Bad Bunny Wins the Super Bowl and the Elite Play God

Incompetence and Rot in the Billionaire Class

No one knows better than the sitting US president that culture is powerful. Today, we talk about culture and how President Trump’s meme-posting is landing differently because of his administration’s violent approach to immigration enforcement.

In contrast to the President’s racist late-night posting, we’re also talking about the Super Bowl halftime show and Bad Bunny’s ability to dance his way through layers of political messaging about Puerto Rico, immigration, and what “America” means in a fun and light-hearted way (with a wedding!!!!)

The competence and artistry of the halftime show also stand in stark contrast with the incompetence on display in many of America’s top institutions. We talk about the Washington Post layoffs and how elite priorities are being revealed in business, culture, and the latest release of the Epstein files.

Outside of politics (sort of!), we discuss the Super Bowl ads, the musical performances, and maybe just a little bit of football.

Topics Discussed

• President Trump Shares a Racist Meme

• Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

• The Washington Post layoffs and Bezos’s priorities

• The Epstein files illustrate a moral bankruptcy

• Outside of Politics: The Super Bowl commercials (and a little football)

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

We’re so excited about coming to Minneapolis this August. Our live show will be Saturday, August 29, with an afterparty at the Hyatt Centric. It will be a high-energy, thoughtful, and fun live version of Pantsuit Politics. If you haven’t been before, this is your chance!

We’re also hosting our first-ever Spice Conference*. We’ll kick off Friday night, August 28, with a welcome party. On Saturday, there will be sessions, activities, and opportunities to connect with other listeners from MN and across the country.

*A ticket to the Spice Conference includes entry to the live show and afterparty on Saturday night, as well as all meals from Friday dinner through Saturday lunch. It also includes lodging at the Hyatt Centric, which we are filling entirely with the Pantsuit Politics community!

Premium Members get first access to Spice Conference Tickets.

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The link to purchase tickets will be sent to premium members via email on Tuesday morning, February 10, and again at the sale times.

To learn more about the event, access the event website, and more, please visit our Join Us in Minneapolis post from January.

Additional Resources

• Craig Cree Hardegree’s Facebook post about “morality” and the half-time show.

• A Dismantling of the Washington Post (Columbia Journalism Review)

• Good Morning to the Fallout (Good Morning | Pantsuit Politics)

• Mitt Romney’s Soul Searching with McKay Coppins (Pantsuit Politics)

• Was the wedding during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance real? (USA Today)

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:10] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:12] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:13] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Elites have always lived in their own form of reality, but for years it accompanied at least a nod to public stewardship. Those days are over. Whether it’s Jeff Bezos gutting a newspaper for efficiency. Big tech lighting $660 billion on fire for AI hype, or billionaires dismissing Epstein’s crimes as social indiscretions, the elite class have stopped even pretending to care how their actions affect the rest of us. They treat the economy like their personal casino, the press like a disposable toy, and the law like a mere suggestion. We’re going to unpack how that is showing up in many ways after we discuss Trump’s racist meme and Bad Bunny winning the Super Bowl. Then we’ll turn back to the Super Bowl at the end of the show to talk about ads.

Beth [00:01:04] If this conversation and others are helpful to you, we would love for you to follow Pantsuit Politics on your podcast player and on Substack. The number one way people still find us is word of mouth. So if this episode is helpful to, please send it to a friend. And friendly reminder, our one and only live show this year will be on August 29th in Minneapolis. Our premium subscribers on Substack get first dibs on the tickets. Those go on sale tonight. So check the show notes for more information.

Sarah [00:01:30] And speaking of our premium content, I wanted to share that I’ve made a little change to my show, Good Morning, where I give a quick rundown of the day’s headlines. It is now available in an easily skimmable written format that will go to your inbox every morning if you are overwhelmed by the headlines and it’s an easy peasy way to keep up. So if you’re interested in that, you can go subscribe on Substack. All right, let’s catch up from the weekend. For about the last month, you and I have discussed the feeling of overwhelm that we really thought we had grown out of when it came to news and politics. I just thought like, we’re professionals, we don’t get overwhelmed. But the deluge of crises and disasters and in particular sort of slow rolling problems, trends, institutional collapse, it just feels like it is growing and growing and growing. And I say all that, not to talk about it, we’ve talked about it a lot. You mentioned it on More to Say recently. It’s because in the face of that, the fact that we have to spend time because the President of the United States shared a grossly offensive, hateful, racist meme makes me want to set things on fire.

