Charlie Kirk's Death and the Doom Loop of Cancel Culture
The death spiral of online discourse & how to move beyond the doom loop of cancel culture
We talked for an hour and twenty minutes on today’s episode. As I referenced in that episode, I’ve also been in a two day long conversation with my husband and an ongoing debate/conversation with my eldest son as well. I’ve texted so many people. I’ve listened to podcasts. God save me, I even went on x.
This man, his death, everyone’s reaction to it is just about all I can think about, and it’s definitely all I want to talk about. That’s a sign to me that there’s something there. There’s something worth thinking about. There’s something worth talking about - even though it’s hard, even though it’s confusing, even though it’s painful.
It’s moments like this I am the most grateful for our work here at Pantsuit Politics.
If you’re in the same boat as me, this episode is for you.
Topics Discussed
The Life and Influence of Charlie Kirk
Algorithmic Social Media and the Death Spiral of Online Discourse
Moving Beyond Cancel Culture Cycles to "Soft Conflict"
Outside of Politics: Television & House Plants
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Episode Resources
How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right (The New York Times)
Christopher Caldwell’s big idea: The civil rights revolution was a mistake (Vox)Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America's Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power by Kyle Spencer (Harper Collins)
Dismiss Unite the Kingdom march at your peril (The Times)
Roundup of Charlie Kirk's Quotes from Sharon McMahon (Instagram)
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 [00:00:10] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:11] This is Beth Silvers. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. The major news story breaking through in our communities and our lives, continues to be the murder of Charlie Kirk in its aftermath. So today we'll spend more time processing what we know, what we don't know, why we think this is breaking through and how we're thinking about it. Outside of politics, despite liking Nate Bargatze very much, and liking TV very much for most of our lives, neither of us watched the Emmys. And we haven't watched a lot of what was nominated at the Emmys. So we're just going to talk about TV, what we're watching, when we're watching, why we're watching, maybe why we are not.
Sarah [00:00:49] We've heard from many of you over the past few days about Friday's episode, and we really appreciate that. We also have seen many of your sharing that episode. We have always wanted more than anything else to be a podcast that helps you have conversations with you people. So it's been really encouraging to hear from you. If you like the show and want to share it, please know that we're on all of the podcast players. If you want video, you can find us on YouTube. We're on Substack. And if there are ways we can make it easier for you to share our discussion so that you can have your own, let us know.
Beth [00:01:18] Next up, we'll continue to talk about Charlie Kirk. Sarah, when we were reacting to the news that Charlie Kirk had been shot on Friday, we were so in the moment of that horror that we didn't really have an opportunity to step back and level set on sort of what we personally knew about Charlie Kirk. And I'm sure that we've both spent a lot of time learning new things about him. So I'm wondering what your knowledge and assessment of Charlie Kirk looks like as we sit here today.
Sarah [00:02:05] That is so hard for me. I've said it on the show before; I don't sort people into good and bad categories. It's just not how my brain works. I can think something you've done is truly horrific. I have strong opinions about your behavior on a wide spectrum of things that don't matter to big deals. And I just don't then go your trash and you're done. I don't know if it's like a moral testament to anything deep within me, I think it's just how my brain works, how my personality is. I just don't do that. I find people endlessly fascinating when they do things that I think are dangerous, when they do things I think are beautiful. I am a fan of humans. And so I didn't really think about him as this like trash person, because I don't really think about people like that. Even people on the far right, even the proud boys, even the violent, the extremists. I think about them as extremists, but I don't have this big bucket in my head of good people and bad people. And so I always thought he was fascinating. I think he was fascinating because of his rise so young.
[00:03:25] And that's the thing. My husband and I have had a long conversation about Charlie Kirk over the last few days. And I said, I think a thing that's getting lost is he's so young. He was so young over most of his career. Can you imagine if your meteoric rise to incredible online fame had taken place since the age of 18 to 31? I don't want that journey for myself. It's just a young guy and his path to power. There's a fascinating New York Times Magazine profile of him that took place right after the election. I read it at the time. I reread it. It's super interesting. He participated in the profile obviously and it's very much about how he used the levers of power. Less sort of this debate that's going on now, more about how the rich boomer billionaire said like were so impressed by him.
[00:04:25] They loved him. They were really instrumental in his rise. They gave Turning Point an enormous amount of money. And Joe Walsh was like a mentor to him before they fell out over Trump. So I just think that the whole journey as it is a reflection of so many pieces of that movement and the discordant nature of so pieces of that moment was always really, really interested me. What I did not understand about Charlie Kirk until his death is how much and how strong a religious turn-- they touch on that a little bit in the profile piece after the election that he over COVID became very, very religious. But I don't think I fully understood the depths of that until his assassination. And so I've been deep diving into that and his religious orientation to the world over the last four years.
Beth [00:05:28] I didn't know a lot about him. I understood that he had both done a lot and was just getting started in a number of ways. I understood that people found him very charismatic, which I thought was interesting because the few times that I did take in sort of a video or a podcast conversation with him, I thought he seems fine, but I wasn't blown away by his charisma. So I knew that there was something that I was missing in the connection that people felt to him. I have a book that I've dropped in and out of called Raising Them Right, about Turning Point and about the ascension of conservatism among very young people, especially young men that I probably need to go back to and spend more time with.
[00:06:14] So I understood that he had really dialed into something that gets talked about a lot in democratic politics after elections, that if you want a community of voters to show up for the election, you have to show up for them a lot in non-election years. And I feel like Charlie Kirk really understood that. He wanted more young people voting Republican, so he went to them. He spent lots and lots of time on campuses with young people and lots and lots of time online where young people were. I also think that I missed cultural and religious influence he was exerting in the process. Over the last few days, my algorithms have fed me a lot of Charlie Kirk videos that have very little to do with politics and a lot more to do with dating and marriage and fatherhood and motherhood and his views on what makes a good life. And that has really helped me better understand the level of significance that he held to people who were invested in his work.
Sarah [00:07:31] Yeah, I've been really consumed by Erika Kirk over the last few days. The day he died I spent that night like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through her Instagram feed and looking at what she presented to the world. Because I want to be clear, this was an exercise in presentation and content creation and branding from both of them. They were very online.
Beth [00:08:00] And savvy and sophisticated and professionals at what they do. Absolutely. And I don't mean that like judgmentally, just neutrally, just as an observation.
Sarah [00:08:10] I was completely fascinated by this decision they made to not tell anybody she was pregnant, to not release their children's names, to keep their faces hidden, but they also post about their kids all the time. It's always their backs. You don't see them, but they're posting constantly. Even the video that's getting shared about how he took the Sabbath, it's video of him on the Sabbath. I'm like who's filming it if you're not using your phone? That sort of like meta situation. And I think that this turn can be linked to her. To him dating her, to him marrying her, to him having kids. He was procuring a life for himself that a lot of people want, a lot young people want and feel like is out of reach for them. And I do not think that should be underestimated. I really, really don't. In the same way Jordan Peterson reached out to young disaffected men and said, "Try harder. This is what you need to do. You need to let me give you a path. Let me give a solution.".
[00:09:13] And I think that that is a piece of this puzzle. That he was presenting family, this really idyllic family life. There's this video where they're saying like what's your advice? It's both of them. What's your advice to couples about to have a kid for the first time? And he's like she needs to quit work. If you're not making enough money, try harder. You need to be able to support the whole family on one income. And I'm like I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say I don't understand where he's coming from. I did not really full time for the first like five years I was a mother. Especially the first two years where my babies were really young. So I'm going to be like, ugh, that's so traditional and dated. Because I enjoyed that and it was a stressful situation financially, but it was a blessing too. But I also thought like, dude, everybody doesn't leave Turning Point USA. Everybody can't tap mega Republican donors for big O donations. So you're going to quantify that all and be like I'm really blessed. No, he did not. He was like, step up, try harder, make more money so your wife can quit. I was like whoa!
