Pantsuit Politics Flashback: 2019

The first impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, heat on social media, and great music

Pantsuit Politics is celebrating ten years of podcasting this year!

A lot has happened politically, culturally, and personally in the last ten years. This summer, we’re revisiting each of the years we’ve been podcasting with a special flashback episode. Today, we are looking at the big moments and lessons learned from 2019.

We’d love for you to celebrate with us! Join us for our 10th birthday celebration in Cincinnati, OH - or with a virtual ticket - this July 19. Learn more and get your tickets here:

Pantsuit Politics 10th Birthday Celebration

Topics Discussed

• The Year of Ugh: Government Shutdown, the First Impeachment, and Jeffrey Epstein

• Learning Lessons and Rising Temperatures on Social Media

• Outside of Politics: Cultural Highlights of 2019

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• Covington Catholic, the Shutdown, and House Committees (Pantsuit Politics)

• Racism and Values in American Politics (Pantsuit Politics)

• Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer for President in 2020 (New York Magazine - Rebecca Traister)

• How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation (Buzzfeed News - Anne Helen Petersen)

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.

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

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

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Flashback 2019, a very special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are revisiting the 10 years that we have been making Pantsuit Politics. Next up, 2019, the last year of the before time, as I think about it, Beth, feels like it should have been a simpler, easier time but, spoiler alert, it was not. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

Beth [00:00:33] They're never simple. Every year, the last 10, you're like, maybe, nope, nope. Maybe it's coming for us. That year is coming. Well, we want to tell you that we are not only celebrating here on the show, but we will be celebrating in-person in Cincinnati on July 19th. Now the in-person tickets are sold out for that show, but we really want everyone to be there. And thanks to our sponsor, Substack, you can get virtual tickets to join us. The link is in the show notes. You'll be able to participate in polls and feel like you're there with us. We hope that's our intention. So grab those tickets and be with us on July 19th for our 10th birthday party.

Sarah [00:01:11] Next up, 2019. Beth, I'd like to give every year a little label. I call 2019 the year of, ugh.

Beth [00:01:34] Okay.

Sarah [00:01:35] Some of you are evening making the sound right now. You look back and there's some things that I think we're making harder than we needed to. We should we should have taken our minute to rest when we had it. We didn't know we needed it so badly at the moment. And then there are things that I'm like we weren't paying close enough attention to that. That's what we really should have been upset about and dialed into. But let's get into all that. Let's talk about 2019. The government shut down. It was the longest government shutdown at the beginning of the year; 35 days from December 22nd to January 25th. It was all about the border wall. Approximately 800,000 federal workers were furloughed or working without pay. Can I confess something? I don't remember this.

Beth [00:02:21] I didn't remember it until I listened back. And then I heard us saying things like, "This is so stupid, it doesn't have a point. There's really no goal. How do you negotiate when there's really no goal?" And I thought, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sarah [00:02:35] I feel like I really should have been dialed into this government shutdown, but I was not. I think back and I'm like I don't remember being mad about this. I don't remember why I was mad about this. I don't remember any impact. I don't remember some of the ones we got closer to because I was traveling and the national park system was like, oh, no, please don't shut the government down. But that's bad. The near misses that directly affected me have more impact in my memory than the long one. Obviously, the main reason I probably don't remember it is because wasn't a federal worker.

Beth [00:03:08] Yeah, what came to mind for me when I heard these conversations were some emails from federal workers that we got during this time period, because it really did affect our community. This was serious. This was so, so long. But it tells you how much was happening this year and what was difficult to understand in this year. Because what I remember about this year is reading transcripts of hearings and court documents and the Mueller report and thinking about the Ukraine impeachment. That is what absorbed my time in 2019 in a way that the shutdown we were just like can they do it? Can they get it together? Come on, guys.

Sarah [00:03:48] Yeah, the impeachment came pretty soon in the beginning of the year. And then in March, we get the Mueller report. And I look back at both of those moments and all I see in my head is a deflated balloon. That's what I think about when I think about the first impeachment and the Mueller report. That can't be good.

Beth [00:04:13] The first impeachment is hard for me to think about because I get so angry. Again, a sliding glass moment, a pivotal moment, you just wonder what would have happened if the allegations made about that call to President Zelensky of Ukraine had been taken more seriously, had the Senate conducted the trial differently, behaved differently? Everything about it, you just think, man, is this a moment that could have altered the course of our history in a very, very positive way? And it doesn't serve to get stuck on things like that, but I can get really hung up on that one because I always thought that was a bigger deal than Mitch McConnell wanted me to believe it was.

