Pantsuit Politics Flashback: 2022

We look back on the invasion of Ukraine, the January 6th hearings, the overturning of Roe, and the slap at the Oscars.

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 look back at 2022. Sarah explains why she thinks the slap at the Oscars was such a pivot point, and we reflect on the invasion of Ukraine and the January 6th hearings as big moments as well.

Topics Discussed

• 2022 as a Pivot Year

• What Mattered Most in 2022?

• Outside of Politics: Cultural Highlights of 2022

Thank you so much for listening! We’re currently out for a short summer break. We’ll be bringing you new episodes of Pantsuit Politics on Tuesdays and finishing up our flashback series on Fridays. We’ll have a couple of new More to Say episodes for you each week, but no Good Morning and no spicy bonus episodes. We’ll be back in your ears in real time and on our regular schedule on Monday, August 11. Until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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Episode Resources

Republican’s Life-Threatening Pregnancy Collided With Florida’s Abortion Politics (The Wall Street Journal)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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

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Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:09] And this is Beth Silvers. You're listening to a special episode of Pantsuit Politics Flashback 2022. We are making our way through time and have arrived at 2022. So much in this year.

Sarah [00:00:21] This is the year of the 10. I believe this is the year.

Beth [00:00:27] I am fascinated by that perspective. We're going to talk about all of it. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the January 6th hearings. Lord help us, the slap at the Oscars.

Sarah [00:00:35] The slap. It is a pivot point, Beth. It's a pivot point.

Beth [00:00:39] We're going to get into all of it today. A lot to unpack with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight.

Sarah [00:00:46] We also wanted to let you know that we're going to take the next two weeks off. We'll have prerecorded episodes, maybe some reruns for you on the next few Tuesdays. And then the next two Fridays, we will finish out the flashback series with 2023 and 2024, and then we'll be back, raring to go on August 12th. Our kids are starting back to school. We're going to get back in the swing of things. It's going to be time. It's going to be time to put everybody to bed. Get everybody back on a schedule, including here at Pantsuit Politics. So get excited for that.

Beth [00:01:18] I'm ready. I love a routine. I'm to be in a routine, next up, let's talk about 2022. Sarah, the Council on Foreign Relations is with you. It said 2022 may be a hinge in history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Sarah [00:01:48] I really do, I think it's the year. It's the where I felt myself just take a turn. I just was like, okay, I'm done clinging to before COVID, before Trump, I'm just going to acknowledge that things are different and they, not just different, but I think I just accepted a lot of change and rejected a lot of the traditionally democratic, progressive way I had been trying to deal with that change, truthfully. This was a big moment for me. And I know that this is technically in the culture component of this conversation, but it really was the slap for me. The slap happened on March 22nd. And I felt like everybody had completely jumped the shark in their reaction. I was so done with people. And then Felix was diagnosed with diabetes on April 17th. And that diagnosis was also a huge pivot point for me, where I was thinking about when you were talking about this in the last flashback episode, where understanding people who hear everybody dies differently than you do. And if I'm being honest, that's where I started to have more empathy for those people. That sounds terrible, but I did. His diagnosis really, really changed things for me. I know that when I say this out loud, I understand how crazy it sounds, but I think it was because it happened in conjunction with the slap. Do you think people know what we're talking about when we're talking about the slap.

Beth [00:03:26] I was just thinking it might be good to remind us all because we have lived a lot of life since then.

Sarah [00:03:31] I've never moved on from that moment, but I understand other people rightfully did.

Beth [00:03:35] We're talking about the moment when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. And probably I don't need to say more than that because that does bring it home, right? Everybody remembers that moment.

Sarah [00:03:49] Yes. Look, we've been working this out a lot on our Substack where a lot of us started to feel abandoned or started to abandon the general narrative around allyship and privilege and that post 2020 moment particularly on social media. And this was the moment for me where I was like we've lost the plot. If we cannot identify clearly and definitively that punching someone, slapping someone across the face is unacceptable, then we need to go back to our corners, touch some grass and come back again. Remember when Glennon was like, hey, we don't hit people and then people went after her so hard she took it down? Does everybody remember that? I do. It's seared into my memory.

Beth [00:04:42] Do we want to stay on this or do we want to go other places and then come back to this?

Sarah [00:04:44] I think it is all here. I think all of us here, if you start the beginning of the year with this.

Beth [00:04:53] If you're putting that timeline together, the slap happened very close in time to when Russia invaded Ukraine. Which was, I think, that hinge point. When I was looking at the Council on Foreign Relations Analysis, I thought, yeah, a land war in Europe. We said it over and over again, a land war in Europe is just not something that we thought we would see in our lifetimes. There was a real definitive sense of what the post-World War II order looked like and what the rules of the road were, what countries were and were not willing to do. Even as we still had all kinds of foreign policy flare-ups, war, it's not like life was peaceful rolling into 2022, but this level of aggression was shocking. Even though Russia had already tiptoed into Ukraine, the force of this and the swiftness, it was kind of the international slap, right? Where it was just like, man, we're in a new era. People are doing new things. And we're going to have to have new discussions about those things and figure out where we're going from here.