Beth [00:10:32] And, look, I think that that message was really appealing to women. One of the things I've noticed over the past few days is how many women that I've interacted with personally enough to be connected to on Facebook, posting about how important he was to them. And I think that message to men of try harder connected with a lot of young women too, that they wanted men to get their stuff together and be the kind of husbands who would support a family and be the kind of fathers who would be present and engaged and providing. I did work when my kids were babies. It was really hard. It's still really hard. I still feel pulled in a million different pieces.
[00:11:14] So I understand why this message was connecting and I know that we have people listening right now who are frustrated and are saying, "But what about the racism and what about the homophobia?" And what I'm trying to understand as I sort through what everyone is sharing about him, is what percentage of him are we understanding as we talk about who he was? Because he was so prolific and spoke and worked in so many different contexts and I didn't follow his career closely. So I don't know if someone was really into him what their primary attachment was to him. But I sense that it is not the pull quotes that are being fed from algorithms that sense that I am a more liberal person.
Sarah [00:12:02] Well, here's the thing. Again, I'm going to go back to this video, I'm going to pull us back just a minute because I think it's in service of what I want to say to what you just said, which is, so then she says, "And don't get tied to your birth plan." We had this birth plan and didn't go the way we wanted to. And I thought, well, isn't this a rich text on just all the levels? All the levels. She's out here presenting this form of motherhood and this form traditional family life and is also subtly saying I couldn't meet my own standard and it was really hard on me, which I thought was fascinating. And I say that because particularly in the last few days, but everything Charlie Kirk produced, and then Charlie and Erica Kirk, and then Erica Kirk now is a rich text and I want to encourage everyone to treat it as such. I want you to think about the people in your lives who have been listening to Charlie Kirk for hours. That is a very strong parasocial relationship. Hours and hours and hours, and hours. And I want you to think about the relationship you have with us. And it would not be hard for someone to pull quotes, particularly from me, and put them on the internet and make me seem like a monster,. And how would you feel?
[00:13:18] How would you if they did that, when you know me the way you know me through this parasoical relationship? When you've listened to me for hours and hours and hours and I have said things that have connected with you deeply in your lived experience. And then someone got out there and said, well, what about this? It wouldn't be hard, guys. It really wouldn't be hard. I shared Sharon McMahon's roundup of these same six quotes. And I thought it was particularly productive because I thought she did a good job of not just putting the quotes and being like, see, but saying, this is why people have a problem with this quote, which I do think is important. And I would encourage people who've listened to Charlie Kirk for thousands and thousands of hours to just think about that. Think if they don't have that relationship and say they see this quote, this is what it feels like to them.
[00:14:00] I think that's really productive and helpful to be like this is what people have a problem with that. Because I think so often we just we put this quote out there and be like see. And if people are like, wait, I'm confused, you're like, well, then you're a bad person. You're a racist. Or whatever the case may be. So I thought that was like move the conversation forward. But so many of these quotes, the one that's been going around a lot and Sharon put it in her roundup, it was from January, 2024. And he says, "If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified." Now, if you go to the conversation, you listen to the rest of the conversation like two sentences later, or two kind of exchanges later, he says, "I don't want to think like that. No one does."
Charlie Kirk (Clip pulled in) [00:14:40] If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified.
Co-host [00:14:44] Well, you wouldn't have done that before.
Charlie Kirk (Clip pulled in) [00:14:47] That's not an immediate--
Co-host [00:14:48] No, you wouldn't have done that before.
Charlie Kirk (Clip pulled in) [00:14:48] That's not who I am. That's not what I believe.
Co-host [00:14:51] It is the reality the left has created.
Charlie Kirk (Clip pulled in) [00:14:53] I want to be as blunt as possible because now I'm connecting two dots. Wait a second, the CEO said that he's forcing that a white qualified guy is not going to get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person. I say, boy, I hope he's not a Harvard style affirmative action student that has points for and he he landed half of his flight simulator trials.
Co-host [00:15:15] That's the thing. It's such a good. It's so fair.
Charlie Kirk (Clip pulled in) [00:15:17] And by the way it also creates unhealthy thinking patterns. I don't want to think that way and no one should right? So then I kind of sit down and I'm like...
Sarah [00:15:28] So he's trying to get at something I disagree with about what is our takeaway from affirmative action and DEI? Same for the quote about black women. He's saying like they're admitting it. They're admitting it when you hear quotes from like Sheila Jackson Lee, like I wouldn't have been in college without affirmative action. And his point is, see, you didn't deserve the spot, which is not her point, obviously. But again, if you go and read the quotes, there is a debate. You might disagree with it, but it's not like Charlie Kirk was out there arguing for segregation. I found a really fascinating kind of fell down a hole about his comment about the Civil Rights Act and we're worse off because of it. And I was like, okay, let me go dig up what he said. Went and dug up the whole exchange. I watched the whole exchange and he's citing this scholar, Christopher Caldwell. And there was a really, really great article on Fox where one of the Fox reporters has this exchange with Christopher Caldwell about the book that have been very influential in right-leaning circles. And it's a great conversation. It's not easy. There are no easy conclusions to make. No one's arguing that the Civil Rights Act was terrible for overturning segregation. It's a more complex legal and political argument than that.
[00:16:43] And I thought it was good. Not easy and not easy conclusions. And Charlie Kirk because of what he did leaned on a lot of easy conclusions sometimes, but especially on his show, less, I guess, in his debates. But I thought it was really interesting. There's a lot here. That's just what I want to say. Not a lot here that I agree with. That's not even what I am arguing, but it's a rich text. To me, I don't look at some of this stuff and go you're garbage. I mean, I'm seeing people on Facebook like this is greater than the purge of 2015. I just got rid of 500 friends. And I'm like please God, no. There's a lot here. And there's a lot here worth engaging in good faith with members of your own community. I'm not saying go fight in the comments. But there is a lot here that people are attaching to on both sides that I think is worth. It is really getting at some of the hardest, most difficult conversations we are not having. I'm not going to say attempting to have, because we're not having them in America right now. And I think that's why this has been such a powder keg because there's a lot here and it's not easy.
Beth [00:17:56] That Facebook comment that you just referenced is exactly why I'm interested in the rich text. It's not that I'm trying to tell anybody how to feel about this or trying to write any particular history of Charlie Kirk. That's not my job or desire of how I spend my time. It is because it is so clear to me that so many people who I run into at the grocery store or at a school event did spend a lot of time with him and identifies really strongly with him and they are rich texts. And I don't want to empty my Facebook page. I don't want to be weird at Kroger or in the school pickup line with people. I don't want to feel the kind of tension that this event is creating and tension feels like too weak of a word in this case. So that's why, to me, it feels worth it to just try to understand him as robustly as I can; and right now as curiously as can.
[00:19:06] I'm not going to say neutrally, but with as much curiosity as I bring because he is a proxy for people who I care about. And so I want to figure out what it is in him that they were connecting with and what it in the reaction to his death that they find so repellent. And how can I work through that? And at the same time, we know very little still about the person in custody. I want to learn as much about the alleged shooter as I can too because here is another whole set of subculture of text, of symbols that are outside my experience but that are clearly breaking through with a segment of the population. And I want to engage with that text as well.
Sarah [00:19:55] I understand people's concerns about the deification of Charlie Kirk, but to me the argument is not like he didn't deserve it. The argument is this is bad. This is bad for him. This is for his kids. You don't want this. Do you think it would be easy to grow up as the child of someone who is being described as a martyr and a perfect father? I am so sad for his kids. And when I watch like the communications from Turning Point and in the right with this martyrization of him and all this, I'm like, I thought you cared about his kids. This is such a toxic situation to put them in. Let him be human. Let him maintain his humanity, even in death. That is what we should all want. The thing that is true about Charlie Kirk, about his killer, about the college students on UT Austin in that video going around where they're like he deserved to die, good he's [inaudible].
