politics, it is prom season and the kids seem to be skipping the dancing. So that has us thinking a lot about the too much structure, too little structure conundrum that lots of parents face, and we’re excited to talk about that.

[00:01:07] Sarah: Are you filled with rage? I’m filled with rage. My friends are filled with rage. This episode is meant to help us process some of that rage. If you have someone in your life that is also filled with rage, maybe you could text them a quick link to this show. Even people who say, I never listen to podcasts. If you say, “I think this might help,” you’ll be surprised what that can do. It might be worth the whole value of the national debt to both of us. So please share the show if it helps you. Share it with someone in your life who you think it may help.

[00:01:43] Beth: Next up, let’s talk about the Supreme Court. Before the Supreme Court weighed in on Louisiana’s maps for this cycle, the maps were already in disarray. We were talking about the maps all the time, and all the places because if you’ll remember, president Trump wanted House Republicans to encourage their state legislators-- and the White House directly encouraged state legislators-- to try to draw the maps in ways that would make it more likely for Republicans to hold on to control of the House of Representatives during the midterms. And Democrats said, well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And so we have seen efforts by both parties in many states to change the maps as quickly as possible before we get to November. Louisiana was scheduled to have early voting begin on May 2nd, but mere days before that the Supreme Court issued an opinion that Louisiana’s maps had to be redrawn.

[00:02:45] Sarah: Well, absentee voting had already begun. Yes.

[00:02:48] Beth: That’s where we were starting. Supposed to start and now Governor Jeff Landry has said, well, we’ll do everything else but not the House and we’ll redraw the House maps and then we’ll figure it out. And he says that like that’s normal, but nothing about any of this is normal. And we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about Louisiana versus Colay today, and what has happened with the Voting Rights Act.

[00:03:12] Sarah: It’s another place where Trumpian politics has erased any semblance of normality. You find stability in elections by long processes without dramatic changes that people can trust. And after almost a decade of undermining our elections and having the president of the United States repeatedly say it’s rigged, there’s fraud, just constantly berate and lie about our electoral system, then you have him come out and say, well, we are going to redraw the map, so we win. That’s what it is. Now these states are coming out and saying with mere weeks, days to go, what we really want to do is eliminate any semblance of representation in places where you have a third of the population are African American. Not to mention last, what was it, two weeks ago there was a story in the New York Times that the Republican caucus will have no minority members. The few they had are leaving. So you’re going to have a party of white people saying, we’re going to hurry, hurry, hurry, to eliminate these majority black districts so that we can win this next election. The layers of incredulity are breathtaking. Breathtaking.

[00:05:13] Beth: Often by the time the Supreme Court gets a case, there are layers of arguments frozen in time embedded in it and I think that’s the case with this one. A Lot of Voting Rights Act conversation assumes that black people in the South are going to vote for Democrats and white people in the South are going to vote for Republicans. And occasionally someone will mention that there are issues in Texas around enfranchisement of Hispanic voters. And then that really kind of muddies the waters because as we have seen over the last few years in particular, demographics are not destiny in terms of politics. A lot of our understanding about who votes for whom and why has been scrambled, especially in the most recent election. I think it’s wild that both parties now are openly disregarding the progress that had been made for independent commissions to draw the districts to try to build trust in the system. And the whole discussion about it sounds like we’ve gone backwards to believing that white people are always going to vote for Republicans and non-white people, especially in the south, are always going to vote for Democrats. I hope that this bonanza, this arms race of gerrymandering, that everybody’s just putting all their cards on the table about, will be enough for people to be fed up and say, we are not going to let you assume that you don’t have to persuade us. We are not going to just show up and vote for the party that has been drawn in this district to win because we still have a choice. And I’m so frustrated that we have made some real I think positive democratic institutional progress around districting and we’re just being taken all the way back.

[00:07:08] Sarah: I think it’s really hard. I was listening to Up First and they were standing outside a polling place and asking members of some of these majority black districts how they were voting, what they were confused and clearly an older gentleman says they’re just trying to take it back to Jim Crow and I want to take that seriously. I think it’s easy to say, we’ve made progress. So put on your Samuel Alito hat and say, of course, it’s not the 1960s. And I think we have not as a country grappled with this. I think you were right in your analysis on more to say that neither Alito nor Kegan grappled with the, well, it’s not that bad, but it’s not fixed. So what does that mean for the Voting Rights Act or our approach to civil rights generally? And also Pete Hegseth’s out here just firing all the black people. So I would love to take serious the progress we’ve made since the 1960s. I have beef with some of the lack of competition in some of these majority black districts. The Times did a great piece on this. How many members of the black caucus have not caved to the calls for a new generation? One of them just died in office, so it’s an issue. They’re not competitive and everybody deserves better. Majority black districts, red districts, there’s no competition. No one has to be persuaded because there’s no competition. We’re looking at it a reality where the few members there are 435 for 330 million people. There’s going to be like two competitive seats. What the hell? That is not democracy. When no one feels like they have to persuade new voters, much less be responsive to their current constituencies because they’re completely safe. I mean, the number of representatives, we are talking a lot about the change of control of the House of Representatives, and ignoring the fact that the vast majority of that 435 don’t have a primary, won’t have a competitor. That is not democracy when you don’t ever have to compete for your votes. And that is true in some of these majority black districts. When you’re drawing them this way, it’s an abomination. I don’t feel represented. Jimmy Cobert doesn’t give a shit about me. Why would he? It’s not close. He doesn’t have a challenger-- he does actually have a Democratic challenger. But I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what we’re doing. And I don’t know how long this can last because I guess we’ll just death spiral so that Democratic states come back and they get rid of their independent commissions and everybody just, goes and goes and goes until either the Republicans have such an advantage that maybe we just cancel elections altogether and they can just serve in them in life seats. I hate to be hyperbolic, but that’s what some of these are anyway. What does it matter?

[00:10:19] Beth: Well, I want to be really clear that the progress I was referring to is in those independent districting commissions, not in terms of our racial progress, which is the argument Justice Alito was. So different types of progress that we’re talking about, and I want to make sure that I’m not conflating those, or that our conversation isn’t conflating those. So justice Alito’s opinion says a bunch of things. He tells us that the question he wants to wrestle with is whether you are allowed to have a government explicitly considering race when it draws districts, given that our constitution said we don’t abridge rights based on race. And so if I give you the strongest version of the conservatives argument, the court here is saying we don’t discriminate for good or for bad. That’s what they did in the affirmative action case too, right? We don’t want anyone making decisions based on race for any reason. And the court has a giant open door to walk through because a few years ago they decided that legislatures can do partisan gerrymandering all they want to. The courts have nothing to say about how districts are drawn if they are drawn based on politics. And they said that in part because state legislatures can consider whatever they want when they draw districts, they can think about geography, they can think about population density, they can think about protecting their incumbents. Everything is fair game. And now the court says last week everything’s fair game. And so unless you can totally disentangle race from the rest of that and show that race is the one thing that was on the mind of the legislature when they drew the district, the map’s going to be fine. And I think that’s where we’re lost because it means that we have no check anymore on partisan control. So when we have a president and we have state legislatures that are totally in lockstep with that president, we don’t have any place to say, wait a second, you’ve gone too far here.

[00:12:24] Sarah: I mean, I think the issue, as I see it, is America doesn’t know what it wants to do about discrimination that is not overt, that is not Jim Crow. Now, Democrats I think for a long time have hesitated or and ineffectually argued that we still live in that era. I feel like that’s the opposing argument. We still need it because everything’s still bad. That’s not convincing to most Americans because that’s not their lived existence. People don’t see overt racism in their everyday lives. And I mean that across the board. I’m not saying that people don’t experience discrimination; I’m saying I think if you pulled most Americans of many different identity groups, do you see overt racism? They would say no. Of course, now the other side of my brain is going, unless you want to go look at the Pentagon or the Trump administration or ICE officials who the Supreme Court gave a green light to pull people over based on their color of their skin. So it’s like I feel schizophrenic. I think that we were making progress and if things weren’t getting better, the problem was changing in a way. The laws were written for one type of problem. The problem changed. But now you can’t even orient yourself policy-wise in that environment because they have drug us back. The video of people saying like, “I was an American citizen. They pulled me over and were like, where are you from, Mexico?” The Supreme Court gave a green light to discriminate and ICE stops based on the color of your skin, overt racism, while issuing this decision. Are you kidding me? And saying, we’ve just made all this progress. So you can’t even orient yourself in a way to say, okay, the majority of Americans understand race relations this way. So we need to make the argument policy wise around this reality because they’re disrupting that reality. And so then everybody doubles down, goes in their corner, and you can’t blame them. You can’t blame them. I feel that way as a woman. Like the pay gap is really tough. It’s not because men are going, “I hate women, I’m going to pay her less.” It’s very complicated and it’s a lot of complicated factors. And also they’re just sexist. And so it’s like a pursuit of a completely sexist agenda. And so you can’t really give some sort of nuanced policy argument because they’re out here acting like it’s 1932.

[00:15:28] Beth: Everything is disrupting the lines that most arguments break down on. I think a big one that just like hangs like a cloud as I’m reading Voting Rights Act cases, is the fact that so many Americans now don’t identify as part of just one racial group. Like our multicultural democracy is a smashing success in that people are in relationships with and having babies with and building families filled with people of many, many different backgrounds. We cannot keep litigating race relations on the terms of the civil rights era in that reality. It’s different. Doesn’t make it irrelevant, doesn’t mean we should never discuss it, or that we should throw away everything that was passed in that era. It means something different is happening. And I think that when you layer in that kind of generational change with an administration that does acts of overt racism all the time through government power in the sharpest exercise of government power with a court that operates in some senses playing a very long game where cases build on each other towards certain results and in other cases really compartmentalizes issues, it makes it hard to have a real conversation about this. I think America needs a real conversation about this. I think we need to sit down and say, do we want a legislature to consider race when it draws districts? Do we want a judge to say to Louisiana, you should have two majority black districts. I think that is an important discussion. I think Congress taking another look at this in light of all of these things would be a really good idea. And I think that the daily outrageous flowing from this administration, and even if you don’t see them as outrageous, just the daily deluge, the fact that Sunday night the president posted just a fire hose of bizarre AI images. We can’t focus on anything long enough to get anywhere serious. We’re kind of in that we’re not serious people place as a nation right now. And so when a decision like this drops, it is annoying to me that we have Republicans going, all right, let’s redraw all our districts to make sure we don’t have any majority black districts. And have Democrats going, well, we’re back in the 1960s. We’re back to Jim Crow. I want to be able to go somewhere real with this, and I feel like none of the circumstances of the moment let us go anywhere real.

[00:18:20] Sarah: I feel like the easiest way to present this to the American public should the next Congress want to, I don’t know, pass a law, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, which is what I would abdicate for, uncap the House, fine with that too, is to just say, do you want competitive districts? Do you want politicians that have to compete for your vote, or do you want them to just waltz into office every two years without having to do anything? Would you like them to actually compete for your vote? Because the percentage of Americans who have representatives competing for their vote is disturbingly small. And so if we want competition, that’s what has to happen.

[00:18:59] Beth: And that’s true when you’re talking about the House of Representatives, but it’s even truer when you’re talking about your local races because in a state like Kentucky where our primaries are closed, it means that people waltz into office all the time. Eleven percent of eligible voters in my county voted in the last primary election. And many, many of our local offices are unchallenged by Democrats. So such a tiny percentage of people are expressing who they want to make decisions about how much you’re going to pay in property taxes. Big decisions that really make a difference for your Household budget and your quality of life. And I do think most people would say, yes, I want them to compete, but they would also say, but I don’t want all the text messages and I don’t want the mailers, and I don’t want somebody knocking on my door on Saturday afternoon when I’m trying to enjoy my life with my family. And so, again, we’re like in this territory where, well, okay, what are we trying to do?

[00:19:55] Sarah: And what infuriates me so much about that this is all coming down around Louisiana. Louisiana has real problems. It has real problems. I read a report today that New Orleans should be considered basically terminal. It will not survive.

[00:20:12] Beth: It’s sinking.  The state is sinking.

[00:20:14] Sarah: It’s a bowl floating in the ocean. Okay? It’s below sea level. It’s a base and below sea level. It will not survive the next 50 years, much less the next 20. Is anyone in Louisiana concerned about that or are they just too busy trying to draw out those districts? It’s infuriating. They have real problems. We all have real problems, but they’re too busy cheating so that they don’t ever have to compete for our votes. I don’t feel represented. I don’t know how to say it anymore clearly. And I think everybody’s feeling that. Like the usage of taxation without representation. The idea that people are like why am I even paying taxes? The distrust of this institution, the nihilism around younger generations, this is not sustainable. This is not sustainable and what I’m so worried about is that we’re just going to keep in this death spiral where it’s like, see, nothing matters. So why am I participating? Well, if I’m not participating then the reinforcement of the power dynamic just continues. And then the people get the feedback that it doesn’t matter and so they don’t participate. It’s this feedback loop that is really bad. And it’s not about authoritarianism or fascism, it’s just about a lack of democratic representation and participation.

[00:21:28] Beth: And I don’t want to contribute to that. I was really upset. I love Justice Kagan’s writing usually, but I was really upset by how forcefully her dissenting opinion said, this will make it where black votes in Louisiana just don’t count. I do not believe that. I believe that our votes count even when they’re not outcome determinative, even when we don’t ever get even close to what we want. And I really want to hold onto that because that is the only path out of the things we’re describing. The only path out of all this is to elect people who will address these problems and who will be brave enough to address some of the structural things that get us here. Open primaries, uncapping, the House the things that we talk about all the time that would, I think, make our races more competitive and make the system feel more responsive to us. So it’s like this hard balance because I want to be honest about what we’re feeling and how frustrating it is and what the scope of the problem is. But I also want to be clear-eyed that the solution comes through this existing system and it still can make its way through this existing system.

[00:22:36] Sarah: If we’re going to discuss the Civil Rights Movement, then we should look to the Civil Rights Movement because they weren’t facing a new Jim Crow, they were facing the current Jim Crow that absolutely locked them out. Their votes did not count, period. They could not vote. And so, I think always a historical perspective to remember that they used a system that locked them out to change the system. They used a system that definitely felt like it would never change to change the system. And I do fear that the way you get that level of activism and participation is just because things get so bad that people cannot maintain any sort of safety, stability, or status quo. And that does feel like the road we are on.

[00:23:24] Beth: And that is an unfortunately apt transition to the next topic we wanted to tackle today, which is our national debt. There’s reporting this week that the national debt now exceeds 100% of our gross domestic product, and that is a threshold that we did not think we were going to meet following World War II. But here we are and there’s no sign of anyone caring about it. And I think what I really wanted to check myself on as we prepared for this episode was the impact of this administration, given that the first months of last year were spent telling us that the government is going to get cleaned up, our fiscal House is going to be put in order. The Department of Government Efficiency was launched with the goal of cutting $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. We have almost nothing to show for it.

[00:24:26] Sarah: That’s not true. We have lots of costs on the other side of it. We have more money spent to show for it.

[00:24:33] Beth: We really do. They kept reducing their goalpost. So they said $ 2 trillion, no $ 150 billion, no, $ 115. They cut 9% of the federal workforce. They keep inviting them back. I was just watching a video of Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary in Congress and a democratic lawmaker was questioning her about the Office of Civil Rights, which is the part of the Department of Education that helps deal with access for students with disabilities. And they kept saying, well, like you fired all of these lawyers. And she was like, right, but then we hired them back so it’s okay. And he was like, but you fired them. You got rid of them. And she’s like, right, but then we hired them back, so don’t worry about that. It’s like, they know this was unsuccessful, so they just want to erase it from memory but it had real cost. It had real cost in that situation specifically; all those cases are way backed up. But that’s happening across the government. Like USAID, there will be so many books written about the fallout of virtually shutting down USAID. And so we’ve spent more instead of less. And I think when you look back at that whole effort you have to say, well, it was never really about fiscal discipline.

[00:25:47] Sarah: No. I mean, we didn’t even spend it. I think spend it is generous. We wasted it. We wasted that money. We also cut revenue. The tax cuts and jobs act reduced revenue by about 2 trillion. The 2025 big beautiful Bill Act is projected to add over 4 trillion to the national debt. So we cut taxes, we wasted money, and then he wants trillions of dollars in additional spending for the military. I never believed that this man who has driven his own businesses into bankruptcy multiple time was going to clean our fiscal House. I just don’t know if people understand how bad it is. I’m not really sure this is being conveyed through TikTok, which is everybody’s favorite way to take in news these days.

[00:26:35] Beth: I think a way to understand how bad it is, is that we are adding about $8 billion a day to our debt a day. 8 billion with a B. It’s the fastest we’ve ever added debt as a country.

[00:26:47] Sarah: He just pretends like whatever he wants to do is fine. They’re not putting any check on him. People are pissed about the institution, so they sure as hell don’t want to pay any more taxes. They don’t feel represented. They’re talking about taxation without representation. I do see more and more articles, commentary about how little the wealthy pay in taxes. I am definitely interested in reexamining the estate tax and the way that you can pass wealth on with literal to no taxable impact. But that’s not going to get it done. That’s not going to fix it. The interest rate goes up. It is what I said to a family member the other day. If everything’s more expensive for all of us, it’s also more expensive for the government. So we are spending more, the interest rates are going up. And everybody, including Chris Van Hollands out here saying let’s cut taxes for everybody. It’s not going to work. The math doesn’t math.

[00:27:53] Beth: The interest on the debt exceeds our defense budget. And I’ve heard Rahm Emanuel propose that we make a law where that can’t be the case anymore. And I think that there’s somewhere to go, at least, I’m glad someone’s talking about that. But just making that kind of pivot isn’t going to do it here because that interest cost will continue to accelerate. And the fact that is happening at the same time that we are abandoning our traditional allies right and left, upending people’s understanding about what American foreign policy is and actively prosecuting a war that is unsupported by all of our allies except Israel. Like those two problems are deeply connected to one another. We would have a debt issue with or without Donald Trump. He did not create this. He is making it worse at the same time that he is making worse some of the levers that we have to try to course correct.

[00:29:04] Sarah: Yeah. We would need dramatic growth. I don’t think you can get there. I disagree with Rahm Emanuel. I don’t think growth is ever going to be enough. But he’s put a huge, huge hurt on that. If the tariffs didn’t do it, the closing of Strait of Hormuz did. I just think that’s a one two double whammy that is going to dramatically affect growth. Not to mention, please don’t forget, the dramatic reduction in our workforce through this over the top immigration policy. You have growth by people working and we are losing population for the first time in our history. How are you going to grow a country with less people? How are you going to grow an economy with less people? That’s not going to work.

[00:29:53] Beth: Well, I think this administration’s answer is AI. That we need fewer workers anyway. And I don’t think that’s the kind of growth that most of the country wants or has any way of supporting and getting excited about. I read this piece in The Atlantic today that was talking about how the stock market feels increasingly divorced from Americans sentiments about the economy and the piece was making the argument that stocks are behaving rationally because the stock market isn’t a measure of the price of milk; it’s a measure of corporate profits. And corporate profits are doing just fine right now. And I thought, man, this is helpful analysis and it also leaves me feeling really bereft. Because if we are going to ask Americans to make the kinds of sacrifices that will be necessary to chip away at our debt, not to pay it off, just to get the interest back to a sustainable place, if we are going to ask people for those kinds of sacrifices, that ask is going to have to be accompanied by a vision that people believe in and that represents what they want living in this country to look and feel like for themselves and their children. And I just see so little of that right now; so little of the possibility of that.

[00:31:18] Sarah: I don’t see any vision or solution to the reality that corporate profits continue to rise and so much of our economy is built on a small percentage of people getting richer and richer and richer. If I read one more article about Disney or car companies or airlines making more and more money off luxury options, I’m going to lose my mind. That is not a real economy. That is not an economy that works for everybody. That is a brittle economic model. And it certainly makes for a brittle democracy where we just hope to extract more and more and more by rewarding people at the very top to make more and more and more, and leaving everybody else to fend for themselves. Be it on healthcare or can you find a car or can you find a house? It is just infuriating. And I do feel like there is this undercurrent of like generational conflict to all this, that the largest proportion of our federal safety net goes to the oldest among us who want to pay less, feel like they’ve contributed their whole lives and now it’s time to rest, and they’re the largest and growing proportion of our population. And so you have all this disaffected youth who just feel like they’ve got the wealth, they’re holding the wealth, what am I supposed to do about it? And then we all sit around and wonder why there’s political violence. People don’t feel like the system is built for them. They feel like it is extractive because it is. And I just feel like this deficit and the fact that someone who cares will just keep collecting your tax dollars, wasting it without fixing the problem is going to send people over the edge.

[00:33:51] Beth: I think a part of why I feel so stuck right now in trying to analyze this problem or just about any other, is that a lot of different groups of people have valid expectations and grievances. So when you look at the federal budget, it absolutely reads like a country that does not care about children. It does. The spending tells the story that we do not care about children and young families. When you look at the situation as a 45-year-old, which I am, I have also paid into social security and would like the benefit of that bargain that I have made with my government, that I didn’t have a choice but to make with my government. And if I had planned my whole life for a retirement, that included a certain calculation that the government guaranteed to me, I would want that money and I’d be mad if anybody suggested that I shouldn’t get it. We do have a growing population of people at the end of their working lives and living in a lot of fear about being able to stay healthy enough to stay in their houses. So that you have this young generation that’s like get out of the houses. And the older generation is like to go where? Because there are not affordable options, especially if you have health issues, which most of us can expect to have at some point in our lives. So we’re not really taking care of anybody. And then here in the center are people our age trying to hold both ends of that in our arms and think about what’s going to happen for us. All legitimate concerns, grievances, complaints. And I think all could be unlocked if we had leadership and not one person, not the magic presidential candidate who’s going to fix everybody, but leadership with some kind of vision to say here’s where we want to go as a country and the kind of economy we want to build. And to do that we are going to have to take a number of steps, many of which we wouldn’t choose in isolation. In isolation we wouldn’t want to mess with the retirement age for social security purposes. In isolation we wouldn’t want to raise taxes on anyone. In isolation we wouldn’t want to mess with the estate tax. But to get where we’re going, we’re going to have to do all these things together. And it’s going to be very hard, and it’s going to be worth it. It’s the gift that we’re going to give ourselves and future generations. To stop having the same arguments. I don’t want to have another election that sounds like cut, cut, no spend, or everybody going spend but on my thing, not your thing. We’re stalled and I feel that we can get unstalled, but we have to have a different discussion. I don’t want to elect any more fighters to Congress. I feel like we’ve been electing fighters my whole adult life and that what they’ve done is fight. And that political dysfunction has been really costly.

[00:36:54] Sarah: If someone came to me and said you’ve worked your whole life; we’re going to raise the age so your kids can benefit from the system too, I would do it. But what is that going to look like? How are you going to sell that to people who are having fewer and fewer kids or no kids at all? How are we going to make an argument about future generations when we have a demographic crisis? How are we going to prioritize kids when there are fewer of them? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

[00:37:23] Beth: And that’s chicken and egg, right? Like one has led to the other. It’s hard to know where to start unraveling it.

[00:37:30] Sarah: I mean, if I am picking up all these threads, I think that the leadership that is needed will have to include a story, a convincing narrative about sacrificing our individual wants and desires and pursuit of a common purpose. The positive force I can find to the sort of bleak conclusion of I don’t know how bad this is going to have to get, is if it gets really bad, we’ll have something to work together on and it’s going to require working together. No one’s going to be able to sell this to a country of 330 million. The best Congress on planet earth, particularly with just 435 people to representing 330 million, is not going to be able to sell this in a way that makes everybody happy. Like every generation, every state, every income level, that is never going to happen. I keep thinking all the time about the Ezra Klein conversation on abundance and the guy that just said we don’t have an answer for every voice is a veto. Progressives have made every voice a veto. People need to feel heard. That doesn’t mean we’re going to do what you want. Every voice should feel heard, but it should not be determinative. But people it’s like the less represented they feel from the government instead of adjusting their expectations to say, oh, shit’s broken, it’s going to be a while, and I’m going to have to personally sacrifice even if I didn’t cause the problem in order to get us on the right track, the expectation is wildly elevated. It’s like owe me something because you fucked up so bad. We’re not getting out of there with this. We’re not getting anywhere with that attitude. We’re not going to save our democracy with the idea of you fucked it up so bad, you owe me more. But I feel like that’s what people want. It’s like, well, you screwed it up now you really owe me. Instead of like we have to find a pragmatic solution, including swallowing some stuff that’s not going to be real exciting.

[00:39:58] Beth: Yeah, and it’s hard again to say like what people? Because I agree with you that you can’t get everybody on board with something. That expectation I think is cultural as much as it’s political because some people’s version of you messed it up so bad is and so I’m out. Why am I going to participate in this system in any way? I’m maybe just going to spend my life trying to dodge the system as much as possible instead of being part of something that helps put it back on track. And I get it. I get why people would feel that way. I don’t know what galvanizes enough people around a vision of government that is willing to confront our fiscal crisis, try to find an economic vision that does the most good for the most people. When I listen to conversations about abundance, sometimes I think, but I don’t know if we have a common definition of abundance. What would abundance look like and for whom? And can that be true for everyone? This takes me back to the gerrymandering conversation because what you said from that Ezra Klein episode is exactly what frustrated me about Justice Kagan’s dissent. You have to be willing to vote knowing that your vote is not going to be determinative of the outcome and believe that it still matters. That’s what this whole thing rests on. I think that if you ask most Americans, would you like this country to be even more divided between red and blue? They would say no. And our leaders right now are taking actions to do that, to make red redder and blue bluer. And so I do hope that all these pressures converging at once will motivate some breakthroughs for us. All right, we’re going to take a hard turn and end as we always do with something Outside of Politics. Sarah, you have experienced prom this year. I’m anxious to hear what your learnings are.

[00:41:55] Sarah: That’s a dream come true. Griffin went with my best friend, Elizabeth’s daughter, Kathleen, who he has grown up with. She wore her mother’s dress. It was just a delight. And I was worried because I had heard and see on social media that kids don’t go to the actual dance. They like dress up, they go to dinner and then they never go to the actual prom. Now they went to the prom, but they came back and said no one’s slow danced. There was like a song and a half of slow dancing. And that makes me really sad. But in a way it makes sense. I mean, when I was growing up, we would have like dances for birthday parties. First of all, we had six dances a year. We had football homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, winter formal, basketball homecoming, morp,, which is prom spelled backwards and casual and prom, six dances, and probably not quite that many in middle school, but probably about three in middle school and then you would have birthday parties. So by the time I got to prom, I had been to so many school dances. Obviously, I knew how to slow dance. Obviously, I knew how to fast dance. Obviously, I had a lot of comfort in doing that. I had a lot of experience in doing that. Griffin had been to one other dance for like 45 minutes and because I made him go to homecoming one year, his freshman year. So I’m sad. I’m sad that the kids are not hanging out and the kids are not dancing. And it’s just wild to me that all these milestones are kind of fading away and what they’re being replaced with is just Instagram pictures. If you’re getting dressed up and you’re just taking photos and going to dinner, then this is just for the gram. I did read on a social media post where people said, like, I did that in high school too. Like we didn’t go to the dance. It was long, back in the nineties or whatever. But I got to feel like that was pretty rare. I never knew anybody who got to college and had never been to a dance. But I got to think there’s probably a lot of kids who show up at college and have never been to a dance at this point.