Beth [00:03:25] It is so frustrating because I can hear myself going through iterations of why he posted this, that he wants us talking about this instead of other things. Don’t fall for it, it’s a trap. Like all of the pathways we’ve tried to build to adapt to the Trump news environment take you in a bunch of different directions. What I hear most though in myself is that song that was written about gun violence. You can learn to live with anything if it happens by degrees. And I think that this post is kind of a shockwave to say don’t learn to life with anything if it happens by degrees. Don’t be okay with this. Go ahead and talk about it because it is important to talk about, because it crosses such a clear and obvious line. And it is so damaging and is so intentionally destructive that you need to spend time here. I don’t want to learn to live with this and I’m glad that I’m not alone. I mean, that seems to be the clear majority perspective. Nothing about this is acceptable. It is racist. It is also incompetent. Everything the white house has done since it’s been posted has demonstrated that Trump supporters don’t want this, Trump’s detractors don’t want this, nobody wants this. Stop.

Sarah [00:04:56] That’s what I think is the most interesting thing about this. I’m not frustrated because I have become accustomed to how racist he is. I’m just frustrated because we have so much bigger issues. And I think there is something here that says we have changed, not that he has gotten worse. This is next level offensiveness to post a meme of the Obamas as apes.

Beth [00:05:25] It’s hard to even say that, right? It just feels awful even speaking it out loud.

Sarah [00:05:30] I totally agree. But I do think that he has shared at least some really offensive imagery about her before. And he’s obviously said some blatantly racist things. He cozies up to white nationalists, constantly shares their memes, shares their coded language. He is obviously pursuing a racist agenda when it comes to immigration enforcement. The most interesting thing to me has been the reaction. There was bipartisan, just enough. Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina was like this is the most racist thing I’ve seen. I hope it was a mistake. And even when the White House and its incompetent communication finally said, oh, well, first it was a mistake, then it wasn’t. And then even I love when people go out on an edge or go out in a limb to defend him. And then he throws them directly into the bus and was like I meant it. But I was pleasantly surprised by how I really didn’t see anybody in my social media feeds defending this. I haven’t even heard report-- now I haven’t really gone and excavated the depths of the right wing ecosystem. I’m sure there are people out there defending him. I haven’t even seen though reporting on even right wing influencers defending him and most certainly in my feeds, in particular, conservative Christians have said enough; this is hateful.

Beth [00:07:07] It is really striking to me what it communicates about his view of the presidency too. First of all, that his presence on a social media platform is so insignificant that he can just repost memes. That tells you a lot about how he thinks about the office.

Sarah [00:07:24] How he spends his time.

Beth [00:07:25] And how he spends his time and what he wants to communicate and why. But also to degrade a former president in such-- I don’t even have a language for it. In just such a juvenile, racist, hateful, idiotic, unfunny manner. To degrade former president like that in the same week that he expressed real distress that the House of Representatives wants to talk to Bill Clinton about his Epstein ties shows you how he thinks about the office. He is not feeling for Bill Clinton because he’s so concerned that the office of the presidency be respected. He cannot say that when he’s doing this to former President Obama. It’s just very transparent.

Sarah [00:08:19] Well, and of course, he started this journey perpetuating racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s place of birth. I think that the Epstein connection is that he can’t stand it that Obama’s name is nowhere to be found in any of this. I shared a meme about it I think it is so indicative and illustrative that at the peak of his power as president, and his journey to president, Barack Obama’s journey to President, overlap so fully with this timeline and still not a mention. And you know it’s eating him up. He hates it when Barack Obama is held up as an example, particularly in contrast to him. And it breaks my heart. I think everybody feels this sense of exhaustion and sadness that the leader of this country continues to talk about other human beings like that. My heart is broken for how this has to feel to black Americans on a just cellular level, like the visceral pain of seeing an example and a hero like Barack Obama spoken about like this. It does feel like everybody or most everybody is just like, gross. And I think it’s a lot of things. I don’t think it just our exhaustion. I think it is all the anti-Semitism and the sort of overt racism accompanying the immigration debate that the majority of Americans were exhausted by the race debate around 2020, but that doesn’t mean they want to go back to the 1960s either.

Beth [00:10:40] That’s exactly right. There were unifying moments. I feel like the vast majority of Americans saw what happened to George Floyd and thought it was horrifying. Not what we want. And then the wake of that, which gets shorthanded as sort of the George Floyd summer, the wake that started to wear people down because a million things, right?

Sarah [00:11:09] It’s because there was no path forward. The takeaway is we’re all racist. Well, when everybody’s racist, nobody’s racist. And I think that’s really what we found ourselves in like ‘21, ‘22.

Beth [00:11:21] And you found yourself debating about it in context that seemed to almost trivialize the murder of a human being. I’m not saying that they did, but I think that was the perception and the argument. And then that all kind of goes along and marinates. Well, now we have the immigration enforcement, which again, is very real and very violent and not in any respect trivial. So when you have this meme coming out, as they are just hauling anybody they feel like off the street, keeping people in detention centers, no respect for rights whatsoever, that gets to that majority consensus again that, no, that’s not what we want to do. We don’t want to argue about movie casting all day, every day in terms of race. But we also do fundamentally want to live in a country together and respect each other. And I think that Trump thought he would do this and remind everybody of that like woke exhaustion. But the landscape is completely different now, and he made it so.