[00:21:09] The thing is true of all of those people is that they are very young and they have grown up in an extremely online environment. That's what's true of everybody here. And so much of this processing has been happening in these extremely online environments that just warp and pollute in every which way you can imagine. I think some of the reasons what has broken through from Spencer Cox is that he has been saying that from the beginning. Like, put down your phone. Don't try to make sense of Charlie Kirk's death either because you loved him or because you hated him by getting online. To me, that is the thread. I mean, Charlie Kirk was an extremely online dude. And to think about what does that mean for our understanding of him? What did it mean for his understanding of himself? What does it mean for the understanding of his legacy and his death and what comes next? I just do not think can be underestimated.
Beth [00:22:21] And another truth here is I recognize that I am generationally removed both from the Kirk family and from the alleged shooter. I am generational removed from a lot of the dynamics that are central to this story. And the people that I'm primarily connected with online are too. Some a lot more than me. And they also are very, very online, just in a different way. And so it's happening in parallel these conversations. I think that the people in my age group and older who I see talking about this are interpreting it either as primarily about Christianity versus the world or about left versus right. And I think neither of those dynamics get at the heart of why a lot of young people were really attracted to Charlie Kirk, or at the heart of what might've been going on with the shooter. I think that those rubrics are dated. And I'm in it with you guys. I am dated in my rubrics for this, and so I'm trying to catch up and understand as much as I can. The other thing I want to say about the deification, there are people in my life who are so upset, lots of them, about flying the flags at half-mast and that kind of symbolic honoring of Charlie Kirk. And I think that there are a couple different things or at least I read a couple of different things going on there.
[00:23:52] I think one is what you said that it feels unhelpful in a lot of respects both to him and to everyone else. I think another has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk and is more about the feelings that people are containing about this patriotage system. Because this is happening because the president likes the people who like him and the people like the president get all the honor in the world and people who don't like the president get called satanic and evil and the worst. And so there's a whole argument happening here that is really not about this, it's just a reflection of it. And then I am trying to figure out how to talk my daughters through this because they are closer generationally to a lot of these dynamics than I am and we talked about how it was September 11th, maybe the flags are at half mask because of September 11. There was a school shooting that day, too. There's a lot to grieve. And it costs nothing to lower the flag. And if that provides a little bit of comfort to anyone for any reason, who am I to stand in the way of that? I don't know. I guess I just want to try to see all of the different things that could be happening because this is clearly only a little bit about Charlie Kirk. The provocation here is clearly only a little bit about him as a person.
Sarah [00:25:23] Well, I think what really rose me the wrong way is the constant critique of the transactional nature of Donald Trump. And then in a moment like this, the demand for a fair transaction. I can compose y'all's messages for you if you'd like. I can already hear the like I won't treat him a rich text because they don't treat us as a rich text. Correct. I'm not arguing that they do. What is this death spiral we're in? They do it to me, I'm going to do it them. And it's a literal death spiral. It's a literally death spiral! They don't deserve it, I am going to hunt them, they're hunting me, I'm going to hunt them first. What are we doing? I agree with you that Donald Trump would not offer me the same grace I am offering right now. Grace is unearned by definition, and so fine. He doesn't get to define my functioning. I will not function, I will not operate, I will not behave by the standards defined by those I disagree with, fundamentally. I will not do that. I define my standards. I define my moral and ethics.
[00:26:40] And, look, you're not going to want to hear this, but that's a lot of what people liked about Charlie Kirk. Is that he said these are my standards, and if you disagree with them, fine. But these are my standards. You might think his standards were homophobic. They were. You might think some of his standards were sexist. I do not submit to the authority of my husband in case anybody needs to hear me say that on the record, okay? But I do think that there was so much of the traditional family life that people feel like is out of reach for them, that he was advocating for, living, at least publicly, that appeals to people. And I can see that. Nothing is lost by me seeing that appeal. I'm not spreading his message by engaging and debating with people's felt needs. I don't agree with that. I'm so tired of the like you're platforming somebody. What platform, guys? We all live on the platform. Everybody's on the platform.
[00:27:48] It's like a whole other universe and we're all there in different ways and to different levels. But all of that I just think it sounds dated to me. It's sort of like I feel this like desperate clinging to an old way of engaging online or to an old way of understanding online. And if you need to be humbled in your understanding of what online culture is like, do a deep dive into this shooter and realize like, wow, there's like whole-- do you know how many things I've had explained to me by my 16 year old this week? A lot. Like so many. So no person is one thing. No idea is one thing. No movement is one. No group of people is one thing. This is also complex and that's okay. That's not some sort of moral out. You can only take a moral stand if it's simple. I reject that idea. I think you can have complex ethics and morals even in the face of being online in 2025.
Beth [00:28:59] I think part of what I am learning, both about Charlie Kirk's vision and the gravity of that vision, as well as the nihilism that seems to be at the heart of a lot of the subculture the shooter spent time in, is that in all of this complexity, it is someone saying, no, it's real simple. Let me make it real simple for you that is drawing people in. And so I want to take a quick break and come back to that sort of death spiral that you referenced and the draw of keeping everything as simple and as rigid as possible. Sarah, one of the phrases that I took from listener comments on our last episode, which are also a rich text, fantastic in so many ways, thought provoking, vulnerable, sincere. But one person said we're having this situation that's gone local viral. And I thought that was a really helpful way to describe something that I'm seeing, too.
[00:30:06] We are also having a situation that has gone local viral about a person who responded without any grace to Charlie Kirk's death online. And that person owns a business and the screenshots began and started circulating until that business lost an important contract. And it's kind of the mob coming in for this person, which is a dynamic we've seen in other contexts. I would not have expected to see it in this one. I've been a little bit surprised by that, but here we are. And we hear from the president on down to our local viral situations, people saying there will be retribution for this. There will be retribution for what we believe is a wrong reaction to this crime. And that feels of a piece with everything we've been talking about so far to me. That this is both about Charlie Kirk and not at all about Charlie Kirke, but what people have been holding.
Sarah [00:31:06] My quick hot take on the firings and the canceling of people is that that will end as badly for the right as it ended for the left because we did our fair amount of that as well in 2020 and 2021. Where you got hunted down for something you said, it got screenshotted, and then you lost your livelihood, you got publicly shamed. I've been really fascinated by what's been happening in the UK because they had these really awful, violent anti-Islamic protests around some violent events, local viral, very much so, in Southport and some other places in the UK. And people got online and posted anti-Islamic violent hate threats, and they got arrested. Two women got arrested and sent to prison for it. Fifteen months in prison, 31 months in jail. I think she got out early. So if you saw on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, these giant protests in the U.K. called Unite the Kingdom, where they were memorializing Charlie Kirk, that's what some of this is about. Some of these is like this far right movement in the UK around free speech debate, throwing people in jail for their Facebook posts about like a very pro Christianity bent. And so you can see why this was already planned by this guy who's pretty heinous, this anti-Islamic campaigner.
[00:32:50] Because there is like a real healthy dose of anti-Islam wrapped up in Charlie Kirk and wrapped up in the far right and wrapped up in this pro Christianity. It's like the mirror image of the pro Christianity aspect of so much of what he had to say was like an anti-Islamic bent. And I think that when 100,000 people show up in the streets, you should take that seriously. You should take the democratic action seriously. You can't just throw it all away because of who organized it because totally predictably, if you saw the beautiful images of them holding up candle and Charlie Kirk's image, know that there was also violence and arrest and some, like, pro-Nazi protesters mixed up in the crowd. But this idea that where is this coming from? What is it feeding off of? I think the free speech angle is particularly difficult because what a weird paradox.