Sarah [00:05:01] I don't know. I think I might be thinking about the sliding door in the opposite direction, actually. Because you know what really sticks in my brain? It's all the reporting that Zelensky didn't think it was a big deal. It didn't even clock with him. And I'm like why were we so worried about it if he wasn't? If he didn't clock it as influence, then should we have been so worried about it? I just think if someone else had done this, let's go to the most likely suspect, Richard Nixon. First of all, Richard Nixson did do stuff like this. Like when he interfered with the negotiations with Vietnam during the election with Johnson. So this did happen. He didn't get impeached for it because there's a part of me that's like, well, no one else would have done this because this is a distinctly Trump thing to do. Are we mad about that? Because isn't that what people wanted from Trump? They wanted that distinctly transactional Trumpian approach. There's a little bit of where I'm not saying I agree with it, but I can see it from that perspective. I can see it as this pursuit that only made him stronger. Because if you're going to go after somebody like him-- that's what I look back at this. I look at the shutdown, I look back at the impeachments, I looked back at the Mueller report. If you going to go at somebody like him, it has to land or the pursuit only makes him stronger. That's what I see looking back. All this just made him stronger.

Beth [00:06:46] That almost makes the point for me of why I view it in the opposite direction. Because I think the phrase that you're avoiding is if you come for the king you can't miss. And to me, this event is when we decided he can be a king, it's fine. I think President Zelensky didn't clock this as influence because he's in Ukraine where Russia is exerting its influence constantly. And this is the moment where we as Americans said the fact that he's using this office for his personal political project, he's using this position and his influence in this position and his control over military weapons and foreign policy for himself, we don't care. And to me, that opened the gates that have not closed since. And it disgusts me.

Sarah [00:07:39] Here's where we've never been honest with ourselves, and I don't think we were being honest with ourselves at that time. For most Americans, they weren't seeing him as an isolated incident. We were talking about him like he was a special case, for sure, but they never saw him that way. They saw him as just a continuation of what every president does. They saw it as they all do this. At least he's honest about it. They all do this. At least he's doing it for us. Hey, they all do it. They all pedal influence. They all get what's best for him or their cronies or their party. They all do it! I accused, rightfully so, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney of much of this behavior that I was so mad about with Donald Trump, but I always talked about Donald Trump as if he was some history-shattering example. And I think that's what I mean. We talked about him like he was a history. We were making an argument to the American people that he was some history- shattering example and the American people I don't think they were saying, "We don't care. It doesn't matter." They were saying this is not an exception. Everybody does this. Starting with Nixon, starting earlier. I think that's what I keep playing with as we go back and listen to these episodes, that we really were trying to hold him up as some-- because he is different in a lot of ways, but I just don't think the American people saw him as different in this way.

Beth [00:09:25] Well, I think that he is not as aberrational as I tried to say he was during this time period. I will concede that point, but I will not concede that this wasn't something new, especially because since Nixon, we had gone about a project of trying to say, how do we make government more transparent, more accountable? How do we hold presidents to account when they screw up? Did we do it perfectly always? No, the Bush administration is an example of that. But this was so blatant. And the American people had an easy time shrugging it off because their elected representatives shrugged it off. Well, some of their elected representative. Could the Democrats have made a more compelling case? Perhaps. Did Democrats at every turn make it easy for Republicans to go, "Oh my God, you guys again," sure. Sure. There are lessons to be learned, but the political lessons that you take from that time period to me do not change what actually went down. And the fact that it was wrong and I do believe it was a high crime and misdemeanor for which he should've been impeached and removed from office. And I just look back with such sadness that that didn't happen. Because I don't know that if a president Mike Pence had come into office at that moment, as much as I disagree with Mike Pence on basically everything, I just don't that we would be here today having lost so much in Ukraine and having lost much in the world because of what's happened in Ukraine.

Sarah [00:10:57] I think back on this first impeachment and I wonder do we still have impeachment as an option? Does it exist in name only and not practice? That's the other thing I think about. I just think the thing I was not fully grappling with when you talk about elected representatives, or we're talking about Republicans, because the only check on a president is his own party now. That's this system that we have designed or let design itself. That's the other thing. I think so much of that project of transparency took place at this very high level of bureaucracy, completely detached from the American people. The American people didn't want inspector generals. They don't know what that even means. They wanted term limits. They know what means. I think that that's the problem. It's like it was happening at this intellectual, academic, bureaucratic level as the government itself became further and further away from the American people. And that's why you can't get invested and feel wronged by a process you already feel excluded from. Like how far is it from everybody's daily lives diplomatic calls from a country people can't place on a map? That's really far away.

Beth [00:12:24] And I think this has to be laid at the feet of Congress again, because what Congress built along that path to greater transparency and governance allowed Congress to again not really get its hands dirty. Have the inspector general do the oversight work for us. Have everything be lost in a sea of reports. And I am for inspectors general. I believe the government is too big and complicated for Congress to directly oversee everything. But in so many ways, members of Congress I think can be rightly accused of insulating that body from having to take a stand against the executive and particularly against members of their own party. And I think that in that way, some of these efforts toward greater transparency and better government have just fed that cynicism and that sense of everybody's just looking out for themselves.

Sarah [00:13:16] Yeah, I really think that that's what's at the core of all this. I don't think it's people don't care. They just have not seen or been convinced why it matters to them and why this is different. Because really what the argument always was with him is like can't you just see? Can't you see how ridiculous he is? Can't you just see that of course he's breaking the rules? But some people can't. In the same way that that was the argument about Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal and George W. Bush and lying about the Iraq war, it's not hard to find a through line. It just isn't.