Sarah [00:06:05] Well, and I think that was it for me. I had not really put the timeline together with Russia and Ukraine, but that was also a very definitive moment for me, just even an analysis, because I, in that moment, thought, this is not going to be as simple as people think it is. I feel really good about that take looking back on this moment. I remember in the news brief saying people are just assuming they're going to roll in here and crush them, but does anybody remember Vietnam or Afghanistan? It's never that simple. When people have something to fight for, they fight. And I think there was the presence of this extreme violence, then you have this, again, not comparable, but moment of physical aggression. And I think I just got in this space-- I don't remember when I read Conflict Is Not Abuse, but it was somewhere previous to this moment. Because I was already feeling like I would say on the show, "Words are not violence, they're different things." And I would get pushback. And I'm like, no, no, no, we have got to draw a line between actual physical impact, and then language that we find harmful. If we cannot distinguish those things, then we are good and truly lost.

[00:07:23] And in those moments, especially, I think what really-- I don't want to use the word radicalized-- pushed me through some shit was wildly enough in my personal life. Right when this happened at the Oscars, Griffin got attacked by another child. Also, I have a handicapped child. Felix has hemiplegia in this moment. So I'm like please don't tell me that first of all alopecia is the same as any other disability. That's the other part of that discourse around Will Smith that ran me up one side and down the other. And then don't tell me that just like words are the same thing as violence. My kid just got punched. Like it's not the same. And then when Felix got the diabetes diagnosis, it just became like it's such a visceral experience. Like a physically visceral experience. And you came to our house early after the diagnosis and watched us do manual daily injections. It was not just psychologically, but physically impactful. You're waking up in the middle of the night. I think the physicality of what we were having online discourse about versus not, do you know what I'm saying? It was just a visceral moment where I'm like we have got to distinguish between psychologically impactful things and physically impactful things or I'm going to lose my ever-loving mind.

Beth [00:09:00] I wish there were a word for life-altering experiences like this and the way that they reshape your political participation. Because I think that's an experience so many of us have. And you can kind of tell when you're in a moment like that. When something has just really shaken the foundations of your life and you've had to reorder the foundations of your life. You do just analyze the discourse very differently. But you also analyze what leaders are saying and doing differently. There have been a couple things in my life lately that have just made my political patience run out in terms of people who won't step in and do something with the job. I'm just really, really frustrated with how many people are in these positions of power. And I've never liked them making podcasts, but I'm really over the people who take a position in leadership and just chat about it all the time. I'm really, really tired of it. And it is because of things like you're describing where you just run up against something in your own life that is undeniable. You can chat about it all day, but there is a hard reality to it that you have to keep living. One step and then another step and another step. And so it is transformative. And I wish maybe the Germans have a word for this, but just a nice way to summarize, this was a hinge point for me personally in a way that translates to my politics and my perception of other people in politics.

Sarah [00:10:42] Well, think about it; we got a lot of governors out there starting podcasts. You know who doesn't have a podcast? Volodymyr Zelensky. That's who doesn’t' have a podcast. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Beth [00:10:52] Right.

Sarah [00:10:52] I'm not even mad at the governors. It's a different job. It's a different situation.

Beth [00:10:58] I'm mad at governors.

Sarah [00:10:59] I know. You know what I mean? Can we just acknowledge it's different? And I mean that hinge point, particularly when we talk about the physicality, the visceral nature of it, I think that's in June too with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, where then it is different. Then you realize that the before, when we were talking about restrictions on abortion, the physicality and the impact is different. But I think when you're in that hinge point and you're feeling it viscerally because of your lived experiences, this is when I really embodied the other lesson I've very much learned from 2022, and particularly from the overturning of Roe v. Wade as I've watched this sort of fall out over the next several years, is people don't learn the lessons I want them to. People do not see things the same way I do. And I think that's what was so disorienting about the slap.

[00:11:53] I was like, wait, what are we doing? How could we all not agree on this? It's mind boggling. But I think, especially watching women, I just read an article about this Republican legislator in Florida who couldn't get surgery for an ectopic pregnancy and she's like, well, it's just the Democrats' fault for fear mongering these doctors and thinking they're going to get sued. It's not the law's fault, it just the Democratics' fault. I was like, what? But 2022 is when I really started being like I think I just felt before then, like, I'm on the right team. I'm a moral person. I'm following the lead of my team as far as opposing Trump around COVID and all this stuff. And 2022 is when I started looking around and being like, oh no, I don't think there is a right team, I think everybody's on their own journey here.

Beth [00:12:53] Can we spend a second on that Wall Street Journal piece about Cammack, the Republican representative who is angry at Democrats for her inability to get reproductive care? I know how bananas that sounds.

Sarah [00:13:08] I know. My instinct is like, no, I don't want to spend another minute on that sentence you just said.

Beth [00:13:12] I hear you, but this is related to my more recent political shape-shifting as a result of life events. I kind of get it. That is of a piece with just saying, if you are in a position of power, use it. Are you really afraid to do what needs to be done here? I understand that perspective. Now, I fully understand the perspective of physicians who are like, yeah, I am. Look at the hospital policy, I could lose my job. I could be prosecuted by some insane attorney general who wants to make a name for himself or herself. I get it. But I can more see both sides of that because of personal life experiences like Felix's diagnosis, not the same as, but those moments where you come up against something that is raw and real and touches you in a variety of ways. And it just opens doors that were closed before. It makes things more complicated that seemed simple and it makes things that seemed simple more complicated.