[00:34:07] You're out there firing people and shutting people down because of what they had to say when Charlie Kirk's-- I think, and my perception of him over the entire course of his career, and not just the past four years, the strongest piece of his brand was open debate. We debate. We just talk. That's what we do. We don't fight. We're not violent. We talk. And yes, I've seen the post about Paul Pelosi. I think arguably in the best interpretation is that was anti-bail. And then again if you go on, two minutes later, he says, this is horrific. We don't want this to happen. So all of that is just such a circular firing squad. You didn't hear me and so I'm not listening to anything else you said. And you didn't hear me, so I'm not listening anything else to you said. Meanwhile, there's like a lot of people in the middle going like some of this I agree with. Not all of it, but some of it appeals to me. Not all of it. It is hard not to just be like Spencer Cox and be like throw it out the window, go touch grass.
Beth [00:35:18] It is so combustible and you start to hear I think that maybe free speech is just not a helpful construct for any of this. Maybe that's not what we mean. Maybe we mean I really want my speech to be respected and I really want to be free to disrespect your speech if I think it's wrong. And I think it would be helpful if we just admitted that instead of talking in abstractions. That's what I'm finding hard (again an understatement). What I am just running up against over and over again is my sense that I don't know the difference between symbol and substance anymore. I don't know where the abstraction ends and the specific or the pragmatic begins. This situation has made that more concrete to me than it's been before.
[00:36:30] I have felt that disorientation with Donald Trump from the beginning. I have spent more of my life than I care to admit just trying to think about the hats. What is the deal with the hats? What do the hats mean? Why are the hats so powerful? Is it just a hat? What is happening with the hats? I've spent so much time fixated on that. And I feel like that questioning and that disorientation, that confusion about what are we actually talking about here is getting thornier and thornier for me, especially as I watch this kind of free speech, but not the wrong speech. We don't punish people for their ideas except when we absolutely do as hard as possible. I don't know where we are right now.
Sarah [00:37:22] I think we're in a dangerous place. And I would like to be a part of the movement to get us out of it.
Beth [00:37:29] Agreed. Amen.
Sarah [00:37:32] I don't want to argue this way anymore. I don't want to be detective so that we can all find the one thing that gets to prove that this person's bad and we should all move on, or this person is great and we should all move on. I don't want to do it anymore. I just don't want to do it anymore. I don't find the micro analysis of people, true, good, productive, or even interesting. Because we are all so complex and we are universes of existence. All just entire galaxies of things. Including Charlie Kirk. That is true if you want to make him a saint and that is true if you want to make him a monster. I think the one thing if I squint really hard that I can find as a little bit of encouragement in this moment is people just seeing-- and I don't think it's just because of this moment, I think this has been building for a long time, that algorithmic social media is a poison. It is a poison. It brings out the worst in all of us. It does not allow for complexity. It gives you ideas you didn't even know you had and didn't need. You know what I mean? And it is particularly dangerous for kids. I found one of the most affecting images is that post the shooter's mother made about him getting all his computer gear and finally able to ignore them. It was just so hard to see.
[00:39:35] Just like it's hard for me to go back and watch the video of me and all my family coo and all and laugh and think it's so cute when we handed Griffin a cell phone when he was three years old. This experiment has gone badly and we should shut it down. And I really want people who care about a future for this country. Not people who are ready to fight in the streets for a civil war, and not people ready with their go-bags. People who say I'm going to stay here. This is it for me. This is my country, what are we doing? We have got to find a path forward, and I think there's a lot of agreement about that. But we're not going to come to an agreement about the most basic things and what we should do about them if everybody has to clear a hurdle of never writing, saying, posting, sharing, liking, following, commenting about anything that could be offensive to you ever in your whole life. We're never going to get there. We're not ever going to get there.
Beth [00:40:42] Isn't it weird I experience all of us right now-- adults I'm talking about, kids are really different. But adults I experience us as both incredibly conflict averse, except for the hardest of hard, you suck, you're the enemy kind of conflict. And I guess I just want to figure out how we do medium conflict. How can we practice soft conflict? I think there is a very romanticized version of Charlie Kirk's debates happening in media right now that I do not agree with. I particularly did not agree with Ezra Klein's characterization of it. So I guess I wish if we're not going to put away algorithmic social media-- and I very much wish we would, but I'm finding myself re-engaging with it because I'm realizing people are here still and this really matters to them. And a lot of how they view the world is being shaped here, so maybe I need to be part of this. I don't know, I feel so confused about everything right now. But what I wonder is if we going to do that, what if we had more questions instead of pronouncements? Everything right now makes you feel like nothing's good enough. You said this really well in our last episode. What is anybody going to say that satisfies someone who sees the world differently from them?
[00:42:10] And I think that's right. I think people sometimes listen to us and we're just trying to like work things out for ourselves and it still comes across as prescriptive, sermonizing, lecturing, scolding. And it's not my intention at all. Even the people I see who are really disgusted, who are like I'm so sick of this, I hate that this happened, I hate the way people are behaving, their Facebook posts adopt the language we've all been steeped in for the last 10 years and sound like do better. You all are horrible. Do better. You're never good enough. We've got to have some kind of release for all that. I think a lot of the people who are fixated on those same six quotes that are offensive from Kirk, especially if you lift them from their context, are like, guys, I got beaten up about not being enough of an ally. I got beaten up about my privilege. I got beaten up about not knowing our history well enough.
[00:43:11] I've gone to school on all of that. I've worked on it. I've tried to do better. I was told to know better and do better and now I'm doing better and you're telling me that that's dated and it's not the better anymore. That's not who I'm supposed to be? And I can't even have a moment after this person dies of wrestling with what that means to me or feeling like his work was toxic even if his life was sacred? Like, so it's too much. And I feel like the stress-- I wrote this on Facebook over the weekend. My timeline is just a waterfall of pain and stress from every angle. And the only way I know how to get better at coping with that is to get offline and into people's homes and into spaces where there can be questions and this kind of soft conflict. I was talking to some friends this weekend and I said I feel like we just really need to kind of have a real argument about church music. Because that's the place that you practice the skills to get to these bigger civil questions.
Sarah [00:44:22] Yeah, I saw an exchange where a female college student was like with Charlie Kirk in this debate process was like, "You're 31. I'm 20, what does this prove?" And I thought, damn, I wish this could have played out longer as he got older. So I would like to hear his answer. His answer was like, well, what's the difference with what your professor does? Well, Charlie, the difference is the professor's not creating content for the internet, buddy. You know that. But I would have loved to have seen what happened to him as he got older.
Beth [00:44:54] And as his kids got older.
Sarah [00:44:55] Yes, as his kids got older. Like what are we going to do now like that you're locking this 18-year-old to an opinion you've shared on your YouTube page. At the time he was also young. He's getting locked into things he felt at 18, 21, 22, whatever. I was like damn that would have been a good interesting conversation to have. And, look, there's an undercurrent of all this, particularly around the quotes that are getting shared. And I have said this, we've talked a lot about this in our Substack community, but let me say this. There is one area in which I agree with Charlie Kirk and that is race relations and the way we talk across race is really broken in this country. Now, him and I had very different ideas about how to fix that, very, very different ideas. It's like this avoidant, like it's so combustible, but it got to where nobody felt like they could say anything. And so this is what I kept arguing to my husband. Like, when we do this, when we decide there's one right way to be, then you open up a path a mile wide for somebody like Charlie Kirk to walk through. You say this is not acceptable. And then we don't want anyone to talk about it. We're done here. Like, you create an opening for that.