Beth [00:13:58] Because what we really want and fairly in a lot of ways is to say, I like this person; they can handle it. That's their job. I'm going to go do my job now. And I think that a tragedy of the last 10 years is that that's just not working. And I'm sure it's a longer tragedy than these 10 years, but to me the lesson of these 10 year is like even if you choose someone who's great and who really cares about the country and really wants to do the job well, they are stuck in a system that makes that exceptionally difficult. And they really need the power of the public to help advance any cause, even a small one.

Sarah [00:14:43] Well, and I think the other part that I didn't take seriously enough, we spent so much time on the Mueller report, so much on the impeachment proceedings. But what's had a longer tail than Jeffrey Epstein in 2019?

Beth [00:14:59] That's true.

Sarah [00:15:01] What's had more impact as far as deep-seated resentment towards both public education and higher education than the Varsity Blues scandal? Because what were you telling people? We were saying, okay, Mueller, that's an attorney you should trust. That's an FBI guy you should trust. While over here with the Jeffrey Epstein, you should definitely not trust those FBI guys who definitely probably knew and ignored it. So just this one's good because we say so. And this one is not, but they're just outliers. They're just bad apples. In the midst of telling people there was all this corruption and systemic discrimination, we were basically saying, Jeffrey Epstein is just a bad apple. When people are like, "I'm seeing everybody in the halls of power in photos with this guy and you're telling me this is just an outlier? That's not what I see. That's not what I experienced." And especially with like Varsity Blues, that is what they experienced. And then they just got confirmation of all of it. And it's hard. I look back and I'm like, man, we talked about Jeffrey Epstein one time when he killed himself because I wanted to just put it in a box, and because it complicated some of the narratives in my own head about our institutions and cynicism and who to trust and who not to trust.

Beth [00:16:16] Yeah, I remember us debating should we talk about this more, and just concluding that what is there to say? One, it's grotesque, it awful, it painful for the victims. How do you do this in a way that respects the people who were hurt by it? And two, there was an official knowledge available about it. There is just kind of this sea of what's happening on the internet. And that was the story, the discrepancy, between the official knowledge and what the public was circulating and saying, clearly there's a there-there. Why is no one getting to the heart of it and quickly?

Sarah [00:16:53] Well, and that discrepancy really is the story of the last 10 years. The discrepancy between the official knowledge and what people feel like they can see with their own eyes or hear with their own ears. And the way that the internet just is the ocean that fills that gap between the official knowledge and the experience. And whatever you want, it's got it for you.

Beth [00:17:21] And, look, we're recording this episode a little bit before it will be published. Maybe things will change between now and then. But the fact that there's no closure around Jeffrey Epstein whatsoever now is also a stain on the country. It's really bad that we haven't, in some more meaningful way, put a full story into that official knowledge kind of landscape where we can all really grapple with what are the lessons learned here? What are the mistakes made? Who should be held to account and has not been? I'm not sitting around waiting daily for a list of names or anything as I know some people are, but I am waiting for someone to tell the comprehensive, well-sourced, well-researched story of what went down here and what went wrong in our response to it.

Sarah [00:18:13] Even now, here we are six years later, and Virginia Dufrey, one of the main accusers, the one in the photo with Prince Andrew, has just committed suicide. There's still so much heartbreak out there. There's still some many unanswered questions. And again that desire to just wrap it up, the desire we talked about in 2018 to just say, it's going to work out, we just got to get through this, we're going to wrap it with a bow, we're going to get questions, we're go get our questions answered, of course nobody killed him in the jail. Because that's what I felt at the time, there was just this obsession with the fact that he had been murdered, that I thought, man, this is just like full conspiracy theory. I didn't want to feed that, that I ignored the real questions around what happened when he was alive, whatever happened surrounding his death. There are still questions about what happened around his life and his predatory behavior and his crimes that just fueled this sense of with the right attorneys, with the amount of money, with the right college tutors, you don't have to obey the rules.

[00:19:31] And so when you're crowing about someone like Donald Trump not following the rules, people were like, yeah, duh. Of course, he doesn't follow the rules, president or otherwise. So we had all this going on domestically, but I think globally the two stories that really broke my heart and lent to the sense that the world was on fire is that it was literally on fire in the Amazon. And then we had Notre Dame Cathedral burned down on April 15th. That story broke my heart. Obviously, I went out of my way to go travel and see it now that it's been reopened, which is a testament to humanity. If you need some sort of healing from the last 10 years, may I recommend to you going to Notre Dame Cathedral and seeing the beautiful, gleaming, white interior of this place that has stood as a testament to so much since the Middle Ages. But at the time it just felt like, ugh, one more thing. One more heartbreaking thing.

Beth [00:20:37] The Los Angeles fires felt so shocking to me. And as I've been looking back at our old episodes, they really should not have been. There were fires every single year. Every quarter or so it seemed like we were talking about some really significant fire in a part of the world and saying we're only going to see more of this. And that's been true. We have only seen more of it. But it's like the government shutdown. Here's this really impactful thing that is really speaking to a thread underlying our politics. And I guess because I haven't personally been impacted by one of these fires yet, I don't immediately say, oh, well, this year, this fire. I have to see it in that progression of what we've been doing.