[00:44:01] Beth: I was not allowed to go to dances until prom, so prom was my first dance.

[00:44:05] Sarah: What do you mean?

[00:44:06] Beth: I mean, my parents did not want me to go to dances. My mom was a teacher. She felt like not good things happened at dances, and so I didn’t go.

[00:44:13] Sarah: You didn’t go to homecoming or anything?

[00:44:15] Beth: No.

[00:44:16] Sarah: Did your friends have birthday parties where there was dancing?

[00:44:19] Beth: No.

[00:44:19] Sarah: Okay.

[00:44:20] Beth: No. So I experienced some of the bleak reality that you were describing even back in the eighties and nineties. I really enjoyed being in college and going to parties with dancing often. I loved that part of being in a sorority. I’m shocked that I was in a sorority, given my history that I’ve just described to you. And I thought it was really, really fun to have dances going on all the time. And I wish that life was like that as an adult. Like, I would like to go to morp. I would like to go to prom. I would like all these things to happen.

[00:44:47] Sarah: Well, are you sad you missed them in high school?

[00:44:49] Beth: I think I am a little bit. It’s hard for me to like-- of the things that I’m sad about from high school, that’s way down my list.

[00:44:55] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:44:56] Beth: But I think it’s healthy to have structured events. I wish that there were more line dancing opportunities in my life. That’s something I’m really going to be looking for as I get older because I love a format that says here’s how to dance everybody. It’s easy. Get in here, do the thing. Not all of it’s easy, but get in here and do the thing together. I think that’s really good for us. I do also think it’s good for kids to get dressed up and go out to eat. I especially love seeing prom kids at not a super fancy restaurant. I try to really go out of my way to tell them how great they look and encourage them. And I hope that lots of adults are doing that because I think it’s a good experience too to be overdressed somewhere and just learn what that feels like and learn the upsides of that because there are a lot of upsides of being overdressed in different places. So I’m happy they’re still doing prom, even if a lot of it is for the gram. I’m happy that they’re going out to eat and I endorse more dancing everywhere because I think it is really good for us. To me, what makes it especially urgent right now is that dancing is such a physical, embodied experience. And if you live a lot of your life on a screen and a lot of your socializing happens via text or Snapchat or whatever, it probably feels extremely vulnerable, even more than it did for us to dance and especially to slow dance with someone. That’s a lot of physical interaction and I think that’s needed and great.

[00:46:27] Sarah: I got my first kiss at the winter formal my freshman year on the dance floor while slow dancing. I understand the concern that not great things happen at school dances. We watched Footloose the night before prom in a prom movie night here at my house. We loved Footloose. Pretty and Pink got a thumbs down, but Footloose was a thumbs up. And it is a great movie. I feel like it holds up in this conversation of we want to keep them safe, we want them to have our values. But I feel like we’ve overcorrected with the teens. I have at several points in my life joke that I’m all but Carey Nation would take an axe to the bars. And also now I’m not talking about high schoolers, but I worry that the drinking rates have bottomed out. I think there’s a reason for humans to form connections with each other and lower their inhibitions have drank for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Like we’ve protected them to the point where they’re scared to do anything, that it’s all anxiety producing because there’s so much pressure because everything’s a performance. One of my kind of beefs as a parent, I told this to a couple the other day, new babies, they’re like, oh, he doesn’t like the pacifier. I said, he’s a week old, he doesn’t know what he likes. I think there’s this sense of like-- and I’m not saying push your kids to do things they hate, although people do that all the time. Like they do have to have some structure and some experiences that of course they wouldn’t sign up for. Let me tell you something, Amos Holland would never try anything new for the rest of his life if I let him get away with it. He would’ve never learned to ride a bike. He would’ve never learned to swim. Like he just has a lot of anxiety about new experiences. And so I’ve had to teach him like, no, you can do it. And it was really interesting because Griffin’s date, Kathleen, goes to a small private school and there is an enormous amount of structure around the dances. So they have like an actual square dance with a line collar and the kids love it.

[00:48:22] Beth: I mean, that sounds so fun to me. I want to go do that too.

[00:48:24] Sarah: It sounds fun. They know what they’re doing and even at their formal, they can’t bring kids from outside the school district or outside their school. They have a dinner and that’s what shows up in a lot of the like movies like in Pretty in Pink. They’re sitting there and they’re having a formal dinner and then they’re going to the dance floor. And at their school they like give them like a little waltz lesson. And there’s like a lot of structure about who you are asking and the upper class boys have to ask different girls and there’s just all this sort of structure and protection, not because we want to bully our kids into our experiences growing up and not because they can’t trust themselves to know what they like and what they don’t. I’m not arguing that. I’m not saying we overcorrect. However, I think when we leave it up to people and especially young kids, teenagers who are trying to figure out life and adulthood, it’s really easy to default to the safe comfortable option. It’s always so easy to just opt out and to support people in opting out. I think people thought I was truly bad for making Griffin go to homecoming his freshman year. He cried on the way there. He didn’t want to go. And then he called me and he said, “This is not so bad. It’s mainly boring.” And I’m like, exactly, babe, that’s what I needed you to learn. Like sometimes it’s not scary, it’s just boring. That’s okay. Listen, sometimes it’s I had a great time. My kids tell me multiple times, “I had a great time. Thanks for making me do that.” I just think we’ve become allergic to making kids try things and especially in social settings because I can’t make that call for every kid. I’m trapped, right? I can’t make everybody make their kids go to prom, but I can’t make my kid go to prom and have a good time if nobody else is making their kids go to prom. It’s like the screen time, right? Putting it on individual parents to cut the screen time is very difficult. And so it’s like we need a cultural shift around parenting and around like the pursuit of supporting them in trying new things and finding the joy in dancing on a dance floor with a bunch of people or slow dancing. I love to slow dance. Like you know what I’m saying? Like there has to be some structure and support as opposed to just support for opting out.

[00:50:45] Beth: Yeah. I find myself in such a weird place because on one hand I can really aggressively argue that kids’ time is too structured right now and that the activities is an arms race of their own and that a lot of things are very off track in that way. At the same time, I observe with my own kids that they really do thrive in situations that are very structured. Like there is a reason that we have all this structure because that is where they seem to feel free in some ways. It’s like the structure does some of that planning, strategizing, ruminating, worrying that is happening in their heads when there isn’t structure there. And so I think prom is probably more important now than it was when I was a kid. And maybe that means that it needs more structure built into it. Like it would be really cool for schools to do dinners on site with like etiquette experts there to kind of teach you like, hey, if you’re invited to a really fancy event, here are some of the things that we do. Not because that’s the only way to be or we’re trying to raise a bunch of aristocrats, but just exposure. Exposure to something else. And then permission through that group norm for everybody to buy in. That’s what I say about every party I host. If you want to come, I really want you to be here, but I need you to commit to the bit. It’s only fun if we’re doing a theme for everybody to be all in on the theme. And I think that’s maybe what that line dancing and what your friend’s daughter’s school is giving them. It’s permission for everybody to commit to the bit, do the thing, and then find a lot of freedom within the structure created for them.

[00:52:32] Sarah: A couple things. I think that with the activities, it’s that the pressure around the activities is because they have been combined or condensed or confused for a social life. Yeah. And there is no social life outside. If you’re on a travel sports team, that’s your social life. And so the socializing and the relationships are connected inevitably to the pressure of the activity itself. My social life as a teenager was not connected to any of my extracurricular activities. Now I think probably some of my friends who were cheerleaders or on our teams would feel a little bit differently than that.

[00:53:11] Beth: Mine was the band for sure.

[00:53:12] Sarah: Yeah. But I was friends with people in choir, but we weren’t going to choir parties. You know what I mean? Like I wasn’t hanging out with just people from the choir. And public school is important for lots of reasons. Certainly for education and certainly for preparation for a career or college. And it makes me emotional. It is one of the most profound, economically diverse experiences of my life. When we’re talking about the ways that we are sorting, which certainly travel sports perpetuate, the prom experiences perpetuate because some people are still getting that experience where they’re sitting down to a fancy dinner and getting that education. But it’s sorted economically. And to me that is really detrimental. It would’ve been detrimental to me as a person. It’s detrimental to our democracy. Like my public school education and the class I grew up in and the bonding we have around these social experiences means that-- I think all the time I have a friend who is a neurologist and I have a friend who was a janitor and they dated in middle school. Where else in American life does that happen? There was no sorting in a real way when I was growing up. And I think all the socializing we did at the dances and outside of class that helped that we bonded. We got to know each other. And it’s not just even in my public school, that happened at my church youth group. We were talking about this recently because we had a reunion among the people in the youth group. And we were talking about my youth group was composed of people at multiple different schools. We could not see each other or hang out unless we came to church. Because there was no Snapchat, there was no texting. Like the way to connect with these people because we did not see them at school was to go to church. And it made me feel this real like flexibility socially. I think it gave me a lot of confidence because as important as my class was to me and as bonded as we were, so many of us went from K through 12 together, I had this other group that knew me in a different way that didn’t see me at school, that I wasn’t defined by my reputation at school. And we hung out all the time. All the time. It blows my mind that teenagers, my kids and their friends, they’ll hang out like once a month. We were hanging out every single weekend for hours a time. Friday night, Saturday night often, and Sunday afternoon. And did some things happen? Yeah. Was there experimentation sexually and other ways? Sure was. But are we trying to prevent all of that? Like we don’t want them to take risks. We don’t want them to make bad choices. We don’t want them to suffer consequences. At what cost? Like at what cost? I don’t know, man. I am worried that they are missing out on this fundamental aspect of how you build who you are and how you understand your place in a community and how you bond and connect and form friendships.

[00:56:32] Beth: I can’t figure out which parts of my wonderings about my daughter’s experiences are like normal. Every generation thinks something about their generation was better than the one that comes after it. My childhood was romanticized compared to yours. And how much is like this genuine fear that I have for them, that is mostly based on the presence of screens in their lives? Because I really do feel like fundamentally their childhood is so different from mine. I had such a difficult realization rereading Little Women that my childhood is more similar to the Little Women’s childhood than to my daughters because of the impact of the internet. So I don’t know what this will look like to them when they’re raising their own children and reminiscing about what worked in their childhood. I don’t know what parts of it will sound really different to me then than they do today. But I do really want them to get to hang out with people and to have a lot of structured hangouts available to help them do that, to help them get out of their own heads. I think they don’t hang out a lot right now in the unstructured way that we did because they don’t know how to do that. Every time I witness a group of kids just hanging out where there’s not a lot of structure, it’s pretty much everybody on a phone.

[00:57:58] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:57:59] Beth: And so the only solution that I know to bring to the table is let’s have some activities, let’s make them fun, but let’s have activities and maybe not all of them fun, maybe some just where you really get the focus of every single person in the room. But offering that structure seems important because without it, I think we just scroll.

[00:58:21] Sarah: Yeah. I think that if you asked my mom, I don’t know if she worried about it the way that we do, but the trajectory was. First of all, she was one of four and I was an only child. Just by default there was less socializing because I didn’t have siblings. So I spent a lot of Saturdays. I’ve been reading some of my teenage journals. I spent a lot of Saturdays watching tv. So it wasn’t the internet, but there was a TV in my bedroom, which she did not have. She did not have as much TV and she did not have it in her bedroom. So there was already the presence of a screen changing the way I spent my time as a teenager compared to how she spent her time as a teenager. I think my mom probably engaged in a lot more creative pursuits. She tells stories about like in the middle of the night wanting a new outfit, so she’d sew a whole new outfit. I don’t know how to sew. And also more risky behavior as teenagers, especially like when she talks about her brothers. I think we’ve pursued safety for teenagers at all costs. And that it’s understandable. Look, I have three boys. I know the statistics okay? I understand that they have not the best decision making capacity that can result in really dangerous situations. We had a wreck this weekend in my community where two seniors were on a side by side. Now I would blame the side by side, not the teenagers. I hate those vehicles. I think they’re incredibly dangerous. But I just think that we have tried to provide a type of structure that prevents all risks for teenagers and that has manifested in their fear of any social risk and a lot of social anxiety, which we also want to protect them from but you can’t. I mean, you can, but it leads to a really jacked up life. Someone’s going to say something mean, someone’s going to hurt your feelings, someone’s going to bully you. Someone might aggressively attack you. I don’t know. It’s risky out there to be among other humans and I just think because we love them and because it’s a scary world we’re trying to keep them safe and think it’s coming at a cost.

[01:00:17] Beth: Well, that’s a long way from dancing at prom, but I do think dancing at prom is really good and important, and I hope that we’ll find ways to encourage kids to be in their bodies and o out of their heads as much as we can and with each other in happy, constructive ways whether that’s at prom or somewhere else.

[01:00:36] Sarah: Well, maybe we just need a steady rainfall of glitter like they have throughout the entirety of the prom in Footloose. And I don’t mean confetti, Beth. Glitter. Raining glitter the entire time. I could not get over it. So maybe we’re just overthinking this. They got to be like inhaling it. I bet Kevin Bacon has glitter in his lungs to this day. Like I’m just saying, maybe that’s just what, maybe we don’t even need a dinner at prom. Maybe we just need a glitter, a rainstorm of glitter to make it magical then people would dance.

[01:01:15] Beth: Whatever it takes I’m on board with, I will commit. If there is a theme I’m going in. So if the theme’s glitter, I’m going to do it. I’ll be there with you. And we appreciate you all being here with us. We will be back with you on Friday with another new episode. Until then, you can find us on Substack. And if you would like to know more about the legal issues in Louisiana versus Callais, I covered that on More to say on Monday. You’ll get Sarah’s Good News Brief on Thursday and the daily headlines every other day. So we hope you’ll join us over there. We’ll see you back here on Friday. Until then, 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.

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

I’m excited for 2028. I’m also curious about what we all think America needs in the A.T. era.

Rahm Emanuel frequently says a version of “tough times call for a tough leader.” As much as I have resisted the tough-guy routine from many politicians, I find myself buying it from Emanuel. He has drawers of receipts from battles that were hard-fought and hard-won. He’s been honest about the trade-offs involved in tackling hard questions (you’ll hear him talk in this episode about the difficult decision to close schools in Chicago). I’m leaning forward in my chair when he endorses an immigration bill that he acknowledges is imperfect. His particular combination of experience, pragmatism, and willingness to listen to regular people all across America is meeting the moment for me.

I’m thrilled that he joined us as a guest today and would truly be up for 40 more hours of conversation. And I am very curious to hear whether he meets the moment for you. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Education Crisis: Why We Know What to Do and Won’t Do It (science of reading, phonics, the Mississippi Marathon)

• High School Reform, Community Colleges, and the “Learn, Plan, Succeed” Framework

• Phones, Screens, and What We’ve Abdicated to the Algorithm

• School Closures, Political Will, and Owning Tough Decisions

• Outside of Politics: Swimming, Coffee in Bed, and Raising Boys

Episode Resources

Rahm Emanuel

• Rahm Emanuel Eyes 2028 Presidential Bid, Advocates for Education Reform (Axios)

• Draft Rahm Emanuel for President 2028

The Mississippi Miracle (Marathon)

• Inside the Mississippi Marathon (Progressive Policy Institute)

• Was there a “Mississippi miracle” behind its soaring reading scores? (Chalkbeat)

• Mississippi’s Reading Revolution (George W. Bush Presidential Center)

Immigration

• The DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act of 2025 (Congress.gov)

• The Dignity Act of 2025: Bill Summary (National Immigration Forum)

Chicago School Reform

• Sean Reardon/Stanford study on Chicago public schools

Episode Transcript

Sarah 0:29

This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth 0:31

This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we are joined by Rahm Emanuel, who has done everything. Rahm Emanuel has been a member of Congress. He’s been the White House Chief of Staff. He’s been our Ambassador to Japan and the mayor of Chicago, and we are really interested in him as a 2028, presidential contender, because he has all this experience, but doesn’t seem content to just rest in it. He feels like someone who is out there listening to people. He’s traveling the country, going to places that people don’t expect him to go, talking to people that he is not expected to talk to, and you can hear it in the policies he’s rolling out. So we wanted to have him on to talk about education and a whole lot more. You are not going to want to miss his Outside of Politics tips for empty nesters.

Sarah 1:15

We find Rham refreshing. If you do too, we hope that you’ll text this conversation to someone in your life and let them know what we do here at Pantsuit Politics. It is the best way to get normal people interested in politics, and we need more normal people participating in the American political scene.

Beth 1:34

Next up, our conversation with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm Emanuel, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.

Rahm Emanuel 1:49

How are you doing?

Beth 1:50

We’re so glad that you’re here. We have been excited about all the conversations you’re having right now, because you’re talking about education. And every presidential cycle, we sit together and say, why is no one talking about education? So how did this get on your front burner?

Rahm Emanuel 2:06

Well, a couple things. So, actually, when I was in college, I studied to be an early childhood teacher. Always was an interest of mine. I’ll even wind the clock back a little, I got accepted to the Joffrey Ballet School, did not take it. Much to my mother’s anger, still to this day. Convinced her I’ll go to Sarah Lawrence College and I’ll study dance, and if I miss it, I can always go down to New York City. It’s up in Westchester. Anyway, mom and dad drive off and I throw the ballet shoes against the wall. Stacker! Fool them. Anyway, so I go, and while I don’t dance, I get very interested in early childhood education and they have a school there for not only teaching, but for early childhood education and that is what interests me. Now, maybe you could relate it to the fact that my dad was a pediatrician. I used to go on rounds with him every other Saturday, etc. Probably, if you know, we were paying a therapist 100 bucks an hour, who took Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but that’s probably a piece of this. And then I go into interest in early childhood psychology. And then if you fast forward, it’s actually a primary interest of mine when I’m to run for mayor. And when I’m mayor, we not only create full day kindergarten for every child which did not exist, but also full day Pre-K for every four year old which did not exist. We added an hour and 15 minutes also to every day. Actually, we added four years of classroom time for every child more than they were prior to my tenure as mayor. And I think when you look at graduation rates, reading scores, math scores, Stanford says Chicago is the best of the top 100 school systems in America. So that’s been an interest of mine. And also, it’s not just an interest. I’m also a father of three. I firmly believe in education, you can’t get from here to there with 50% of your kids not reading at grade level. And what’s weird to me then, on a political level, I worked for Bill Clinton, who was on the vanguard of education, Governor Riley, Governor Hunt in North Carolina, Governor Chiles in Florida. I can’t name four governors today that are on the vanguard of education. And let me drill down just one level deeper. When President Clinton was in the vanguard, we didn’t know what to do, but we had people experimenting. What’s weird to me today is with 50% of our kids it’s not reading at grade level, the lowest in 30 years. Mississippi actually--

Sarah 5:05

I was going to say there’s some people on the vanguard.

Rahm Emanuel 5:07

Mississippi tells you what to do. So the problem isn’t what’s the combination to the lock. We actually have the combination lock. Nobody wants to move their fingers. It’s actually political will is the problem. Thirty years ago we didn’t know what we had, but we had political will. Today, we know what to do, unlike 30 years ago, but we lack the political will. So this is core to me. And look, if it’s not important to-- and I say this everywhere I go. If education is not important to you, don’t vote for me because you’re going to be disappointed. It’s really important to me because I know how I’m sitting in this chair. I know how my kids are sitting in their chair, and no child can get from here to there. I don’t care. And this was a big reform we did in Chicago. You could not get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from either a college, community college, a branch of the armed forces, or a vocational school. You had to know on graduation day not that you were walking, but where you were walking to. And 98% of the kids in Chicago met that expectation and requirement.

Sarah 6:15

As a parent, I tell people I feel like we live in Kentucky, we’re kind of in the normie situation here, and I feel like I’m Indiana Jones. I have a fifth grader, and I’m running with this fifth grader, and the road is crumbling behind me, and I’m just barely keeping up with the teacher hiring crisis, with the fact that we just keep piling on schools doing more and more and more and more. Social work, security, education, the testing. And so as you think about this, because you’ve worked in the federal government, you’ve worked in Chicago, I’m particularly interested in maybe anything you picked up in Japan [crosstalk].

Rahm Emanuel 7:00

I’ll talk to you about that.

Sarah 7:00

What’s the role the federal government in preventing this road from washing out underneath all of us?

Rahm Emanuel 7:03

We’re going to have to do three or four podcasts here. Okay, we can’t do it all day. So one is bracket the elementary years and return them to the fundamentals. What Mississippi did was phonics and the science of reading. It’s what you grew up on, I grew up on. About 20 years ago, some jerk at Columbia University went with the art of reading. If you like the letter A, use the letter A. If you don’t like the letter A, don’t. And we ruined a generation of kids. Get back to the science of reading. Get back to the science of math. And so I say in the elementary years and including early childhood, the fundamentals. High School fundamentally reformed. And we did, as I said, three things in the high school years in Chicago that drove our graduation from 56 to 84 and two thirds of our kids were going to college. One, learn, plan, succeed. Nobody graduates without a letter of acceptance from what’s next. Two, 50% of our kids graduated with college credit. I would make that a national paradigm 100% of our kids in high school must graduate with a minimum of 10 credits. Re-energize and re-engage kids when we lose them most- our high school years. Put the college there. One, kids get confidence. More importantly, or equally, mom and dad save a lot of money. They don’t have to pay for those 10 credits again. They get them free. And then third, some states are already doing this, but we did it first in Chicago as a city. Tennessee did it first as a state. If you earned a B average in Chicago, we made community college free: tuition, books and transportation. So the high school years went from diploma driven and focused to college and career focused. Big difference psychologically and then all the pieces. Fourth, which I played out a community college plan, which is you basically got to do four things, kind of similar to what we did in Chicago. But I saw it in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I saw it in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I also saw it up in Franklin, New Hampshire, but make it national. Which is of the 1200 community colleges, you must have a dual credit and dual enrollment program with your high schools in the area. High school or high schools. So kids are getting those college credits. Two, you must have a board made up of the corporations and business leadership so the curriculum at the community college is relevant to what you’re hiring and training for. So when a nurse wants to become a radiology nurse, he or she can plus up. When a somebody in a law firm wants to become office manager, he or she has the ability to bother working to skill up and move up the middle class ladder. We have 1200 community colleges. Nobody has invested in them in over 40 years, and they are the backbone of our economy. And to be honest, also the insurance against AI. Put that education system from the community colleges down to your elementary years on a race to the top model, I’m going to give you 400 million bucks if you do these reforms. If you don’t, you don’t have to have the money. Not a problem. But given the stress in Kentucky on money, you’re going to apply for that money. So there’s a carrot and stick. And the other thing is and drive these reforms. You’ll design them for Kentucky. Illinois would design them for Illinois, but we’re setting the goals. Everybody’s going to adopt, learn, plan, succeed. Nobody graduates high school without what’s next in life. A hundred percent of our kids are going to graduate high school with a minimum of 10 credits from college. Our elementary years are going to go back to the fundamentals. I’m also saying if you come out of the military, we’re going to give you $10,000 as a signing bonus to go into one of the trades. You want to be a carpenter, great. You want to be an electrician, great. You want to be a plumber, great.

Rahm Emanuel 11:13

Our problem in society is you want to hire a lawyer there’s a line of 40,000 people. You want to hire a plumber, you have to wait four weeks to hire somebody because there’s not enough. And so to me, it doesn’t take new money. As I said, like the community college plan $8 billion. What are we building? All these detention centers that nobody wants in their backyard? Yet, you in Kentucky have a lot of community colleges that could use that money to refurbish the curriculum and refurbish the facilities. So take 20% that we you were dedicating to something stupid that nobody wants in their backyard-- and they already have something in their neighborhood. It’s called a community college or a technical school. Modernize it for the 21st Century. So when a paralegal wants to become office manager, he or she can go get it while they’re working full time. Almost half, if not 60% of the people going to community colleges in America are working full time while they go. And I saw this in Spartanburg. Young man, unemployed, he’s working at the community college in Spartanburg. May 11, I think I’m remembering the day, right? He’s already got a job at GE at 33 an hour plus benefits, and he was unemployed. I saw it in La Crosse, Wisconsin. They got a robotics program so that the people in the high school, but also in the community college, can go work at a furniture company manufactured right there in their community. The community colleges and the people that go are not seen, not heard and not respected by Washington. So the federal government provide the resources, the goals, and then locally, the governors and the mayors of America who are closer to the ground implement. And again, you don’t want money for your community colleges? No sweat off my back, but I got $500 million here for you. You want to modernize; you want to get relevant? Here’s what you got to do with it.

Beth 13:22

I love all of that, and I like that you said the thing about re-engaging kids when they’re burned out in high school because I definitely see that in my own kids.

Rahm Emanuel 13:29

How old are your kids? If I may.

Beth 13:31

I have a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old, both girls, both really good students, both people who I think are capable of knowing what direction they want to go in at the end of high school, but they are really burned out because elementary school and middle school have become so much about the atomization of skills. It’s like we believe skill plus skill plus skill equals learning, and there are not ideas being embraced. They’re not talking about big things; they’re not connecting dots. They’re just trying to master things, mostly through software programs. I feel like we’ve tried to answer every question in education with software. So I’d love to hear how you feel about that.

Sarah 14:08

Don’t get us started on edtech or we’ll be here for another five hours. We’re both mad about it.

Rahm Emanuel 14:13

My kids are 29, 28 and 27 so I’m kind of past, but I would say three things. I’ll be quick. I’m 100% going to ban all telephones in classrooms. They should be focused on the teacher. It’s not the teacher’s job to police the students.

Sarah 14:26

Yes, that’s another thing we’re asking teachers to do.

Rahm Emanuel 14:29

Okay. Number two, which is I was the first on this, but I absolutely studied it for about a year and engaged with the professors that did the research on this. No social media apps for kids 16 or younger. It’s either the adult raises the adolescent or their algorithm, and that algorithm is an addictive drug, and Facebook told you they wanted to make it a drug. Third in this area of technology. I don’t know if you saw the story the other day, even with the technology, if you ban all the other the telephones from the classroom, when you ban the social media, kids are using the computers and tablets that schools gives them in the class to do YouTube videos. They’re watching them. So my view is kids are conversant with technology. You don’t have to teach them anymore. A generation ago, fair question. Today, forget about it.