Sarah [00:12:33] Yeah, and I think there is no better side by side in this debate and in this moment than him sharing that meme with Bad Bunny’s halftime show. I really hope we look back at this particular moment as like when he jumped the shark, when the culture wars jumped the sharks, when everybody just decided like we’re done. I really feel like even if ‘everybody’ doesn’t decide, this feels to me because they came so close in time and Bad Bunny’s reaction, response, argument, (whatever you want to call that performance) was so perfectly calibrated in my opinion that I was shocked. At the end of the performance my friend Kate goes, “Can’t wait to get on Facebook.” But you know what, it was fine. I got on Facebook and people who I check as my little barometer were like what’s the big deal? It was great. I was like what’s happening? I was like am I being punked? Like, it was incredible.

Beth [00:13:43] What’s the big deal is the perfect place for America to be around the Super Bowl halftime show. Left and right. It’s a good place to just be like, what’s the deal? It was a good show. I enjoyed it. It was fun. He’s a great musician. That is the calibration that I need.

Sarah [00:13:58] What I see, and maybe it’s just because so many of us, including millennials specifically, have spent so many years in this culture debate sea, I don’t know, that we’re learning to swim. I can’t believe I’m saying this. It feels like people’s critical thinking is getting a little stronger around this. I don’t know if maybe it’s just because we’re all taking it so much or it’s been happening for so long, but I read a really great post that several people shared from Craig Cree Hardegree about Bad Bunny and the response on TPUSA with Kid Rock. And he was like TPUSA is putting on this Christian hat and they’re saying we’re saving America from the sexualization, but obviously that’s not true because Kid Rock is as crude as they come. He is as crude as they come and I thought this was so good. He said, “In today’s evangelical culture war, morality is no longer measured by content, repentance or transformation. It is measured by political alignment and once politics becomes the moral compass since it stops being something to be confronted and starts being something to be managed, excused when useful, condemned with inconvenient.” So the hypocrisy, I just feel like people are getting clearer. They can spot it faster. I think people are just tired of the culture wars generally. And I think in particular Bad Bunny didn’t go out there and make an expressly political show, and in doing so crafted the most effective political message.

Beth [00:15:47] It was very political, but it was not divisive. What I thought was so genius about the politics of this halftime show is that it met people on a whole bunch of levels. First of all, if you’re a Spanish speaker, it meets you on a level. If you are Puerto Rican, it meets on a particular level. If you’re from any Central or South American country, it feels, I think, different to you. If you recognize some of the imagery or not, if you know about the blackouts in Puerto Rico or not. Like all of it, there’s so much symbolism in it and there’s so much text there. It kind of made me wish that my beat was music instead of politics because I could have spent all my show preparation time digging into this halftime show. It was very rich and somehow totally light in doing all that. It was not heavy-handed. It felt like a Broadway musical. It’s visually stimulating. It had movement the whole time. It went so fast. When it was over, I was like, oh, that’s really short. It was masterful to say so much, but to not yell it at you, to dance through it. That’s what he did. He just danced through a really unifying, lovely message. And I think that is helpful if you’re a candidate. It’s helpful to see things like this where somebody says, I am going to meet people on different levels; have my message out there and let it be fun and let its sink in with people where they’re ready to sink in with it.

Sarah [00:17:24] Yeah, it was joyful. I mean, there’s no other word for it. It was just so joyful. And it was such an incredible experience to have to depend on everything but the words because I don’t speak Spanish. And so to have to depend on his inflection and his face and the dancers, I knew what he was laying down. When we started at the sugar cane, I was like, this is incredible. When we went through nail salons and construction workers and the food, I mean, I’ll just get joked up. Like my grandmother turned 90 this weekend and we hired this incredible local business woman that makes all of our favorite Mexican food. She’s incredible. She’s young. She came and catered it. It was so, so good. And I thought a lot about the food. And I thought about all his references to the bodegas and the taco stand and how Americans across this country eat Mexican and Spanish and Venezuelan food all week, every week, all year long. And we love it. And these people are a part of us. We are together in this. When he said together like on the football-- I forgot what the football said like together is what America is all about. Love is stronger than hate. Just this beautiful vision of what America is, the idea that we have always been striving for that is represented so beautifully in the Latino community that literally builds, feeds, clothes, this entire country in so many ways. The way he showed us all that, even if you don’t speak the language. And not even mentioning the people that are the backbone of this country, but the people who are the aspirational. He is the embodiment of the American dream. You saw Pedro Pascal. You saw Jessica Alba. You saw all these people that have contributed at the very top echelon of American culture and American society. Like, this whole broad depth was just so magnetic and beautiful and a love letter not just to Puerto Rico, but to America, to the whole hemisphere, because we are constantly in conversation with each other, both on American soil and in other places. And I was entranced. I absolutely loved every second of it. And I haven’t even talked about the damn wedding in the middle of it, Beth. We haven’t even talked about the wedding, which I’m obsessed with.