Sarah [00:21:29] But you know what? I think the fires could very well follow the trajectory we talked about with the shootings in the previous year in 2018. That it's going to feel like we're on an intractable journey to more and more and more. That's what our brains do. It's a negativity bias, right? It's only going to get worse. We are on a one-way street to worse. So we always do. But always there are things happening that we don't see. That's my training from the Good News Brief, right? That even if it's not the solution we wanted, even if its hardening school buildings and we were like, that's not a solution, but it has helped and it has. We reported on a prevented school shooting not a month or so ago because people are figuring out solutions. They're not waiting for the one solution they think will fix it. They're like, fine, we'll find another way. They're doing that with tip lines around school shootings. And this is going to be true for fires as well. I was in Dublin a couple years ago in the Liberty University library, which is stunning. It is beautiful. It is a testament to human knowledge. It's gorgeous. And they realized after Notre Dame they did not have a good enough fire suppression plan. They had not very much of a fire suppression plan at all. And so they took years, I think it's still going on, taking every book out.

[00:22:57] They had to vacuum all the dust because the dust itself is a historical object because it's been there for decades and decades. And catalog people, I guess, who catalog dust (I don't know. There are crazy jobs out there.) they're doing all that. They're taking every book out. They're shutting down this major tourist attraction, but they're all of it to protect the library from fire. You saw it in even Los Angeles, that the Getty Museum had used this technology we've learned after fires in Hawaii and other places to harden the environment, to protect the infrastructure. And so we're not always on this trajectory to worse and worse and worse. That doesn't make headlines. You're not going to see as many headlines about the fire prevented at Liberty University's library as you will about Notre Dame's fire, but it's happening. That Cathedral now is stronger than it's ever been because they've rebuilt it the way it was built and they've added all the stuff we've learned since. And so I have to remind myself of that, too. That it's been helpful especially around some of the gun violence to watch this trajectory take place across these 10 years and to remind myself every year wasn't just hard on top of hard on top off hard. We were learning lessons. We are instituting those lessons. They don't make headlines, but it's happening.

Beth [00:24:19] Yeah, I think that's all true and really interesting. I was thinking less about the fire and more about what lands in your brain and plans itself as a memory even as you're absorbing-- and not just absorbing but working in all of this information. And I think one thing that I've realized looking back over these 10 years is just I've got to give myself a break because we aren't really meant to make memories around every news event. And that feels like a sense of grace for the present, too. And I can see myself working differently this year, I think in part because of this exercise, just realizing I just can't build a chamber in my head for every single thing that feels important today. Even though it is important and it is changing the scope of things, the space, the neural pathways available to me are understandably wrapping around that which really lands in my life and my family and my community. It doesn't mean I don't care about the rest of the world, but it does mean I can't expect to set up like a little school inside myself for every kind of event that grabs my attention in the course of a year.

Sarah [00:25:40] That's why I'm so grateful for the Good News Brief, because that's what I've built over these last several years, is that muscle. I clocked that situation in Liberty University. I was like, okay, good. Because you have to build that muscle along with the paying attention to the world. You have to start cataloging and taking in the other aspects of these news stories. I don't know if I'd have clocked it. I don't know if I'd have remembered it certainly that moment in Liberty University for one thing if I had turned away from the heartbreak of Notre Dame. It's two sides of the same coin. You don't clock the hope if you don't let the heart break affect you. And I think that's what I'm so grateful for, even in these most difficult years, is that I know that I'm doing both at the same time all the time. It's hard, but it's worth it to say, I see that that's where we went astray. But I wasn't the only one that noticed that. Of course, other people noticed that and did things.

[00:26:47] I keep thinking about this article I read about the bottoming out of juvenile detention. And they are talking about the crack epidemic. And they were saying, yes, of course, there were all these negative consequences. But you know what else happened? Communities were like no one's coming to save us. We have to find our own solutions. And they did, and they're still in place. And they don't make headlines, but they're there. And I just think that every hard year we clock on flashback, lessons were being learned. People were innovating, people were seeing something and going, well, we can't do it this way anymore. The slow burn across all this is social media. I think this is the year we talked about the Netflix documentary. You can start seeing it bubbling up in our episodes, like, hey, this mass experiment on the brains of ourselves and our children is probably not turning out as we had hoped it would. Just FYI, you can just see it bubbling off a little bit at a time.

Beth [00:27:45] That's the episode that I picked as my spotlight episode, was the Covington Catholic situation at the Lincoln Memorial. And that's completely a story about social media.

Sarah [00:27:54] Well, let's talk about that next.

Beth [00:28:05] I was very nervous to listen back to this episode because this is a story that has been, I don't know, laundered so many times. But I listened back January 22nd of the year and we had just been in Washington, DC for an event that was adjacent to the Women's March. And we're telling a story in the episode about getting on the plane from DC to Cincinnati and how you could just see that some people had been at the Women's March and some people have been at The March for Life because they happened the same weekend. And also that weekend was the Indigenous People's March. There was so much marching going on this weekend. No wonder it fueled some fires, including the situation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that took place between people who had been at the Indigenous Person's March and a group of kids from Covington Catholic, which is just a few miles up the road from my house, who had been at the March for Life. And so the first part of our discussion was like, hey, March for Life is probably not a good field trip. And I think that take holds up.