Sarah 15:24

Do you know how many calls I get that it’s like, well, your son is distracted in class by the laptop. And you know what I say, I didn’t give it to him. I didn’t give him the laptop. What do you want me to do about it? I did not give him the laptop that, of course, he’s distracted by. It’s so frustrating.

Rahm Emanuel 15:39

In every school, I would just say to give you example from Franklin, New Hampshire, and you guys know this anecdote, etc., and data point, they banned the telephone in the classroom. The cafeteria came alive again. There was conversation again. Kids were engaging each other. You didn’t have social and isolation and sense of depression. Their attendance is now at 96 or 97%. where prior there’s a host of problems giving kids depression, sense of isolation that they didn’t show up at school. So these things have been obviously become ubiquitous in our life. That is a fact, but we have to manage it. This wild west is out of control. No telephones in classroom, no social media apps for kids under the age of 16. And I would also go as far as related to tablets and computers-- I’m making this up as we talk, so I want to be really clear. Hold on here. I mean, basically, kids can’t get more than an hour and a half of computer time.

Sarah 16:44

Well, I think they should go back computer go back to the computer lab. They don’t have to take them everywhere.

Rahm Emanuel 16:49

I’m with you, man. Look, we have a job as adults. We have a responsibility, and we’ve abdicated to this thing called the tablet. Like, screw it.

Beth 17:09

Every time I’m in a school, I have this overwhelming feeling that more adults are needed. Not just more teachers, but more people in the cafeteria, more custodians. You just can see the battle that these folks are fighting. And I look at the budgets and how much money we’re spending on technology, how much money we’re spending on Chromebook chargers, and it really bothers me. I really want us to value people in our schools.

Rahm Emanuel 17:37

I’m only smiling and laughing because our eldest, Zachariah, who’s now 29, we used to ban TV. So in our cottage there was no computer, no internet, no TV. And he use to whine that we were not a normal family because we didn’t have a TV show that was a Family TV show.

Sarah 18:01

And now if you have a family TV show, that’s like sweet.

Rahm Emanuel 18:05

Yeah. I said, there’s a whole host of reasons we’re not a normal family, that’s just [inaudible].

Sarah 18:08

Well, and here’s what drives me crazy. Like this is why I appreciate your focus on education and kids because we know where the federal budget goes. The federal budget goes to seniors. It’s like we spend 10 times the amount on seniors than children, and that’s why you have young people who are nihilistic and frustrated and checked out because you want to see the priorities of the federal government. Look where they spend money. It’s like a massive amount on Medicare and Social Security, and they’re like, well, what about us?

Rahm Emanuel 18:45

Well, I don’t want to get wonky on you for a second, but...

Sarah 18:49

Please do. It’s welcome here.

Rahm Emanuel 18:50

Okay. Well, 1960s early ‘60s, one out of three people that were in poverty were seniors. So everybody says the war on poverty didn’t succeed. It did. Today, one out of 10 seniors are poor. So Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid-- I’m sorry, breaking news-- really successful. So successful that-- and I’m not against, or would I advocate cutting Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, but we went from one out of three people in poverty to one out of 10 who are seniors. That’s a successful war on poverty. What has happened is what you exactly said, which is we haven’t made either equal-- and it’s not about taking money away-- equal investments in our kids. And also I would say one thing, and this is lost, California spends more than Mississippi on education, so it’s not more money alone, it’s how you spend that money. So when we created three community college, I noticed in the community college budget for Chicago we had a separate system, six schools campuses, that we were spending $40 million on remedial math and reading out of a call it $600 million budget. So basically about in that kind of 8, 9% of the budget, or 8 to 7% of the budget, was going to making up for what they should have been doing in the elementary and high school years. So I said, if you give me $5 million of that $40, and we say you get a B average, you get it free. Let’s reward success, not ensure failure. And it’s a self-propulsion fund. So the $5 million redirected, we still spent-- at that time, I don’t know what they’re doing today-- $35 million on the remedial. But we spent money of that within the budget. We didn’t raise taxes, etc. We spent it on if you’re getting a B average, pretty good bet you got the reading and math skills that we don’t have to spend on the remedial. In the same way, I would say you could spend more money in California. You ain’t getting a different result because you’re not doing phonics education. So redirect what you’re doing. Retrain the teachers around phonics, get coaches for every school so they stay disciplined on it. This was a 20-year journey in Mississippi. They call it the Mississippi marathon. Everybody outside calls it the miracle. It’s not a miracle. It took work. Miracle was like, whoa, look at that! I really admire Mr. Barksdale from Netscape who put the money sea capital. Because they said, okay, we started kindergarten all the way to third grade. Massive increase from 49th in the country to ninth. But they realized there was a tapering off for fifth and sixth grade. So they’re now doing reading campuses and redesigning to make sure that the momentum they have from third grade doesn’t fall off a cliff when you go to fourth and fifth. And so it’s a very-- but it’s a marathon. And again, to back to your core subject or point, to me, what you’re spending on is as important as how much you’re spending. So as I would say, and I would design it, what role does the federal government have? Here’s the money we’re going to give you if you do these three things. You don’t, it’s okay by me, I’ll just spend double in Tennessee. Or I’ll spend double in Illinois because they’re going to do it. So Kentucky, you ain’t got it yet. And I happen to think you got a great governor and your governor’s going your governor is going to figure it out, etc. But the one thing I worked with President Clinton when we did public school choice. I worked with President Obama when we did Race to the Top, and then as Mayor of the City of Chicago, I happen to think the incentive money is the right way to go based on you get the resources for these policies, but you implement them. But again, I want to be clear to the crux of this. Unlike 30 years ago, we didn’t know what to do when Mr. Bloom wrote the book or the report for President Reagan, which was a Nation at Risk. We now know what to do. Mississippi showed us. Chicago showed us. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Spartanburg, South Carolina showed us. Hattiesburg showed us. Where’s the political will?

Beth 23:38

Speaking of political will, we have a lot of teachers in our audience. When I read education publications right now, they say, we are so glad that Rahm Emanuel is talking about education, but he closed some schools in Chicago. So can you walk us through that experience? Because it’s hard to get things done around education for a lot of reasons, right? So can you just talk us through that?

Rahm Emanuel 23:58

Yeah, absolutely. So one, I joked that when I became mayor I was 6’2 and 250 pounds. I’m now 148 dripper wet, and I’m 5’8. So look, it was one of the hardest decisions I made as mayor. For years, they were talking about reducing the school buildings we had because we had a school system set up for 550,000 kids, and we were down to 410. But it’s a real tough thing. It’s tough on the kids, it’s tough on the neighborhood, it’s tough on the parents. My life would have been easier had I never touched it. Outside of my kids schools, teachers showed up with signs outside the window. Your dad’s an asshole. Your dad’s a jerk. And my kids grab the sign. We agree. We hate him too. So I say this, my life would have been so much easier if I just left those kids wallowing in a school that year after year was failing. Number two, parents were pulling their kids out of schools. Parents, those friends and classmates were leaving. We had a high school Chicago built for 800 kids, had 75 kids in it. Okay. So this was not like built for 800 and you had 670. You had shrinking populations and consecutive years of failure. So I thought, kids don’t get a do over, and that’s why I did it. Now, again, I want to be really clear. Education not your priority, I ain’t your candidate. You want somebody else to talk problem, vote for him or her. I made a tough decision. I’m not the one that’s accepted 50% of our kids can’t read at grade level. I feel like I’m Paul Revere around here. You got 50% of our kids can’t read at grade level, and you have a president united states that could tell you more about windmills and he’s never commented on the reading scores. So did I make a tough decision? Yeah, I did. If you want somebody that will [inaudible] their political capital and never spend it on kids. Vote for somebody else. I took on failure. If it was easy, somebody else would have done it. It was hard. It was very hard. It was hard on me. It was hard on my kids. It was hard on the kids I did it. It was hard on the community. End of the story.

We went from a 56% graduation rate to an 84%. We went from not tracking kids going to college to 67% of our kids go into college or community college. Not only that, we had reading scores and math scores that were growing to the point that Sean Reardon, the leading demographer of Education at Stanford, called Chicago the number one public school of the top 100 in America. And we have 83% of our kids came from poverty. Every one of those little Harvard snot nose little punks would tell you, oh, not those kids, not that background, not from that family, not that zip coded neighborhood. So I did a tough thing. I don’t back up from it, but I’ll tell you one thing. Everybody says, oh, Rob did this. I’m going to reverse the question. Go ask the people that kept schools closed during Covid longer than they needed to be and lacked the political will. Everybody ran around during Covid, follow the science. Follow the science. Within five months we knew kids did not have then anywhere the mortality rate of adults on covid. We knew that and nobody had the political will to say, open up the schools. Okay, so did I do what I did? I own it. I have the results to show it. Now, go ask the people that kept schools a year and a half closed longer than they should have been when the data told you not needed, and they left them there because they’re timid souls. Now, I will tell you, quoting Teddy Roosevelt, if you think you’re going to turn around education and get that 50% that can’t read a grade level down to zero, I ain’t your guy. Because it’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take everything you got every five year in your body. I know that from Chicago, and tough things require tough leaders.

Sarah 28:30

Yeah, here’s the tough thing that also kind of keeps me up at night as a mother because I would like to gift my children a world better than we left it. And we’re talking about I’m not worried about education. I don’t think that’s a big piece of the federal budget, but I do think we have some problems here as far as the percentage of our GDP that’s going to... Interest rate payments and our deficit. I’m a Democrat. I’m not used to talking about like this. This is a new skill I have developed. But I’m worried. I’m really worried. I’m worried about that no one wants to say the tough, top, hard things to people that we’ve got a problem. We have to find either more income or spend less and or both probably. And I wonder how you think about that when you’re prioritizing and you’re thinking about the federal government because this problem is knocking at the door, and it is definitely going to require some tough choices.

Rahm Emanuel 29:18

Let me knock down one of your assumptions.

Sarah 29:20

Okay, please.

Rahm Emanuel 29:22

You’re not going to solve the fiscal piece. You’re going to have to raise taxes. You’re going to have to cap spending. But if you don’t have a growing economy, those first two things are going to be harder, and you’re not going to have a growing economy if people can’t do reading and math at grade level.

Sarah 29:39

Yeah, I’m not worried about making any hard choices around education. I’m definitely all about that investment. I just wonder about the other tough choices.

Rahm Emanuel 29:45

Let’s just go back through this, okay? President of United States wants to spend $35 billion on detention centers. Redirect the money to the community colleges and education. You’re going to get more bank for your buck than a big prison system. All right, so that’s an example, but there’s a larger thing. You’re not wrong about-- and I think both parties are wrong. I reject the crony capitalism under this president. That who you know and how you pay gets you what you want. And his he’s all about his kids, Witkoff’s kids and let Nick’s kids make the money. This president’s $40 billion richer than the day he walked into office. That ain’t public service. That’s private gain. Now, on the other hand, our party’s all about redistributing income. I want to have a growth strategy. I’m tired of a country that’s the only thing that it grows is pot. I want to grow jobs. I’m against that we have a national strategy for growing pot; we don’t have a national strategy for growing jobs. So there’s five components. Education, which we’ve taken about a half hour to talk about, and we got another 40 hours to go. Number two, immigration. I endorse a Dignity Act that has 23 Republicans, 23 Democrats. You don’t get that around any issue like that, and it stays true to two principles. We’re a nation of laws must be abided by, and we’re a nation of immigrants, and must be respectful of. Third which I laid out, we got to double the size of our research and technology investments.

So I’ve called for a 10% tax on all online sporting gaming and the Polymarket and Kalshi and all these predictive markets. And double up National Institute of Health so we win the cancer war. Double up the National Science Foundation so we win fusion war. We use the quantum computing war. We use the AI war. I’m not conceding this to China. They’re raising their budgets. Our president’s cutting. We’re not going to win by cutting, so double. The fourth component to this, and I’ll be laying it out soon, is around the energy and infrastructure and the capacity of the United States to have a 21st Century foundation for a 21st Century economy. And then the fifth, which is your right, which is both a sustainable fiscal picture with also the revenue to meet it. You’re not going to cut your way there. And our tax code today is built around preserving wealth, not about creating wealth. It is ridiculous. You have people this thing called step upward basis, literally, you pass from one generation to another. My kids got two things that Amy and I said, you’re going to get a loving home and a good education. The rest is up to you. But today, the tax code incentivize you to pass on a generation of wealth. I’m passing on an education and love. That’s all you’re getting. So all five of those are about growing the economy and growing jobs. The training, the immigration, the science and technology, the energy and infrastructure to have an economy prosper and then a sustainable fiscal picture that invests in America’s future. Now, I don’t agree with redistribution is somehow how you’re going to get from here to there. And I definitely don’t agree with crony capitalism over there, so that’s how you got to do it. And education, I’m sorry, is a core component to economic growth.

Beth 33:29

You have laid out a number of proposals that I would call like medium ideas. They sound like things that people talk about at barbecues. We should do this. We should just do this. We should put age limits on our elected officials.

Rahm Emanuel 33:41

Well, you must go to a different barbecue than I go.

Beth 33:41

I have really good barbecue and good friends here and there.

Rahm Emanuel 33:41

I like mine mild and spicy.

Beth 33:41

But you know what I mean?

Sarah 33:48

The age limits is a normie idea that all Americans are on, right?

Beth 33:52

Just like 90% kind of ideas. How’s that happening for you? Because we are accustomed to presidential campaigns from Democrats starting with a big, esoteric health plan and a lot of lofty proposals. This all feels pretty different to me.

Sarah 34:11

No, first it starts with a memoir, Beth. First it starts with a memoir and their their life story. Then maybe we get to the ideas at some point.

Rahm Emanuel 34:19

I’ve written two books, Nation City, one about cities, and the other one was a big plan, big ideas for Democrats in 2005. I’m not interested in my biography. My brother’s written too a book called Brothers Emmanuel. Never read it. I’ve never read a single book about President Clinton’s presidency or President Obama. I lived it. I’m not interested in it. I don’t want to read it. I’ve been in a manual. I’m self-aware. I don’t need to read about it. I’m not interested, nor are you. You shouldn’t be. I’m interested in the American people. I’m not interested in my story. I’m interested in your story. That’s the story I want to talk about. I’m not interested in mine. You got a lot of other people think about here, let me tell you about how I grew up or whatever. I’m not interested in my story.

Sarah 35:09

Are you going in these small rooms and you’re testing ideas like a stand up comic and then see what’s landing? That’s what it feels like to me.

Rahm Emanuel 35:19

I did a bunch of town halls and a bunch in Mississippi Water Valley. I went to a county Donald Trump won by 21%. I went in Des Moines, 400 people in a picnic outside on a front yard. I did it in New Hampshire. I did it in Milwaukee. I’ve done it in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I’ve done it in South Carolina, all over. I’d rather talk to people, or rather about your story. My story is I think I’ve won the lottery ticket of life. I’m an American. I do. I told my kids that. You’re an American. You won the lottery of life. Now give something back. Two of our three kids went into the armed forces. Zach after UCLA, went into the Navy Intel. He’s now a reservist after full time six years. Alana’s a Navy reservist. But I’m into we won the lottery of life, and you are to give something back to this great country. Your story is what I’m interested in. Writing your chapter. I’m not interested in my chapter. I’ve had the gift of love from my mom and dad and my family and an education. Now the other thing is, you say, normie. Look, the one thing, I think the biggest thing that we have to work on, we can stoke this anger or try to restore some calm. It’s not hard to stoke anger. I’m sorry we have a president United States doesn’t wake up a moment of his day that’s not trying to figure out how to pit one American against another. Now I’m going to flip into Japan. China is betting on us having a civil war over here, that’s their bet. So we can keep doing this and thinking our politics is a bunch of hunger game and I’m going to wear blue and red and we’re going to divide up, or we can get focused on working together. Now I happen to think I’ve never run into a parent anywhere I’ve been in the country that says, you know what my kid is missing, more screen time. They don’t want it. Get that Facebook and Tik Tok out of that kid’s hands and get them focused on the teacher. I’m also of the view I’m tired of people betting against America. Why don’t they bet on America?

Double up our science and technology. I want the entrepreneur to win. I don’t want the gambler. You have other people who want to figure out how much they can grow pot. I want to grow jobs. And the one thing I’ll tell you this funny story, it’s always stuck with me. Two anecdotes. So I’m done being mayor. The next morning, I got on a bike, and I’m riding around Lake Michigan, through Indiana, through Michigan, Wisconsin, back home here in Illinois. Two anecdotes. One, I say this jokingly, but somewhat true, the worst of cell phone server is, the nicer people are. There was a direct-- the worse the network system was, the better and nicer kind. I ran in a woman, I knocked on the door at a coffee shop that said open at 11:00, I said, it’s 10:00, she goes, come on in. I’ll throw a pot on. I’ll give you a cup of coffee. That’s America. Then the other thing is, we’re all the way at that-- Me and my buddy-- at the top, north of Traverse City, not Upper Peninsula, but right up there. And we’re at a bar. We had ridden 65 miles. I’m tired. I’m having a big ass burger, beer, fries, but I burnt 4000 calories. I deserve a hamburger, whatever I want. And this guy’s wearing an NRA hat, National Rifle Association. He’s looking over at me, looking over across the bar, and my stomach is just tightening up, and he starts to walk towards me, and I’m like, oh, boy. He pulls up a chair, and he goes, “You mind if I pull up a chair?” I said, “Hey, I got no problem here.” So I said, “Let me buy you a beer.” And we start talking because he knows that I passed for Clinton the assault weapon ban and the Brady bill five day waiting peri Now, after 45 minutes, I did not convince him of the merit of the assault weapon ban, and he did not convince me of the merit of letting anybody buy whatever gun they want, but we had an honest discussion, shared views. He paid the tip. I paid the two beers. That’s where we are. And I’ll also be honest with you, we all got to work on empathy. I got to do. We all do. That’s a skill. That’s something we as a country. Now I can disagree with you, and you can disagree with me, and we can be really passionate about this. It’s okay to be passionate if it’s about a principle etc. But you’re not my enemy. You’re not my opponent. You’re just a person with a different view. And I think about this, I remember being with President Clinton when Oklahoma City bombed.

Rahm Emanuel 40:13

I went back and looked at this because I’m like, because when I went to Mississippi areas, overall, I went to a red state. Here you have the worst bombing under American soil, domestic terrorism. Nobody reported that President Clinton was going to a red state. He’s going to Oklahoma City to help heal the city.

Sarah 40:35

We didn’t talk about states like that back in the 90s. That’s a new invention.

Rahm Emanuel 40:39

9/11 George Bush goes to New York City. Remember, this is not far from when we didn’t believe he was a legitimate president because of Florida and the time nobody said he’s going to a blue city. We have adopted a false paradigm about ourselves. We are doing China’s work for them. So I’m going to lay ideas out. They’re going to be hard. But the one thing I’ve always told my kids, what is leadership? Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then having the guts to get it done. And if you look at great presidents, you look at great governors, you look at great mayors, they had both of those. This is going to take a lot of work.

Sarah 41:20

Yeah, that tees up our next question perfectly. So we’re kind of having this own debate among ourselves, I think, and we want to hear what you think because the idea is we have no beef with. Like, every time you come up with a new one, we’re like, yeah, that sounds right. But here’s what I worry about.

Rahm Emanuel 41:35

Maybe you guys should go see a therapist or something. That’s a problem.

Sarah 41:38

Whoever is next, whoever’s president, 2028, there’s this kind of tension between, we all know there’s going to need to be an enormous amount of just triage, just straight up triage. Like, pragmatic day to day putting some pieces back. But then there’s also this tension of, like, well, when things are torn down, there’s an opportunity to build something new. So, like, how do you think about that? What are we doing here? Are we just trying to get everybody to do some small things so people build trust in the institutions and we start rowing in the right direction because this administration has torn so many things apart, or are we coming in FDR style? Because that’s the other thing I worry about. We’re at the end of this unitary executive road. Well, God save us. I hope we’re at the end of it. I kind of want to hear somebody say, like, we got to put some power back in Congress. Like it’s going to be tempting because everything’s going to be such a mess to come in and lean into this power that he has blown up. But I think the next president really should say, like, hey, we can’t. We don’t want a king, remember, so we’re going to have to put some of this back in the checks and balances. And that’s a hard thing to do when you finally get your hands on the reins.

Rahm Emanuel 42:48

There’s two things. One, the one thing you didn’t mention, you’re not wrong. So there’s what you do to govern, etc., and there’s also the kind of spiritual sense. And what I mean by spirit is there’s a palpable anxiety in America about the future, about kids, your kids future, and that we’re not taking care of business here. And you go back in 2015 I get reelected, and my second inaugural as mayor was only about the alienated men of our city who’ve internalized a sense of failure, and there’s a spiritual component to this, whereas what Teddy Roosevelt said, there’s a bully pulpit that comes. So there is our homework assignment in front of us called education, investing in science and technology. But there’s also not just healing the divisions, but finding our common purpose, which is why could be one policy on that last six months of high school, universal national service, go clean up a river, go do tutoring, learn something about the neighbor next to you that you never do. Find the thing that binds us rather than divides us. Now, I think being a former congressman at you because and being in the legislative branch, I’m going to challenge you. You guys can keep doing what you’re doing, and I got all these tools that President Trump left me. I’m going to give you a chance to show up and do your job because all you’re doing is spending time on redistricting, fundraising, scoring political points. I’m not against scoring political points. I’ve done that good part of my life, but I’m at a point in my life either we get our homework done around here, or you ain’t going to be around here much longer, which is why I also called 75 you’re done. Across the government, courts, Congress, executive branch, you’re not hitting your stride at 78. You haven’t done it by 75 go teach. Get on TSA. Be pre clear man. Get out of here. But I’m serious about this, which is, you have been debating immigration since Ronald Reagan. Every president with chewing gum, super glue and some rubber bands trying to figure this out, it’s broken. Every mayor and governor is trying to figure it out, it’s broken. The reason I endorse the Dignity Act has 23 hours, 23 Ds, isn’t the bill I would write. No, it’s not the bill I would write. Does it hit the goal? We’re a nation of laws and we’re a nation of immigrants. Yes, it’s true to that. Now get moving. Now, if you don’t fix this in four months, I’m going solo, so I’m going to give you four months to show up as a letter changer and earn your pay. You get subsidies for housing when you live in DC, you get subsidies for security when you’re in DC, you get subsidies for food when you live in DC, and all you do is fundraise. Now show up and earn your pay like everybody else does. If not, you will continue to be an institution where only 9% of Americans have confidence in and I want to meet that 9% because I want to know what they what they see you doing, because right now, all I see you doing is picking up a paycheck, free health care, you get housing subsidies, food subsidies, security subsidies.

Sarah 42:48

Hey, don’t forget about the death gratuity that I just learned about that we pay them to die in office.

Rahm Emanuel 43:32

All right.

Beth 42:48

We always try to end with something Outside of Politics. So we heard from your team that you’re a swimmer and that you get a lot of your best ideas in the pool. Tell us about that.

Rahm Emanuel 43:32

Two things I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you that one other thing that you got to tell your husband, okay? I’ll start with that one. So we become empty nesters and personally in the morning I get I get up early, I bring coffee in bed to Amy, I say, Happy Mother’s Day. We’re free. We done it without killing each other and them. Yeah, we got three out of here. So she liked it so much every day. So every morning for the last seven years, she gets coffee in bed.

Sarah 47:22

Yes, I’ve been on my husband to start this.

Rahm Emanuel 47:25

Okay. I get to her in a little cup, hot, whenever she wakes up, there’s a hot cup of coffee. You’re going to start the day on a good foot. The rest of the day, I’m an idiot. I know I’ve made a mistake and I’m stupid. Somehow, you marry me anyway, but you’re going to start first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee next to bed. Number two, so you don’t know this, but when I’m 17, I nearly die. Probably the most important thing that ever happened to me in my life about life was nearly dying. I spent seven weeks in a hospital. Had five blood infections, two bone infections, gangrene in the first 72-96 hours. I was in total ice packs with 105.4 fever. When I was in the hospital for those seven weeks, I lost three different roommates across the time, and they almost cut my arm off, and this nurse saved my life, saved my arm. Nurse Mona. Anyway, and the doctor said, if you weren’t in the physical condition, that’s when I was a dancer, you would have been a goner. And that just became a neurosis of mine. I mean it. So like this morning, I swam one mile, and I did an hour of weightlifting with my trainer. Tomorrow I will swim a mile, do an hour training with her, and later in the day, I’ll do an hour yoga. I do 10 exercises a week, an hour and a half every day. I’ve been doing this for 43 years. So rather than just 123, read something in the morning when I’m making the coffee and I’ll say, okay, this is what I want to think about.

Sarah 49:11

I love it. Well, here’s one more I got to ask you. It’d be it would be malpractice. I have three boys. I know you haven’t read your brother’s book, but we all know the brothers, very high achieving brothers. Anything I need to know to keep my boys close. And 16, 14, 11.

Rahm Emanuel 49:30

They’re going to be close anyway.

Sarah 49:32

Okay, good.

Rahm Emanuel 49:33

First of all, one or two things going to happen. Either they’re going to kill each other by the age of 18, or you’re going to kill them. I once said to Zach, I’m be 54 you’re going to be 15. One of us is going to make it one when I tell the judge why I’m getting off, okay? It’s going to be not one degree, not two degree, I’m getting off because the judge is going to agree with me. They’re going to be great. They got a loving home, a good education. The thing is my parents did one thing and this is really important. They did a lot of things. I wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal, parenting. We don’t talk about it. Single most important thing. So down in our family room, my mom and dad put the purse that carried my grandmother, my two great aunts, passports. It was in a frame, and above it was another frame with their passports, my grandmother and my two great aunts. Grandma Sophie, Aunt kitty, and Aunt Ida. And on either side of that, there were nine pictures here, nine pictures here was the relatives of my mother and father that never made it to America. And every day you had those eyeballs on you. And my parents told us there was nothing subtle in a Jewish home. They couldn’t make it to America. You are not to waste this opportunity. There’s other things that I think my parents did. We did similar things, Amy and I, we did some tweaks to it, but everything is about we won the lottery of life being an American. Do something with your life. Don’t waste it. Second is I’m not into quality time. I’m into being present in your child’s life. So Amy, like, I was coming home when I was a mayor on the phone, and the kids come to the door, and I said, “Hold on, I got to finish.” She goes, “Stay out on the porch, you idiot. Finish the phone call when you walk in be present in their life.” When one of them had a big homework assignment or something, I would do my work on their bed where they were after dinner just so they could say something to me if they wanted if they didn’t want to say it in front of the kids, their siblings.

Beth 51:50

Thank you so much to Rham and his team, to Nikki, who helped set up our conversation this morning. We hope that you enjoyed this episode. We do hope that you’ll share it with others in your lives. You probably heard Sarah’s mention of our unsustainable debt load in this conversation; our plan is to talk about that more in detail on Tuesday. So we’ll see you back here then, 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.