Beth [00:20:05] And listen, I agree with everything that you just said. And I take nothing away from it. And what I think is really smart about this is you get the vibe from Bad Bunny that if you were like, huh, not my thing, he’d be like, cool, cool. Have a good day. You’re not trying to say like, well, then you must be a racist. Like it was so light. Even though it contained all the things that you described so beautifully, it was light. And I really appreciated that.

Sarah [00:20:34] And I just thought it’s so hard to do this. I Want to emphasize how hard it is to make an argument and to present this beautiful counterpoint when using the exact tools and rhetorical barbs against the people trying to yield them at you. Like, what is more American than hard work and family? Which half of that performance was a love letter to this couple got married in the middle of the show and then they all danced and sang at their wedding. When he started doing that, when I realized, because I saw the couple and I thought immediately, there’s just, listen, a bride gives a vibe and people aren’t that good at actors in a moment like that, you know? And I thought, “I think those people are getting married like for real.” I thought it immediately because her face was just glowing. They were just both in love and it was so sweet. And I thought it was real. So when all the media was confirming, yes, that was real, like they invited Bad Bunny to their wedding and he was like I’ll do you one better. And you best believe, that’s what I said to my dad when he came in this morning and said he didn’t watch it. I was like you’re never going to believe what happened. This couple got married in the middle of it. Because what are you going to say to that? Gross, un-American? Give me a break. Exactly, you can’t. You can’t say anything about a love letter to hard work and family. I’m sorry, you cannot.

Beth [00:22:02] I think that’s the mood that people are in. Like, let’s just let people live their lives. That halftime show is a bunch of different ways that people live their lives, and I think we just want to let people live their life. I hope that that message really feels pervasive to people running for office this year. That most of us just want to let other people be, and we’re happy to let lots of different kinds of people be around us.

Sarah [00:22:31] But there is one group that I don’t want to let be, and it is the elites, the uber wealthy. I have a bone to pick with, which we’re going to talk about that next. So Beth, one of the top stories that I would have liked to dedicate the top spot to, but we had to talk about racist meme share in chief, is the devastation at the Washington Post. They laid off 300 people eliminating the sports death photography. They laid off people. Like they closed basically the entire Middle East correspondent, like the entire middle east desk and then the editors were fired and then they had to start posting go fund me accounts to get these people back from the war zones where they were basically abandoned. It is a horrendous story.

Beth [00:23:39] There’s so much here. I just want to start with the people abandoned in the war zones and how what I have been led to believe in this economy is that if you make it to billionaire status, it’s because you’re very good at business. And if you are stranding your employees in another country, which this is not the first time we’ve talked about in the last two years, a billionaire in charge of stranding people in countries because they just changed their mind about what they wanted for a department or an agency or a newspaper, it’s just the definition of incompetent. And I think that that’s a lot of what you see in the way that the post is being run and a number of businesses around the country are being run right now. No vision, a sense that unless it is printing money for me at an astronomical speed, it’s not worth my time and attention. And the people involved in it aren’t real enough to merit some change management consideration.

Sarah [00:24:44] As a quick review, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post in 2013. Now, there’s a lot of people arguing that what he spent on the Washington post at the time is chump change, right? He’s worth $240 billion. So, sure, he probably could run the Post at a loss in perpetuity and be fine. That’s not even my beat. I don’t necessarily think that’s required of him, okay? But it’s like you said, if you can’t run the business sufficiently, if you see it continue to lose subscribers because you decided to revoke the Kamala Harris Endorsement, you lost 250,000 subscribers. If you were still flailing about way before then, trying to be a little bit of everything all the time or just trying to follow the New York Times-- I don’t know what the vision was for the post because I don’t think you had one. So what really enraged me was reporting that Kara Swisher had gotten together several investors and was willing to purchase the post and they never heard back. So if you don’t have a vision, can you at least sell it before you run it all the way into the ground?

Beth [00:26:02] My first reaction was how much money does Kara Swisher have? Just apropos of nothing, but I’m curious about that. I think it’s right that there just hasn’t been any vision here, and there has to be. You look around media right now, and people are just trying things everywhere. When you have an asset like the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that has a legacy of credibility, you shouldn’t just be trying things. You got to lead through that. And you can lead in a whole bunch of different ways. I don’t think it’s all so high minded. I understand that the New York Times built out the games for a reason. But I respect a vision that says, okay, we’ll build out the games and we’ll add the athletic so that we continue to be able to report out stories in the Middle East that, yes, a smaller percentage of the audience will pay attention to it, but a vital percentage of the audience will pay attention to it. Those stories are still crucial for a functioning democracy. I don’t expect Bezos to run this at a loss forever. I don’t. I expect him to have the acumen and the insulation that money buys you to be able to have a vision and pursue it in a very focused way. The canceling of the endorsements and everything that’s happened with the editorial page to me speaks to even more incompetence in this sector. He does some things well. He does not run a media company well. You could easily have announced in not a presidential election year that you’re going to stop endorsing candidates. It would probably be a good idea. You could probably earn a lot of subscribers through a decision like that. Instead, the timing of it made it look like they just didn’t want to endorse against Trump or they didn’t want to endorse Kamala Harris. Whichever one it is, that seems partisan and political and the opposite of what a newspaper should be trying to say. So this has just been fumbled all over the place. If he’s losing money, right now it seems like his fault and whomever he’s put in charge there.