Sarah [00:29:14] Yeah, that always bothered me when I lived in D.C. The March for Life is a bunch of high school kids. That's just the long and short of it, guys. If you've ever been there during the march, it is a massive amount of high school kids. As a person myself who really leaned in to my religious self-righteousness during my high school time, I'm just always a little like, "You might not always feel this way, guys,"

Beth [00:29:37] Well, and how different now that all of it gets captured. You might not feel this way later, but there may be videos of you that live on YouTube for the rest of your life showing how you conducted yourself at an event like this. So that's what happened. You get these clips of an encounter between a high school student and an older gentleman, and suddenly everybody's weighing in and the conversation escalates so quickly and there's discussion about doxing the kids. Then the kid is suing media outlets and winning some of those cases and losing some of these cases. It was all such a spiral. I was happy when I listened back to hear us saying, "Hey, this is not good for us." And that's part of the clip that I wanted to play here.

Audio clip: Beth [00:30:22] The whole bulleted list of things about this interaction are true. It is true that the initial videos were shown without context that I think is important. It is also true that that context does not absolve these kids have responsibility for what they did. And it was still disrespectful. It is also true that I think they didn't understand the impact that their actions would have when they started the dancing, chanting, cheering, jumping around, and that the adults with them might not have either. And everyone is still responsible for all of that. And we just got to be able to hang with that messiness because there is a lot to be learned here if we'll do that.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:31:00] Hold attention.

Beth [00:31:03] So we could see at the time that there was incomplete information hardening in everyone. And I was glad that we could, but then it made me think through how this was really before short form video became everything. And so how much of this lesson did we really learn and where should I be doing this here are all the things that are true at one time exercise and I'm not, it's just passing me by?

Sarah [00:31:32] Well, that's interesting you say that because 2019 is TikTok's breakout year. We weren't on TikTok, but a lot of other people were. And it would be interesting to know how much of this virality of that moment took place on TikTok because this was when you started hearing it. I think still at this point TikTok was really dances.

Beth [00:31:50] Yeah, I was living this through Twitter. Twitter is the lens that I was taking this controversy in.

Sarah [00:31:55] But it's so interesting you say that because my episode where I'm like why were we doing this to ourselves, is we were getting so upset and really doing exactly what we were recommending not to do in this situation, which was to de-escalate around his tweets about the squad and garbage countries. And they should go back to where they came from. Why were we escalating around women in a position of power and recommending de-escalation around a teenager? I went back and I was like, oh my gosh, we did a whole episode on a tweet. Why were we giving him that much attention? And then I was, like, okay, when did this take place? Well, not surprisingly. He did this in the midst of all the Mueller report was about to come out, impeachment proceedings. It's classic. I'm so much better at this now being like, okay, he's done something incendiary, time out. What does he actually not want us to pay attention to? But, man, I was crying. I was so upset. Why?

Beth [00:32:58] This is when I changed my party registration.

Sarah [00:33:00] I know. Do you think like why were we so upset about him insulting women in power who are more than capable? Because this is definitely where I started to see the power play. This is also the year I started to see Nancy Pelosi very clearly for the genius that she is for what it's worth. Through the government shutdown, through the impeachment, like watching her. This was when we got the, "I'm a Catholic and I don't hate," which is a gift to my spirit. I think about it all the time. So why was I crying about these women in power? They didn't need me to shed tears. They're big girls. They're more than capable of protecting themselves. They're all still in power for what it's worth.

Beth [00:33:35] Because it wasn't about them as much as it was about all women, I think, because we were living in the world where Brett Kavanaugh had just been confirmed. We're still hearing people spill their me too stories everywhere, because this is the moment when it felt like how much more do we have to share about the experience of being a woman for us to just be treated with some basic respect? Because all of this was cumulative. I didn't change my party registration because of the go back where they came from comment. But that was the last straw for me because it was just a moment when I thought what is left to fight for in the party if this kind of thing is okay, and this kind of thing on top of all those other things.

[00:34:25] The mountain had piled up to the point it was like the Jenga tower that toppled over because of the one piece. I think that's what it was. I'm not mad at myself at all about that. I wish I had done it sooner. To me, it was like there were these clarifying tweets and moments from him where the bankruptcy was so obvious. And it didn't have to be obvious to everyone for it to be obviously to me. I get that the political lesson is that it wasn't obvious to everyone, it's still not obvious to everyone. If it is obvious, people believe everyone has their flaws and so they can look past it, fine, whatever. But, for me, it was just a moment when I thought, "I got to plant a flag around something. This just doesn't work for me anymore."

Sarah [00:35:15] Well, it's interesting because the moment I picked out, it's really not through the lens of gender that we were talking about this, primarily it was through the lens of race. And I have this moment where I'm just wholly convinced that this is going to be the death knell of the Republican party, because they're so racist. I think we should all be forced to listen to me say this.