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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.

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.

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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.

“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.

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

I’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.

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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.

That’s the situation today. Sarah and I look for moments of clarity in a cascade of news: the Pope’s grounded message of peace; an Iowa candidate breaking through with an anti-corruption message; the Hungarian public turning out in record numbers to say “enough.”

And Artemis II. Artemis II splashing back safely on earth, bringing home astronauts who’ve inspired us (see outside of politics) to remember the fragility and wonder of our piece of the universe. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Less Eric Swalwell (California) and More Rob Sand (Iowa)

• Pakistan Negotiates Iran “Ceasefire” while Congress sits on its hands

• Melania Trump’s Press Conference

• JD Vance’s Losing Streak in Iran and Hungary

• Outside of Politics: Artemis II

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.

Eric Swalwell

• Ex-staffer says Eric Swalwell, candidate for California governor, sexually assaulted her (San Francisco Chronicle)

• Exclusive: Four women describe sexual misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell, including a former staffer who says he raped her | CNN

Trust and Corruption

• Lawsuit Accuses Writer of Using Classmate’s Story in Best-Selling Memoir (The New York Times)

• Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos? - The New York Times

• Sam Altman (blog)

• Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker

• The Good Friday Agreement (Pantsuit Politics)

New York Times Oral Histories

• Kash Patel’s FBI Is Making America Less Safe, Current and Former Employees Say (The New York Times)

• 60 Attorneys on the Year of Chaos Inside Trump’s Justice Department (The New York Times)

• Inside the Turmoil at RFK Jr.’s CDC, as Told by Current and Former Employees (The New York Times)

Polarization

• Opinion | Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy (Ezra Klein | The New York Times)

• Hey, Democrats: Take Yes for an Answer (Tim Miller)

Episode Transcript

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

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

Sarah [00:00:32] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We’re back from Spring Break and catching up on all the things, wars, negotiations, Eric Swalwell, whatever the hell’s going on with Melania, and much more on today’s episode. Outside of politics, we’re going to wax poetic about the poetic waxing from our friends over on Artemis 2.

Beth [00:00:54] Most excited about that part. We are very excited that we’re doing our first t-shirt contest in many, many years. We had so much fun the last time we did it. This time around, we are asking for your designs for a Good Neighbors t-shirt to celebrate our live show in Minneapolis, the community there, the power of communities all over the country, America’s 250th anniversary, all the things. Designs are due April 30th. All the information for this contest is in our show notes and on our Substack. We can’t wait to see what you create.

Sarah [00:01:33] Up next. Let’s get to it. Beth, I think we should start with a positive and end with a positive. We’ve got a lot of shit in between.

Beth [00:01:38] I like it. Good plan.

Sarah [00:01:39] All right. Here’s the positive before we get to the more horrific stories from upcoming elections, is the governor’s race in Iowa has been moved from lean Republican to toss up because the Democratic state auditor Rob Sand is killin’ it apparently. They’ve got a five person Republican primary and they’re already campaigning against him. They don’t even know who’s going to win.

Beth [00:02:07] I like it. I like that I know the name Rob Sand. Like you can tell he’s just been out there because I am not from Iowa and he is on my radar. He seems like a person who’s willing to talk to anybody, go anywhere, do anything. And Iowa is a high touch state. You got to be a person who wants to connect with people if you want to win in Iowa. And he seems to really understand that.

Sarah [00:02:27] I just have a warm place in my heart for Iowa after our time there during the Democratic primary.

Beth [00:02:33] Same.

Sarah [00:02:33] And I do think it’s an interesting state and I don’t think it is easily classifiable. Like I know it went for Trump by 13 points in 2024, especially after that-- remember the pollster controversy. Remember when the pollsters came out and said Iowa was going to vote for Kamala?

Beth [00:02:50] Yes.

Sarah [00:02:50] That was the worst. But I do you think it was more complicated. And I think this is true for so many places in the country. You get the right candidate with the right campaign strategy and anything’s available. I truly believe that. I truly believed that.

Beth [00:03:06] Well, and Rob is running on the strategy that I think is the right strategy, which is anti-corruption. Good government. Let’s do things right. That’s what I think is the right answer.

Sarah [00:03:14] Can you put a pin in that? Because that is also a theme from our good stories opening and closing the show.

Beth [00:03:21] Okay.

Sarah [00:03:22] Let’s talk about a less positive campaign development. So I have not been paying attention to the California governor’s race because I found it very overwhelming. There were like eleventy people running. We had Katie Porter have a controversy when she was seen on sort of out clips berating staff and just generally acting out very nice.

Beth [00:03:51] Well, she kind of had a fit in the middle of an interview too that went viral. Just a lot of things.

Sarah [00:03:55] So then kind of falls apart. Although, she’s still in the race, still polling like 14%, I think. So then Eric Swalwell comes in. I don’t know if he was recruited. I don’t know if you just saw his moment, but I was actually thinking about this through the lens of Governor Newsom. Like the fact that it’s just like so wide open to me is a little bit problematic with regards to him. Like I’m not saying he should have like gifted the governorship to anybody. But there should have been some bench building and I don’t know, general strategy. This is always a critique of Barack Obama as well. All that to say, Eric Swalwell gets in. He’s a front runner, but still not like running away with it because there was all this discussion about the Republicans. Maybe the Republicans could win. One of the Republicans could actually win in this like jungle primary or whatever they’ve got going on over there. Then Trump gets involved, he endorses somebody, and the analysis I read was like, well, that fixes that because now people will either avoid the candidate like the plague or coalesce around him, taking voters from somebody who maybe could have risen to the top. Anyway, all I have to say, it was kind of wild all over the place. But Eric Swalwell, I think, was considered the front runner. He had a ton of endorsements: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Alex Padilla. When over the weekend the San Francisco Chronicle published an account from a former staffer accusing Eric Swalwell of sexual assault. This came after weeks of chatter online. Then that is followed by a CNN story with more women coming forward. At first, he says, this is false, none of this is true, although I’ve made mistakes and I want to apologize to my wife for my mistakes. He loses basically every endorsement in a very short amount of time. And as of Sunday has suspended his campaign.

Beth [00:05:55] California does democracy in a very overwhelming way always. This is how they roll. It’s an enormous state, bigger than many countries in the world, massive economy. So it makes sense to me that they started with a huge pool of people. It is surprising to me how little coalescing there’s been within that pool. It’s also surprising to be that everybody lined up behind Representative Swalwell because even at his heyday of popularity, an allegation like this would not have been super surprising to me. I never thought about him as a really disciplined, serious legislator. I wonder if he got a little bit of the Gavin Newsom effect, that sense that we need social media stars, we need fighters, we need people who are willing to say anything. And I think he was following along that path. This news didn’t shock me. I had heard things like this floating around social media for some time. I do want to say, I think it’s important for a show like ours to be careful and wait until a newspaper goes forward, publishing those types of allegations. That’s a serious thing. And I want confirmation from organizations that have the resources to report that out and who have the stakes involved to be sued if they’re wrong.

[00:07:09] So I’m not surprised. I think it’s good that he got out of the race. I’m particularly interested in Ruben Gallego withdrawing his endorsement so quickly because I know those two are pals. And I also know that Gallego is somebody who’s being talked about as a potential 2028 candidate. So I think that’s kind of an interesting dimension of this story. To your point about there not being someone kind of clear from the beginning, I just wish Kamala Harris had run for governor in California. I think that that would have been the most effective way for her to prove out that she was a serious contender for president to oppose the Trump administration. I mean, obviously, this is a seat where you can do an incredible amount of good. The state has so many resources, just the legal apparatus in California opens so many doors. And she’s a person who would know how to work with the legal apparatus in California. So I was really disappointed that she passed on this. And I know that people are likely to coalesce maybe around Xavier Becerra right now. That makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m not a Californian and it is a complex state.

Sarah [00:08:18] Yeah, the listeners who I asked in the comment thread of the Monday’s news brief said Xavier Bracera is like where a lot of people are ending up. I had not heard any of these rumors about Eric Swalwell. I had always had like a red flag about him ever since that spy controversy, which never made sense to me. I’m not saying he was like in on spying with China, but it just, to me, indicated a level of sloppiness, bare minimum in the management of his staff and his offices and his general political career. Like it did seem like there was more ambition than much else. I think the point you were making about while we had not commented on, it is difficult because I think in most of the reporting, even from major news sources, it’s these content creators were putting pressure on mainstream media to pay attention to these women and their stories. And I think that’s a really hard line. Like where are you elevating a story ethically? Where are you using the power of a platform to bring attention to something that the mainstream media is ignoring?

[00:09:38] Now, I would say understanding how newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle operate-- I was also thinking about this while reading a write-up of the New York Times reporting on that blockbuster memoir that seems to have been a lie, The Tell, it just takes time. So it feels like content creators were the only ones thinking about these for weeks, but it probably took weeks for the San Francisco Chronicle to do the reporting necessary to actually confirm sources, confirm all the stuff. So I understand and agree sometimes that it does take outside independent media groups to bring attention to a story. I think with something this delicate, I do think we’re-- I don’t know if you think this is naive. I kind of think we’ve passed the point where like a news organization buries something like this, unless it was like the Washington Post about Jeff Bezos. You know what I mean? So they want to get the story, they want to get it right. And so I think it’s hard. I think it’s a tough one. I think it’s a tough one.

Beth [00:10:54] I do too. And no shade to anyone in the way they make those decisions. For me, it is important to wait. If people contact us with information that we can’t confirm, we tell them you should be in touch with this person. Here’s a person at an organization with the resources to do this right. We don’t have them. And without that apparatus behind us, I just don’t think it’s right for us to go forward. And I’m aware of all kinds of social media rumors about Eric Swalwell. Going back a number of years, there are some current ones right now that aren’t being talked about in connection with this story. So I want to just be transparent about the fact that sometimes we know what’s out there, but we’re not going to talk about it until that confirmation comes through in a way where we feel like we can responsibly talk about it. Other creators are going to make different decisions and that’s what this wild west of independent media looks like.

Sarah [00:11:49] Either way, I’m glad that these stories came out.

Beth [00:11:52] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:11:53] They’re horrific. His level of abuse of power, just sexual harassment, sexual assault, the trauma that many of these women experience it’s horrific. I’m glad that the Democratic establishment so quickly was like, uh-uh, no, absolutely not. It was a pretty rapid response. And now there is talk of a response in Congress. So Congress is back to work this week. They got a lot on their plate and so they decided to add expulsion dramas to the list. Representative Anna Paulina Luna has announced plans to force an expulsion vote for Eric Swalwell who is still a representative from California, possibly as soon as this week and then in a classic tit for tat, Democrats said they will counter with their own expulsion boat targeting Tony Gonzalez which we talked about on the spicy. Who admitted to a relationship with a former staffer who then self-emulated and killed herself. It’s a truly horrific story. There’s some other representatives, a Republican from Florida, a Democrat from Florida-- what’s the common denominator there-- who have been found guilty by the House of Ethics Committees on corruption related charges. Expulsion votes are pretty rare because it takes two thirds of Congress to make that happen. And so I can’t tell if this is just political theater, I mean, Anna Paulina Luna seems to love to take the reins of Congress in her own hands. The girl is really always really itching to reform a lot I think of the party processes when in the House of Representatives. So we’ll see. The majority-minority situation in the House of Representatives is so tight right now. This could really mix things up.

Beth [00:13:47] I think there are a couple of dynamics worth discussing here. One is that I do think in connection with the Epstein files, there is a contingent of people in the House who are aware that Congress itself is due for an examination of how they handle it when members are accused, especially by staff members of sexual assault or harassment. And I think there are some people in that contingency who I wouldn’t agree with on much else, but I think they’re sincere in their desire to reform Congress. I think expulsion is the worst way to do that. But I think that that’s where some of it comes from. I also know that people fundraise off trying to censure one another, off trying expel one another off the theatrics that come from this as the kind of story that the public can wrap its brain around. That piece of this sends me to the moon with anger. The important things on the desk of the House of Representatives right now, the fact that Congress is just laying down as the president wages this war in Iran. I do not want to hear about this. Also, we have elections. There’s a democratic way to get to these issues. Work with your party, run someone against these folks, put pressure on them and tell them you need to step out, cut off the fundraising spigots where you can and get the information out there. But the people can expel the representatives who don’t deserve to be in the House. We don’t need Congress spending its time this way.

Sarah [00:15:18] Well, and especially since they have work to do. I mean, they’re reconciling the two versions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The House and Senate Budget Committee chairs are beginning to draft instructions for the second reconciliation bill targeting particularly healthcare spending. They want to do this by July, but these Medicaid cuts that they’re talking about, the letting Republicans say they’re going to pay for this through cutting fraud, which is a sleight of hand-- not to mention they have the FISA reauthorization that they’re trying to attach to the Save American Act, which they cannot let go of even though nobody wants it and everybody hates it. Okay, not everybody, but most people. It’s just, to me, taking this razor thin majority and making these two big things y’all are trying to get accomplished, almost impossible by taking all these expulsion votes is just classic Mike Johnson. Lack of management.

Beth [00:16:22] And I would like to focus on the fact that that second reconciliation bill would be about funding ICE and Customs and Border Patrol for several years. Taking those two entities out of the normal process to get them funded so they won’t have to work with a Democratic majority Congress on the funding. And I think, again, if you believe your immigration agenda is popular, stand up and put your name on it. Don’t weasel through this reconciliation package. Defend these organizations or not, but this is the opposite of that. To continue to do things that are so unpopular in such an underhanded way as we approach elections, I think they’re just telling on themselves and they’re giving Democrats a lot to talk about as we head into November.

Sarah [00:17:10] I can’t tell if they care.

Beth [00:17:11] I can’t either. It’s bizarre.

Sarah [00:17:14] I can sincerely not tell if they care. Sometimes I wish I could do like a Freaky Friday and just change places with like a Jamie Comer or somebody just so I could like truly understand the motivations, the strategy, how you’re thinking through all this, seeing how unpopular the war in Iran is, seeing how people are just being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed by prices. Like I am dumbfounded. I know what’s going through some of their minds. Some of their minds are like 50+ of them are like, I’m out, I’m not doing this anymore. What do I care? But the rest who want to stay, I guess there’s just such a high proportion that are in incredibly safe seats and they didn’t get a primary challenge, so they’re just thinking they’re good. I don’t know.

Beth [00:18:08] We have a lot of short-term thinkers in Congress who feel like being in the minority sucks and so I want to get out of that. And then they are in the majority and they’re like, oh, this sucks too. And if you’re unhappy with the job, cool. Get out of the job. It’s a two-year gig. It’s pretty short. You can stand on your head for two years, as my grandmother would have said. I am disgusted though especially by the people who’ve decided they are getting out, that they aren’t doing more to focus on what really matters right now. Again, we have this whole war going on. And for Congress to be bickering over the details of things they know will not pass, for the People’s House to be so knotted up around funding and the Save America Act and these expulsion motions and censures, it just feels so unserious to me. But I would love a different perspective and I would watch that Freaky Friday episode. I would even be willing to make a podcast with Jamie Comer to facilitate that situation.

Sarah [00:19:13] Well, let’s talk about an update on the war in Iran up next. So while we were on spring break, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate the entire Iranian civilization. I don’t really know what else there is to say about that. He was just threatening, threatening, and threatening. Then right up next to his deadline, we got a two week ceasefire deal with Iran. Now, I’m not sure anybody told Israel, who continues to bomb the shit out of Lebanon, the conflict and interest between Israel and the United States has deepened. Israel has been clear that they want to annihilate Hezbollah due to Lebanon what they did to Gaza. I think it was like 40,000 homes have been destroyed. They’ve said you can’t come back. And so I don’t see any real ceasing of hostilities between those two groups anytime soon. And there’s just no light. There’s no daylight, particularly now between Hezbollah and Iran which seems to keep complicating the negotiations between the United States and Iran. Vice President JD Vance put his face and name and presence all over this latest round of negotiations that took place over the weekend. They were mediated by the Prime Minister of Pakistan. They went on for 21 hours, but they got nowhere. They want Iran to give up their enriched uranium. They want Iran to give up control of the Strait of Hormuz and open it back up. Now, Iran was like, no, thank you very much. We have now found this incredible tool in the global economy. So we’re not going to do that. And so now Trump is saying there’s going to be a blockade so that Iran cannot export any oil through the Strait of Hormuz if no one else can either. And it’s just a giant, giant mess.

Beth [00:21:15] I am also angered by the tone of the 21 hours discussion from the White House. Are we supposed to be impressed? You’re holding the whole world by the strings right now. Get back in there. 21 hours is not even a whole day. Get back in there. Take a nap and roll up your sleeves, guys.

Sarah [00:21:39] Well, the pulling up your sleeves is in direct contrast with the vibe of the president who was at a UFC fight as these negotiations fell apart.

Beth [00:21:47] With the Secretary of State.

Sarah [00:21:48] Yeah. And saying, like, I don’t care, we’ve already won, who cares what happens. Outrageous.

Beth [00:21:55] I suppose you can say we’ve already won when you seem to have no idea what winning means. That’s been the problem from the beginning. I have trouble talking about this war because I want to put myself in a space of really testing my biases. I want to ask myself if another administration did this, would I have been supportive? Would I have understood it differently? Would I be thinking about it differently? And when I have gotten to a place on that question, I want to ask myself, okay, well, even if the answer’s no, we shouldn’t have done this, which is where I am. We shouldn’t’ve done this. Okay, well we did. What does a reasonable resolution look like? And this administration just makes it impossible to even pose a serious question because the president shifts his messaging constantly because he says things like we’ve won anyway while at a UFC fight after posting on Truth Social a threat that had the entire universe holding its breath. And then he sends JD Vance over there.

[00:22:56] What possible experience in JD Vance’s life prepared him to conduct these negotiations? You look at this whole team and just think what is going on here? We know from the podcast, former ambassador Swanny Hunt, that women being involved in peace negotiations actually leads to more sustainable peace. There just seems to be no one at the table here who is anything other than a political actor and a political hack. And I think the Iranians have gained as much power as they’ve lost here. If I am part of the Iranian government now, and I don’t even know what the Iranian government is right now, and I don’t think administration knows either, I read reports that one person on background told a news organization, we don’t really know who we’re negotiating with, and we don’t really know what we’re negotiating about. So those seem like problems for any kind of discussion to be successful. But if I were part of whatever contingent in Iran is trying to negotiate something with the United States of America, I think I’d recognize that the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 and beyond might be as valuable to us or more so than having a nuclear weapon. So they’ve not only not articulated what the goal is here, they’ve also probably changed the calculus for Iran several times over by their actions.

Sarah [00:24:14] Yeah. Iran has learned they can treat it like a toll booth.

Beth [00:24:17] One hundred percent. The president told him that. He put it on Truth Social.

Sarah [00:24:21] Yeah, I mean, so that’s a pretty powerful thing. I think he does know what winning is. And it’s when he says it’s winning. He defines his own reality. And for a long time has successfully defined it for enough people that that worked for him. But war is not culture war. We put the word culture in front of it for a reason. And probably that’s not a fair description either. This is different. You can’t just bloviate or filibuster your way through this. It’s the same for the economy. You can’t just say it doesn’t matter. We’re winning. I decide. The way he is communicating is just getting so ridiculous and over the top. I mean, we wanted to talk about his fight with the Pope. I don’t know if you saw this, but did you see that? Amidst this fight with a Pope, he posted a photo of him like Jesus healing someone.

Beth [00:25:37] I did.

Sarah [00:25:37] And it’s a joke. Like everything he says is so over the top, I mean, the Pope’s stuff when he was like he’s soft on crime. The pope? What are you even talking about? My dawg, what are you talking about? I understand the frustration with the people in the House who are starting to talk about the 25th amendment. And also, I don’t know, I could be persuaded. It’s unhinged. And the long post he went after Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens because in the midst of this I’m going to eliminate a whole civilization they said, this is whack, this evil. This is not how somebody’s supposed to talk. So if in the course of a week you’ve pissed off everybody from Pope Leo to Tucker Carlsen and you’re spending your time in the mist of a war and an economic crisis going after them and posting photos of yourself looking like Jesus, maybe this is a 25th Amendment situation.

Beth [00:26:48] We clearly have a problem because even as the civilization ending threat, Truth Social posts came out, I’m also seeing on social media rumors that he’s back at the hospital or perhaps he’s dead or whatever. I mean, it’s wild everything that’s out there. And that is hard to keep your feet on the ground and be a serious person in such an unserious time. I’m not talking about the 25th Amendment because you would need to use smelling salts for me if this cabinet made a move like that. I just think this cabinet is not going to do that. I don’t see where impeachment gets anybody anywhere right now. So all I need to do as my whole body absorbed the true fear and grief and embarrassment and shame that I felt when I read that post was to pray for him. To pray for his mind and his heart and his soul to be moved to see the people and the stakes as real. I think Pope Leo breaks through all of this noise and slop and mess so clearly because everyone is real to him and because he is guided by something that is worth making sacrifices for. And I have never seen any indication that Donald Trump as a business person, as a father, as a human being, certainly as a president, is guided by something worth making sacrifices for. I’ve just never seen it from him. I don’t know what you do when that’s the truth about the president, but that’s the truth about the president as I understand him.

Sarah [00:28:37] I mean, look, I posted on social media myself, I shared Pope Leo carrying the cross through all 14 stations in the Coliseum. It was like the first Pope to do this in like decades. That if he keeps this up, I’m going to convert. He is such a powerful figure. He’s enormously popular. Him inevitably coming to conflict with Donald Trump should not be surprising to anyone based on who Donald Trump is and who Publio has shown himself to be. And I think something about him being American, something about being on the global stage, especially this week where he is heading for an 11 day tour of Africa, which is the future. It’s the future of the Catholic Church and in so many ways, it’s the feature of the globe. And so it’s like that future orientation, that acknowledgement, and just the way he will speak with such clarity and moral authority when he said, I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel.

Pope Leo XIV [00:29:38] I don’t want to get into a debate with him. I don’t think that the message of the gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing. And I will continue to speak out about this, against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialog and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to the problems. Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed and I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this. I have no fear of neither the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly about the message in the gospel. And that’s what I believe.

Sarah [00:30:16] That’s it. And it is so heartening. It is so inspiring. The way Trump continues to pick a fight with him when you are so clearly losing it is just wild to me. It’s also that the Catholic Church is growing. It’s getting all these young converts right now. And you think going after the Pope is the right call? Over spring break on one of our very many long hikes, Nicholas and I were talking about we are in this space where you know it’s not just the war in Ukraine, it’s not just the war in Iran, it is the chaos in Cuba and Haiti and Venezuela and it’s this economic fallout which I think is going to get so much worse. I read this analysis that was saying we’re like moving from price shock to market breakdown. There’s not going to be enough. It’s not about like pricing the futures. The oil won’t be there. The fertilizer won’t be there. Like it’s going to be so bad because this is layering on stress on top of liberation day and all that bullshit. And it’s hard to remember that these were choices. He could have come in with this victory, which he did have in the 2024 election and just coasted and been probably enormously popular by now, even if prices hadn’t come down dramatically. Like you’re just causing all these problems for yourself. Like I told you before we started recording, sometimes it feels like he’s trying to destroy the country on purpose. It’s mind boggling. I hate to bring up the White House again when we talk about these serious things, but it’s like well now it’s a security risk. Well, you tore it down and we’re supposed to be worried about the security risk you created by tearing down the East Wing before asking anybody and not just not asking, but lying straight to everyone’s face and saying you were going to retain the structural integrity. Like it’s so ridiculous.

Beth [00:32:41] I won’t get this right word for word, but John Ossoff has a great line about how in Trump’s America the wealthy get tax breaks, the well-connected get stock tips, and the rest of us are left holding the bag. And that’s what everything that you just talked about looks like. If he were just coasting and preoccupying himself with the decorating and the statues and the arch and whatever...

Sarah [00:33:06] Oh God, don’t bring up the arch! I swear to God, my head will turn around backwards.

Beth [00:33:11] But, look, I could live with that. I wouldn’t like it, but I could live with that. That’s not what he’s doing. He is taking the highest stakes situations that were simmering on the stove and throwing them all over the world’s kitchen. And how could the Pope not address that when this administration tells us in a number of forms that they do it in the name of Christianity? I understand people don’t want to go to church and hear who to vote for. I don’t either. But when the Christian church is being used as justification, as deflection, as sword and shield by the president and so many actors within this government, I absolutely need religious leaders to say something about that. And I think the Pope is saying the best things that he can say on the other side of it.

Sarah [00:34:09] Well, and again, okay, let’s say he didn’t have all these completely unforced errors. I’m not saying there weren’t going to be challenges and difficulties. But he’s not paying attention to any of those either. Like the artificial intelligence, I am concerned about AI, obviously. I am growing more concerned about the tenor of AI resistance. So over the weekend a man was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home. Since then, there has been another attack on his home. And what really freaked me out was there was an Indiana lawmaker whose house was attacked and there was a note that was like “No data centers.” Just like the vitriol and the violence. And when you have a system that seems so corrupt, when everybody’s getting powerful and more rich and more powerful. And I’m supposed to read this piece of the New York Times about how Lauren Sanchez Bezos deserves to be happy. There’s a part of me that’s like I’m really concerned about this, and also I think it’s completely predictable. People feel powerless. Concerning people on the thin edge between wellness and violence, this is not a good environment for them. Is he paying attention in all of this? No.

[00:35:36] I finally sat down and read the oral history of Health and Human Services under Robert Kennedy’s leadership. And the part I cannot stop thinking about, because I hadn’t even realized, is that you had that attack on a federal building where the man came and shot at the CDC and killed a police officer, and Trump has never acknowledged it. Never even acknowledged it. And who’s soft on crime and who doesn’t care about law and order? Not to mention, I read a whole list of all the crimes that the January 6th people who were released have committed since then. That about sent me over the edge. So it’s not just like he could have not created more problems. There still would have been problems. There still are other problems and it’s not just he’s ignoring them, he’s often making them actively worse.

Beth [00:36:22] To your point about this being predictable, I was on a panel years ago now with some business leaders locally. And one of them said after the panel, people like me who have made it well past the American dream, the American dream with an exponent, have got to recognize that we are in French Revolution territory right now. Something has to give. This is not going to work. And that was years ago before anyone was talking about artificial intelligence at anything close to the scale we are today. And so I don’t think this is technology resistance. I just think AI has taken the sentiment that was already existing and supercharged it and given it new tools and changed the way that we talk to each other about these issues and created new opportunities for people who wish us harm to come in and divide us at an even greater depth and scale. And here again we have a president untethered to any kind of guide post to help us through that. I don’t think a lot of Sam Altman, but I read his blog post about this. I don’t wish him harm, certainly. I don’t wish for his home to be attacked. And I was reading his post saying, we need a social conversation. We need social leadership. We need democratic leadership on what is supposed to happen with AI. Who is to guide us through that right now? There are a number of ideas about that, but even if we went hard at it, even if we said, you know what, AI is a utility. Data centers have to be approved by this federal agency. We’re creating a new federal agency to deal with all of this. Do you want this administration to be in charge of that? Do you think this administration stewards that more responsibly than private industry is stewarding it? I don’t know. I have no confidence whatsoever that putting more power in the federal government, which is where I think it would have to sit, would do much for us right now. It might make it worse.