Sarah [00:14:18] Yeah, I think that's it. I was thinking about it after you said that last time about people who hear this and I thought, oh no, that's me now. And I'm like am I less empathetic or am I more empathetic to a different group of people who reacted differently than I did for decades?

Beth [00:14:36] Both.

Sarah [00:14:36] Both, right? I'm not really sure what the answer is, but there is a part of me-- I don't want to keep on this, but I really think the slap had pushed me far because I felt like there were reactions that were just truly unhinged from reality, like completely detached from any realistic expectation of human behavior or human reaction. So I was already on the tipping point of being like, enough. Enough. Then when he was diagnosed, it just pushed me right over the edge. I think the other thing that happened this year, particularly for us on the show, where I think was like another moment is we had this big conversation about teen mental health. We had an expert on from the CDC who had perpetuated misinformation and we had interviewed this person. And I think that was another part where I was like, okay, I got to stop just deciding based on who's speaking, I agree with them. Because that's what I was doing. I was like, okay, well, this influencer or this expert or this politicians on my team, so they must be right. And I think particularly with the slap because there were a lot of people who were "on my time" who were saying things that I thought were completely detached from reality or any sense of ethical or moral obligation that we hold to our fellow human beings, that I was like, all right, well, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to have to decide each time like detach from the person saying it, whether I agree with what they're saying.

Beth [00:16:20] Maybe that's a way to characterize 2022, like the rubber met the road in a lot of places. We had been hovering around Russia's invasion of Ukraine forever and it did it. We had been hovering around the overturn of Roe vs Wade for years and finally the court did it! We had been aware that the phones were not good for the children and 2022 is the year where that became a huge focal point, where we did start to have data and we started to have good data and bad data and all kinds of in-between data about how kids are struggling in a new way than they've previously struggled. We knew that people had pent up anger about COVID. 2022 is year people were showing up at school board meetings talking about kids in litter boxes. Like just a whole bunch of things that had been pent up, released. But that release was not like a beautiful, healthy release. It was a dump.

Sarah [00:17:23] No. We were not circling around the fire, deciding what the lessons we had all learned from 2020 and 2021. That's not the energy that I felt in 2022. It felt like the bees out the mouth. I definitely felt like that. I definitely feel like there were moments where I was just like releasing some things. And I don't know how you feel about this, but I think with Russia and particularly with the protest in China, the zero COVID policy and watching that play out. I think this was the year they were doing like the blank paper, holding up the pieces of blank paper. And I thought, okay, again, there isn't an easy narrative around China. Yes, it's growing in strength and perhaps technical capacity, but it's also very, very fragile. There's some real brittleness here. Same with Russia. Now, I think I was paying attention to the wrong things in Russia as far as what would produce that brittleness and what would create tension within the population there. I look back on our conversations and I'm like, man, we were so obsessed with sanctions and I really but should have been paying attention to weapons. But with China in particular I think this is when I started thinking, okay, this isn't a monolith. There's not a simple narrative here. It's more complicated. Even though we all agree China is a threat. It is more complicated than that. They're not this behemoth that's every chart for all times is going to go up and to the right. Like that's not how it works.

Beth [00:18:46] I did a bad job applying the COVID changes everything framework to foreign policy.

Sarah [00:18:55] That's interesting.

Beth [00:18:58] Because it did. Think about everything that's happened on the other side of COVID. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fragility of the Chinese authoritarian regime, the Syrian government, October 7th in Israel. So much has happened on the other side of COVID, and it's taken me too long to connect that back to this moment when a lot of people reset and did decide, you know what, if we can shut down the schools and tell people that they can't go to their gym and give out massive amounts of government dollars for people to stay at home and lock down in other countries in a much more extreme way than we ever thought about doing here in the United States; if we can so substantially disrupt daily life for most of the world, then I can do this thing I've wanted to do. I'm not going to sit around and protect the status quo anymore. And it's taken me too long to understand how intense the impact on foreign policy has been from COVID.

Sarah [00:20:08] Well, I think it's a couple things. One, it is hard to know a place you don't live there. It just is. Travel can get you some places. I have this experience every time I travel where there's like political posters up. I'm like, oh right, they have elections too. Why does it hit me that way every time? That doesn't make any sense, but it does every time. I see a political poster, I'm like, all right, who's that? I'm excited anew. But I think some of it was there had been a globalistic, neoconservative, neoliberal, whatever you want to call it, post-World War II, 20th century order narrative that I think I definitely internalized. Which is there's this giant system, these giant governments in this giant global economic order, and there's just a limit to how much change you can do. There's just a limit to how much you can do within it. It's too big, it's too hard to move. It doesn't do big, dramatic things anymore. We're kind of moved on from that, right?