[00:46:17] And what I said to my husband after we fought about it for two days, we finally came to an agreement, which is like, look, he's a rich text, which means he's also a funhouse mirror like I said on Friday. And what I just want everyone to do is you don't have to agree with whatever version you find abhorrent. Either the he was a monster or he is a saint. But understand that's very real to the people that feel it. And so it is kind of soft conflict to think about that and work through that. Also, can I just recommend to everyone a fucking group text? I had lots of very strong opinions about Erica Kirk's post and approach over the last few days. And you know where I worked those out? With my girlfriends in my text message as God intended. I'm not going to talk about it here on the show. I'm going to post about it on Facebook or Instagram. It's a perfect thing for me to just go talk about with my girlfriends. Not everything has to be for public debate. You know what I mean? Like, can I just recommend some, like, I don't know, gossip. I believe in gossip. I think it is good for us. I think that we are intended to work out how we feel about things and our hot takes and what we're missing in a group of like three to five people, not the internet.
Beth [00:47:42] Because in the group of three to five people, you can say the first draft of how you feel without qualification and know that you're going to get worked on through the conversation. Somebody will feel free to give you their first draft, even if it's totally different than yours. And I think on the internet-- this is kind of a weird and gross metaphor, and I'm sorry, but I think on the internet we are all acting like we want to be able to be nail clippers instead of files. And in your group texts, you're all filing constantly. There are few people as influential in my life as the people that I spend a lot of time texting with because you're always working it out. Another form of soft conflict that I'd like to have is talking about the debates and how hard it is here in 2025 to not use people as props. It's really hard in media to not use people. It's really hard to know when you are using people, especially your own children.
[00:48:46] I was thinking this weekend about how many forms I've checked lately that say, sure, you can take photos or videos of my kids and post them to show how great your activity is or to show that everything's fine at school. You have my permission for my kids to star in what are effectively your commercials, and I support what's being advertised. And at the same time, I'm consenting to the use of my children. What does that mean? What does it mean to live in this world where we all are doing what is essentially commercial activity as the deepest expression of who we are all the time? All the time. I want some discussion of that. Robust, healthy discussion that has nothing to do with Donald Trump or political party. It's just how do we live now? How do we in this world? And I hope that the break that feels so apparent and jagged and raw right now will bring us to the table for that kind of conversation.
Sarah [00:50:02] Well, and look, this is not a foolproof plan. My text messages are pretty homogeneous, okay? The people I'm texting with are pretty homogenous. But I don't know, I've been thinking about this the last few days. There was a long period of time where it felt like the next to the worst thing you could be after a straight white man was a white lady. A lot of mean messages about being a white Lady. But I am one. And I've kind of been like, you know what? us white ladies, we're a real mixed group. But because I am, I feel an enormous amount of empathy for both Erika Kirk and Amber Robinson. Two white ladies, two mothers of boys. And I think, is that bad? There's a lot of places where the diversity of our culture is ever present, hard in the best kind of ways. We work on each other. We see things we don't understand. We see that are way outside of our lived experience. And I think we should celebrate that, but we should also celebrate the spaces where with people that are a lot like us and have our lives that are like us, where we can kind of just process stuff and work through it and not have to process the complexity of all 330 million of us and what we bring to the table.
[00:51:41] Be it you know an immigrant lived experience or a transgender lived experience or a conservative Christian experience. I can't do that every time. This is a space where a lot of white ladies come together and process what's going on. That is the primary demographic of this audience. And also the best times are when someone who does not fit that demographic show up in our comments and go, and what about this? And what about that? But I do think you got to have a little bit of both, man. We're not up for processing everything with the empathy of the lived experiences of all 330 million of us every damn time. That is too big of an ask. And I think Charlie Kirk both understood and arguably exploited the idea of like you don't have to do that every time. I'll give you permission to just think about it the way you want to think about. And so it's like I'm not even making a case. I'm just saying what I see.
Beth [00:52:42] Well, here's what I hear from the case you're not making. I think that it is especially impossible for us to speak, think, feel with empathy for all of the diverse experiences represented in our country when we take it as a stain on our character if we have missed something. That if someone comes in and says, what about this? We hear, you're a bad person for not knowing what about this. If the expectation is we all get it all right all the time and that's how it tends to feel, that's breaking us. I think that's a thing that's breaking us and so I think Charlie Kirk's answer to that's breaking us has been let's go back to the thing that felt comfortable for us. Let's go back to a set of rules that made all of this a lot clearer, that created fewer things to have to understand and said the things that really challenged those are just kind of wrong, and are not part of living a good life. And then I think that what we're learning or what I'm starting to understand about the shooter here is the other answer out there to this is nothing matters. It's too much because it is all destined for nothingness. And the only way to have a good life is to laugh and joke and shock along the way. Just along the path to destruction, destroy faster and harder and make it more interesting.
Sarah [00:54:36] Well, it's not the path to a good life. There is no good life available to you. It's like completely nihilistic. There just isn't one available, so why bother?
Beth [00:54:44] It's hard for me to even have language around that because it is so antithetical to what I believe. So knowing that helps me. It hurts me deeply. And it a little bit makes me like need a minute, but it helps me break out of the paradigms that are easy to get stuck in and try to accept that we're in a bunch of new paradigms. And so now what?
Sarah [00:55:12] Well, let me just say this too. Look, I know this is going to sound like what the hell, we're talking about Charlie Kirk and it sounds like we're just back to another critique of wokeism. Which I get. I have a lot of critiques of that moment in time and what it did and how it played out because that's what I lived through. That's the corner of the internet I exist in. But I've been on the internet long enough and I've lived enough life that I can see the same mistakes coming from the right. Because they're humans and they're going to do the same crap. So I'm watching how this is all playing out. Again, it's not on the side of the internet I exist in, so I can't speak as clearly with examples and I'm not living in that side of internet. But the policing of purity, they absolutely do to each other. Charlie Kirk was not always universally beloved as he's now at his death. I love seeing Candice Owen out there puppeting him all the time. She gets fired everywhere she goes because she's so anti-Semitic, even for Charlie Kirk. And so it's going to happen there too.
[00:56:39] Like this surge of feeling like the world is on their side and this moment is happening and this media narrative is happening and the moral momentum is with them. And so they're going to get people fired and they're going to police people's speech and they sure as hell going to police their own side. I can't believe they even let that guy on Fox News publish the editorial saying Charlie Kirk wouldn't want people to get fired. I'm surprised that even made it onto the website. It's going to happen the same way. It's going to be you're not a good enough Republican, you're not a good a good Christian, you're good a a good family man. It is not a universally diverse movement, but there's a lot more diversity on that side of the political spectrum than there was when I was growing up. There's a big old New York Times feature on all the gay Republicans running Washington DC right now. So this is not going to be like they're ascendant, they are getting it all right, they're just going to dominate and it's still human beings.
Beth [00:57:49] Well, I don't want to speak for you, but I think what we know because of where and when we grew up is the pre-online version of cancel culture. I went to a church conference once where they passed around a literal coffin for us to put secular CDs in. The cancel culture is not new, it just went to different scale with the advent of social media. And conservatives are not new to it either. I grew up in conservative cancel culture, just offline. And so then you have this big reaction to it that gave rise to wokeism. And I used to resist that term, but I think it's fair to say there was something there that was pervasive and coherent and punitive enough to recognize as a thing. And then certainly now we're living a new version of that that maybe hasn't been named yet and might be the defining characteristic of Trumpism that history remembers because he is punitive and pervasive enough with it that there will be another backlash. And I think the question is how do we stop this cycle of just swinging from one way of you suck to the other and get somewhere. Because it does feel like a lot of what we're arguing about-- and this is, again, because I see mostly people my age and older doing the arguing, but we're still arguing about old stuff. Old, old stuff is coming out in the wake of this death that is generationally removed from us. So like you said, I want to be part of getting somewhere.