Sarah [00:28:14] Well, it’s not Will Lewis anymore. He fired the CEO. So now they’re not only in this like hole from laying off all these people. They don’t even have real leadership. And here’s the thing. I think you can look at the Good Trends, where it comes to the New York Times. I totally agree with the games and Washington Post. Like half tried that. Or the Wall Street Journal, which is obviously has a different model and is doing blockbuster reporting in an incredible job. We talked about it last week. Okay, so there are other models for these institutional media companies that I think are vital. Somebody has to pay the reporters. Somebody has to actually have journalists. It can’t all be opinion. And at the flip side, this trend that you see in other institutions, you have a biotech billionaire pushing the Los Angeles Times to the right. You have the Ellison family with Barry Weiss trying to transform CBS News into some best-case scenario neutral, worst-case-scenario MAGA-friendly news operation, much less talking about Elon Musk and X. And to me it’s the consolidation and the extraction and the idea that these are like hobbies, side projects that these billionaires look at, like will give their attention when it’s required. They will use the tools when it is necessary to them. I would love to see some reporting on the Washington Post role in the Melania documentary and promoting that. I would be interested in that because I bet it’s there. So it’s like a toy they can use when they need it. Who cares if we run into ground in the process? And also, to me, the more this consolidates, even if they’re their main ventures when it comes to Elon Musk, like putting X with AI, with Starlink, what happens if they fail? They’re consolidating, they’re extracting; they are consolidating and they’re extracting. And the rest of us suffer as institutions we depend on that are essential to our democracy and civic culture continue to degrade.

Beth [00:30:32] And we’re going to see more of this, unfortunately, because the same class of people keeps telling us that at least entry-level white-color workers are already useless to them. They can do it all with technology. No, again, vision for what that means for society, what we want those people doing instead, how we’re going to get people who can be more experienced workers, who still have value in an AI economy. One of the reasons that the model of elites like the Rockefellers, the oil barons even, one of the reasons that that model had some value is because there was a sense like I have reached this pinnacle of wealth and status. I owe something back. And the problem with this class of people is that you don’t see any sense that like I owe some back. That’s what it looked like Bezos was doing when he bought The Post in 2013. And look where we are now. It’s sad on an individual level, and you could think a lot about him personally and what’s going on there, but that’s not even very interesting because he’s just one of a whole bunch of people who are operating in the same fashion.

Sarah [00:31:49] Well, and I think it’s bigger and more concerning even than their side projects, their little hobbies, like the Washington Post. They’re just treating everything like they’re the casino and we’re the dum-dums who keep signing over all our money. Even when I was watching the ads for the Trump accounts during the Super Bowl, I thought, well, you’ve gotten your hands on everybody’s pensions and 401k, so now you need more accounts to extract wealth from to fuel your gambles like AI. I mean, the crypto industry, I think, is finally understanding this is just a market for the people at the very, very top like the Wittkofs and the Trumps and maybe some sports stars to own the table and the rest of us keep signing up and losing money on silver and gold and Bitcoin because they just keep falling off a cliff while they get rich no matter what.

Beth [00:32:54] It’s also maddening because that is some of the anger that brought us to their power. That people felt like going to college had become the equivalent of sitting down at a slot machine. That shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be that you work hard and follow this path that you were promised would lead to a comfortable life. Not a fabulously wealthy life, just a comfortable life. And it actually leads to crushing debt and few employment opportunities. And no vision for advancement, and even a sense of precarity that makes you think can we afford to have another child? Can we afford to have a first child? What can we do here? People are pissed about that, and that anger is growing, and so they took a flyer on these guys who are supposed to know how to run the businesses, and it’s just getting worse. It’s just getting worse every day.