Audio clip: Sarah [00:35:35] This might be a short-term strategy that works. Fear and hate and xenophobia and racism. Let's not fool ourselves that sometimes that motivates people. So it might even work now, but the idea that this is not going to do permanent damage to the Republican party I think is insane. And so I can put myself in this space where I'm like, yay, this is going to kill the Republican Party.

Sarah [00:36:09] And as I listen to that and I just hear from myself and I hear from a lot of our conversations, particularly around race-- I don't mean like Pantsuit politics, I mean like culturally, globally.

Beth [00:36:22] But us too.

Sarah [00:36:23] But us too. That is just can't you just see? What's wrong with you? Isn't this obvious? There's no persuasion. It's just if you're a good person, you see race in America this way. And if you are a bad person, you see race in America race this way That's what I hear. This is the 1619 project comes out this year. The tenor of there's one way to think about this if you're a good person and not a racist is like really reaching a fevered pitch. And same for the Me Too movement. There's one to think about this if you are a good person. And I think 2019 is also the year our first book came out, I Think You're Wrong, but I'm Listening. So I'm trying desperately to occupy so many different spaces. It's also the era my brother passed away from a check every box death from despair. And I think this is where I was trying to make it all fit. I can hear myself.

[00:37:31] I think that's why I'm crying. That's why I'm so emotional. I'm just trying to make it all fit. I want to be a good person. I want the people that love to be good people, but I'm seeing this suffering in the black community. I'm seeing this suffering in the American community. And I can feel myself just trying to shove the pieces in and just go, okay, everybody just get on the same page and we'll all be good people. We don't have to keep fighting anymore. And you guys could just read our book and we'll be in tears about this tweet, we'll also be over here on Glenn Beck's show promoting our book, which was a super freaking weird experience from that year. We'll be on the Mike Huckabee show. I feel like I'm just tap dancing. You can just see me tap dancing constantly, constantly, constantly.

Beth [00:38:13] Well, and we were still saying Sarah from the left and Beth from the right at this point, which was just miserable for me. People were telling me directly that I must be racist all the time because I was from the right or because I was a Republican. I distinctly remember experiences when we were out speaking about the book and people would stand up and address a question to me that was basically like, "How do you sleep at night being associated with this party?" It was hard. It was hard and it was shitty in a lot of ways. It was great and it was an honor and it shitty. And if we were losing that capacity to persuade and being really instructive, I think that it is very much a reflection of some of the pressure that we were under. There was a ton of pressure in this time.

Sarah [00:39:07] Well, and here's what blows my mind about it though. Okay, we're all tap dancing. We're feeling all this pressure. We're trying to make it right about systemic racism. We're trying to make it right about the Me Too movement, sexual harassment, sexual assault. We're holding it all. We're trying to fend off Donald Trump. And at the end of the year, there's a real conversation where everybody goes, "Yeah, I think Joe Biden." So many layers of this. The guy who led the Clarence Thomas hearings. Sure, yeah, good. Good idea. Post-Kavanaugh. Let's look at Joe Biden and go, he's the right fit. This old school politician who used to be pro-life. Tracester did a really good piece. I totally forgotten about it where she was like, are y'all kidding me right now with this Joe Biden talk? Like we're all tap dancing. We're all feeling burned out. This is the millennial burnout year. This is when Anne Helen writes that article and we all go, oh my God, yes. And we're like, I know. I wrote in my notes we had all these questions about Joe Biden. We had this deep bench of our dreams, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and we all go, no, no for sure, that guy.

Beth [00:40:22] Which probably was more instructive than we realized at the time. Because it summed up in so many ways like when you're burned out sometimes you just give up and you go, fine. Yes, fine. And that's really what happened with that primary because I was looking back through these episodes too, and it's like the first democratic debate, the fifth democratic debate. And we're like these debates are like an hour and a half on the finer points of healthcare policy. And it's a different universe from what's happening in the Republican party. And there's some awareness of that with people who aren't particularly political. And so I think when Joe Biden put it away in South Carolina, literally everyone just said, okay, fine.

Sarah [00:41:07] That wouldn't come till next year. I just was very totally consumed about how much questioning there was about him because he was seen as a front-runner at the end of 2019. And you know what, the thing about it is were they debating the finer points of healthcare policy or were they also tap dancing? I remember a lot of tap dancing from this phase in the Democratic primary.

Beth [00:41:26] I do think that when people write Substacks now about the groups and the activists, this was a pivotal time for that. That was the energy.

Sarah [00:41:36] Yes. Again, felt like being a Baptist. You're never good enough. You're ever, ever, good enough, just so you know. Never good enough! That's why we all felt so burned out. And it's definitely when Yascha Mounk came on and said when you cannot control the other party and the other part is the only check on Donald Trump, then what do you do? You control what you can. You police within your group. That's a totally normal reaction. We were all worried. A feeling I'm very familiar with because I'm feeling it right now. We're all worried we're not fighting Donald Trump hard enough, so we want to prove it in some way that we're not the people in Germany who just slept on the Nazis. I know we're all doing that moral calculation. So how can I prove to people that like, no, I'm on the right side of history. And you can see that so much in 2019.