Sarah [00:38:24] Well, after reading the oral histories of the takeover, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services, my answer is definitively no. It is a shit show. Every one of those, if you’ve not read those three from the New York Times, I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of mental health preparation you would need to do to read them all at once, but it would be something. And this was so frustrating. Like to the Sam Altman of it all, if we didn’t have to spend all our time talking about the horrific leadership from the Trump administration. Like you could spend a whole show on him because there’s a lot going on there. Yeah, he’s not your favorite because the New Yorker just did this human investigation and there’s some real problems. Two decades of deception, manipulation, this idea that he is a liar, no other word for it. He still has that lawsuit from his sister accusing him of sexual abuse. He said in one of his posts, “I’m not a normal person anymore.” What does that mean? I have some ideas. Meanwhile, OpenAI is valued at $852 billion. And also I am kind of interested in his policy proposal structured on the new deal. I respect that he at least put it out there. No one else was. And it’s like how do you hold all of that at the same time that he’s getting Molotov cocktails thrown at his house? I’m not really sure.

Beth [00:39:50] We have the same situation with Sam Altman, which he does at least acknowledge that we have with this president. One person’s whims, desires, baggage, motivations, cannot hold the world by a string. And we keep landing there. That that’s what is happening with Donald Trump, and that’s what is happening with a lot of these tech leaders. It’s just too much power and responsibility for one person.

Sarah [00:40:14] Well, and you have Sam Altman, Elon Musk, another person who’s like sort of in that scenario, they’re going to be going to trial about their ongoing feud. Jury selection begins April 27th. To me it’s been described all kinds of ways like predatory foreign policy coming from the United States or as Ezra called it, head on a pike foreign policy. Like, it feels like all these kings feuding: Musk, Altman, Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu. It did not feel like that to me in my 20s or 30s. Like there were powerful people, but this was a table that everyone was sitting at and everybody had different motivations and there was an ability to keep them in check. And as people feel tossed around, and at the mercy of the whims of people who do not lead normal lives, they’re going to keep lashing out. They’re going to keep lashing out.

Beth [00:41:27] That is a global phenomenon for sure. In America, if I had to focus in on one problem to start chipping away at to deal with that, it is our Congress.

Sarah [00:41:40] I thought you were going to say Melania and Jeffrey Epstein.

Beth [00:41:44] No. I do want to talk about Melania and Jeffrey.

Sarah [00:41:49] You don’t think that’s the number one issue facing our nation requiring an important presidential address?

Beth [00:41:58] It isn’t. No, but standing at the same podium that he stands at to talk about war and peace, there she is. Before we talk about her, I want to say all of this used to be how the world was. We explicitly designed a system informing this nation to keep the world from being that again, to change how the world is, and we have degraded it so significantly. We also have an opportunity to change that. I don’t mean to be a broken record, but the way that this Congress is doing nothing-- and I put it on the Democrats too. I’m tired of reading pieces about how it’s unfair to be angry at the Democrats because what can they really do about the war? I don’t know, but it’s something more than the people they represent can do about the war. And I think it’s pretty clear what the American people want here. And I think that they ought to take some risks and stand up and be counted and do their darndest to reclaim their mantle as the first branch of government. And if they don’t, they are sentencing us to a world of capricious kings picking at each other and all of us being tossed around in the midst of those fights and people casually discussing ending civilizations because that’s what they feel like that day. But Melania...

Sarah [00:43:33] Well, I think there is a thread here because it’s not unrelated to Jeffrey Epstein in this story. A lot of what we’ve talked about today. But also that feeling of like the powerful play by a different set of rules. And also before we get to her at the same podium that he was at, I want to talk about him going to that podium and saying absolutely nothing really quick because I don’t want to pollute our discussion of Artemis with discussions of him, but it’s almost like he couldn’t stand that the attention was on the astronaut.

Beth [00:44:02] A hundred percent.

Sarah [00:44:03] So he stood up and said nothing, just so we were talking about him again. He didn’t even go to the launch. Even though this is part of his legacy, he was definitely pushing a revitalization of NASA, pushing back going to the moon. Couldn’t even take credit for it. I know nobody wants to hear me say this, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I stand by that analysis. I think it’s always true, still true. I don’t know if the same is true for Melania. I don’t know if it’s like missed an opportunity. I just am so often baffled by her. And there’s like moments where I’m like I totally get what makes her tick. This was not one of them.

Beth [00:44:44] I do think Melania fits into the thematic elements we’ve been discussing in that she behaves like a queen. She owes the public nothing, except exactly what she wants to give the public. Melania cares about Melania. I really wanted in Trump’s first term for there to be a redemption arc for Melania, for there be more going on than met the eye, for her to be telling us something, telegraphing things. There was so much analysis around her in the first term. After observing her through that first term, reading her book, watching how she’s behaved in this second term, I don’t think any of that. I just think that she is a queen in a world of kings. And that’s how she conducts and comports herself. I thought that this move was wild and that it tracks. Both things are true for me. I find few people as unrelatable as I find Melania Trump. I don’t understand anything about her worldview. I perceive her as someone who’s pretty shallow on the whole. The nice things I can say is I think she really loves her son. I think she really loves her parents. I think she does care about children generally. I know she’s doing foster care work with some legislators right now. I think there are some things that she tries to do that are good. And I think she wants us to know that she’s a benevolent queen. What specific piece of information prompted her to stand at the podium and defend only herself, not her husband, to do it in a way that seemed to be thrown together very, very quickly.

Sarah [00:46:19] Yeah, I mean the reporting is the aides had no idea.

Beth [00:46:22] Well, and a lot of people pointed out the blinds coming down behind her midway through the press conference. And then what struck me more than the blind, the one person I still open Instagram for is Queen City Lisa, who is a local influencer who tells us about Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky things to do. She also happens to be one of our academic team parents and like the nicest person you’ll ever meet. She pointed out that Melania was backlit and Melania would never choose to be backlit. That’s the kind of thing she pays attention to and has expertise in? So everything felt very thrown together to me about it. Again, on the socials, there is conversation about that New York Times piece where Trump had a woman deported on behalf of a friend. And that that specific story has tentacles to Melania that Melania does not like. I don’t know if that’s it or something else. I don’t know if we’re waiting on a big reported piece that she wanted to get in front of. Whatever it is, I’ve heard lots of theories. It is clear to me that it came together very quickly and that it is further evidence that she is the queen and it’s just about her and nothing else.

Sarah [00:47:32] Well, and it gave the Epstein story more oxygen, which is never what you’d want, even if there is some story coming out about her. To me, you saying she’s shallow is 100% correct. Like she’s the queen and she’s dumb about stuff like this. No one’s told her instincts are bad, but her instincts are bad. Clearly she only has yes men around her. Clearly she only has people who tell her how smart and wonderful and beautiful she is. I don’t really think he gets onto her, criticizes her about anything. So no one says to her like, hey, in the middle of all this AI backlash, maybe you don’t walk through the halls of the White House with a robot. How about that?

Beth [00:48:16] And present it as a teacher? All of that was as bad as it possibly could have been.

Sarah [00:48:21] As bad as it could get. Hey, let’s not give oxygen to this Epstein story. She clearly doesn’t ask for advice. Why would she? No one in this administration does. It’s just a smaller queenly manifestation of the mistakes they make, including with the Iran war. We know we’re the smartest. We know what’s going to happen. There’s no need to plan or take seriously the strategic long-term risks of any of our actions because if it doesn’t go our way we’ll just say it’s going our way and that should be good enough.

Beth [00:48:50] And again, you’d like to find some deeper meaning there. You’d like think maybe she really wants to elevate the voices of the victims. Maybe she really thinks that this should stay in the news. Maybe she wants to hurt him, but I just don’t believe any of that.

Sarah [00:48:59] No, I don’t.

Beth [00:49:00] I don’t believe any of it. I think there is something that got her goat. And on a moment’s notice, she said, “Summon the commoners to listen to me, and they will believe what I tell them.”

Sarah [00:49:12] There’s no there-there. You know what I’m saying?

Beth [00:49:15] I do.

Sarah [00:49:16] Okay, well, we’ve gone from the massively impactful to the merely befuddling. Now let’s wrap this up with something positive since so much of it was not, which is JD Vance. This is me being petty, and then we will move into the real human consequences of this. But JD Vans keeps losing. Before he went to the negotiations that he failed at. He went too Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orban, who has ruled Hungary for 16 years, slowly degrading their democracy in the process. I guess it didn’t work because after 16 years, Orban is out. He lost. Opposition leader Peter Magyar won. His party won 53.6% of the vote, 138 of the 199 parliamentary seats. Incredible. Incredible. In fact, they think his party might have two thirds majority enough to amend Hungary’s constitution and dismantle much of Orban’s grip on the judiciary, staying on enterprises, the media. One of my friends lives in Hungary and he was saying there was like a hot mic moment where one of the media outlets was like, we’ll be back with more. And then the hot mic, the person was like more what? Like, what are we going to say? We’re supposed to just say good stuff about Viktor Orban and he just lost? And they were kind of like ad-libbing about how crazy it was for their media situation. So. It’s a new day for Hungary for sure.

Beth [00:50:51] That has global ramifications that I do not want to brush past. But as an American, I also do not want to brush past the fact that our vice president went to Hungary to campaign in their presidential election full stop. You could end there and say, what? What? When we’re at war, when we have the issues that we have, when healthcare is so expensive, when any number of other things. What? The vice president went to hungry to do a campaign stop for their presidential elections. But also to campaign for someone who has governed as an authoritarian, who has made the media fearful of criticizing him for any number of other things. I got to be honest though, if JD Vance were out stumping for someone I really like, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that either. I understand that we have a lot of disputes in our country about America’s role in the world. I feel pretty confident that historic majorities of Americans would agree that our vice president’s role is not to get involved in other countries choosing their leaders.

Sarah [00:51:57] Yeah, there’s only one that’s like pro-Russia. And it makes sense through the lens of this administration that they love somebody who was anti-EU. But I mean the Hungarian people who turned out in massive numbers, the turnout was like 77% or something bananas. If you have not heard them all singing, we are the champion in this big rally, I highly recommend it. It’s uplifting. Magyar ran on a anti-corruption, pro-EU platform. He’s still center right. This is not some like super leftist, but like a real social movement. I mean, the crowds at his rallies are insane. And it’s just so interesting to me that you’re seeing how in other places in Europe too, like with Germany’s AFD, with Milani in Italy, with some of the far right candidates, these populist candidates in France, they’re just running out of room. They’re running out of room on this message. And they’re certainly running out of room and aligning themselves with Trump. Orban and Trump have been like peas in a pod. And it was concerning because of this sort of march of populist authoritarianism around the globe. And people don’t like it.

[00:53:11] And I totally agree about him coming to campaign for him. I just cannot. It is so difficult. I don’t know if I ever took Steve Bannon and his flood the zone strategy as seriously as I should have because there’s just so many times when I think we’ve just forgotten that this is abnormal. I guess because it’s gone on now for 10 years, this Trump era, I don’t know if you still call it abnormal. But I’ve lived for 44 and a president campaigning against a member of his own party, sharing pictures of himself looking like Jesus, posting crude curse word filled missives on Easter Sunday... Remember when they were all mad about Obama’s suit? I know that’s like always the example, but it is hard to just remember one of these things that barely gets an attention like this disaster with the labor secretary. The fallout at the CDC. Like the fact that we have a measles outbreak. Children are dying from measles and it barely gets a damn mention because you can’t swim through all the shit. The norms they shred, the offensive inhuman, from inhuman to ridiculous to stupid. It’s maddening.

Beth [00:54:45] I spent the weekend with a group of listeners at a retreat and we had a presentation party where everybody got to show up and give a presentation about anything they wanted to. And one of our listeners did this amazing presentation, Tina, about a species of bird that was introduced in a very incompetent way to manage a bug population and the bird was an invasive species. Okay? And the bird has been treated as an invasive species by the bird community for a very long time. And Tina, who is as best I can tell, the most fabulous homeschooling mom you’ve ever met, was pushing her kids on the question, how long do you think of something as an invasive species? If that bird has been here for 100 years now, is it still invasive? Or is it part of a constantly adapting, evolving, changing ecosystem? And she told that as a very beautiful and poignant allegory about immigration. But I was thinking about it in this context, too. There has been this global march around populism and there is something in that that persists. A lot of what we’ve talked about in this episode, things we’re mad about or worried about, could be characterized fairly as populist concerns. But the governance by the populists has been manipulative and selfish and demonstrably taking advantage of populist sentiment instead of trying to serve the people that elected them.

[00:56:38] And I don’t want to be ugly to the people that elected them in the course of figuring out, okay, here we are in this world where for a decade we have had an invasive species in our politics. It’s becoming part of our ecosystem. There are things about that that will endure. There are things that will fall away. And I think it’s just such a difficult moment to know that we’re in the midst of that adaptation. We’re seeing people say, “I voted for him three times. I’m so mad at him. I voted for him three times. I’m so embarrassed that he posted himself looking like Jesus.” I’m not going to say to any of those people, “Yeah, you’re the worst. You suck. You should never vote again.” I don’t feel that way. I feel the things shifting. I feel of the ecosystem sorting out what needs to fall away here and what is here to stay and what will remain. And I certainly hope that a lot of what we’ve talked about today is part of what has to go to make way for something new.

Sarah [00:57:41] Hungary’s central message of anti-corruption, that the government was no longer serving the people, was incredibly successful and hyper relevant here. I mean, Ezra Klein wrote a piece about the criticism of Hassan Piker. Tim Miller just wrote a peace saying like we’ve got to invite the America first people and he made it a lowercase first. Do you think Hungary got to this spot where 77% of people voted and they voted overwhelmingly for the new guy because they were shaming people who’d fell for it? Even if you voted for him three times, even if I feel that some corruption was predictable, this level even surprises me. So there’s plenty of room for forgiveness and an invitation to join us in fighting this level of grift and exploitation and power-hungry greed. Like even the person who wanted very different things than I do about abortion or crime, I don’t think they wanted this. Again, I hesitate to say it wasn’t predictable. But again, even I’m surprised. Did anybody think he was going to roll in there in the first year and tear down the East Wing of the White House? He still has the capacity to just blow through norms and expectations. And we have got to acknowledge that and find space for people who are just as surprised by it as we are. And even if you’re not surprised, even if you predicted all of this, there’s supposed to be a path forward. We all weren’t in the same place. Maybe we’re getting closer to the same place now. I mean, you see glimmers of it with Artemis, with these moments. And so it’s not impossible.

Beth [00:59:47] And you have to be careful. Now this opposition party in Hungary has to deliver. An anti-corruption message can also be a manipulative message that was part of Trump’s message. Remember, he was going to drain the swamp. He was going to clean this up. He told us this is how the world works and I’m going to come change it. And instead he said this how the word works and I going to come get even more of it. I’m going to get an even bigger piece of it. If I stick with the birds, I try to remember that the birds outlasted the dinosaurs because people who want to come and take the bigger chunk don’t make it through the evolutionary process. And I do hope that we figure out here in the United States. I hope the people of Hungary figure this out. Ukraine has been in this process for a number of years before Putin invaded it. What does it look like to truly reorient your government to one that serves the population instead of takes from the population?

Sarah [01:00:41] Well, hopefully Hungary is not the last to try to figure that out. Artemis II made it b ack safely.

Beth [01:00:57] I’m so relieved and happy.

Sarah [01:00:58] I knew they were going to. I just want to say that. I was not worried.

Beth [01:01:04] I was worried.

Sarah [01:01:05] I was not. I’ve felt nothing but peace and calm and competence. Like that was my inner gut vibe the whole time.

Beth [01:01:16] Not me. I have been infected by a lot of what we’ve been talking about. And I had read that there were some systems that people were worried about and they were afraid this launch was rushed and should have been delayed. And in my mind, there was no way it was going to be delayed because of X and the SpaceX IPO. And so I was concerned and I felt very, very, very relieved when they splashed down so successfully.

Sarah [01:01:41] Well, and I just thought the science and the technological achievement that they went so far was something. But I don’t know if these astronauts got media training. I’m assuming they did.

Beth [01:01:57] Who did they hire? I would like their business cars.

Sarah [01:02:00] Seriously. Because they just were up for it. They were here telling us philosophy, talking like poets, getting everybody on board, uniting people, sharing some of that incredible perspective that astronauts uniquely have. And it’s just really beautiful.

Beth [01:02:24] I would love to play the audio from one of those poet philosopher moments that really touched me.

Astronaut Victor Glover [01:02:31] You have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special but we’re the same distance from you and I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are and that we are the same thing and that we got to get through this together.

Beth [01:03:18] Thinking of Earth as a spaceship given to us in the midst of a universe that is so filled with nothingness, just going to be holding onto that for long. That’s a new Bible verse for me.

Sarah [01:03:31] We were in Big Bend for part of our spring break, which is like a dark sky certified place. You can see so many stars. And just the way it works on your head, just here sitting on top of a truck, looking up in Texas. I cannot fathom what it’s like being up there and understanding the expansiveness of space. And there’s this thing that happens to you. And I think some of this is like scientifically established. And it’s not even just looking up at space. It’s like when you look up at an expanse and you look far in the distance, it changes your brain. And I think that they give us a moment to do that. Everybody’s all on their little screens and Artemis II gave us an opportunity to look up and be awed and be inspired and remember that there is so much more to our shared identity as citizens than politics. And you just heard I think over and over again how hungry people were for that.

Beth [01:04:50] I think that’s right. This spaceship metaphor works for me in the sense that it is also precarious, that it’s precious, that it requires work and caretaking. I had so many moments, especially the Easter Sunday post from the president, I had some many moments when I thought, why do we do this to each other? Why are we not all working together to keep our spaceship in good condition, to keep it working? To see how amazing it is. We also went out west for spring break and drove and drove, and drove and drove and saw so many amazing things and work constantly in awe at the scale and the colors and the layers that are created over millions of years on this planet that we all share. And it just was such a reminder that it’s a gift to live here. It’s a responsibility to live here. And I don’t want to spend the precious time that I have to receive and to steward in a wasteful, selfish, short-term posture.

Sarah [01:06:09] That’s why I was so grateful to Artemis too, as I know we all were, for giving us another posture to adopt at least over the last week or so. We hope that you find another similar posture to adopt when you listen to us here at Pantsuit Politics. We thank you so much for listening today. We will be back in your ears on Friday with another episode. We’ll see you in the comments on Substack. 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.

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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.

Sarah is here talking with Aaron Barrett, a retired professional baseball player and current manager of the Clearwater Threshers. They talk about the culture of baseball, Aaron’s experience with Tommy John surgery, the impact of sports gambling on players, and the status of league negotiations. As a very dedicated baseball fan, I’m so excited about this one. And because I love baseball, I couldn’t stay out of it. So outside of politics, I share some thoughts on the new ABS system, aka “are the robots taking over baseball?” -Beth

Topics Discussed

• Aaron Barrett on Baseball, Resilience, and Protecting Players

• Outside of Politics: Who’s Calling Balls and Strikes?

Episode Resources

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

• Aaron Barrett (@aaronbarrett30) (Instagram)

• Nats call up Aaron Barrett in emotional announcement (ESPN)

• Clearwater Threshers Announce 2026 Coaching Staff

• MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement (MLB)

Episode Transcript

Beth [00:00:29] This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We’re on spring break this week, so I’m speaking to you from the past. I’m recording this little introduction on Wednesday, April 1st. Who even knows what has transpired between my time and yours right now? Sarah and I’ll be back in real time next Tuesday to break whatever it is down, but for today, we have a true treat for you. Sarah is here talking with Aaron Barrett, a retired professional baseball player and current manager of the Clearwater Threshers. They talk about the culture at baseball, Aaron’s experience with Tommy John surgery, the impact of sports gambling on players and the status of league negotiations. As a very dedicated baseball fan myself, I am so excited about this one. And because I love baseball, I couldn’t stay out of it. So Outside of Politics, I share some thoughts on the new ABS system, AKA are the robots taking over baseball? Before Sarah and Aaron talk about America’s favorite pastime, I want to remind you that our special edition T-shirt design contest is in full swing. We’re inviting you to submit designs for one special summer shirt that celebrates our community, America’s 250th birthday, and our live show in Minneapolis in August. We want this to be a shirt inspired by all that greatness, but that you’d also just be genuinely happy to wear in your life for many years to come. The theme is Good Neighbors. You can find all the details in our notes and on Substack. Submissions are open through April 30th. We cannot wait to see what Good Neighbors looks like to you. Next up, Sarah talks Baseball with Aaron Barrett.

Sarah [00:02:10] Aaron Barrett, welcome to Pantsuit Politics. I’m so excited you’re here.

Aaron Barrett [00:02:16] Me too!

Sarah [00:02:17] And not just because I’m related to Aaron-- although I am-- but also because, although, I am not a sports fanatic, let’s be clear, the people are not going to be fooled if I roll in and try to be some sports aficionado. Sports culture, sports management, especially around baseball, that stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. So when you got your new job as the manager of the Clearwater Threshers, I was like, hey, you want to come on Pantsuit Politics and talk about like the culture of baseball? And you were like, yeah, I do. So, first of all, people now just know your role and that we’re related, but tell people about your history inside baseball.

Aaron Barrett [00:02:59] Yeah. It’s kind of a long story.

Sarah [00:03:02] Yeah, I was going to say, how long have you been playing baseball, Aaron?

Aaron Barrett [00:03:05] I’ve been playing since I was five years old.

Sarah [00:03:07] Oh my gosh.

Aaron Barrett [00:03:08] But this is my 16th year in professional baseball.

Sarah [00:03:12] So you played for which teams and where are you now?

Aaron Barrett [00:03:16] Played, obviously, high school baseball, grew up in Evansville, Indiana, and then I went to Wabash Valley Junior College in Illinois and then transferred to University of Mississippi-- go Rebels-- and drafted by the Nationals and then made it to the big leagues in 2014. And then obviously we’ll probably unpack a lot of the other stuff. But basically, drafted in 2010, made it to the big leagues in 2014. Officially retired in 2022 and then went to the other side, the dark side, as they call it-- just kidding-- with the Philadelphia Phillies right after that.

Sarah [00:03:55] Okay. And is this your first official management role?

Aaron Barrett [00:03:58] This is my first ever time being a manager of a team in Pro-Ball, forever really.

Sarah [00:04:06] You’re explaining to me that this is what level-- I didn’t know there were so many. I knew you were in the minor leagues and then I knew were in major leagues. Those are the levels I know about. You just told me there were more than that.

Aaron Barrett [00:04:17] Yeah, so it can be a little complicated because in the other sports like NFL and NBA, well, the NBA has what’s called the G League and D League, I think, whatever they want to call it. But in baseball, it’s such a high skill sport. And because it’s based off, again, if you really think about it, a Hall of Fame player if they get three hits out of ten at bats, again, you’re failing seven times. You’re considered a Hall of Famer. So it takes a lot of patience and a lot of skill to be really good at this game. So we have what’s called the minor leagues. And so when you get drafted we have the rookie level which is at the complex, and then Low-A, which is where I’ll be this year. And then we have High-A, then we AA, and then we have AAA and the next step after AAA is the big leagues. So it’s a long process.

Sarah [00:05:20] Well, I remember when you were in the minor leagues, I remember going to dinner with you and you’re like, well, if you figure up all my time, it’s like $3.25 an hour. You were drafted four times before you signed a professional contract. So what kept you going? What advice are you going to give these guys who’ve now been drafted and are starting this process?

Aaron Barrett [00:05:40] I think the unique thing for me is everybody has their own story and I’ve, obviously, my whole journey from start to finish up until this point has covered a lot of different perspectives. So I’m excited to now be able to connect with these guys because I feel like every single player in that clubhouse I can actually connect with and I think that’s what makes my perspective unique. So I’m excited just to be able to, again, every single guy, whether you’re a first-rounder, or whether you are a guy that’s on the bubble, or whether you’re a Latin American guy, whatever, I feel like I have an opportunity to connect with them and share them like, hey, as long as you have a jersey on, you have an opportunity to be a major league player. And that’s the whole purpose of why these guys-- again, it’s the dreams, it’s the vision. So I’m excited just to be able to inspire these guys and hopefully help them the best that I can.

Sarah [00:06:42] Well, your journey inside the majors was kind of crazy because you played for the nationals, you went to the world series, like the dream that everybody envisions, but I think one of the things at the time you were most well-known for that got all this attention and is now to me a part of such a bigger story that’s happening inside baseball and specifically inside pitching is the Tommy John surgery. So tell the people about your Tommy John story.

Aaron Barrett [00:07:17] I was on the rise in the major leagues and ended up making an opening day roster in 2014 with the Nationals and was kind of on my way to having a lot of success in the major leagues, pushing the playoffs. And then in 2015 I was leading all the baseball and appearances, just doing my thing, trying to be the next back in closer, being the guy that was my dream, to be the next big thing. And unfortunately, I pitched a lot and arm couldn’t hold up and end up having to get Tommy John surgery. And so for those who don’t--

Sarah [00:07:59] Wait, for people who don’t know, we’re throwing that around, but for people who don’t what that is, tell them.

Aaron Barrett [00:08:05] I think I can’t remember is back in way back when I can remember exactly the day, but there actually was a picture named Tommy John in the major leagues and he’s the first person to ever have surgery successfully done. So what happens, there’s a ligament inside your elbow called the under collateral ligament. And due to either increased velocity or overuse, which that’s what happened in my case, the ligament will either stretch or it’ll just break. And so we’re right now in kind of an epidemic across all of baseball, not only in the major leagues, I think they just came out the statistic the other day that 39% of guys in the Major Leagues end up having Tommy John’s surgery, which is insane.

Sarah [00:08:54] That’s insane!

Aaron Barrett [00:08:56] But even worse is it’s the youth, the youth right now, the amount of kids from anywhere from 13 to 17 years old, it’s happening at an absolute rapid rate. And obviously it pulls on my heartstrings a lot. Well, anyway, so the surgery itself, you can do it a couple of different ways. So they get your palmaris tendon, there’s this little tendon and they take that tendon out and then they attach it to this bone on the inside and that’s how they replace it or you can also get it from your hamstring. So next thing you know, 12 to 16 months later of rehab you’re all brand new and go get them. So that’s kind of the short story of what Tommy John surgery is.