Sarah [00:33:50] And we haven’t even gotten to the Epstein files yet where the people at the very top, including Elon Musk, are joking. Richard Branson, famous billionaire, joking in a 2013 email, asking Epstein to bring his “harem”. Elon Musk is asking, begging for invitations to the island for the wild parties. I was so devastated to see Noam Chomsky, a thinker I’ve always had enormous respect for, who wrote a book about the empowerment of people at the bottom calling Epstein’s problems hysteria. Like it’s just devastating to watch the complete moral bankruptcy. Not because they were necessarily signing up to abuse young girls. That’s not necessarily what this latest drop shows, but it certainly shows people with absolutely no moral compass or ethical foundation

Beth [00:34:58] I saw a clip of a woman who has some kind of association with Prince Andrew saying that of course she’s in the files because everyone who’s anybody is in the file. That they were all in the same circles. And the way she was talking about it, yeah, it was gross. It was just an ew kind of moment. And I thought, this is the thinking that leads us here where you do believe that you’re entitled to something different than the rest of us ants marching around. I really am struggling with the way that this information is rolling out and how little context we have around it and how we’re still not getting to the fundamental question that people wanted from these files, which is what did the government do with this information? We’re not getting our answers on what did you investigate? What did you try to get more about? Why do you have these emails versus other emails? And when you saw this, did you pursue this lead? The accountability side of this is getting completely lost in this endless gossip parade. And yet the gossip parade is going to continue forever because the government still isn’t even just putting the information out in front of us. I really hope that the ability of members of Congress to access what’s been redacted and held back, which is beginning this week, I hope that leads us to some kind of process that gives us the answers to the questions that actually serve the victims and that actually serves some sense of justice. But in the meantime, what we are getting is a powder keg of fodder for anger at this class of people who thought that everything was fun and games and designed for their amusement.

Sarah [00:36:55] And they’re not doing anything necessarily illegal. They are just being gross.

Beth [00:37:02] The worst.

Sarah [00:37:03] They’re just being really, really gross. Now there’s been enormous fallout in Europe. Not everyone is escaping accountability. I don’t think Prime Minister Keir Starmer is long for this world as a result of the fact that the Ambassador Mendelsohn that he appointed to the US is all over this thing. And just that the influence trading and the willingness to let all manner of crimes slide in pursuit of status and influence should be a warning. It should be a reckoning that there is no-- again, we’ve gone all the way from like they can’t even business. They’re not some sort of innovative genius. They can’t even business. Even their big strategic thinking is really just a gamble on the rest of our backs. And if we’re waiting for all this to play out in some sort of moral or public service minded gift to society, that ain’t coming. So to put all that together needs to be front and center when we vote. Not because the money itself and the way it flows-- you can see in that Texas state house rate. I mean, he got outspent 10 to one, the guy who won outside Fort Worth. So not necessarily because I think we have to shut down or reorient all public political donations. I would love that, I’m not opposed to that, but I just think it’s about acknowledging that there is a different reality of wealth and the more we can limit politicians who are beholden to that reality, much less belong to that reality, the better we all will be.

Beth [00:39:20] I hate to be like let me talk about Mitt Romney again, but I would like to because here’s a person who had a lot of wealth. But also what I took from McKay Coppin’s excellent book about Mitt Romney’s life is that he was tethered in a bunch of different ways to family and to principles. He had a bunch of counterweights to that high-flying life where nothing is real anymore. And I think we’ve got to look for that in our candidates. Like the lifestyle that Jeffrey Epstein was serving up for people was clearly so tempting and will be forever, right? There will be some version of that forever. I don’t understand it. I think it’s vile, but I also am a human and recognize that maybe there’s a version of my life where there is a temptation that I can’t handle. So we got to elect people who are tethered to their communities and their people and their principles. It doesn’t have to be the same as ours, but we need to know something is happening in and around you that will bring you home instead of letting you get swept away into this inner circle where you think everything goes.

Sarah [00:40:42] Before we leave the elite spenders all the way behind, let’s talk about the Super Bowl ads next up in Outside of Politics and real interesting crossroads, intersection sometimes of the billionaire class and their priorities and all the rest of us pedestrians. Beth, how many AI ads did you count over the course of the football?

Beth [00:41:12] I had a note in my phone going to just write down observations from the Super Bowl, and I put in my own phone, it feels like the American economy is AI and pharmaceuticals, and I’m realizing that maybe I really love stuff. Maybe I miss stuff. Maybe I want more stuff in our economy.

Sarah [00:41:33] I actually had a glimmer of hope in the midst of all this. Because I thought, oh, we’ve been here before. Remember when they were all crypto? Remember when they were all Squarespace and they were like all website building? They were all social media? I was like, oh, you know what, this isn’t the indication. Dumping of a massive amount of money in something they’re all obsessed with that will probably affect our lives in some way, shape, or form. So it was like thou dost protest too much. If AI is supposed to be this revolutionary technology, then why are you trying to convince us so strongly in all these Super Bowl ads?

Beth [00:42:14] Well, and I also think that it was clear that they want to differentiate themselves from one another. That’s just not where the population is. You put these ads alongside what you’ve been reading in the news about usage and how there are people who are using AI for everything all day, every day. But the people who haven’t adopted the technology yet, you have to still convince to use the technology, not to differentiate between Claude and Chat GPT. So these commercials were hilarious to me because they were funny and interesting if you know something about AI. I think if you don’t, you just look at them and thought, I don’t want any part of AI period.