[00:21:18] World War II is over. We'll never see a moment like that again where the government steps in and does big, dramatic things. I think I just internalized that. Whether I agreed with it, whether I wanted it, I think, I'd internalized it. And I would imagine that was true around the world. And so when you see a government all of a sudden step up and do giant things like shutting the world down, like handing out all this money, then you're like, whoa, then I wanted to do more. I wanted to do some things for me. I think that's where you see this surge of populism post-COVID that wasn't non-existent before COVID, but definitely took off after where it was like, well, if the government's so big and it can do all this stuff, I would like it to do some stuff for me. I want to see some big changes. Apparently, we have a larger appetite or at least a larger resilience in the face of change than we thought we did. So let's change some more things. You would think that post pandemic people would really hunger for a return to normalcy. And I don't know if that's what I saw. I think what we experienced was more like I don't know what else could we shake up a little bit.

Beth [00:22:26] I'm sure there is a similar moment for every generation. I think for me I grew up believing that with the end of the Cold War, things were done. The new maps were made. The big outstanding to do on earth was done. It was checked off. And I think the lesson of the years, certainly the years we've been making this podcast, is that the inbox is always full. It's always full. I think 2022 was really significant, but as I was preparing this episode, the more we do these flashbacks, the less inclined I am to be like this was a big year because they just all contain so much. There is something that you said a minute ago that leads to a thing I'm really interested in talking about today. You said we were so obsessed with this that we missed that. And I would like to talk about that politically in the United States after a quick break. Listening to all of those voices individually on every single note leads you to this place where everything is filled with contradictions. Everything is filled with contradictions. And it has just helped me to know no I need to listen to this as a chorus. I can be really sensitive to the things that I'm learning from it and at the same time recognize I got to hear it with one sound and I've got to hear the trends. I have to hear the song, not the notes because that's the only way that I can make sense of the world.

Sarah [00:24:23] It is that loss of the universal that is breaking my heart right now, I think. It is that feeling that we have conversations and the takeaway is there are parts of me that are unknowable to you. There are parts my experience that are unknowably to you and the attempt to even try to understand is proof of your wrongness. And I think that is uniquely harmful to human beings as social creatures. So much of my values, my ethics, is the belief in the power and the divine found in the connection between human beings. And so when it becomes this sense of we are separate from each other, we are separate because of my sexuality, we are separate because of my gender, we are separate because of my race, we are separate because of nationality, we are separate because of socioeconomic status, there is just something fundamentally painful in that. I think the separation is what is hurtful that we can't find a path together. We can't find a connection. It's too much.

Beth [00:26:17] The painful part to me, Sarah, of revisiting our episodes in 2022 was recognizing that we were on it. Everything related to 2024, we were teasing out. We were talking about losing men in the Democratic party. We were taking about Elon buying Twitter, not just as a thing, but as representative of a thing under the thing. We were talking about activists running the Democratic Party in January 2022. We had that conversation.

Sarah [00:26:50] And the gerontocracy.

Beth [00:26:52] Yes. We were talking about people feeling shamed and berated instead of invited in. We did the chorus of 10,000 voices episode this year in April where we talked about that sense of everybody walking on eggshells because of what the internet will declare as the correct response to things. We were on all of it. And I think we as a business, as a show, we're so devoted to covering the January 6th hearings that they existed in two separate spaces. And so it kept me personally in the mindset that Trump is forever so obviously unacceptable. That these other trends are interesting and out there but they're not going to be determinative. And I paid attention to the thing that would end up not being determinative more than the thing that would even though we were working on both of those tracks at the same time.

Sarah [00:27:51] Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think the January 6th hearings and the way they were produced actually felt in concert with those larger conversations. The problem was the hearings ended and no one picked up the baton. I think if there had been an agreed upon production narrative that a campaign could have picked up, that would have been different. I think it really would have been different. But nobody was watching those hearings but us and some of our audience even as well-produced as they were. They had impact, but beyond the headlines, I think part of the problem always, including during the Biden presidency, is the only person with a loud enough voice willing to pick up the threads and make a coherent narrative for the people who don't pay close attention to politics is Donald Trump. And until we get another voice on the national scene that is that powerful and that skilled-- let's just be honest-- skilled at taking the national or international vibe and spinning it into a narrative, then he's going to keep defining it.

[00:29:11] He's going to keep saying well that doesn't matter and let me tell you why because no one else is commanding that level of attention and we live in an attention economy. I think that's part of the problem too, is it's like a vacuum situation. If Joe Biden had announced in the middle of the January 6th hearings that he's not running again, what would have been different? Hell, at the beginning of the 6th January hearings, if he'd said, you know what? This is important, I'm going to let the next primary and then we would have had a Democratic primary kicking off in probably as early as 2022 around the midterms. That's the other big part of this is the mid-terms that then confirmed that the Democratic party was doing everything right. Look at this, this mid-term, they didn't lose seats. And it really disconnected in the way you're very much describing these things that not just us, but lots of people were identifying from political, strategic and campaign impact. Do you see what I'm saying?

Beth [00:30:16] I do. And I do not regret the time we spent on the January 6th hearings. I think it was important and I think those hearings were well done. But the problem that I did not put my finger on, politically, looking toward the next election, which I'm just learning that we always should be as much as it's painful. Nobody watched the January 6th hearing and thought, all this effort is making my life better. Nobody, not even me. And politically, that is the question. Is this speaking to something that I am either struggling with or hopeful for? And that was not present. And it couldn't have been. It's a different purpose. That's a big ask. But that was the big moment that Democrats had in Congress, in media, in general. Like that was the democratic argument of 2022. And it didn't speak to what people needed. And we were identifying through all these other episodes that people had a lot of needs. And everything we talked about in the first segment, the school board meetings, it was showing up all over the place. Everything was flashing. All the indicators were going off. The check engine light for America was on.