Beth [00:42:30] Yeah, and I feel like it's all exacerbated because it's never only or even mostly about Donald Trump. It is the manifestation of Donald Trump in your community and the people that you love and the spaces that you spend time in and just trying to figure out like, man, who am I in all of this? And how do I love and find love and be good enough somewhere when the world is a sorting exercise right now.

Sarah [00:43:06] Well, next up, let's talk about the cultural stories of 2019. Beth, I'm still mad about Avengers Endgame, because when I was tap dancing and I was burned out and I went to the movie theater and I wanted to sit down and go on a journey with the Avengers where the good guys won and the bad guys lost and no one told me that it was part one of part two, I still feel that pain. I'm so mad about it. I was about probably an hour and a half into the movie and I looked at Nicholas and said, "Wait a second. Does this have a sequel?" And he was like, "Yeah, it's two parts." And I almost got up and left. I was like how dare you do this to us in the year 2019.

Beth [00:43:57] And leave us in utter despair at the end. We had committed so much to Marvel at this point and then they left us in utter despair this year.

Sarah [00:44:11] Outrageous. Well, and again, though, this is another moment though with Marvel, where you felt like here's another thing we thought was just going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And this was really kind of the peak.

Beth [00:44:23] It absolutely was the peak. And Marvel took this peak and said, how do we squeeze everything out of it? Which is, I think, kind of another force that's sort of outside of politics, but that we were feeling everywhere. Like, now they want me to watch 15 TV shows. That's where it's heading.

Sarah [00:44:46] I'm not doing it. I'm out. I don't do any of it anymore. Are you still in the universe?

Beth [00:44:50] I watch the movies. I can't do the TV shows.

Sarah [00:44:53] All of the movies? There's still a lot of movies.

Beth [00:44:55] Yeah, we go see the movies.

Sarah [00:44:56] No, [crosstalk].

Beth [00:44:57] I'm rooting for them. I love these kinds of stories and I love just a fun kind of summer blockbuster movie, so we go. I liked the Thunderbolts. I'm excited for the Fantastic Four. I feel like maybe they're starting to find their footing again. I think the message that we need some scarcity here is a good message that they should keep leaning into. But it was very fun to be on that journey of building to Endgame. And I don't know that they can ever recapture that completely.

Sarah [00:45:26] Well, we also got this Little Nas X this year. Another brick falling from the wall of country music. I feel like this has also been happening over the course of our time at Pantsuit Politics because you get Beyonce's Lemonade, which I maintain is her best country album. I feel very strongly about this. It's a country album, they didn't call it that at the time, but that's what it is. Then Little Nas X comes along and you're seeing the bricks crumble bit by bit.

Beth [00:45:53] I would characterize that differently though. I think country music was being built into something new and a lot more fun and a lot more accessible to lots of people. That was a good song. There have been a lot of innovation that was exciting.

Sarah [00:46:10] Now, I was a little slower on the Billie Eilish train. This is when she comes onto the scene. I was very confused by her at first.

Beth [00:46:16] We made people so mad when we talked about Billie Eilish the first time, because neither of us were that into her and it was like the hottest, most controversial take I think we'd ever had at that point.

Sarah [00:46:26] I don't remember this. Did we say that and people were mad?

Beth [00:46:29] Oh my god, the number of emails that we got explaining to us that Billie Eilish was a genius, it was a lot.

Sarah [00:46:36] But they were right!

Beth [00:46:37] They were right, but it was also a very 2019 phenomenon. It was like, "You guys are being shitty because you're too old for this and because your take is a little bit ableist and because of this." It was very, very 2019. If you wrote to us at that time, I'm not mad at you at all. I'm just telling you that the volume of messages on this, again, reflected that sense of like everything feels out of control so I'm going hard at what feels within my grasp.

Sarah [00:47:05] Well, this maybe wasn't the peak cultural story for the nation, but as I was looking back 2019 gave us the Highwomen. It's been so long, can we have another album, ladies? If you don't know the Highwomen, I'm sorry. You should look them up. It's Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, and Natalie Hemby. It's probably one of my favorite country albums of all time. It's so, so good.

Beth [00:47:34] And that's why I feel like you have to look at this time as like a great time for country music. Instead of it being dissembled, it's like, wow, it's just being celebrated in a whole bunch of different ways and spaces. That album had like a real kind of Bluegrass undertone, too. Like there's just a lot of resurgence around what country music could be and mean to all of us.