Sarah [00:09:47] So you got it in 2015 and then what happened?

Aaron Barrett [00:09:50] So in 2015, I absolutely dominate my rehab. I’m literally a week away from going back to the major leagues, crushing it. And on a backfield game on one pitch, I’ve been pitching just like I have my whole life. Actually, as I’m accelerating my arm forward, I snap my humerus bone in half, break it.

Sarah [00:10:12] You broke your bone. Y’all, this was very traumatic for Aaron and also the rest of our family. Witnesses said it sounded like a gunshot. That’s the part that I can never, will never forget.

Aaron Barrett [00:10:23] Yeah. I’ve gotten a lot better telling the story because I’ve told it a lot now, but every time that I do tell the story, it’s just such a traumatic event for me. We had a couple guys puking in the dugout when it happened. They said it sounded like take like two stacks of like two by fours and then like snap those in half.

Sarah [00:10:47] Oh my god.

Aaron Barrett [00:10:48] Yeah, it is not supposed to happen. There’s only been a handful, I think five or six guys in the history of major league baseball, that’s happened to. I know there have been some other kids at the youth level it’s happened to, but...

Sarah [00:11:02] Where they broke their bone doing it?

Aaron Barrett [00:11:05] Yeah, but it’s such a rare thing. It’s not supposed to happen. So next thing you know, I go up to Dr. Andrews who did my original surgery. And when he first saw the x-ray, he actually thought I got in a car accident because again, what I did is not supposed to happen.

Sarah [00:11:26] So then you get it again.

Aaron Barrett [00:11:28] So, that whole story is wild because, again, they didn’t understand how it happened. And so, my surgery is supposed to only be about two hours, and it ended up lasting six. And the reason why is because every time they went to drill a screw into my bone, the drill bit would break off in my bone. So, they had to replace the drill bit all 16 times. So it lasted six hours. So when I woke up, the pain was unlike anything I’ve ever imagined. So two plates, 16 screws. And basically they told me I would never throw a baseball ever again.

Sarah [00:12:13] But you did.

Aaron Barrett [00:12:14] But I did.

Sarah [00:12:18] How long were you in rehab the second time?

Aaron Barrett [00:12:20] The way that you count rehab is in order to be a successful rehab, you have to throw a pitch successfully at the same level you’re at. So for me, since I was in the major leagues in 2015, my total rehab process was a total of four years to make it back to my previous level.

Sarah [00:12:43] What was it like when you got back there?

Aaron Barrett [00:12:47] Unlike anything I could ever imagine. That whole process is really like very humbling. I felt like I had a pretty decent faith foundation and it broke me. To be honest with you. And so, I wanted nothing to do with God. I shut him out of my life and questioned everything, questioned why. Because I felt like I was a pretty good person and felt like I was on the-- again, I made mistakes just like everybody else, but it was such a traumatic event that I just... So, for me, the gift that he blessed me with he also broke me with it. So that was very, very, very hard to swallow. So I just wanted nothing to do with him and so I just thought that I could do everything on my own. And about a year into my rehab process I was on my hands and knees begging for everything that I can’t do it anymore on my own. And then slowly started getting back in word and my daily devotional. And sure enough I started healing a little bit more and start getting a little bit better. And the days turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, obviously. And next thing you know three and a half, four years later, and I finally get the call, then there’s that viral video of me getting called back up where my teammates just mobbed me in September 7th in 2019.

[00:14:31] So that whole story is nuts because I’m living in Atlanta at that time. And for me, again, to have my first game back in Atlanta where all my family’s there, it’s where I’m living, that’s such a God thing. And I just remember it’s kind of a funny story. I get called like, hey, you’re going to the game. I’m a wreck. I’m a emotional mental wreck. And I’m on the mound. I’m just like it’s a bigger deal than it was my first in my major debut, you know? And so I go ball one, ball two, ball three, ball four, ball five, ball six. And I remember I step off the mound and I go, what are you doing? And it’s like you’ve been dreaming about this for four years and this is how you’re going to start? Like, let’s go. So I reset, get the guy out, next guy out. And then I strike out Ronald Cuney Jr. who’s arguably one of the best players in the game. And then get the next guy. And I just come off the mound and it just hits me. And it all is such a humbling feeling knowing that what God did in my life. I’m getting a little choked up thinking about it because it was incredible. I can’t even explain what that moment was for me.

Sarah [00:16:18] What I think is so interesting and what I really wanted to talk to you about today is that I think as you’re like going into this manager position, you have to put together your individual story with what’s happening in baseball broadly. And at the time I remember it was such a big deal. You were the only person to have had it twice. Now that’s no longer true. I’ve read something the other day that somebody might be getting it like three times or maybe they already have. My first question is like, were you just mad at yourself and God? Were you ever mad at baseball? Like where you ever felt like were you questioning like the overworking or the-- and now that you’ve seen this like play out broadly, how do you think about your own journey and how are you going to coach these guys? I know one thing you mentioned to me was like a different philosophy around pitching. Like how are putting your journey, this broader trend and all of this together as you’re responsible for other players?

Aaron Barrett [00:17:15] It’s a great question. Yeah, the state of the game is definitely much different than when I played, and the demands of the game are much different and the type of player. I think the average velocity right now-- again, I do like 95, 96. And I think the average philosophy right now is like 94, 95, which is crazy.

Sarah [00:17:40] It’s not like you were playing 20 years ago. It wasn’t that long ago.

Aaron Barrett [00:17:42] I know. I know it’s crazy. So I think the trend of what the athlete-- like the athlete today is on another level. They are so talented. Whether it’s the nutrition, it’s the way they train. It is just different. Not in a bad way. And I was the rehab coordinator before this position. So one of the things that I try to now preach is your best ability is your availability. Like, it doesn’t matter if you’re not on the field. So getting these guys to understand, okay, what is your routine? Now that’s really hard to find your routine when you’re 18 years old coming out of high school. Or some of these guys have been in college, so maybe they have a little bit better system. But I think it’s going to be unique for me to be able to help these guys understand what the day-to-day grind looks like to be able to come to the field every single day prepared to play because that’s the goal. The goal should be to play 10 years in the big leagues, at least.

Sarah [00:19:07] Interesting.

Aaron Barrett [00:19:09] With the demands of the game and everybody that’s especially on the pitching side, longevity is not really a thing anymore. So trying to find ways to get these guys to understand what these guys are doing to be able to stay on the field for a long, long time. Not just this year, but for the long haul.

Sarah [00:19:33] Yeah, and I feel like the strategy of just getting Tommy John multiple times is not a great one.

Aaron Barrett [00:19:37] No, it’s not.

Sarah [00:19:38] As far as longevity, you know?

Aaron Barrett [00:19:41] No, it’s not. And it’s hard. You have to balance it because the game is very hard. It’s very hard like I mentioned before. And so, obviously, seeing the trends of the game, where we’re at with velocity and pitch shapes and they call it stuff. They call it having good stuff.

Sarah [00:20:06] That’s a word doing a lot of work when it comes to pitching- calling it stuff.

Aaron Barrett [00:20:11] That’s always been a thing though. So the harder that you threw, it just affords you, allows you to make more mistakes. So someone that has a little bit more control of the baseball can obviously put it where you want. A guy that has like nastier stuff or harder velocity, you don’t have to be as accurate. But in the major leagues these guys are the best of the best. So balancing that, the demands of the game, while still trying to find ways to keep these guys on the field for the long haul, and that’s like the state of the game right now where we’re at.

Sarah [00:20:52] Yeah, and that’s a lot. Like what would you tell what would you tell a young pitcher in your clubhouse who had to go get Tommy John? What would you say to them?

Aaron Barrett [00:21:02] The message that I delivered now, because I’m a firm believer, again, based on my story is everything does happen for a reason. I’m a firm believer in that number one. So in the moment it stinks and now my message is you have to look at this as an opportunity. There’s clearly something. That was either the way you were throwing, your mechanics, or maybe it’s a situation like mine where it’s overuse. There’s clearly something that happened where there’s a link in the chain or multiple links in the chains. So now it’s like you now have an opportunity to... And we try to look at it from a very holistic view, not just it’s-- and again, we can talk about this a lot, but I just I genuinely believe that you have to develop a person first and then build the player. So I try to look at it like I can fix this guy’s mechanics. I can do all these things, but if the person is not being addressed and we’re not finding the root causes of some of these other things, then we’re not going to be able to build the players the best of our abilities. In my opinion, that’s how I [inaudible] in my community.

Sarah [00:22:22] I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me when you’re talking about a game that’s as complex as this, that is as demanding as this. To me what you’re seeing with these trends is like what you were talking about like there’s a lot of focus on velocity or there’s a lot of focus on mechanics but the overall philosophy of the longevity of the player or the strength of the team or however you want to put it like to me that makes lot of sense that it’s what you’ve heard for a long time around professional players. Like in all leagues they always talk about people get into this and really, yeah, they needed to become the best player, but they also needed to understand how to manage the demands of being a professional athlete like financially, spiritually, psychologically, like it’s like a very holistic integrated impact. And so your strategy to manage it has to be holistic and integrated.

Aaron Barrett [00:23:17] Yeah, it has to be, and that’s kind of the fun part. I think now being on the other side where I think as a player, again, you’re not supposed to think about it. You just have to do your job. But now being on the other side, seeing all the pieces that go into, again, like one of our mottos is like putting the player first. So, and I genuinely believe that like every decision that is made, it has to be down to like what is best for the player. So if you keep that as your North Star, you know that all the decisions that you make every single day, knowing that you’re not going to be perfect or right, but you are doing everything you can that serves the player. And when I was a player, I genuinely felt which coaches or whoever that was, that had my best interests, not only just as a baseball player, but as a person. And so players know. I mean, we just do. And I think people do. It’s authentic. And so that’s been my approach. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t. But the players know that I’m going to do everything I can to get the answers they’re looking for.

Sarah [00:24:37] Well, hopefully you’ll be there and so early in their journey that they’ll it’ll be definitional for what that relationship should feel like. I think that’s the power of being there when they’re just starting their career, is to say, like, this is the this is what you’re looking for. And it’s like having your first boss be a good boss. It makes all the difference.

Aaron Barrett [00:24:55] Yeah, I hope so. Again, I’m going to be me. I’m not perfect. Every day I’m trying to strive to be the best version of myself and that’s another message I try to get these guys to understand too. We’re on the process of excellence. What does that actually look like?

Sarah [00:25:17] I like calling it a process. It’s a process of excellence.

Aaron Barrett [00:25:21] Because it is.

Sarah [00:25:23] Yeah, that’s good. I like that. Okay. Here’s another question I have for you. Could be a little controversial, but when you said player first, I couldn’t help but think about this new $300 million deal that Major League Baseball has signed with Polymarket. Pantsuit Politics has some firm opinions about sports gambling and the pressure it puts on players. What did you think about when you heard that deal announced?

Aaron Barrett [00:25:47] Oh, man. I mean, everything’s driven by a dollar. The gambling thing is interesting. We had a couple of players, I think, last year that got in trouble for some gambling stuff. It’s tough. Again, I’m not playing, so I don’t know exactly how the players truly feel about this. But I just think when you’re looking at it from the fan perspective now where all I’m hearing like death threats and comments on social media where fans are coming in guys DMs like because you blew this game or because they lost money. Correct. And it’s just like that’s not the fan experience in my opinion.

Sarah [00:26:35] First of all, people are crazy enough when there is no money riding on the game. People will jerk a foul ball out of a child’s hands. You know what I’m saying? Like they’re wrapped up into it before the money even gets involved.

Aaron Barrett [00:26:49] Yeah. And that part’s sad to me a little bit because again being a player and I’ve been in many, many bull tons and one thing that I always like to do was I actually like to interact with the fans. There’s just something I-- it’s funny fans think that there’s like this invisible fence or wall and they’re like they can say whatever they want to you and then like the moment you like look at them and interact with them like kind of are like oh...

Sarah [00:27:20] Oh crap.

Aaron Barrett [00:27:22] Right. You want to go have a conversation after the game? Let’s go. You know what I mean? I have no issue with that. So I don’t know. It’s just one of those things there’s a part like, okay, yeah, this is our job, right? Like our job we get paid a lot of money to try to do our best on the field to have success. And it’s always one of the things that, like, let’s just say a guy walks the guy or a guy doesn’t get a hit. It’s like what do you think we’re trying to do out there? Do you think we’re trying to throw balls? Like we are human beings. Sorry, sometimes we’re going to fail.

Sarah [00:28:07] Well, and to me with baseball as opposed to like basketball, just like the physics of it and just like you said, like seven times out of 10, if you don’t get it and you’re still in Hall of Famer, like just like statistics and proportionality and all of that in baseball to me, it makes it way, way, way more like complicated, especially when you get into like prop bets and gambling as opposed the EMB. I’m not saying like one’s a better athlete or other. There’s just a lot more, like not chance, but like skill in the face of an enormous amount of factors. You know what I mean?

Aaron Barrett [00:28:40] I do. I do, yeah. So back to your question, I don’t know. It’s tough. I just wish we were continuing to try to grow the game through a different lens. And the gambling piece is I don t know. I understand you’re trying to generate revenue. And there’s a lot of revenue to be made. These guys are making a lot money. But I don’t know if that’s the best route.

Sarah [00:29:09] Is there anything else that kind of worries you about where the game is headed either through the fan perspective or the player perspective or anything like that?

Aaron Barrett [00:29:17] I mean, we have a big CBA coming up. I don’t know if you know about that.

Sarah [00:29:22] No!

Aaron Barrett [00:29:23] So we have what’s called a collective bargaining agreement. So it’s an agreement from the player association with MLB and that expires at the end of the season. So it’s kind of a big deal because there’s a lot of very interesting things going on. Again, I’m not in the circle as a player to know, but I know enough. We had a lockout in 2022 and I was in the Dominican Republic at the time when we got actively locked out. And that was pretty scary, pretty scary stuff, honestly.

Sarah [00:29:57] Yeah.

Aaron Barrett [00:29:58] So we haven’t had a true strike since 1995. And, again, the state of the game, how much money is being made. There’s an open, the owners have talked about they want a salary cap, which some of the other NFL and NBA have. We do not have. And there’s obviously reasons for that. The players obviously do not want that. All the players want is just competitively they want all 30 teams to be competitive and that’s the whole goal. If you own a team your goal should be to try to win. So that that dynamic has gotten interesting so we’ll see. There’s been a lot of talk about us not potentially having a season next year in Major League Baseball.

Sarah [00:30:46] Whoa. You heard it here first, Pantsuit Politics listeners. Well, assuming there is a season, what has you like the most excited thinking about this season and the next?

Aaron Barrett [00:30:58] This season, I’m excited. One, the Philadelphia Phillies, we’ve been to the postseason the last four years. So being a part of a winner is always a lot of fun. Being a part of an organization that is actively trying to win. And that’s, again, we were in the World Series in 2022, fell short. But we’ve been in the playoffs the last three seasons. So everybody’s trying to win the title. And that is, again, as a player and being a part of an organization that really wants to win, that’s exciting. That’s always exciting to be a part of. The players can feel that, too. So trying to be like, hey, with these guys that just got drafted and this kind of first step in pro ball, trying to like help these guys build their foundation of what does it mean to be a pro. Being a part of that and the goal of like, hey, at some point the goal is to win a whole series, being able to instill what that looks like. That’s what I’m excited about the most.

Sarah [00:32:05] Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, if you could go back, I’m sure you think about this a lot now in your new role. If you could back and tell your younger self one thing about this career in baseball, what would it be?

Aaron Barrett [00:32:16] I would say the one thing for me that I would probably do a little bit differently like earlier is what does ownership of career actually mean? And that took a long time and I think that’s multi-layered because one thing now that I feel like I’m able to do is have some really good conversations with players and like, okay, what does that mean? Because there’s so much information out there now, almost can be too much. And so if we’re telling the player who they are before they even know who they are based off again what the information is telling them, honestly, I think it could be paralysis by analysis at a lot of times, if that makes sense.

Sarah [00:33:15] I never really thought about this before, even though I do love like sort of sports history and the sports stories and that one of the things-- I’m sort of a student of fame. I find fame endlessly interesting. And the thing you hear so often, particularly from like entertainment celebrities, George Clooney talks about this a lot, is I’m so glad I was older when I got famous. Like the people who hit fame later in life, just like what you said, when they know who they are, they just handle it a lot better. But that’s baked out of the process of sports, right? Like you have to be young, you have to be like in certain physical capacity. I think that’s why Alyssa Liu from the Olympics like hit somebody so hard. But even her she’d gone through this process. She was like 16 and retired and then came back. And yeah she’s still young, but she’s kind of old for an Olympian. I never really thought about through the lens of sports you have this paradox. You have to be young, but it’s like you said, you’re sort of short-circuiting this process that helps you deal with that level of success. I never thought about that before.

Aaron Barrett [00:34:26] Yeah, it’s because whether it’s temptations or whether it’s-- there’s so many things they get through my personal story about the moment things clicked for me was the moment that I literally was like, yeah, I know who I am and I don’t really care. And that’s such a freeing feeling to be able to just let go and then again getting back to like I know who I am and now I’m on this relentless pursuit of excellence. And that’s the only thing that matters because at the end of the day, the only thing that does matter is controlling what I can control.

Sarah [00:35:11] Yeah.

Aaron Barrett [00:35:12] And in this sport, when the demands are so high because of, again, you’re constantly surrounded by failure, it’s tough.

Sarah [00:35:24] Well, and I think about you like you had such a good foundation. I mean, not to brag about our family, but it’s really great. Your parents are amazing. Like you had this incredible support system. I can’t imagine for some of these guys who don’t have that what this process must be like.

Aaron Barrett [00:35:38] My foundation and yeah I’m very, very lucky and blessed. And that’s the cool part. And that’s where I feel in a way called to again be in this position now and be obviously the way my story has been written and being able to again build on those blocks, because again, to your point you got to have the foundation. And the moment you don’t have the foundation you find out real quick and it just collapses.

Sarah [00:36:12] As a member of your family who’s been rooting for you this whole time, I was so excited to see you in the majors, but I’m even more excited about this next phase. I think that you’re going to be really good at this job and I’m very, very excited for you.

Aaron Barrett [00:36:28] Thank you. It’s fine. So traditional managers, right, especially in the major leagues are normally like former catchers. So me being again like a former relief pitcher is kind of outside the box, which again I’m very, very thankful for the opportunity that Phillies and Preston Manley and Luke Merton have given me. But it’s funny because like so every day I’m reminded of that of all the things that I don’t know. But it’s been awesome because it’s challenged me because I just have found out that I grow more the more uncomfortable that I am. And so I’m learning something new every single day and it’s just such a reminder every day that this the journey, my comeback and my injury and all that stuff, my paths of the big leagues, that wasn’t my plan. In my head, I wanted to be a Major Leaguer, absolutely. I wanted to win the World Series, but the way it was written was not the way that I had planned. So now, again, being in this position, I never once thought that that was something that was going to happen, but obviously God had a plan, and that’s where I’m excited to be able to kind of share all these guys have a journey that’s going to be written.

Sarah [00:37:57] And ways they might not be able to foresee. I heard somebody call it a process of success, Aaron. That’s what I heard somewhere a very wise person describe it as.

Aaron Barrett [00:38:06] It’s all it is.

Sarah [00:38:08] What is?

Aaron Barrett [00:38:10] It’s literally all it is.

Sarah [00:38:12] I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing that journey and your process here on Pantsuit Politics. What a delight.

Aaron Barrett [00:38:20] Thanks for having me. This is great.

Beth [00:38:31] I’m weighing in Outside of Politics today. Aaron talked about how the game is changing for everyone, and that is so true. And change is notoriously tough on baseball fans. Chad and I are, in many ways, very stereotypical baseball fans, and especially stereotypical Cincinnati Reds fans. We’ve been sitting in the same seats in Great American Ballpark since our first date in 2005. We raised our children at the park. They learned to walk in Scouts Alley. I have nursed babies in every imaginable nook and cranny there because my kids predated the very nice mother’s lounge. Their first games were when they were days and weeks old, not months. We love baseball. We are consistent about baseball. We are certain every year that this might be the Reds’ year. We are equally certain every year that it’s probably not. As baseball fans, we can be resistant to change and baseball keeps changing. Last season, we got used to new rules designed to speed the game up. And on the whole, it wasn’t so bad. As we watched games, I couldn’t even feel most of the changes. I just appreciated getting home a little bit earlier. This year’s big change is felt. We went to see our first game on Saturday, March 28th, and if you follow baseball closely, you have perhaps seen some clips of that game because the automated ball strike challenge system was as much a player as anyone on the field.

[00:39:54] So this year if an umpire calls a baller strike, and the pitcher, catcher, or hitter disagree with the call, the player can instantly tap his hat or helmet to challenge the call, and immediately the Jumbotron shows the pitch and the position of the ball relative to the strike zone as tracked by 12,8K cameras using software to create 3D renderings, and everyone at the game at the same time can see how accurate the umpire was or wasn’t. The system shows you where the ball was relative to the 17-inch strike zone, and if it’s outside, by how many inches. There’s strategy involved in deciding whether to challenge. A team gets two challenges each game, but if they’re right, they keep those challenges. During the game we attended, the Reds challenged five calls. They were successful every time. Their opponents, the Red Sox, were wrong on two challenges early in the game, so they didn’t get to challenge later when it might have mattered more. The stakes are real. Eugenio Suarez challenged two called strikes in a row with the bases loaded. My favorite Reds player-- now that Joey Votto has retired-- Will Benson, walked instead of striking out because of successful challenges. For the crowd, this system is pure drama. Baseball fans love to disagree with officials. To ritually humiliate them with multiple and indisputable displays of their wrongness, what could be more delicious than that? Except that it is genuinely uncomfortable.

[00:41:27] Chad and I looked at each other every single challenge, like, what are we doing here? The people in front of us talked about how much this had to suck for the empire. And I think deep down we all know that if some kind of AI system monitored all of us at our jobs constantly, we’d have our share of more than two inch misses all day, every day. Imagine thousands of people cheering and jeering those mistakes. I squirmed in my seat, thinking, there before the grace of Anthropic go I. Advocates for the new system say that in addition to increasing the drama and accuracy, it actually highlights how great umpires are. A 17-inch strike zone that moves based on the player’s height judged from behind the player as a pitcher is throwing a ball at 90, 94 miles an hour and a catcher is framing it to deliberately trick your eye. If you get that right more often than not, what a miracle. How amazing are these folks to even get close? But as in the rest of life, the few moments we’re wrong land harder than the many moments that we’re right. Baseball is a long game, that’s why I love it. So I’m going to wait a season before passing definitive judgment on the ABS system, but I am watching this evolution warily, even when it gets Will Benson on base. There’s a fantastic clip from an Orioles game where a pitcher successfully challenged a call and the twins manager lost his mind. And the announcer said, as only a baseball announcer could, “He’s arguing with the robots. You can’t defeat the robots!” And, honestly, that is what I’m worried about. Thank you so much to Aaron and Sarah for a terrific conversation. Thanks to all of you for listening. We will be delighted to join you right here again on Tuesday to catch up on whatever the universe has delivered during this week. In the meantime, 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.

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Topics Discussed

• Will Missouri Voters Veto Partisan Redistricting?

• What Democrats need to win elections in 2026 and beyond

• Outside of Politics: Kansas City Stadiums Explained

Episode Resources

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Episode Resources

• Jason Kander

• Majority 54 with Jason Kander and Ravi Gupta

• People Not Politicians

• Missouri is next to answer Trump’s call for redrawn maps that boost GOP in 2026 (The Associated Press)

• The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics (The New York Times)

• Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

• Leaders We Deserve

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:30] Jason Kander, welcome back to Pantsuit Politics.

Jason Kander [00:00:32] Good to be with you. Thanks for having me again.

Sarah [00:00:34] We love having you on the show.

Jason Kander [00:00:36] Thank you. Are you going to tell people that when we first came on the camera you said you have more gray hair than the last time I saw you. And then you tried to pretend that because it looks good.

Sarah [00:00:45] I’m not pretending and our audience will know that I’m glad we didn’t talk about this until on the air so I can get you on this. I am firmly on the record as in favor of silver foxes. Firm. Established on the internet. So there you go. How about that?

Jason Kander [00:00:59] Well, I appreciate it. I don’t have a choice. I’m going silver.

Sarah [00:01:03] You do. You see men out there trying, bless their hearts. It’s not a good look.

Jason Kander [00:01:07] Yeah, I’m going silver.

Sarah [00:01:09] Remember Rudy Giuliani and it was running down the side of his face?

Jason Kander [00:01:12] Yeah, that was so bad.

Sarah [00:01:13] Bless him.

Jason Kander [00:01:14] Yeah. You know what, it’s too much work.

Sarah [00:01:18] Word. Listen, mine’s starting to go gray up here in my bangs. I was telling my friends last night my mom got to where it was like she was dying it like every two to three weeks. Do you know how long that takes? Do you know how much money that takes? I’m not doing that, no. It’s just going to come in when it’s going to come in.

Jason Kander [00:01:31] My wife swears she found one gray hair like a year ago, and I haven’t seen it.

Sarah [00:01:37] Dang! Jealous. I mean, I’m 44, so I’m going pretty good. My red has faded, but I have more than one.

Jason Kander [00:01:45] I’m 44. She’s 44.

Sarah [00:01:46] She didn’t have but one?

Jason Kander [00:01:48] Well, she’s always looked much, much younger. When we were 21 and we’d go to the movies together, if it was an R movie it was always funny because they’d be like you can go in and they’d be like, well, I guess, actually you’re old enough, you can take her with you. And I always thought like what sort of scandalous thing do you, a, think is going on and, b, are doing nothing about?

Sarah [00:02:11] That’s funny. Good for her. Because also that is not something she has control over, but also super feminist because I feel like always men age better than women. So I love that she’s got the other going.

Jason Kander [00:02:27] Yeah, it ain’t going that way in this house

Sarah [00:02:31] Well, let’s talk about where you got some of those gray hairs from, which is this redistricting in your state.

Jason Kander [00:02:37] Sure.

Sarah [00:02:38] What’s going on? Give us an update.

Jason Kander [00:02:40] First thing you need to know is that Missouri has this really unique thing that is really great that everybody should have. It’s called the citizen veto. So we’re going to come back to that in a moment. But basically, the Missouri Republican controlled legislature decided that they were going to get rid of a Democratic seat. And the way they were going to do it was they were going to get rid of the Democratic seat here in Kansas City.

Sarah [00:03:03] They didn’t decide shit. He told them to do it and they did.

Jason Kander [00:03:06] Yeah, fair. Sorry. I forget. I sometimes inadvertently assign them free will and that is incorrect.

Sarah [00:03:12] They don’t have that. Correct.