Sarah [00:31:31] Including the slap. That was [crosstalk]. I swear, I'm going to die on this freaking hill. People think stuff like that's not important. It's massively important. It is an indication celebrity culture is basically like a dipstick for all of America, okay? It matters. Check the oil that way. So I totally agree with you. And I do think the other argument was Roe v. Wade and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That definitely helped them in the midterms. It was relevant. It was visceral. It had impact. It mattered. I think it would be interesting to go back and think about that question of what am I struggling with? What am I hoping for? Through the lens of Watergate and those hearings?

Beth [00:32:17] Yeah.

Sarah [00:32:18] Did that did that matter or do those hearings ultimately just put on display the dysfunction of our institutions?

Beth [00:32:26] It's a great question.

Sarah [00:32:27] You know what I mean? If that's all they're doing, if they're just putting the problems on full display without an articulable like Alexis de Tocqueville this is why this matters moment. This is why this is important. Which I think they tried to do in January 6th. They really went on the rule of law. No one is above the law. We have to do this. We have talk about no one is about the rule of the law, but I don't know if those hearings and those levels of investigation ever do anything except make people more cynical.

Beth [00:33:03] It would be really interesting to read a comparative analysis of all the other factors at the time, too. How were people feeling economically? What were the cultural threads? Like if you line up Watergate with January 6th along every dimension you can think of, what are the lessons that we learned from that? Particularly what are lessons for Congress? It feels to me like a lot more happened after Watergate on a bipartisan basis to say we don't want this again.

Sarah [00:33:31] Yeah, for sure. We did do the Electoral Count Act or whatever that name is. I can't remember.

Beth [00:33:37] Right. And I don't want to discount that.

Sarah [00:33:39] I don't want to do that. You know what? I'm glad they did that. I think that was good work.

Beth [00:33:43] Well, and also I've only looked at Watergate through the lens of someone who was not born at the time. That may have all taken a lot longer than in my mind it takes because I view it as one incident instead of being part of the unfolding of it.

Sarah [00:33:55] I definitely think we're probably closer to Watergate, like economically, culturally, politically, than we were to the Star Report and that investigation.

Beth [00:34:04] Yeah, for sure. I totally agree.

Sarah [00:34:06] I mean we were in a very different place in the 90s when everything was going. Nicholas just went to the Clinton Library and he was like, man, we were a proper country back then. We had surpluses, they passed legislation, like a lot of it.

Beth [00:34:17] Why has the 90s come back in so many ways, but not some of those?

Sarah [00:34:21] Really seriously. When we have a surplus and everybody's swing dancing. You'll know that the 90s are good and fully back. I don't know. I think that I do worry that so much of this-- we have an negativity bias anyway. So letting people mire in their cynicism and they're like "See, I knew it was broken" I think we need to think about that a little bit more. And we need to worry about that a little bit more. And at a certain point, we have to decide that there are things worth pursuing through our institutions, or else I'm not really sure what we're doing here. And there's plenty on this list from 2022 to pursue. Uvalde happened in 2022. We still were having devastating effects of climate change. Now, let me ask you this. How are you feeling about the classified materials three years later in the search of Mar-a-Lago How are you feeling about that? Where are we at on that?

Beth [00:35:23] I gave a lot of my one wild and precious life to following that case that I wish I could have back. It's unquestionably real that the classified documents are another indicator of how casually Donald Trump views the role of the office of the president. It is also undeniably real that seems like most of them have, in some respect. And I can spend all day and every word and breath I have articulating the differences between Trump and Biden, but the second classified documents were found in President Biden's garage-- as a political matter, this was done, right? All of the wind was out of the balloon. I go back to my sense that I shared in the previous episode. I just wish that Biden had pardoned Trump and we had moved on because I do believe that the pursuit of him through the legal system was never going to fly with the public. And in hindsight, I think all those prosecutors did their very best. People tried hard for the right reasons. It was a noble pursuit, but politically it was a loser.

Sarah [00:36:50] It's an attention economy and what did it do? It gave him a lot of attention. It kept him in the public eye.

Beth [00:36:57] And I don't know what that means for the rule of law. I don't. We can't run the rule of law on this attention economy. They're fundamentally at odds.

Sarah [00:37:08] That's where I'm really trying to take seriously some takes that previously over the last 10 years I've been on a spectrum of dismissive to snobby about. So I'm beginning to acknowledge that the people who speak about freedom of speech, when I would just blow them off and be like, okay, it's about a government passing laws that restrict your freedom of speech. No one gives a shit about Facebook. I'm kind of like, no, they were naming something real. I should have taken that seriously. That people want a culture of tolerance. I think that is true for some of the cynicism around the institutions. That we say a rule of law, but we all know that people's experience inside the legal system is different depending on how many resources they have and who they are. So if I'm just trying to stand on a platform and sing the praises of lady justice, when people have very different experiences inside the system, what am I doing? How is that helpful?