Sarah [00:47:58] I don't mean dissembling is like-- I mean the country music industry that was trying to build a moat around what they thought country music should be. And there's Lil Nas X throwing a bridge over one side, Brandi Carlile and her girls are like shooting an arrow up one end of the wall, Beyonce sneaking in the back in some sort of Trojan horse, you know what I mean? They couldn't hold it off. They couldn't hold off the innovation. They couldn't frighten people or whatever the crap they do. Shut them out. Because good music's good music. And that's just the long and short of it. Now I think Highwomen probably is more accurately described as Americana right now, which is fine. I think country's becoming more expansive as far as definitely the style of music and probably more pop than what you and I grew up with. That's why I loved Highwomen. Because it could have been a Trisha Yearwood album. There's just, well, probably a little more rock and roll than Trisha was ever up for. And just speaking to so many of grown up lived experiences, I just love it so much. Now I did do what I do with albums, which is I just played it so much that I wrung every bit of emotional impact out of it. I actually don't want to hear Crowded Table again as long as I live, but it was so good at the time.

Beth [00:49:21] It was really good at the time. Country music is, at its best, such a vehicle to describe all of the emotions that we just spent this episode naming. And so it is great. It makes me think of that John Craigie song called Presidential Silver Linings, how he talks about how we have the best music when Republicans are president. If there's a bad president, then music gets much, much better. And then in the Clinton era, we had Chumbawamba. That may not be how you view politics, but I do think there is an observable trend with music.

Sarah [00:49:54] I'm sure there's a Chumbawamba equivalent of 2019. There was some sort of trendy music. I mean, now that's what happens, man. This is what happens when TikTok comes on the scene big time. They will just take a song. I don't want to hear that Dochi song, Anxiety, ever again, because it's just, good Lord. They do the work for you in the short form video. Everyone uses the same song.

Beth [00:50:17] Well, two things. One, the weirdest experience I have of that is whenever they use the White Lotus theme at a baseball game. It's so bizarre. Like the club remix White Lotus theme at a basketball game is a strange thing.

Sarah [00:50:29] That is weird.

Beth [00:50:31] The other thing is I don't mean to be dismissive of Chumbawamba. Don't email me. I get it. Chumbawamba is actually a really deep band in a lot of its music. It's just that Tubthumping wasn't it.

Sarah [00:50:42] I'm hearing songs of the 90s influence in that analysis. Why do you know that much about Chumbawamba?

Beth [00:50:50] They have a lot to say, and I don't mean to take anything away from them as a group. I'm just saying Tubthumping probably not the best that we all have. I think they feel that way as a group, too.

Sarah [00:51:02] I try to wrap it up, because I do feel like probably the biggest story we were missing that we'll all look back it's like the year that nobody took seriously that the iPhone was coming onto the scene is TikTok. If this is the year TikTok came on the scene, that's what we should have been talking about every single episode.

Beth [00:51:18] Yeah, that makes me sad, but I think that's correct.

Sarah [00:51:22] Because they just sneak up on you. You don't think you need to be taking seriously all these people doing dances, except for when it's Charlie, what's her name? And she's built a million dollar career from dancing on TikTok. Well, then maybe we all should have been sitting up a little straighter and listening a little harder.

Beth [00:51:42] Because you tell yourself like, well, people are just dancing. How great. We probably said that at one point. How fantastic that people are dancing. Good, we need a break. We need some relief. We need some treats. And then you also don't want to be a person who's so paranoid and skeptical about everything, which is where I feel myself now. If you put in front of me a headline about how AI is melting the brains of children, I'm like, I'm in, I'm clicking, I am reading it. And I don't want to go too far in that direction either. So it's just, ugh, the technologies.

Sarah [00:52:15] It probably makes a lot of sense that we spent so much time talking about how 2019 was the year of, ugh, the year of burnout. And there was a real opening for TikTok to come along and say, would you like to watch something completely mindless? Because you couldn't do that on Instagram. Instagram was highly politicized. You commented, you said something, you didn't say something when you were supposed to say something, then forget it.

Beth [00:52:41] And you were your own press secretary on Instagram and Facebook for sure.

Sarah [00:52:44] All the time. And so it shouldn't be surprising that TikTok came along and said, would you like something easy, very, very easy? And if you don't want to see anything political and you want to watch people build doll houses or whatever the hell it is that tickles your fancy, great news. We'll serve it up to you. And not only that, it doesn't have to be social. You don't have the comment. You don't have to do anything. You can just sit and relax and let your burnout fade into the background.

Beth [00:53:16] And what would we have said if the ghost of technology future had come to us and said, now the price of this will be the following. It's hard to see at the time.

Sarah [00:53:30] Well, we got of the ghost of future years really knocking at our door because next is 2020 and the pandemic. I had a five-year journal where you answer the same questions for five years in a row and I started it in 2019. So I had one good opener of before time, before the years that float afterward, then you can really kind of trace the passage of the pandemic and all its impacts across that journal. That's what we're turning next. Guard your loins, peeps. Next week, flashback 2020. Thank you so much for joining us for this series. I'm really enjoying it. I don't have a great memory. I'm a very forward oriented, present and future oriented person. So this has been a good practice for me, Beth.

Beth [00:54:24] Yeah, painful, but good. And also it always leaves me with a sense of gratitude because I think we were in it together and this could have been the year that we all said, I can't do this anymore. And we didn't, we kept going and I'm proud of all of us for that.

Sarah [00:54:39] That's right. So we're going to keep going next. We'll have a new episode for you on Tuesday and then we'll do 2020 next Friday. Until then, keep it nuanced y'all.