Sarah [00:59:43] It's the abstraction that's just wearing me out. Well, if you find something that proves your point, if you find someone that's literally celebrating Charlie Kirks death, well then that doesn't count because that's not a leader. But on the opposite side, everything counts. It doesn't feel like it's I can abstract, but you can't. You're responsible for everything. And it's like, again, we're not getting anywhere because the truth is Charlie Kirk is not the only rich text. We're all rich texts. And so whatever you're looking for, you're going to find it. Whatever you're look for, you're going to find it and it's just the escalation of, well, this person, these people or this side doesn't care about kids. Or these people, this side, they're Nazis. Like, we have a few like canards that like if I say that about you, that means that's the ultimate Trump card, no pun intended, or maybe the ultimate pun intended. And then we're really done.
[01:01:09] I know we want to find an easy way to say basically I'm a good person and you're a bad person. But this is what I mean when I say politics isn't the right place for it. It's just not a good way to prove what kind of person you are. It should be a place to think about what ideas work, what have holes in, how can we stress test them, what policies work. And we just lost that because so many of the places I think we really were working out this stuff about where to live a good life, how to live good life have been destabilized, they've lost their power, they've lost their influence. And one of those is church and religion. And I think we're going to see a surge in more religious, spiritual participation or at least sort of articulation. You're already seeing it. I couldn't fathom a day that Mark Wahlberg would have a Catholic app, but here we are. It's happening
Beth [01:02:12] A million people posting on Facebook today about some kind of revival sweeping the nation. Be part of it by copying and pasting this first. Again, this is older people. But that's influential, that clearly has some legs.
Sarah [01:02:27] It's not just with the older people. I hope I'm not going out on a limb here to say religion is also a rich text that is not easily discarded or it's also not all the way good or all the bad. Because again back to the algorithmic, social media requires the conflict. It requires the easy conclusions. It requires judgment. It requires the hot take that the church is the source of all oppression or the church is the source of all redemption. Charlie Kirk is either all bad or all good. The United States is either bad or all good. Marriage is either the source of patriarchy or the thing everybody wants. It's exhausting. And I'm an Enneagram one, I love black and white thinking. But it's not working. It's not taking us anywhere. It's not what I want for my kids. It's not what I want for my country. It's not what I want for my Tuesday afternoon.
Beth [01:03:35] And I am really thinking about the cultural side of this and how to be helpful in the cultural space. That is the space where I am willing to unilaterally disarm because somebody has to go first. Somebody has to first, and I'm willing to be one of the people who goes first, and part of that is because of my privilege because I live a life where I'm fundamentally safe in most spaces where I can go on. I can name all the things, but I get it. I'm willing to culturally unilaterally disarm because somebody has to go first. That doesn't mean politically. We ask Maggie to tell us what kind of comments we're getting. Maggie is our director of community engagement. So she reads every Instagram DM, all the places where people who never listened to the show come to exercise their feelings. Maggie reads. And she told us that the comments on our last episode were basically a bell curve where the vast majority of people are just upset. They don't want this to happen. They don't want people to tear each other to shreds because it happened. They're just upset.
[01:04:43] And then there are a handful of people on one end of the spectrum who think he was a bad person and got what was coming to him and a handful people on the other end of this spectrum who think that we personally contributed to his death because we recently did an episode asking whether Donald Trump is a dictator. My feeling about that is that the political sphere is still ripe for medium to difficult conflict because those are difficult issues that require conflict to get anywhere good. I don't regret that episode. I thought it was a really good one. I thought we got some places that were interesting. I think that we did a good job separating where Trump could go unchecked versus where he could go checked by our system and our constitutional order. I'm not saying don't fight hard for what you believe in. I'm also recognizing that we can't have medium conflict about the budget if we're having all-out war over what it means to live a good life or whether a good is possible. And I'm just really thinking about what are the spaces that can address that cultural layer.
Sarah [01:06:05] David Brooks wrote an editorial that we haven't gotten to talk about, but it really hit me where I was at. Nobody panic, I'm still a liberal. But he was like this is why I'm not a liberal, because liberals think that every solution is found in policy, which means every conclusion has to run-- this is my favorite part because if you listen to us on Substack you know I've been kind of hard on the social sciences lately. It was like everything has to walk through the very narrow door of social science studies. Because that's the only way you can objectively through the expertise find a path to the right answer. Because it's definitely not religion because we've secularized and that's to be poo-pooed. And materialism can't be anything spiritual or beyond yourself. Please don't argue to a straight face with me that there's not some issues there. Please don't come to my table and tell me that culturally we've got it all figured out. And I know none of y'all would because the most commented aspect of that episode was how we were talking about people were acting like assholes in public. So clearly we are all on the same page with culturally we have some issues. Maybe that's a place we could find some agreement.
[01:07:14] Now some people are going to present solutions that because of your lived existence are going to run all over you. Like telling people to go to church like Eric Kirk did. That's okay. Let her try to get people to church. They'll go to church; they'll find something they need or they won't. I think he's right. I think that there's something bigger here. And I think the Republican party, including Christian nationalists, including Nick Fuentes, they're weaseling their way in and saying I see all this the way you do, here's my solution. And so if you don't say like I see it that we are having some problems culturally and we are trying to figure out what makes a good life. And the pursuit of long-term unemployment rate aside among college graduates, this very narrow vision that a lot of America presented as the road to success and happiness is not panning out for people. Be it home ownership, be it marriage, be it college, the pursuit of college, the pursuit of career, whatever it is, moving away from your family, whatever the case may be.
[01:08:33] For every clip you can show with Charlie Kirk being kind and considerate and whatever, even if all of that was true, even if the deification of Charlie Kirk is accurate, which I do not believe it to be, I still don't want to leave the conversation to him alone. That conversation is big and wide and we all need to participate. But that does not mean saying your version is wrong and you're a bad person. The end. And I think there has to be a bigger, more expansive place for this. I really think a conversation about social media's influence on us is a great place to start. And I am encouraged by politicians like representative Auchincloss and Chris Murphy and Spencer Cox, who was one of the first ones to try to age limit social media in his state, coming to the table and saying enough this is polluting us. It is polluting us. And let's at least start there and see what happens next.
Beth [01:09:45] I wrote on Facebook this week also, "I believe this is making us sick, me included. So I feel silly trying to say important things on my phone." But also we're all on the phone right now, so here's my best effort. And I try to think critically about what it means to have a podcast in this era, what does it mean to put good stuff in a toxic river? And when do you say, no, I have to abandon the river versus I'm going to keep trying put good stuff in it. And you all responding and participating so that it's not just Sarah and I makes me feel better about that. And so thank you in advance for what I know will be a lively discussion around this episode. You can email us, you can be on our Substack, you can talk to Maggie on Instagram.
Sarah [01:10:31] Don't do that. Don't try to do it on Instagram!
Beth [01:10:35] That's probably the hardest place, but we appreciate you. Sarah, we always end with an exhale by talking about something that is as far Outside of Politics as one can get in 2025. And so I wanted to ask you, because I know we both like Nate Bargatze, and I know that you frequently talk about how you were a child of television. Only child you watched a lot of TV growing up. I watched a a lot a TV growing. Why didn't you watch the Emmys?
Sarah [01:11:11] Because I couldn't get it on my TV.
Beth [01:11:15] So you would have had you.
Sarah [01:11:16] I wanted to. I wanted to go see his opener. You had to either have paid YouTube, which is, I don't know if you knew this, $90 a month.
Beth [01:11:24] Yeah, it's expensive.