[00:38:32] And so instead of like blowing people off because you don't really understand what you're talking about, they're citizens and they have experiences within the system too. And so I need to stop blowing it off as like you just don't have enough data. There is wisdom in the masses-- not always. But even if there's not wisdom, there's something there. They're naming something. Even if I think they've gotten it wrong, you have to take seriously the naming of priorities, right? And I don't know, I just wanted everybody to wake up and care about January 6th as much as I did, in the same way I did. It's not like the polling has ever really shifted on this. Everybody's like that was shitty, they shouldn't have done it. We've pretty much stayed in that camp.

Beth [00:39:16] That's right. That was shitty, they shouldn't have done it, and also we want to move on. And all of these lawsuits did not allow people to move on, and that's what they wanted. And I honestly feel, in hindsight, what people want mostly is to just stop talking about Donald Trump. But I think that if we were going to keep talking about Donald trump anyway people were like fine, give me the upside of this. And did remember some upside from his early presidency and were like cool. Let's just do that again then. It's fine. It's going to be about him anyway.

Sarah [00:39:53] Right. And they don't trust you if you don't acknowledge any upside. And I think you see that thread so many places. You see it with MAHA. If you go in and say all the science is good and all healthcare is great, they're not going to believe a word you say. Rightfully so, because that's not true. That's not true. And so you create an opening for them to say like, look, you can't believe them. They think everything's great. And, look, that's what happened to me. I think that was like the moment with the slap where I was like stop pissing on my leg and calling it rain. I witnessed it. Something wrong happened. Stop telling me there was nothing wrong with what happened. Something wrong happened. I think that's part of it, too. This sense of like you won't acknowledge any complexity here and that undercuts your legitimacy and my trust in you.

[00:40:48] And I think even with the classified documents. I was like a person who could tell me this would never tell me because their job was not to tell me. But even when I hear them talking about like we have to beat China with AI, I'm like, how would you possibly keep this information from them? In the world we live in, are there any secrets anymore with this technology and the way we work? And I'm not sure I believe that. I mean, clearly it's not that dangerous because the Trump administration's been talking on their individual cell phones the whole time. So, I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't know how scared to be about classified information or security data being available. Because also you're telling me that China's been in our telecommunications infrastructure since about 2022. Help.

Beth [00:41:53] A bunch of things are true at one time and I don't want to over-correct either. That's a hard part about doing these look backs.

Sarah [00:41:59] Listen, we know we're going to do it, Beth. You named it in 2015. You said America likes to overcorrect and it's never not been true over 10 years.

Beth [00:42:07] That's exactly right. Here's where I am on the classified documents, which I think also is a corollary to where I'm on the whole picture. There is a reason to respect that system, even if China has all of our stuff anyway. It is a sign of taking your job seriously, showing respect for the people that you work with, having a devotion to your country. There are lots of places, and you talk about this in a lot of contexts, where some friction were doing some things that are a pain that you don't want to do, that make life harder, are part of being in the group. And are part of connecting to other people. And so I'm not ready to throw the classification scheme out the window. What is so depressing about the classified documents episode to me is the exposure that while everything in life happens in degrees, including crime and the justice system is messed up in part because it cannot be black and white, and there are different experiences for everyone and it always slants the wrong way. The person who deserves the most grace gets the harshest punishment, while the person who had everything in the world going for them gets off easy. That's exactly what happens around classified documents. The person who deserves the most grace gets the harsher punishment. And the person who had a whole team of people whose job it was to make sure they complied with the law, still ends up with shit in their garage. It's maddening.

[00:43:42] And that doesn't mean that we throw it all out. It means that it needs work and it needs people to do something about it instead of just chatting about it. This is my perspective on everything. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings here, but let me just speak my truth as we used to say. I hate protest signs. I hate them more every single year. I don't want to see reels of protest signs. I hate them. They read to me very much like the signs that lovely, wonderful people who I like very much had in their yards for a while. The sort of in this house we believe in science signs, okay? I hate all of that stuff because the people who disagree fundamentally with you see you putting up a sign that says look how kind I am as a dig on them. Look how kind am, you suck. That is why we're stuck, I think. Because both sides do this. Republicans say we're the party of tolerance. No, they're not. They shove you out if you don't tow the MAGA line in a hot second. Nobody's the party of tolerance right now. Nobody's to tolerate the party of openness to disagreement. And everybody gets their political kicks from being shitty about the other side. And what I've really been working on, especially as we've revisited these 10 years and I'm listening to myself-- which sucks by the way. Again, I don't know why I said we should do this because it sucks to go back and listen to yourself for hours and hours in the past. But I'm just realizing there was a contraction for me.

[00:45:30] We started this show and I am working full-time at a very demanding job. I'm commuting like more than two hours a day most days. We've got tiny babies. I am picking up the politics in bits and pieces, much more like the average person. So I think in those early days, I saw a lot of things a lot more clearly than I did for a couple of years when we started doing this full- time and it felt like our job to read everything everybody's ever written, and listen to everybody else's takes and then form our own. And there was this contraction for a couple of years where we're both really trying to stay in a lane and figure out what the lane is for each of us. And in 2022, I think both of us in our own ways started to feel like, oh man, I lost something. I lost something doing this full time. I lost something getting all the takes. I lost something trying to hear the chorus of 10,000 voices and conform to that narrative. The hardest thing with the slap was that our audience, which generally agreed with us, there was like a set of expectations. They would hear from us what they thought they wanted to hear. We would hear from them what we thought we wanted to here. There was something lost and the slap brought back some of that friction.