Sarah [00:43:00] So there was a ton of AI ads. The other ones that pissed me off the most were all the sports betting ads, especially like parading as commentary. I just started booing. I was at a big party and I was like, guys, I’m going to boo every single one of these gambling ads because I’m so angry. When the Axios did this, people are warning. I’m like what people are warming? I have been tooting this horn for the terrible influence of this shit for two years. The frustration I feel so strongly with people are like, man, this is bad. Yeah, I know. I’ve been saying that. And so every time an ad came out, I was like, get off my screen, DraftKings, I hate you so much.

Beth [00:43:40] And they weren’t even good ads. I have a proposal. I would like to propose something. I want the people who make ads for the super bowl to not get to use celebrities anymore. Come up with something that’s interesting. They’re just using celebrities and they think they’re done. There’s no cleverness.

Sarah [00:43:58] Well, I thought the Sabrina Carpenter one was clever.

Beth [00:44:03] It was okay. She’s so clever. Honestly, I think they should have let her write it herself though. She would have come up with something better.

Sarah [00:44:08] But I didn’t understand the Ben Stiller Instacart banana ad. I was like what does this have to do with anything? I didn’t understand the Uber Eats with Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper. I was, like, I what is this? I don’t know what this has to do with Uber Eats. Listen, I am primed, okay? I am primed to accept joyfully into my heart anything that has to do with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Literally anything. I watched that new Netflix movie of theirs, okay? I love them. And it felt like catching up with old high school friends, okay. I love those two so much. That Dunkin Donuts commercial was nostalgic slop. They de-aged everybody, which was creepy. They also did that in the Jurassic Park ad. Creepy. And they are there. I’m like you’re just shoving everybody on the screen in this like nostalgic play. It’s not funny. Like the ones I thought in the past were funny. This one was not. I was like what is this? I don’t like this at all. And again, I’m proud. I just showed my kids Good Will Hunting.

Beth [00:45:16] No, I agree. I was just not impressed. The one commercial that I really, really loved was the Lay’s commercial, where you had a--

Sarah [00:45:29] Generations of farmers!

Beth [00:45:31] Yes, generations of farmers, not celebrities, ordinary people, some heartstrings tugged. I like that. But that can’t be the only thing going. It can’t just be tug at my heartstrings with ordinary people or celebrities trying to be funny and failing.

Sarah [00:45:46] Well, there was a couple other classes I would like to introduce. I love the heartstrings. I cried very hard at the Red Fenton ad with Lady Gaga singing Won’t You Be My Neighbor. I thought that ad was beautiful and so touching. I loved that one so much. There was also like booty ads. There’s just like a lot of bathroom humor, booty ads, like the manscaping ad. First of all, people were still eating. It was very early.

Beth [00:46:16] I hated that one.

Sarah [00:46:18] It was so gross.

Beth [00:46:18] I don’t need singing piles of pubic hair. I just don’t. I thought that was awful.

Sarah [00:46:24] But I did like the Levi’s ad with all the booties that you could identify like the Springsteen booty and the like what looked like Destiny’s Child but then it wasn’t. I liked that one. I thought that one was pretty fun. And I loved the liquid IV. Take a look at me now. Check your pee. I thought that was hilarious. That was hilarious.

Beth [00:46:43] You liked the singing toilets?

Sarah [00:46:45] I did. Because it was related. It was clever. Look at your pee. If your pee is too yellow, you need liquid IV. I just thought it was pretty clever

Beth [00:46:54] My friend and I were arguing about that this morning by text. I was like between the singing piles of pubic hair and the singing toilets, I was like, America, where are we? And she said, I thought the singing toilet were fun.

Sarah [00:47:05] I’m dead. Oh, my God, I can’t believe. Wait, we have to go back to the sports betting. I’m sorry, I need to get this off my chest. The combination of sports betting and a Kardashian, I was like this is what’s wrong with all of us. I hate this form of celebrity that it is propping up a scourge on our sister. They’re both A Pox on Our House, the Kardashian and the sports betting. Sorry.

Beth [00:47:31] This section of Pantsuit Politics is brought to you by us being in our 40s. Thank you so much. It’s a very get off our lawn moment.

Sarah [00:47:38] And then, of course, we had the Mike Tyson MAHA ad which was so sweet. Am I supposed to trust Mike Tyson? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing in that ad?

Beth [00:47:52] I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where they decided to make this. I just want to know everything about the decision making process that led to that ad.

Sarah [00:48:00] Now, there were so few trailers, but I am very excited about Disclosure Day directed by Steven Spielberg. I’m into it. I’ll be watching it. Sign me up.

Beth [00:48:09] Yeah, it looked really intense. Ellen was like that looks like a horror movie. And we talked about how, no, not a horror movie, but intense.

Sarah [00:48:17] I don’t want to see the Ryan Gosling one where he’s trying to put the sun back on fire though. I don’t know why that one didn’t appeal to me, but the Steven Spielberg one did.