Sarah [01:11:25] Paid Paramount Plus or the top tier of Hulu or cable. But where I live we have the little antenna that picks the TV up out of the air, like the old days, but CBS is way too far away. We can never get KFVS 12.
Beth [01:11:39] Really?
Sarah [01:11:41] Yeah. It's way too far away. So I couldn't watch it. That's the long and short of it. I tried. And I know this is not about politics, but this is part of the problem. And the fact that all these damn companies-- first of all, this is just not about why I couldn't watch it, this is why so much of what was nominated was kind of mid, as Alise put it. It's like now what? Who is it? Paramount wants to acquire Warner Brothers, or Warner Brothers wants to acquire Paramount? I'm like, no!
Beth [01:12:09] I totally agree.
Sarah [01:12:11] No more consolidation.
Beth [01:12:12] It is outrageous. And I think that if something will break this, it'll be sports. The way that people cannot afford to watch their hometown teams play baseball, that kind of thing, it's out of control. Just absurd. I didn't even think about watching the Emmys. I knew it was happening. And I do really like neighborly scene, but I just thought like, nah, pass. For a long time people have known that award shows are not my thing. But I have enjoyed the Emmys more than other award shows because usually I'm watching a lot of TV and I just right now am having a really hard time wanting to watch TV. My working theory is that it is because I am spending so much time talking to kids about relationships that I don't really have space even for fictional relationships by the end of the day. Like when we turn the TV on at night, I just want it to be sports. I'm really listened out. I'm empathized out. I'm talked out and I just wanted something as simple as a touchdown or not.
Sarah [01:13:18] I don't watch TV almost at all, and haven't for a long time. Right now the only things I watch is maybe like one. My family and I are watching Freaks and Geeks. Highly recommend if you have teenagers or pre-teens cause it's good. Felix can watch it and also Griffin likes it. So it's a good span of age relevancy. But we watch maybe one episode every two weeks. We finished The Sopranos with Griffin. So I'm not even watching that. I just cannot emphasize how little TV I watch. Like maybe an hour every two weeks. And so the reason I wanted to watch the Emmy's is the last two days with all this Charlie Kirk stuff. I've wanted to like numb out and unfortunately I chose Instagram. Actually not unfortunately. Beth, one night I watched like three hours of Reels.
Beth [01:14:19] Did you know it had been three hours? Or did you have that feeling of like, oh shit, it's been three hours?
Sarah [01:14:23] No, I was watching [crosstalk].
Beth [01:14:27] So you were consciously-- you intended it.
Sarah [01:14:28] But there were so many good ones. My algorithm is really good right now. I know I just spent an hour talking about social media algorithms. Like, I get it. But my algorithm is like, would you like to see, first of all, just so many things that make you feel less alone as a parent. So many boy mom stuff, so much like I yell at my kids, it's fine. Don't beat yourself up about it. Just stuff that I thought was a particularly ridiculous personality quirk of my kids. And I'm like, holy shit, it's all of them. Just makes you feel less alone. I got a lot of animals being funny, like dogs giving shade or arguing, which I think is really funny. I'm really into the, well, shit, sugar guy. I think he's so funny and sweet and kind. He'll do his own stuff, but sometimes it'll be somebody will fall and he'll be like, "Well, shit, sugar, I bet that hurt. I'm so sorry." It was so good. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of Annie Marie Tillman in the county clerk's office. So I just watched so much. But then the problem is there's no end. The problem is there's just no hard out where you're like, okay, wait, what do I want to do now? And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to watch the Emmy so that I can watch a little something to decompress because I think I'd need that right now. I really need to watch just a little something, something. But I couldn't get on my TV. I couldn’t do it.
Beth [01:16:02] The sports are the something-something for me.
Sarah [01:16:06] You know why you can watch and enjoy sports? Because you don't have Felix in your house. He's the loudest sports watcher. He jumps, he screams, he flips on the couch five million times. It's stressful from the other room. I'm definitely not going to hang out in the room with him and watch him do it. He's like the most active, loudest, ridiculous sports fun on earth. I can't do it.
Beth [01:16:28] The other thing that I do and I want to numb out right now is I go to YouTube and I google house plants and I just watch you know 11 minutes of some person in a beautiful space with vines all around them explaining what this plant is to me and what it wants, what it needs, how I can better take care of it, how I might propagate it. Because I don't know anything about plants. I am new to the plant lady existence. I do find them to be the greatest source of joy in my house right now. When there is a new growth on anything, I'm elated. I can't believe it. It feels like a miracle to me. So I'm really enjoying the calmness of the people on YouTube who know about plants.
Sarah [01:17:09] Do you appreciate the stress I felt now when I went to your house one time and you had that plant in distress?
Beth [01:17:14] I do.
Sarah [01:17:14] I felt like you thought I was a little crazy at the time, but I feel like now you probably get it.
Beth [01:17:17] I mean, you did repot it without talking to me first, which was a little crazy.
Sarah [01:17:21] But you still think that's crazy now that you've watched all the houseplant people?
Beth [01:17:25] I do think it's crazy that we didn't have a conversation about the repotting.
Sarah [01:17:29] I was doing you a favor.
Beth [01:17:29] You did do me a favor and I will say that plan is very happy right now. I also moved it. This is a lot of what I'm doing right now. I moved them until they seem happy. Like, do you like this window? Do you like this light? How far are you from the vent or not? Like, what can we do for you?
Sarah [01:17:46] That's a good idea. But do you know what the problem is though? Mine are too big, I can't do that shit. I can move them around. They're beasts. I can't do that, they're too heavy. I will say, though, it's like me with a baby. If your baby's crying, I know there are rules of society, but there is a point where I'm just going to be like do you want me to hold the baby? That's how I felt. I was like I'll repot the plant. Because I know you didn't. I was just like I'll do it. I can't help it. It's in distress. It was like crying to me.
Beth [01:18:15] But I'm really happy to be learning about the plants. I bought this little gadget that measures the soil moisture. So I know if I need to water them or not.
Sarah [01:18:25] Do you not have Planta?
Beth [01:18:25] No, I don't do Planta.
Sarah [01:18:26] I love Planta.
Beth [01:18:27] And I love this little guy. It's like I'm taking their temperature. Like it's very maternal for me. I take the plants temperature. I see if it needs water or not. I see if it's getting enough light or not and it feels really good.
Sarah [01:18:41] Listen, Planta has gotten real intense. Like when you put a plant to Planta, when I started using that app, it was like, do you have a fern? Yes, no, maybe. Okay, there you go. When did you last water the fern. Now it's like how many feet is your fern from a vent? What direction is this window facing? Like, it's so crazy.
Beth [01:18:59] Here's the thing, I have looked at it and a couple other apps many, many times. And what I keep telling myself is Beth, do not ruin this in-person, tactile, observant experience with an app. You got into this to feel the earth. Just stay here. But then I watch YouTube videos about it, which I don't know if that's any different or not.
Sarah [01:19:25] Well, it just gets to the point where I have like 55, so I can't be measuring the soil every time. I wouldn't get nothing else done.
Beth [01:19:35] It is a real experience the day that I go around and take everybody's temperature.
Sarah [01:19:38] Well, you would just feel more grounded in your plant lady stuff if you could never live up to your grandmother's expectations, then you could just release it because my grandmother comes over and she's like that plant's upset. And I'm like, you know what, mind your business, Betty. She has such a green thumb, it's obnoxious. I killed my staghorn fern. I'm still kind of sad about it. She has a staghorn fern that is like the size of a kitchen sink. I want it so bad. I'm just going to take it one day. She'll never notice. She would notice, she'd be so mad. So it's kind of like freeing. I'm never going to get there, so I'll just do what I do and do my best because I'm ever going to be as good as Betty anyway. So why not?
Beth [01:20:15] My mother-in-law is like that. And while she's still around, my great-grandmother would be that person in my life.