[00:46:54] And it also I think brought back for us some sense of like, we can survive that friction and so can our audience because that's real and we all want real human things. And so I try to look at the protest signs and say, I hate this. That doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do. That doesn’t' mean that protest isn't meaningful for the people engaged in it. It doesn't mean that people are wrong to want like a pep rally, something that gives them a sense of community and agency and belonging and like I'm part of something. So that's good for them. But it is also not the strategy that wins elections. What is that strategy? Like, how can I just make room? It's like you were saying at the very beginning about empathy. You contract in your empathy for some people and their experiences while you grow in your empathy for others. And how can that continuously be true? How can I make more room in my brain, not for what's right and wrong, but for what is effective and less so? And even more than that, what is everybody experiencing? Because we are a country where people vote. So like you said, even if the masses are coalescing around a viewpoint that is objectively dumb, it is still going to drive the bus. That's our system. So I just want to see that as clearly as I can.

Sarah [00:48:17] I always think about that piece that went viral, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. When really the summary of that article was, I don't know how explain to that you should care other people you complete piece of shit. Like what? Sorry, wait, huh?

Beth [00:48:32] That's how I experienced the signs, exactly like that.

Sarah [00:48:35] Yes. And, look, it is not hard to be empathetic for people you agree with or people who you feel are oppressed or put upon. It is hard to feel empathy for the people you disagree with and who you think are harming other groups of people. That's how you stay in touch with your humanity. The gateway drug is not hating immigrants. It's hating your racist family member. Like, that's the gateway drug to dehumanizing. And I think over the last 10 years in coming to a fruition in 2022, I was like, I just can't do this anymore. First of all, even if it felt good-- which it doesn't anymore, it stopped feeling good. I didn't even get the little high from being morally self-righteous anymore. I was just tired. Like even if felt good, it's not working. It's working because you and I have been talking about political disagreement at this point for what? Seven, six years? And the polarization is not getting any better because the mass decision is you're the worst, you're worst. That's where we'd all just settled. And still I think it's truly in my heart of hearts I do feel like this was when we jumped the shark and it's been getting progressively a little bit better since then. But I just think that until we release that death grip on you're the absolute worst-- and sometimes I will click through the politics stage page on my Substack and it does not look like it's getting any better.

[00:50:13] There is still this just fevered pitch of fascism on the move, everything five-alarm fire all the time. And people are just not going to be their best empathetic selves in those moments. And so I think there was just a part of me that thought I have to decide that there will be another day. That every moment's not the end of the world. Because when I think every issue, every moment, every headline is the end the world, then the stakes are so high, I can justify all manner of things to myself including dehumanizing people who I disagree with. And I think with Felix's diagnosis, just the presence some like really real stakes in my life every single day put stuff in perspective. I can promise you about April 2022 is when I started rolling my eyes at every online controversy about a tweet or an interview or a podcast. And I think this was Ukraine too. I just wanted to be like, give me a break. These people are in bunkers. Like everything can't be the end of the world. I think that's because it's hot right now. So I think all the time about my favorite summer meme. Every day can't be a holiday. Everything can't be about everything. This is the thing we named on our big, long, Substack spicy bonus episode. Because I think 2022 is probably when my husband said that to me. Everything can't be about everything. And I thought, yeah, I'm done. I'm out. I'm out of this.

Beth [00:51:53] Well, I think similarly, you get to 2022 and that's the year we get monkeypox. And to me, that was really significant because we talked constantly about COVID as a super unique event. And it was just a good reminder that nothing's done. Things are just going to go on and on in their own ways. We're always going to be contending with things. And so if I am part of any kind of political movement that believes everything is the most important thing that's ever happened, when do you get to say, actually, this was a good month? Actually, I enjoyed this year. Actually, we're having a lot of fun working on this problem. And that lightness is what I continue to look for. That's why I want to frame up the question as what are you worried about and what are you hopeful for? Because I do think people want to hear that. We were laughing at dinner the other night about this press conference-- and I haven't seen it so I'm giving you my friend Brian's re-enactment of this press conference that Governor Beshear did here in Kentucky. So there's a river between where I live and Cincinnati, Ohio that you have to cross. And that river has been in national news forever, the Brent Spence Bridge, because it's in such bad shape. And I was, while I was working, convinced I would die on it.

[00:53:19] So Governor Beshear has a press conference because they're going to build a new bridge there thanks to the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. But he's doing the press conference and Brian says, "It's pretty clear that he hasn't read all the notes that were prepared for him in advance because he tells the starting date for the new bridge and he reads for the expected completion date, check back later." He kind of laughs and is like, well, we're just happy it's getting started. And I thought, man, that just represents so much in one little vignette. That everybody's expectation of government work tends to be it's going to take forever. It's going cost more. When's it going to be done? Check back later. And I am really looking for those more moments-- like Holly Page named in an episode that we did more recently-- of just awe, where you go, oh my God, they got the bridge open again after a boat ran into it so fast? That's incredible. Oh my gosh, the highway is already back together? That's phenomenal. And I think that 2022 is where you just saw all this frustration being deployed everywhere. Okay, the next side of that, the people who are going to win on the other side of that I think are the ones who go, I got it. Message received. No more need to discuss this anymore. I have some plans. I'm going to try to change your mind.