Jason Kander [00:03:13] They were instructed to do it. And so they decided that the way they would do it is by getting rid of the seat in Kansas City. So they’ve literally taken Kansas City in this new map and they’ve split it into three separate districts, which is by the way just putting aside the partisan piece of this, just a crappy thing to do to this town that deserves to have a representative that will actually bring back federal resources. And we’re none too happy about it here in Kansas City, but that’s what they did. They passed a map that does that. Now, there was a lawsuit. So there’s two sort of branches to this fight. So there was a lawsuit to try and invalidate the map based on the Missouri Constitution, you cannot redistrict in the middle of a decade.

Sarah [00:03:57] Oh, okay.

Jason Kander [00:03:58] That, frustratingly, in the last couple of days, the State Supreme Court, which is actually not a particularly partisan Supreme Court, but it ruled four to three that there was nothing in the Constitution that explicitly disallowed them from doing that. So the State’s Supreme Court couldn’t stop them from doing it, which is disappointing but not entirely unexpected. Now, meanwhile, that is by no means the end of the story because we have this thing called the citizen veto. The way the citizen veto works, is that if the legislature passes a law, then within a certain period of days, I think it’s like 90 days from the legislative session, if the people turn in enough signatures, then what can happen is that law goes directly onto the ballot in the next major election.

Sarah [00:04:42] How many signatures are we talking here? Do you know?

Jason Kander [00:04:43] It’s in the hundreds of thousands.

Sarah [00:04:46] Okay, so a lot. Alright.

Jason Kander [00:04:47] It’s a lot. It’s a very difficult threshold to pass. It doesn’t happen very often. They are on track. They’re going to have enough signatures. So this is almost certainly going to go on the November ballot. The only things that would keep it off of the November ballot are stuff like if the Secretary of State makes some sort of successful case which is extremely unlikely that the signatures were not valid for some reason. He may attempt to do that because he’s a Republican and we’ll get to back to this in a moment. Has been trying to do some hanky-panky with the law the whole way, but that’s going to be unsuccessful. This is almost certainly going to be on the November ballot for the people of Missouri to vote on whether or not they want to veto this law that was passed by the legislature.

Sarah [00:05:27] So would the law be in place for this? Okay.

Jason Kander [00:05:32] Yeah. That’s so that’s where we’re getting into the people are starting to mess around with things deal. So the way that the citizen veto is supposed to work is that once you’re certified to have had enough signatures and it’s going on the ballot, then the people basically take the place of the governor. And if that’s the case, think about it this way; if the legislature passes a law and we’re waiting to find out whether the governor’s going to sign or veto it, it’s not like that new law takes effect. The old law is in effect and still until that’s the case. So the way it’s been done for a very long time, for the entirety of Missouri’s existence, the way it’s been done by president and constitutionally is the new law cannot take effect until the people have had an opportunity to weigh in if a citizen veto is going to happen. Now, the Missouri Attorney General, who is a Republican, and the Missouri Secretary of State, who is Republican, are arguing that that is not the case right here. They are arguing, and this is the new case that is in process. There’s going to be a decision at the trial court in not too long, no matter what that decision is, it’s going to get appealed and it’s going to end up in the Western District Court of Appeals and then potentially in the State Supreme Court, likely in the state Supreme Court. And what they’re arguing is, no, no, no, the new districts are the ones that we have to use to vote.

[00:06:49] And we have until sometime in May to get all this sorted out because that’s the time period at which ballots are going to be printed and start to be printed, that kind of thing. I am assuming that the courts follow the law here in Missouri, which they have a tendency to do. That’s the nice thing. Is that we don’t elect our state Supreme Court or our appellate court. We are actually the originator of the nonpartisan court plan that a lot of states have. It actually started here. So with some exceptions, we don’t have like a lot of political hacks on our courts. We have like good lawyers on our court. So I’m and cautiously optimistic that what’s going to happen is that the courts are going to rule that the 2022 map is what has to remain in place for this election, and therefore you’re not going to have a gerrymandered district in Missouri. That’s what I believe is going to happen. But there’s a lot of volunteers doing a lot of great work to get all these signatures and get it done. And then we’re going to have a vote in November as to whether the 2028 and 2030 elections happen on the new map or the old map. And I do not know how that’s going to go, but there will be a campaign to try and win that election.

Sarah [00:07:57] So if you’re in Missouri, there are lots of ways to get involved for sure.

Jason Kander [00:08:00] Lots of ways to get involved.

Sarah [00:08:01] Well, and let me just ask you this. I think 2028 is harder to say, but let’s just say something goes haywire and they get it through in 2026. I don’t know if all of these are going to work out the way they think they are.

Jason Kander [00:08:15] Yeah. I mean, they’ve gerrymandered this one pretty effectively, if I’m being honest. Is it possible that we could win in one of these new gerrymandered districts? It is possible. It would take a pretty serious wave year.

Sarah [00:08:30] Hey, Trump just got a state Senator Democrat at Mar-a-Lago. It’s not out of the question.

Jason Kander [00:08:36] It’s true. What we have working against us, and I’m not trying to downplay the possibility or discourage anybody, but what we have working against us is that unfortunately-- and you know this being in Kentucky-- it’s been a few years since the National Democratic Party invested resources in Missouri. Now we’re doing a lot of work to earn that status back and I think give us a few more years and we’re going to get there. There’s a lot of great work being done. I say we. Occasionally, I help raise some money for it or I give a little talk. I’m not among the group doing the hard work at all, but there’s a lot of people doing really good work. And I think in a few years we’re going to be back on that list as a potentially competitive state, but we’re not there right now. And that does make it harder to ambush them, so to speak, in a situation like that. But it is possible in a wave year.

Sarah [00:09:25] Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good to know. Now that we’ve got the situation in Missouri, let’s move on in the next segment and talk about the bigger election environment.

Jason Kander [00:09:42] Sure.

Sarah [00:09:43] Jason, are you running for president in 2028?

Jason Kander [00:09:45] Nope.

Sarah [00:09:46] Well, are you sure? Because a lot of people are.

Jason Kander [00:09:49] I know a lot of people are.

Sarah [00:09:51] It’s a popular choice!

Jason Kander [00:09:52] Yeah, I pretty much did it in-- I was going to do it, as you know, in 2020. And then in 2018 I was like, no, I think I’ll get therapy at the VA instead. Which was also fun.

Sarah [00:10:04] In a different way.

Jason Kander [00:10:05] Yeah, but there were a lot of people doing it then. I made a lot friends, and a lot of those friends are going to run again, and that’ll be fun. I’ll give you this more serious, less flippant answer on this, which is that I last held office-- I left office at the beginning of 2017, and I last ran for an office in 2018. Ended up getting out before I was on the ballot. But last ran for an office then, was going to run for president in 2020. And in the period that has passed in the eight years since then, I have made a far greater impact certainly on my family and my loved ones, but on the world than I ever did running for or holding office. I’ve led a team that built villages of tiny houses for homeless vets across the country. I got involved in trying to get my translator’s family out of Afghanistan, which resulted in about 4,000 Afghan allies out of the country. And I never did anything on that scale when I was in office. So I say all this to say I’m not saying like you can do more out of office. I’m saying, what it would take for me to want to run for an office again, whether it be president or anything else is, I would have to look at that office and say the only way for me to change the thing that I want to change, what stands between me and doing that is being in this office. And furthermore, I’d have to decide that it has to be me, that nobody else can do it. And I think that’s one of the big things that’s changed in my life post going through therapy for post-traumatic stress, and now having two kids and all this new gray hair you pointed out is that--

Sarah [00:11:44] That hot wife you probably wouldn’t still have, let’s be honest.

Jason Kander [00:11:47] Well, yeah, or at least she’d be a lot less happy and that’d be no fun for me. And so I have reached a point I think I have a lot more wisdom and clarity about the idea of like it doesn’t have to be me.

Sarah [00:12:00] Yeah, but that’s a really good framework that maybe you should share with some of those friends.

Jason Kander [00:12:04] Yeah. Well, people call and they at least pretend they want advice. I think a lot of the time they want money or endorsement or other friends who have money. And that’s okay. I used to be in that business. But when they do at least pretend they want advice. That’s along the lines of the advice. Now, it doesn’t have to be you, but I tend to talk about quality of life while you run things like that.

Sarah [00:12:26] I’ve been thinking about you a lot with James Tallarico.

Jason Kander [00:12:30] Good guy. I like him.

Sarah [00:12:32] I like him too. And it’s giving so much of like your rise. Like he has a very distinctive sort of out of the ordinary democratic identity. He is also very gifted. I think about all the time that story of Barack Obama telling you like, you’ve got it. Like what it is, you’ve it. And he’s got it!

Jason Kander [00:12:48] He does. And I will admit to being old enough now that I look at him and I go, oh, he reminds me of me when I was younger and that makes me like him. And I had him on the show and I was texting with him the other day and trying to figure out little ways that I can be helpful to the campaign. I think he has enormous potential.

Sarah [00:13:07] I do too. I think if he wins the Senate campaign, if he doesn’t think it, somebody else is going to put it in his ear. Maybe you should think about 2028.

Jason Kander [00:13:14] Yeah. I think that the comparison to my situation those many years ago is accurate in the sense that I think the country looks at James and goes, well, this dude seems to know how to talk to these people. And I think that’s what happened with me. I always joked that I lost the election and I just barely lost that Senate election in 2016. And I thought, well, that’s probably that. And then I woke up and people were like, hey, maybe you. And I joked and it reminds me it’s like nuclear annihilation happened. And I came out of the bunker very depressed that like most of the people I’d known in my life had been obliterated, but the other survivors turned to me and were like we think maybe you’re in charge? And so that’s how 2016 felt after the election.

Sarah [00:14:02] You need to read Stephen King’s The Stand. That’s just a book with a very similar situation. I think there’s some characters in that book you would see yourself in for sure.

Jason Kander [00:14:11] Well, I’ll read it. And if it rings true, I will send it to James.

Sarah [00:14:14] There you go.

Jason Kander [00:14:16] I think he’s super talented. I mean, look, there’s a bunch a folks I really, really like. Ruben Gallego is a genuine friend, not just in the way that when you’re in politics you’re like, “He’s a friend of mine.” No, he’s a genuine friend. And I just think so highly of Ruben. I really like Wes Moore a lot.

Sarah [00:14:34] Yeah, we’ve had him on the show.

Jason Kander [00:14:35] Yeah. I know Wes a little bit, but I really like him. I mean, there’s a long list of people who would be great. Pete Buttigieg is another. I’d say he’s a good friend.

Sarah [00:14:44] But he’s in a tough spot though because he’s not in office right now and you can kind of feel it.

Jason Kander [00:14:49] You know what, I think that’s a great spot.

Sarah [00:14:51] You do? Tell me more.

Jason Kander [00:14:53] Yeah, well, for one thing, it’s great to not be in office because you don’t get to sit through stupid hearings all the time. For one thing, personally, he gets to live his life a little bit right now, which is so important for so many reasons. One, from a having the energy to run that gauntlet sort of thing, you need the time to charge up your battery before you do it. The other reason is Pete doesn’t have to go in and vote on every stupid little thing. It also gives him the freedom that if what he wants to do is run full-time, he can just run full-time. And it’d be one thing if he had never been secretary of transportation, and he were once again trying to do it as the former mayor of South Bend. But there’s nobody who doubts Pete’s leadership ability. There’s nobody who doubts his qualifications for it now. So he’s got the platform, he’s got the experience, and he’s got the time to really build something. And I say that because my situation was-- and I think we were on a good headright state in the race. I’m not saying I would have won, but we were on a good trajectory to really be in the mix. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I had left the measly little secretary of state of Missouri office, but I had this national and growing sort of buzz. And so we were building a real national network and it was pretty much what I was doing full time. And that was a huge advantage that I have over people who were better known and we’re in many respects better qualified because they had to be in DC all the time, or they had to be in the governor’s mansion somewhere all the times.

Sarah [00:16:37] Yeah, that’s true. I mean, a person we’ve been talking about a lot and we’re about to talk to is Rahm Emanuel, which I realize is a crazy name to throw out.

Jason Kander [00:16:47] Not at all. There’s no such thing anymore.

Sarah [00:16:50] That’s a good point. But there’s a lot of people who I think have it, have an authenticity, have a story, have some buzz that I think connects. I think Ruben Gallego is definitely one of them. James Tallerico is one of the. Wes Moore. I just think there’s a lot people who you’re like...

Jason Kander [00:17:11] Stacey Abrams is one of them.

Sarah [00:17:14] Yeah. I think they just seem like normal. You know what I mean? I think no way to discount normal, but...

Jason Kander [00:17:20] Once you can fake that, you’ve made it.

Sarah [00:17:22] Would you fake it? [Inaudible].

Jason Kander [00:17:25] I’m Kidding.

Sarah [00:17:28] But Beth and I are just hungry. I want to hear some actual ideas. I don’t want to hear we’re going to love our neighbors. With love, I love my neighbors and I think neighborism and I could talk about it for hours coming out of Minneapolis, but I want to hear your ideas about AI and I want to your ideas about public education and I want to hear like actual, like a vision for how we get out of so many messes. And I don’t hear a lot of people giving me those ideas except for Rahm Emanuel.

Jason Kander [00:18:01] I have not followed what Rahm Emanuel has been saying at all, but to what you were saying broadly, I think this election particularly the nominating period on the Democratic side, is going to be more focused on big visionary ideas than anything we’ve done in a long time. Because if you think about it, for a really long time, I don’t know, since probably 2008, that was probably the last time we had a Democratic nominating contest that was really about vision, now certainly 2016 with Bernie, but he didn’t prevail. So it wasn’t fully about it, right? His campaign was about it. But really ever since 2008, what we’ve had for the most part, with the exception of I’d say Bernie’s campaign, we have had a series of people saying, look, we all know what the agenda is. Pick which one of us you think is best to win the election and put this agenda in place. Whereas, Obama, was very much like I have a different vision. And it worked really well because the vision, the message, and the man all were perfectly interwoven. I mean, the slogan of the campaign was change and the candidate was a black man named Barack Hussein Obama who had opposed the war in Iraq. So it all perfectly melded together. And I actually think that this next election is going to be one where people will reward the person with the broadest and clearest vision. And the reason I think that is because I think really young millennials and Generation Z are going to play a huge part in this. And I’m monologuing here for a moment, I apologize, but this is a big thought I’ve been having lately, which is that folks like senior millennials like yourself and me, and then everybody in the--.

Sarah [00:19:47] How dare you?

Jason Kander [00:19:49] Well, you know, me.

Sarah [00:19:51] No, we’re the same age or something.

Jason Kander [00:19:53] When’s your birthday?

Sarah [00:19:55] July 28th, 1981.

Jason Kander [00:19:57] Okay. Well, I got you by two months. Like I said, I’m older. To be clear. The generations above us and our tippy top part of the millennial generation, we look at things and we think about everything going back to the way it was. That’s always the conversation we’re having. It’s when are we going to go back to normal? And our politicians of our age talk about things in terms of like getting back to these American ideals. And what we have to remember is that everybody younger than you and me doesn’t remember it ever being like that. And so I’ve become friends a bit with David Hogg and have gotten a little bit involved with Leaders We Deserve, his group, and people see that group as super extreme and super liberal. I don’t see it that way. I see that groups and I see what David Hogg is saying and others as a really well-earned impatience of that generation, because they’re going, look, we don’t really hardly remember 9/11, which means we don’t remember the pre-9/11 era and we also don’t remember the two years or year really post 9/11 where we were all getting along.

[00:21:00] We don’t remember the pre-9/11 era where we didn’t fight about every single little thing. We didn’t live through that. We were born into basically a recession followed by graduating college if we went to college and finding it way harder to find good jobs than our parents did. So all of this American dream, we all have these values that unite us. We kind of want to take your word for it, but we’ve never seen it. From their perspective, when they look at a Mamdani or somebody like that, whereas our generation might see somebody who’s really strident and really super liberal and out on the outer edge of progressivism, they don’t see it that way. They see it as here’s a person who’s making some sense because they’re not talking about tiny little changes that have never been made. They’re talking about things the way we see them, which is this is bananas. Why are we doing it this way? I’m coming around to that.

Sarah [00:21:52] I mean, that was Bernie’s appeal, too.

Jason Kander [00:21:53] That was Bernie’s appeal. And I don’t know if that makes me more liberal. I’m like, hey, none of this has been working. And so I think that’s what people are going to want.

Sarah [00:22:02] I just think it’s an acknowledgement that things are different.

Jason Kander [00:22:05] Things are different.

Sarah [00:22:05] We’re not going back. It took me a long time to realize like all these lessons that I had internalized about American politics even presidential politics, they don’t apply anymore. Forget about whether you were around during the 2008 election. Like you’re going to have voters like last election, this election who don’t know remember anything, but Trumpism. They don’t remember anything but MAGA. And Biden was a blip, but not that big of one. Trump announced two minutes after that one was over he was running in 2024. So he’s been there. And this understanding is hard as you get older to really think like these things I thought I knew, if X then Y, they don’t apply anymore. That’s just not our politics. That’s not how people think about partisanship. Our media environment is completely upside down and inside out. And I don’t think Rohm Emanuel is some alignment of a new way. But speaking of David Hogg’s The Leaders We Deserve, like he’s the first one that’s come out and said we need an age limit, period. We need an age limit on running for office.

Jason Kander [00:23:15] People want big ideas.

Sarah [00:23:17] Americans agree on that. Like they’ve wanted that for a long time. I remember. I’m old enough to remember when Donald Trump’s first thing was term limits. He promised term limits in 2016. It was on his platform. We’re going to do term limits the second I get in there. Where’d those go? And I just think this idea of like people are terrified of artificial intelligence. I’m glad AOC and Bernie are like no more data centers until we get a framework in place. And, look, the Trump administration put out a framework. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but they’re trying at least. I think we’ve got to have some ideas about what people care about, especially as Democrats. I am worried about I have a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old. I often feel like I am Indiana Jones running as the road collapses behind me when it comes to our public school system. Like we have huge problems. I’m not saying get rid of the Department of Education. Isn’t a big idea, but I really don’t think that’s going to fix it. Here’s where I really wonder how you feel about this. I think part of the struggle is-- and you saw this with the housing bill, right? The biggest problems Americans are concerned about, affordability, public education, college education, the job market-- well, maybe not the job market. But public education, housing, they’re so local. Like they need to be local solutions. And we’ve been on this run where we just consolidate power into the federal government and not just the federal government, but the presidency. We’re in a sprint on that right now.

Jason Kander [00:25:05] Yeah, we are.

Sarah [00:25:06] You know what I mean? And so it’s like I kind of want some ideas about like there’s going to have to be procedure, like even to this gerrymandering fight, tell me how we’re not going to be in this death spiral. I want to hear some ideas about that. Listen, the first presidential candidate that stands up and says uncap the House has got my vote. I’m like, okay, sold. I’ve been saying that for like six years.

Jason Kander [00:25:29] Uncap the House. What do you mean?

Sarah [00:25:30] Oh, this is my favorite. So we only have 435 members of Congress because they basically thought it fit better in the room. It’s just a freaking piece of legislation. It’s not in the fucking constitution.

Jason Kander [00:25:43] That’s a good point.

Sarah [00:25:43] And also it’s insane. It’s insane to expect 435 people to represent 330 million people. Like people don’t feel represented because they’re not. You can’t represent that many people at once. Like it’s really, really hard. And it infuriates me. Like build a bigger House, this is not working.

Jason Kander [00:26:02] That’s really interesting. I’ve literally never heard anybody talk about that, but that’s such a good point.

Sarah [00:26:06] Listen, I’m obsessed with it.

Jason Kander [00:26:08] I think I am too now.

Sarah [00:26:09] Again, I have the receipt. You should be.

Jason Kander [00:26:11] It’s not like they get to know each other now anyway.

Sarah [00:26:13] No!

Jason Kander [00:26:13] They used to. It used to work because they would get to know each other.

Sarah [00:26:16] Yeah. And I think they would build smaller coalitions. Like I think you’d have some really fascinating coalitions.

Jason Kander [00:26:24] That’s such an interesting idea.

Sarah [00:26:25] There’s like a whole campaign now. I started talking about it when we did our tour, our Nuanced Nation tour. Beth and I each came with these ideas and that was mine.

Jason Kander [00:26:33] I’m literally writing a note to myself.

Sarah [00:26:35] Do it. You should have the organizer on and everything. I’m obsessed with it, but that’s what I’m saying. If you don’t tell me something like that that’s like we’re in a new place, we need new ideas, then I don’t want to hear.

Jason Kander [00:26:45] Have you ever done politics in New Hampshire?

Sarah [00:26:47] No.

Jason Kander [00:26:48] It relates to this. New Hampshire is one of the smallest states by population and probably by geographic. But it has I think the largest house of representatives at state level.

Sarah [00:27:00] Love it.

Jason Kander [00:27:00] And what’s funny, when I was getting ready to run for president and I was camping out in New Hampshire all the time getting to know everybody, and every third person you meet is either a state representative or a former state representative. And it’s hilarious.

Sarah [00:27:14] Beautiful.

Jason Kander [00:27:15] And I never went inside the chamber. My understanding is they don’t even have desks on the floor, I don’t think. They definitely don’t have offices in the building. Now, they have a more traditional State Senate. But that’s kind of what you’re describing. And what I like about this is I’m thinking out loud.

Sarah [00:27:32] We need those desks so bad because they all sit in there and listen to each other as they give speeches. Give me a break.

Jason Kander [00:27:37] Nobody does that, even at the state level. By the way, hey, you know I’m not running for president. You just threw out a thing I’d never heard about and I’m like I think I’m for it. Which if I were fixing to run for president there’d be somebody over here being like, stop. But there’s not, there’s my dog sitting two feet from everywhere.

Sarah [00:27:54] Sounds like a good idea to me. Mine’s snoring right now.

Jason Kander [00:27:57] Anyway, when I think about the quandary we’ve gotten ourselves in, in our system, you can’t help but wonder, like, how much better would things potentially be if you could go back in time and say we’re going to have in America a semi-parliamentary system. And what you’re describing without any major constitutional amendment or anything could get you closer to there because you’re right, it would open itself up to a lot of different coalitions. But, yeah, in New Hampshire, people basically represent their neighborhood at the state level.

Sarah [00:28:26] Listen, and you can keep your dumb Senate, which basically represents land masses, fine, whatever. I hate it, but it’s fine.

Jason Kander [00:28:35] Well, you might get back to having real fights between the House and the Senate if you do that because right now that’s not what happens.

Sarah [00:28:41] Yeah, and I just think like there’s not really one Republican party, there’s not really one Democratic party. Ruben Gallego and AOC are far apart. Fine, I don’t care. They represent different groups.

Jason Kander [00:28:55] They could stand to benefit from some regionalism again.

Sarah [00:28:58] Yes, 100% and we can test ideas off each other. We’ve just gotten in this place. And I think this is true for democratic states and Republican states. There’s no testing of ideas because there’s one party control and this doesn’t work. People have bad ideas that way.

Jason Kander [00:29:13] You know what I like, so if I were running and I were running on this uncap the House thing, I would basically be like we need you in government. That’d be my message to people. It’s like you want to have fewer career politicians? Let’s have more, and why not you?

Sarah [00:29:29] Why not you? Listen, they don’t want the job anyway. They’re all quitting hand over fist. Like you can’t keep them in those jobs because it’s a shitty job.

Jason Kander [00:29:37] What does some member represent now, 500,000 people or something like that?

Sarah [00:29:39] Yeah, it’s in a massive amount of people. Like, how are you going to understand what they want? That’s why I think we’ve funneled everything through the lens of partisanship because how else do you wrap your hands around representing that many people?

Jason Kander [00:29:54] We have the worst elements of a parliamentary system. We have just the partisan elements and none of the coalition building elements of a parliament system.

Sarah [00:30:01] Well, and what I’m really worried about to the big ideas, it’s not that I don’t think housing and all these issues are huge- I do. I’m a little worried about a wave in 2026 that I do believe is coming. And I think I’m afraid the lesson that’s going to be learned is like, affordability, that’s the answer. And I’m like, yes, I want you to talk about affordability but we need ideas. Like if we went on affordability in 2028 and then we don’t fix it, which we won’t because that’s not how it works. And then we’re just swinging, I mean, that’s what we’ve done. We just swing, we swing, we swing and we swing.

Jason Kander [00:30:39] Well, and then if you don’t get it done even though you may only control one house people are like well they didn’t do it. They said they would. To your point about AI, I could not possibly agree more that the Democratic Party needs to as fast as possible establish itself as the party that is at a minimum wary or leery About AI and at a maximum even opposed to the massive growth of it. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly but--

Sarah [00:31:07] I’m getting so much out of you today, this is great.

Jason Kander [00:31:10] Let’s see. It would have been I was still getting ready to run for president, so it would’ve been early in 2018. I sat down with Sam Altman and I know Sam a little bit. He’s from St. Louis. I made it my business for a long time to know everybody everywhere who was either in or from Missouri. And on a personal level, he and I to the limited degree we’ve had interactions get along fine, I have some real concerns about Open AI and everything now, but I can remember sitting there and it was myself and my wife, Diana. And we were in his office out there in California, and he was explaining what was coming. And he said to us, he said, “In about 10 years, Americans are going to look around and feel like there’s been an alien invasion, and they won’t know what hit them.”

Sarah [00:31:55] Whoa!

Jason Kander [00:31:56] And I think about that a lot because that was eight years ago. And he was talking about robots. And I think about every time we have these really hot debates about immigration and I think aliens are coming- Sam’s aliens are coming. And people are going to want to know was anybody anticipating this? Was anybody trying to do anything about it? And the truth is right now what we have is we have a Trump administration that is so focused on trying to win some sort of war with China. And I mean literally trying to employ AI in a military context. May have actually done it to great tragedy already in Iran. They’re trying to clear the way as fast as possible and they’re trying to keep the states from having any of their own AI restrictions. And I think right now, at a minimum, we should be the party of state-level-- to your point earlier about local stuff. State level AI restrictions so that, yeah, we’re not going to lose progress on it, but we’re going to have the states as that laboratory figuring out what does and does not make sense. And I also completely agree with you about data centers. We’re about to have one in a town outside of Kansas City here and it’s just going to be great monuments to nothingness after five years.

Sarah [00:33:18] I would like to hear a different platform from a Democratic candidate. If I was running for president, here’s what I would say.

Jason Kander [00:33:25] Maybe you should be.

Sarah [00:33:26] I mean, listen, somebody wants to give me a billion dollars because the billionaires are funding everything in case you didn’t read that New York Times piece.

Jason Kander [00:33:34] I don’t need to, I assume that’s the case.