Beth [00:48:24] I was just happy to see movies in there.

Sarah [00:48:26] Yeah, I like a Super Bowl ad heavy with some trailers because I love trailers. I will sit and watch trailers until I realize I’m watching trailers that were like made three years ago and the movies are already out. We’re doing ads, but is there anything else you wanted to say about the musical performances? Obviously, I thought Brandi Carlile just was perfect when she sang God Bless America.

Beth [00:48:52] My favorite moment is when she was singing and they showed one of the players who was just feeling it. You could tell he was really feeling it in his heart. And I thought that’s exactly how we all look when Brandi Carlile was singing. It was great. I thought it was great. Yeah, I loved it.

Sarah [00:49:07] Yeah, how could you not feel it in your heart? And then there was Charlie Puth singing the national anthem and I was just very distracted because all I could think is he should be a bigger artist from the Taylor Swift song. And I’ve got to be honest with you, Beth, I’m not really sure I agree with that assessment.

Beth [00:49:20] I felt that that national anthem was like every Christian rock song ever written.

Sarah [00:49:27] Yeah, it was like he’d had like a easy listening.

Beth [00:49:32] Just strange amounts of auto-tune, the chorus behind him, the synthesizer. It’s just like you plug and play a Christian rock version of the National Anthem. So I was not into that at all.

Sarah [00:49:44] And especially after Brandi, like, she was much better than him artistically, vocally, performance wise. I just was like maybe we just let her do it next time. Or maybe she’s like I don’t want to sing that song because it’s hard. Although, I am confident she can handle it.

Beth [00:50:01] She could handle it, but America the Beautiful feels a lot more true to her than the national anthem. I don’t know who would have been good to follow her. Probably somebody who went in a totally different direction, but just maybe not this particular direction. I did want to say I liked the logo for the Super Bowl very much. It was so colorful and happy.

Sarah [00:50:20] I Want to say, Beth, that we have spent an enormous amount of this episode talking about the Super Bowl and have not discussed the actual football.

Beth [00:50:29] There’s a reason for that.

Sarah [00:50:30] It was so boring. Look, I know what’s happening now thanks to Travis and our high school football team. I probably understand football better than I have in my whole life. I know what to watch for, I know what’s going on. I know who to a root for. And I was like I finally pay attention and this is the game I get? It was so boring

Beth [00:50:51] There’s so much to admire about great defense, but it does not make an exciting sporting event.

Sarah [00:50:56] It really doesn’t. And now I’m afraid that’s what everybody is going to do. And what is a special team? What does that even mean?

Beth [00:51:11] I’m probably not the best person to answer that, but I will say I bet that’s not what everybody’s going to do. I bet there are a lot of conversations today about what are we going to do because that was very boring. I’d be really interested on what the drop-off in viewership was because I mean we were into the third quarter and I said to Chad has there ever been a Super Bowl with no touchdowns because that’s looking like a possibility here.

Sarah [00:51:34] But this is what happened with my Felix’s beloved Chicago Bears. They wouldn’t start playing until the fourth quarter. Listen, I’m not a poet. Y’all want to shorten football games. I’m all for that. Let’s take it down to two quarters. I’m into it.

Beth [00:51:46] This is the opposite of how our attention spans work though. You can’t save it for the fourth quarter, you got to do something early on.

Sarah [00:51:54] It really was. And I apparently am not a football witch because they flipped the coin and when the Patriots won the coin toss, I thought they’re going to win. I even said it out loud to the room full of people, I was like, I think the Patriot’s are going to win. Clearly that was wrong. And when they almost got shut out, I thought maybe I’m a witch and I just misread the energy and I was feeling that they’re going to get shut out. But now I just don’t think I’m football witch. I’m witch in other ways, but not when it comes to football.

Beth [00:52:20] Well, congrats to the Seahawks fans.

Sarah [00:52:23] Big congrats. I went to a lot of Seattle Seahawks games in my youth and my summers in California. So my stepmother had a family up in Washington, had a Seahawks sweatshirt. Big fan.

Beth [00:52:34] Between the cheerful logo and the halftime show, I was really ready for spring and excited for some outdoor times and some delicious treats. It just helped me see my way out of winter a little bit, so I enjoyed that.

Sarah [00:52:52] Next year, the Super Bowl is on Valentine’s Day. Did you know that?

Beth [00:52:55] I did not.

Sarah [00:52:57] It could lead to some fights. Maybe you might start making your plans now, everybody, to adjust accordingly.

Beth [00:53:01] That’s true, America, we’re going to have to get down to some brass tacks about our priorities here next February.

Sarah [00:53:10] Thank you so much for being here today. A reminder, our paid subscribers on Substack get early access to tickets to our live show and the accompanying Spice Conference this week. So you can check out the show notes for more information. We will be back in your ears on Friday with a new episode and until then, keep it nuanced y’all.

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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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