Sarah [00:54:54] We're not talking about who's going to heaven or not. We're talking about who you're going to vote for in this election. We're not talking about whether or not you're a good person or not, we're talking about how you're going to fill out your ballot. And because those decisions are hugely impactful, it's almost like this really weird paradox where we have to dial down the heat so that we can strategically think about these elections that matter so much. They are really impactful on people's lives. Governing is important.

Beth [00:55:40] Sarah, we always end our episodes with something Outside of Politics. So in our flashbacks, we've been doing the cultural side, and the slap was the big cultural moment. But also this was the year of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

Sarah [00:55:51] Well, before we get to that, because we kind of didn't cover it in the headlines, but I think it was probably more cultural than headlines, is queen Elizabeth passed away. To me, that was another one where I was like you've lost the plot. Like you couldn't say anything nice about Queen Elizabeth or you got one million DMs about how you didn't care about colonialism. And I thought, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it anymore. This woman was a steady presence. We do not need one million qualifications about, of course, there's some complicated history from someone who's been, first of all, a royal member at all. And for like, what, six decades? I was sad when she died. I'm still sad she's gone. She was great. She made me feel better on the world stage as all this change rolled across our lives.

Beth [00:56:49] I think there's some complicated history should just be a forever assumption with every statement. It didn't bother me that there were people who were like let me tell you why she and the royal family suck. I think that's appropriate too. It was more like that sense that not everything belongs on the table. That there couldn't be some good because there was bad as well. That was just coursing through everything.

Sarah [00:57:14] Yeah, because everything requires qualification. Someone said it feels like you can't experience joy without apologizing. And I thought, yeah, that's it. I honestly think the biggest cultural behemoth who was like, no, we can experienced joy without qualification was Taylor Swift and the Eras tour. She was like, guys, we're going to dress in sequins. There's going to be lots of colors. We're going to have fun. And that's it, everybody. That's the whole ball game.

Beth [00:57:47] Yeah, so she announced her tour in 2022. I distinctly remember the moment when I saw that it was happening and I sent it to one of my friends and was like we got to go. And then Ticketmaster broke pretty much. Which is also a good metaphor for how things are. We're excited about something, oh, right. And it is amazing. It's a credit to her and her team that they got it back on track.

Sarah [00:58:13] Yeah, and that did not really affect people's excitement. It was just like, okay, this sucks, not great, but this is going to go forward, it's still going to be exciting, and everybody's going to have a great time. I think that that was a huge thing, too. I wish all of the moments in 2022 culturally were that positive. I do not feel that way about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

Beth [00:58:34] I think it is very, very relevant to where we are today though, too. Think about everything that has become this PR hall of mirrors through the lens of social media. And I don't think this was the height of it, but I think it was close to everybody starting to understand there is an industry out there to shape my opinions for particular people in conflict.

Sarah [00:59:04] Well, I think the problem with 2022, in particular this issue, is no one understood it at the time. Everybody just thought they were experiencing this trial individually on TikTok on their own, which is a banana's take. First of all, these people have not been studying at the feet of Anne Helen Peterson for as many years as I have. It's never just as simple as the interpersonal situation between two celebrities ever, guys. It's like thinking advertising doesn't work on you. Do you think they spend so much money on it because it doesn't work? Do you think these people spend so much money on lawyers and PR and stylists and all the social media consultants and crisis consultants because it doesn't matter and it doesn't work? Of course, it does. It was really, really disturbing to me how many friends of mine, friends my age who have existed inside celebrity culture, friends who went through Britney, you understand what I'm saying? Have been in the streets on this stuff. We're just like, oh, she's evil. She's screwing him. I'm like, what are you talking about? Because my red flags were going up.

[01:00:23] I did not understand astroturfing until Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. I didn't fully until that New York Times piece came out. And then like, a little bit, I was, like, I knew it. I knew something was up with this. First of all, Johnny Depp is not a sympathetic figure and has never been a sympathetic figure. So I was super confused by that. Not that I'm not used to people taking the man's side, Brad Pitt looking at you, done with you, FYI. Maybe it's a pivot point with celebrity culture and TikTok in particular, this moment, that we're just now finally unpacking and figuring out. But it just caught me off guard how many people who again have existed inside the celebrity industrial complex through like Perez Hilton, were just like, oh yeah, for sure she's bad. I'm like, wait guys, come on, we're smarter than this. We know better at this point. We lived through the 90s.

Beth [01:01:19] But this is what we were doing politically, so of course we were during it culturally too. We're just like pick our person and the other person is poison, the end.

Sarah [01:01:28] Amber Heard. Justice for Amber Heard. This was bullshit.

Beth [01:01:33] Justice for Amber Heard seems like a good place to leave 2022. Thank you all for marching through this moment with us. We appreciate you very, very much, especially those of you who have been along for the whole ride that we have been dissecting here. Just a reminder that we will be taking some time off beginning next week. We'll be back with you in real time on August 12th, but keep listening because we have all kinds of good things before you between now and then. Everybody, have the best weekend available to you.