Sarah [00:33:36] Well, here’s the thing, I think you could get to the affordability crisis, the AI anxiety and the big vision with all of this. What I would say is, look, this technology is going to be incredible, but I think, you could, to the Trump of it all, be like, Trump did what Biden did. He allowed an invasion. He allowed and invasion, because Biden did do that. That’s a good analogy. Like he let in too many people, it taxed the system, it created some really toxic politics. He’s letting in too much of this technology. He’s allowing too much wealth to accrue at the top through both legal and illegal means. Hell, I would probably even sweep up the gambling and all this too while I was at it just for funsies. That’s not his job. His job is not to make the rich richer. His job is to make the American people more successful. And so this technology is coming. And what it’s going to do is going to work for us, not three AI CEOs in Silicon Valley. This is a public utility that’s going to change everything. And we’re going to make it a public utility. We’re going to take it.

Jason Kander [00:34:46] It’s a great approach that probably should have been employed at the beginning of the internet.

Sarah [00:34:51] Yeah, because now it’s like we can’t let this go too far. They’re not going to hand it over to us voluntarily, guys. You want to use the power of the federal government in a way with massive impact, here’s your way. Let’s do it.

Jason Kander [00:35:02] I agree and I think if you’re going to step further, people are going to need to have a really clear idea about the future of work and of what labor means in this new world, which is hard to do because we don’t know what the new world looks like. One answer there, I think, is going to be something along the lines of understanding that the point of work is not 40 hours of activity a week. The point of the work is to achieve the ability to take care of yourself, your family-- and my little Zoom just did a thumbs up when I didn’t even do it. So clearly...

Sarah [00:35:33] That’s the Holy Spirit. It likes your idea.

Jason Kander [00:35:35] That or it’s, you know, Sam.

Sarah [00:35:37] They’re listening.

Jason Kander [00:35:38] They’re listening. And be able to say like, hey, the point of work is not to stay busy for 40 hours a week, but the point work is to be able to provide for yourself and your family. And (this is where it gets quasi-European and maybe controversial) to provide leisure time. And if we look at it that way, this is not an argument for AI, but it’s more of an argument for how we should think about employing AI in the future. If there are things that AI is going to do and it is going displace workers, well then we have a choice. We can freak out and say what are we going to do to keep these people busy for 40 to 60 hours a week so that they can get paid if there’s nothing we really need them to do? Or we can begin to tackle the question what are we going to do to make sure that people can still provide for their families now that there is a lot more leisure time but there’s not the opportunity to earn money to put food on the table. My point is like what if the point or what if the object of all of this human evolution to the point of creating this artificial intelligence was actually to achieve more time with each other? And if that’s the case, we’re going to need policies that allow people to sustain their livelihood while they do that.

Sarah [00:36:59] Well, listen, I read this piece. I can’t hunt it down again. Maybe somebody out there can. And I think it was Kellogg’s. I hope I’ve got the company right. When industrialization came, the same thing happened. It made everything much more efficient. And so I think it was Kellogg who was like, well, everybody didn’t need to work as much. Great.

Jason Kander [00:37:25] The cut engine.

Sarah [00:37:27] Yeah, we don’t have to work as much. So we’ll just pay people the same and they won’t work as many. And there was like a panic. And basically the corporate robber baron overlords were like, well, no, that’s not going to work. And they shut it down and pulled it back. Basically it was like, no, our vision is this. And to me, look, there’s no way to stay on this road we’re on of consolidation, of private equity, of growth for growth sake, this scalability in which we have to extract, extract, extract, especially like the Disney model where we have to extract the luxury items because everybody else at the bottom we’re just going to treat like the peons. That’s not our business model. Our business model is the people making like 500,000 plus a year because there’s more of those, and you know we’ll just keep putting the experience towards those people and everybody else at the bottom is just going to kind of get left behind as we extract more and more money and make more and more billionaires. I mean, what’s that piece in New York Times it was like 2016, we had or like, I don’t remember, 2009 we had like eight billionaires, now we have like 500. But it’s still a small number of the majority of Americans, right?

Jason Kander [00:38:43] Yeah, it is.

Sarah [00:38:43] And so we’re going to have to get off that. To me it’s like we stop pushing the wealth up and we take it and we spread it out. It is a regionalism. Listen, AI is an incredible tool as a small business owner.

Jason Kander [00:38:57] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:38:57] Incredible.

Jason Kander [00:38:59] As a scientist. Hell, as a parent.

Sarah [00:39:00] Yes. It doesn’t even have to be leisure because I do think people need purpose. Like some of these universal basic income experiments, they ain’t going so great.

Jason Kander [00:39:09] Sure. Purpose is important.

Sarah [00:39:09] People need purpose. This is a utility that you have access to, to go back to your town or the town you’re already in and build it out and have businesses and have ability to follow your dream and it doesn’t have to be an hourly wage. It could look very, very different and we will pour money into building more smaller to mid-range companies than just allowing the Ellison family to own everything.

Jason Kander [00:39:39] Well, what’s interesting about the debate right now is if you watch, particularly Republicans in the Senate, as they start to realize that if they’re going to have working class voters in their coalition, they have to also say some working class things. Now we’re not all the way at the point where they do working class thing.

Sarah [00:39:56] You wouldn’t be speaking of your own senator, would you?

Jason Kander [00:39:59] He would be one of the ones I’m talking about. Is you’re starting to hear things that now it’s a very corporate version of socialism, but you’re starting to hear more and more of it. But then when you go to Silicon Valley and you talk to these folks who are doing all the innovating and who are creating all these products, if they’re honest with you, what they say is that the end game here where this obviously goes is UBI. It goes to a place where you have all of this innovation, and you have all this capitalism at this upper level. But for it to work, ultimately you’re going to have to have some degree of socialism. Yeah, they understand that. And the other thing that’s kind of interesting about talking to those folks is so many of them are they’re just such quants. Like in some ways, so many of them-- and I don’t even mean this as like a criticism. It’s just a personality type that works out there. They’re like these unemotional quants. I remember when I was raising money out there, you could have the most emotionally compelling story, but you better have numbers. So they were not moved. And that’s how they kind of look at it from that perspective, this analytical, well, it’s not about we have to care for our human man. It’s just the human man will rise up if you don’t do this. So you’re going to have to do it.

[00:41:14] And going back to the idea of large vision, it doesn’t mean like you have to be for UBI or you have to be for socialism at some level, but you better damn well have an answer to those questions. And now because Trump has been so wholly awful, you’ve seen the growth he had among generations he really erodes. But I think that part of the explanation for why he was able to win over the chunk that he was in the last election is because liberals have made the mistake of thinking that if you continue to stand for the same liberal things, the same democratic things, that you were seen as progressive and forward thinking. But if you are the younger generation who’s only seen a certain slice of American politics and you have one side talking about big ideas, now they may be bad ideas but they’re big ideas, then you start to think, well, one side is thinking about the future and changing things and the other side isn’t. And you know what happens? Young people are predisposed to be more liberal. But one side, no matter whether you call them conservative or liberal or not, one side looks like the liberals. Because what does liberal mean? It means open to change. And so if you have a whole bunch of holy bad, super bad ideas, but they’re big changes, and things aren’t working for you, and the other side is just coming up with the same changes that they’ve been talking about forever, well then the Republicans end up looking like the forward thinking liberals. And that’s the trap we walked into and we just can’t be there again.

Sarah [00:42:55] Going back to what you said about leisure, I think it’s a deeper question that I think that America, both parties, during those good old days we all think we want to get back to, really solidified around one value, and that was money, and that the economy. And all ideas had to revolve around money and the economy, and everything was framed that way. It’s the economy stupid. We still say it.

Jason Kander [00:43:22] We’re fighting a whole war explicitly over oil right now.

Sarah [00:43:25] Right, it’s just money, money, money.

Jason Kander [00:43:27] Nobody is even pretending anymore.

Sarah [00:43:27] Which is why we’re in this Polymarket gambling fucking hellscape. It’s sickening and I think people are sickened. And when you have someone like James Tallarico who stands up and says, “I have ideas about what it means to live a good life and I don’t think it’s being rich,” it hits, man. It hits. Because we’ve had 10 years of somebody saying it only matters if you’re rich. Rich makes you smarter, rich makes you successful, rich makes you better, rich makes you have a bigger life. And by the way, I work for my rich friends, not the rest of you dumb dumbs who voted for me.

Jason Kander [00:44:02] Well, that’s correct. I agree with everything you’re saying. When I was 100 years ago, which is to say, I don’t know, eight years ago when I was getting ready to run for president and I was going around, I was sitting down with these donors and kingmakers in the party, what I would say to them is that I’m not trying to say that I am the most moral or ethical or pure person, but what I do recognize is that Americans are looking for more than simply economic leadership. They’re looking for moral leadership because they haven’t had it frankly since Obama. Because what Obama did is Obama talked about things in terms of what was right and what was wrong and he also modeled the way to behave. And I don’t mean this means like you got to be a teetotaler or you got to... But they’re looking for more than just a decent person, okay? Because like you can be a decent person but not inspire people to be decent. They’re looking for somebody who’s going to say like we can be decent and we can be successful and it’s worth being decent to each other, but you can’t do it in a soft way. It has to be done in a muscular way. I think about it just makes me so sad that my kids have really, to your point earlier, only experienced Trumpism. And I’ll give two examples of my two kids. One, I’ll be in the car and we’re listening to NPR or something and there’ll be some news story and my son’s half paying attention, he’s 12. And then I’ll say, did you hear that? And I’ll just say, Trump just did X and X, and it’ll be something horrendous. And my son who very much thinks Donald Trump is terrible and is at least somewhat not super politically, he is 12, but aware and he’s somewhat invested in outcomes. He’ll be like, yeah. Like nothing surprises him at all.

[00:45:54] And then my daughter is five. And we were in the truck the other day and she’s sitting in her car seat in the back and she had asked about Donald Trump and we had said, well, we don’t really think he’s a very good person. And she asked, she said, “Why is he not a good person?” And her entire reference point, by the way, for good people and bad people is the Taliban because my translator’s family lives down the street and we’re with them all the time. And she basically has all these Afghan cousins and she understands that they escaped the Taliban. So she talks to me about she’s fascinated by Afghanistan and the Taliban and wants to talk about it all the time. Particularly they don’t let girls go to school, like that’s wild and wrong. And so she understands good and evil. She’s like so is he like bad like the Taliban? I’m like, well, no. And I’m trying to explain it. And then she says, “I think I know why he’s not good.” And I said, why? And she said, “Because he says things like shut your mouth.” And I was like, what do you mean? And she couldn’t explain it. I asked my wife later, she’s like Bella was taking a nap on the couch the other day and the TV came on, like somebody sat on the remote or something. And it was just a live Trump press conference. There wasn’t even a clip. And it was Trump talking, and it on for like 20 seconds. It was the only time Bella’s ever heard Donald Trump’s voice, and she woke up from the nap and was like, “Turn that off. I don’t like that person.” Found out it was Donald Trump. And my point is she’s grown up in an era where she’s heard the President of the United States talk for a random 20 seconds, and it solidified her view that he is not a good person.

Sarah [00:47:26] He’s hateful. He’s mean.

Jason Kander [00:47:28] And I think people have weirdly accepted that, but also instinctually like deeply understand that we deserve to be led by somebody decent who urges us to be decent. And I think that that has to be part of the big vision for the next person who runs.

Sarah [00:47:47] I have a politician in my life who I’m always like, listen to me, just get on like a vice platform. Like we’ve abandoned the idea of vices and it’s not working. Like just letting kids watch as much porn as they want on the internet and letting people smoke as much weed as they want to everywhere and letting them people gamble on anything all the time, everywhere, these were vices for all of human history. For a reason, they’re corrosive. They are corrosive to the human spirit. It’s okay to say that. It doesn’t mean we want to throw you in jail. But it’s okay to say, you know what, it wasn’t so bad when there were barriers to some of this behavior. That’s really bad for most people. Like, that’s okay. It is okay to say that. I feel like Democrats are allergic to it. Fine, just start with kids. Like let us protect kids from some of these vices.

Jason Kander [00:48:43] Let me agree with an amendment, which is to say, one, I totally agree, starting with kids. Like what other countries have done with regard to social media and kids, that kind of thing. And, obviously, look, Democrats and all politicians are going to be a lot more courageous about that because kids can’t vote. Let’s be real. It’s a lot easier for them to do that, right?

Sarah [00:49:03] Yeah, that’s right.

Jason Kander [00:49:03] But what I would say is I think what we have to be very careful to do as a party when we talk about that is we have to find a way to do it without judgment. Because we just went through a period where, as Marc Maron likes to say, we may have annoyed people into choosing fascism. So, for instance, on gambling, I think you’re right, that there need particularly on the prediction markets, that’s rife with potential corruption and real corruption now. And prop bets and all that kind of thing. And I think the way to do that, for instances, to come at it from the perspective of a sports fan and to basically pull the same bogus move that they pulled on the trans, and making it seem like everybody in the country is competing against transgender athletes. But to go at it as like, hey, look, we deserve to be able to watch sports and know that it’s not been corrupted. And so we need guardrails on things like prop bets. We deserve to know that we’re not going to go to war because somebody placed a bet on us going to war on a certain day. That has to be... And then you can also take the next step of what you’re talking about and say, and hey, we need leadership that asks us to appeal to our better angels and to try not to do these things. But at the same time, what we don’t want to do is say like, hey, look, the good people are the ones who don’t have this. You talked about Josh Hawley earlier. Josh Hawley has been really big on the like no porn thing and all that. And there’s no question in my mind that I don’t even need to see the science. Porn is not good for your mind. It’s not good for your mind particularly if somebody gets addicted to it and particularly for young men and the way that they’re going to treat women. There’s no question about that. And I’m all for there being some reasonable guardrails about that, but I also think that it is really dangerous to sound like you are judging people for their vices. And I know that’s not what you’re doing, but I think that’s a real trap we can walk into.

Sarah [00:51:03] I think the way you do that is you are clear from the beginning. The villains in this are the owners, not the users.

Jason Kander [00:51:12] That’s right. That’s a great point.

Sarah [00:51:14] They’re extractive. Every single person right now, living in the world in 2026, knows what it’s like through the experience of the last 10 years of being extracted through the experiences of social media. We all know. We’ve all been through it. We know like, oh wait, we got turned into the product. And they just wrung out as much money from us and our behavior as they possibly could. Like we know, we all feel it. We know it, we’re probably still participating in it when we’re revenge scrolling on TikTok at 10 o’clock at night. So know what that feels like. So to say we’re tired of being treated like the product to be sold... Like all these weed, alcohol still like this, the gambling, like so many of these industries are built on making money off of the addicts. Like they don’t make money off the moderate users. They make money off the people who never ever stop using. Like they know the business model. They’re very clear. Like even the gambling, the house always wins, man. The house is the villain not the person at the roulette table.

Jason Kander [00:52:19] You’re exactly right. That is exactly the right answer. And it’s even beyond that category of issues because it’s true when it comes to guns. Because on guns the villain is not the gun owner. The villain is the firearm manufacturers who want to do everything possible to make the maximum amount of money and that’s why they don’t want restrictions. It’s true when it come to agricultural policy that the villain is... I get so upset every time I listened to some urban coastal democratic politician complain about farmers being paid not to farm because that is such crap. But if you do it right, you talk about it the way you talk about unions and management and you make clear that the problem is corporate agriculture buying up everything and making it impossible for family farmers to continue to be family farmers and forcing them to consolidate. And it’s true with environmental policy, it’s true with oil companies. It’s true with healthcare with regard to insurance companies. Instead of it being about doctors, it’s about insurance companies. And you’re absolutely right. And you know what it all sounds like. And I say this as a person who is friends with Hillary Clinton, voted for Hillary Clinton but looks back and goes, Bernie was right. He’s 100% right.

Sarah [00:53:41] Bernie used to go on the dining room show way back in the day before he was capital B Bernie. And every time he went I was like these motherfuckers got everything right. Like everything he said I was like-- I’m a member in my early 20s. He would come on and I would be like why isn’t there more Bernie? And then there’s more Bernie and I was like less Bernie. It wasn’t Bernie, it was the Bernie bros that wore me out.

Jason Kander [00:54:02] Well, and the problem was is that we didn’t understand that Bernie also had the politics right. Because everybody’s talking about how do we get our own Joe Rogan? Well, we had our own, Joe Rogan. He was a Bernie voter.

Sarah [00:54:13] Yeah, and then you got mad at Bernie for going on Joe Rogan. Okay, do you have a few more minutes to talk one more sports thing with us?

Jason Kander [00:54:30] I do. Sure.

Sarah [00:54:31] Okay, I just want to say before we started, I said, remind me what Kansas City you are. I know what Kansas City you are. I know you’re from Missouri. I think what I meant was remind me which one the football team is on. I’m not great at sports because I know there’s a controversy between the Kansas cities and I couldn’t remember which direction it flowed.

Jason Kander [00:54:48] Sure. Okay. So you got Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. To do this right, I’ve got to give you a little history.

Sarah [00:54:55] Okay.

Jason Kander [00:54:55] Missouri was a state first and then there was the territory of Kansas, which is why the city that is on the Missouri side, the big city, it’s got a half a million people in it. And then the metro area has got like one and a half. It’s why it was called Kansas City. Now it was originally for a minute called Possum Trot, but we didn’t stick with that.

Sarah [00:55:13] We have a Possum Trot near my-- Paducah’s between Monkey’s Eyebrow and Possum Trot.

Jason Kander [00:55:17] I didn’t know there was a Monkey’s Eyebrow, but that’s outstanding.

Sarah [00:55:19] Yeah.

Jason Kander [00:55:20] That’s so cool. That’d be a great address.

Sarah [00:55:24] Listen, there’s so many t-shirts with that on it.

Jason Kander [00:55:26] I bet. Well, I need one. But, anyway, so that’s how you had Kansas City. And then on the Kansas side, what you really have for the most part are suburbs of Kansas City. So we have the state line. But here the state line is literally just a road called state line. I mean, up in the northern most northern part of Kansas City, it’s a river. But it’s really for the most part it’s just a road and you cross it and you really can’t tell you switch from one state to the other. It’s one big metro area. It’s why like when the mayor of Kansas City, the current mayor Quinton Lucas, when he talks about Kansas City he refers to Kansas City and surrounds because he feels like the mayor for...

Sarah [00:56:05] Everybody.

Jason Kander [00:56:05] And he taught at the University of Kansas and he’s an open KU fan despite the fact that he’s in Missouri. So it’s a normal thing here. So 50 years ago they built the new stadiums for the Royals and for the Chiefs and they built it at what they called the Truman Sports Complex and it’s on the east side of Kansas City so you got the state line. And then you go east and so it’s like from state line to the stadiums where they are now. Probably it’s true in Kentucky too. We don’t think of things in miles. We think of things in minutes. And it’s probably 20 minutes, okay? A 20 minute drive.

Sarah [00:56:41] Deeper into Missouri.

Jason Kander [00:56:42] Yeah, 20 minutes east into Missouri. Now, and it’s on the big 435, the big circle, big loop highway around us. It’s basically if it’s a big circle like a clock, they basically sit at about three o’clock on the Missouri side; whereas, 12 and six up and down the middle, that’s your state line.

Sarah [00:57:03] Okay, got it.

Jason Kander [00:57:04] What’s happening is because of this battle over incentives and stuff, the chiefs are going to move from three o’clock on that clock face to basically nine o’ clock.

Sarah [00:57:16] Okay, got it.

Jason Kander [00:57:18] And so they’re going to move across the state line to the other side of the loop, 435 loop basically. And so like me, I live down at about six o’clock just on the Missouri side. It’s 20 minutes from me either way. So what is the difference? And so the reason I say all this is to say I noticed the way it was covered nationally, people covered it like the team was moving. Like the team leaving Kansas City. And you’ve got Kansas City, Kansas, which is they wouldn’t like it if I say this, but is a suburb of Kansas City and Missouri, right? And then they’re going to Kansas City, Kansas. But Kansas City, Kansas, isn’t even really the largest population town anymore on that western side of the state line.

Sarah [00:58:00] Oh, interesting.

Jason Kander [00:58:01] So they’re going over there and they got a huge financial incentive to go over there. Now the Royals are going to go somewhere. They’re looking at downtown Kansas City as in Missouri side. They’re looking at north of the river, still Missouri side. They were looking for a long time and they’re still kind of I think it’s in play on the Kansas side and we’ll see where they land. But my point here is to say, yes, there are definite tax and municipal results, but for the average Kansas Citian, and by the way, like people who live in Overland Park, Kansas or Shawnee, Kansas, where I was born, when they go on vacation you ask them where are you from, they say I’m from Kansas City. They all see themselves as from Kansas City.

Sarah [00:58:39] So it’s not like people are going to get like new jerseys. You know what I mean?

Jason Kander [00:58:43] No, nothing is going to change.

Sarah [00:58:43] Interesting. Okay.

Jason Kander [00:58:44] It’s going to be a new stadium. There are going to some people who are real mad about it. Politically, it’s not great if you’re a Missouri side politician because you’re supposed to try to keep them. Ultimately, at the end of the day, they’re still the Kansas City Chiefs. They’re going to move the stadium 20 minutes.

Sarah [00:59:04] Right. Well, can I just say this too. They’re doing this in Nashville too. Like, why does everybody need a new, bigger, ridiculous stadium every like five years? It just feels like it’s a little out of control.

Jason Kander [00:59:16] Well, that’s a whole other conversation.

Sarah [00:59:20] They’re building a giant Titan stadium right next to the already giant currently used Titan stadium.

Jason Kander [00:59:25] It’s sort of case by case. What I will say here is that they’ve had these stadiums for really long time in Kansas City. And the other piece of it is that they were built because originally the city planners thought the city was going to grow East and it didn’t. The population growth grew west across the state line. It grew South in both directions on both sides of the state line, and it grew North on the Missouri side. And the one direction the population growth did not go-- now, there’s a lot of reasons for this and not all of them are good. Some of them have a lot to do with like urban renewal and the way the black community was treated. So it’s not like I’m not describing something that just happened naturally. I’m describing a thing that happened is that population growth didn’t go in the direction of the stadiums. So there is this huge sports complex out there that there’s very little around. Which is cool for a tailgate culture, but for instance if you’re the city planners at Kansas City and you want to take this thing, for instance, with the Royals, that’s going to get at least 81 venue event nights a year, you’d like to have it near more of your stuff that is going to get run off business. And so in that case, I think it’s a good reason to have a new location. But I think it depends on where you’re talking about and what team you’re talking about and all that.

Sarah [01:00:48] And your stance. Are you a Chiefs fan?

Jason Kander [01:00:50] Yeah, I’m a huge Royals fan and I’m also a big Chiefs fan.

Sarah [01:00:53] Okay. And your stance on Taylor Swift.

Jason Kander [01:00:56] We’re all Swifties in Kansas City. It’s funny I think people think--

Sarah [01:01:00] I thought so. I just wanted to make sure.

Jason Kander [01:01:03] I mean, when they announced their engagement, there were businesses in this town that just sent people home for the rest of the day. I’m not kidding.

Sarah [01:01:09] Listen, again, back to the theme of me having receipts. I think they’ve been dating about two weeks or we’d known they were dating.

Jason Kander [01:01:18] Oh, are you a hater?

Sarah [01:01:19] No, no, baby. I said they’re getting married and everyone’s like you’re crazy. I was like, no. Those two are going to get married. And I said it consistently for so long that when they got engaged it was like I got engaged. The amount of text messages I got they were like congratulations. I thought of you first. I was like thanks. It was great. I highly recommend like staking out your place so that when it happens, it’s like you’ve won a prize. Like it was amazing.

Jason Kander [01:01:46] Who doesn’t love a love story, first of all? Also, the Kelsey brothers are great dudes. They’re clearly you talk about good, decent role models for young boys. And then you cannot get a better role model for young girls. And as somebody who now I’m a girl dad, which I generally can’t stand the people who discover that women have value when they have daughters. So I try to shut that. I’ve found women to have equal value to men long before I had a daughter. But if having a daughter does give you the opportunity to see certain things that you can’t see without having a daughter. And so, for instance, to see my five-year-old daughter the way she reacts when a Taylor Swift song comes on-- and now she doesn’t understand all the lyrics and everything, so it’s a little different from like..

Sarah [01:02:37] I hope not, with some of the songs on the new album.

Jason Kander [01:02:39] Right. But it’s more of she understands that culturally being a girl who likes Taylor Swift, it connects her to other girls in her school and everything. And I think an element of it is that she understands that Travis and Taylor’s house is like three quarters of a mile from here. It feels very personal to her.

Sarah [01:03:00] Are you going to send him a present? Are you going to send him a wedding present?

Jason Kander [01:03:04] I don’t think they’ll get one from me.

Sarah [01:03:06] I think that you should. Maybe a card from your daughter. You’re neighbors.

Jason Kander [01:03:10] I mean, just call us neighbors. It’s three quarters of a mile. It’s not the same neighborhood.

Sarah [01:03:16] I was going to say, are you doing better podcasting than I am?

Jason Kander [01:03:20] No. To call back to what we were talking about a minute ago, it’s across the state line. It’s on that. And where we live down here-- to give you a little Kansas City geography you don’t need, but to really fill this out, we live down here in South Kansas City, but we’re in Kansas City and Missouri proper. When you cross the state line, which is not too far from where we live at all, you go into Leewood, Kansas, and Leewood, Kansas, is very fancy. It’s still Kansas. Nobody’s driving a Rolls or anything. But that’s where the med spas are in this town. They’re not on this side of the state line.

Sarah [01:04:00] Got you. Okay. I like that you live so close though.

Jason Kander [01:04:03] Yeah, it is a neat thing. My kids think that’s neat. And actually a buddy of mine they ended up buying his house. He’s an older, very accomplished lawyer. And the reason I knew is because he spent a weekend scrambling to try to get rid of furniture and clothing because they basically were like we need a place to stay that has more like--Travis’s house...

Sarah [01:04:25] Security.

Jason Kander [01:04:25] Yeah. And so they were like and we need it immediately. And we will buy it. I think what happened is they were like we will close immediately, but you got to...

Sarah [01:04:33] You got to get it out!

Jason Kander [01:04:34] Yeah, he was like, “I ended up leaving a lot of furniture in there. So I don’t know how much of my old man furniture they still have.”

Sarah [01:04:40] That’s amazing. I love that. Jason Kander. I love it when you come on Pantsuit Politics.

Jason Kander [01:04:44] I have a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

Sarah [01:04:46] I think you need to send this episode to some of your pals. I think we filled out a pretty good platform for them to be honest.

Jason Kander [01:04:50] I actually think we solved many problems.

Sarah [01:04:53] I do, too. More people should listen to us. All right. Well, thank you. I hope that you have a great rest of your day.

Jason Kander [01:05:00] You too.

Sarah [01:05:00] And we will share this episode. We’ll put all the links so that people can go find your show and just thanks so much.

Jason Kander [01:05:05] Thank you!

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