Sarah [01:20:20] Yeah, forget it, just release the standards.
Beth [01:20:22] But it also is nice to feel like, well, I'm taking my place that my great grandmother was into this and now I'm taken my place and being into it too. I used some of my grandmother's dishes yesterday and that always feels good to me. So I think that that's it for me. Like TV isn't scratching any of those itches. So I'm just looking for the thing.
Sarah [01:20:40] It's all the TV is not that good. I said it. I said what I said.
Beth [01:20:45] I can't get through The Bear this season. I just don't like it.
Sarah [01:20:48] I didn't finish The Bear from last season. I never even finished. I was like, okay, I get it. I think Hacks should have ended this season. I know they're ending next season, but I got to the end, I was, like, baby cakes, y'all have said every hat thing you have to say. Yall didn't know where you're taking it. They claim they know where they're going. I'm going to probably see it through to the ends. Obviously, I love Jean Smart. Also, this is how you know when TV's coasting when the same person wins it like five years in a row. Like, Jean Smart is an icon. Nobody is going to show up in my comments saying that I don't understand the genius of Jean Smart. First of all, I've been following her since the Designing Women so don't even come for me. But she shouldn't win it four years in a row just like stupid Kelsey Grammer shouldn't have won it like 10 years in row. If the same person's winning over then we're not innovating, we're doing new, you know what I'm saying? I am going to watch The Pit. I'd been on the fence about Severance or The Pit and when it won, I was like, okay, that's my sign. But I even think that choice of Nate Bargatze Alise watched it. She said he did a very, very bad job. And I think that is even indicative of what they're trying. They're just always trying to split the baby. Just go do something real, man. Like real fake on my TV.
Beth [01:22:01] Here is my best example of we're not doing anything new. Friday night I had planned to have neighbors over for milkshakes and cards because Friday was National Milkshake Day.
Sarah [01:22:12] I love a holiday like that so much. Do you get the emails where they tell you what they are every day?
Beth [01:22:18] I don't. I occasionally look it up. And then I decide what do I want to do with some of this information? And so I had decided about a month ago that on National Milkshake Day, I was going to make milkshakes for neighbors and we're going to play cards. Well, Friday rolls around and Chad is going to get Ellen from her theater rehearsal and he blows a tire on the interstate, hits a pothole, blows his tire out. And it wrecked our plans for the evening. Like we're dealing with the car, the tow truck, the waiting for the AAA, all the things. So we don't get to do milkshake and cards. So we had a little bit of time Friday night with nothing because we had planned to be engaged. And so China tried to watch The Paper which is The Office. And so much The Office that Oscar is back. Like it is truly, truly The Office.
Sarah [01:23:04] As Oscar, right?
Beth [01:23:08] Yeah, as Oscar. As we're watching it we keep getting served this peacock ad that is just like, "See all the ways we've done The Office? Here's The Office, and here's Parks and Rec, and here is The Paper." And it's just like I get it. You have wrung the life out of this one idea. And we're struggling like we want to like it, and we both are just like this is bad. I don't like anything about this.
Sarah [01:23:35] Here's the thing, it's not even that it's bad. Listen, things can be bad and keep people's attention. That's what The Real Housewives is. You know what I mean? Like that's what people do. They just watch The Real Housewives when they want to watch something bad. There's something to be offered in bad.
Beth [01:23:54] Yeah, this is boring.
Sarah [01:23:54] It's mid. It's just bleh. There's no there, there. Some of this is just because they're just greedy bastards that are not really trying to make art. They're just trying to money. The corporations, not the people actually creating the content. Some of the privileged people creating the content. And just like you said, just let me see how much it squeezes out. And some people are out there watching Chicago Fire in the newest version of Chicago Fire. And my dad keeps trying to get me to watch Blue Bloods. I'm like, dad, I'm not going to watch Blue Bloods, babe. Like it's never going to happen. Because some of it's like just too long, too. Even if they get a good idea like The Bear, it does not need to be six seasons. Just like Hacks didn't need to be five seasons, whatever it's going to be. Like that's the other thing. Even Severance, which this has been my instinct. And somebody who shall not be named, it was Norma, said it should have just been a movie. And she's probably right. It's like the non-fiction books you're reading; you're like, this could have been a written article. Some of these are like this could've been two seasons. That's the lesson they should have taken from the British Office which was like, two, we're out. Like where it started.
Beth [01:25:16] Yeah. It's weird where you want something innovative and where you want comfort. We're having this conversation and Ellen and I went to the movie theater to watch Hamilton on the big screen this weekend. It was a delight because the ritual of that is so fun. It's so fun to know all the songs and all the lines. It's so fun to see this thing that I've seen a million times, but he's a slightly different inflection here than in the version that I've watched before. So it's a weird combination and I understand why my parents like Blue Bloods, too. The ritual of those shows is healthy for a lot of people, and they really enjoy it and find it comforting. So, I don't know. We're impossible to please. Humans, we're impossible to please.
Sarah [01:25:54] It is funny at this point in my life and it has been this way for a long time; there is nothing that I find like comfort in that sameness of. Isn't that weird? I really don't even like to listen to the same songs over and over again. Or I've listened to them so much like they carry no more emotional resonance. I'm not a big re-reader. I've re-read a couple of books recently for like the first time in my life, but not because I wanted comfort, it's just because I want to see if they held up. I don't watch the same movies I used to like. I used to do that all the time in my 20s or especially when I was a kid. Like, God, we would run those movies into the ground. Now, and I would say some of is streaming, but Felix does it too. And Felix has all of it at his offer, but he will watch the same Adam Sandler movie over and over and again. So I don't know what it is about this phase for me, but I find no comfort in sort of the like mindless repetition. Isn't that weird?
Beth [01:27:05] I don't know if it's weird. I was just trying to think about the places where I do. So I did enjoy seeing Hamilton. Like I will go see Hamilton again on stage when it's in Cincinnati in December. So shows like that I still enjoy seeing over and over again. We just saw a production of Bright Star, which was so wonderful. And so I keep listening to that music because I'm still in the phase where I find something new. Two things that I thought of immediately when we talked about rituals and comfort for me are yoga and communion, because those are both places where you're more actively taking it in instead of just passively listening or watching. And I think in that activity you can find something new every time. I like it when a yoga teacher will say, hey, I know you've done cat-cow 10 million times. See if you can something new today. And I do love that.
Sarah [01:27:57] Yeah, I don't know. It's really weird. I think some of it is my attention span is just shot. There's no rest like there used to be in watching something a million times like I used to because I would just pick up my phone now. You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to watch the movie five times, I just pick up my phone. Now, I am very careful. Like when we were re-watching The Sopranos, a lot of which I didn't even remember, I don't pick up my phone. Like I don't have my phone now when I'm watching TV. And we went and saw Jaws, but I barely remember Jaws. I didn't have no idea what happened in Jaws. But when we watch the movies I have like I can almost recite. I've seen them so many times and we've watched a couple with the boys. But again, I just hadn't seen them for so long. It's like a totally different thing. It's not like a repetition thing. But I think it's probably because my attention span, I don't have that mode. I don't have that gear anymore where I can watch something mindlessly without feeling my brain go, ooh, but what about. Even podcasts, Nicholas and I tried to listen to some podcasts that people recommended and I found them so boring.
Beth [01:29:17] I think for me that piece, that this is just not grabbing me, is in part because I feel so much scarcity about my time. I feel some much scarcity about actually sitting down and watching a movie, or even listening to a podcast. There's a lot of stuff I try to get through in a day, and I just think, well, is this worth it? And if it's not, immediately in my attention span for how fast I will let it be worth it is shortening all the time. But I wonder if that scarcity is part of it too.
Sarah [01:29:48] Well, I think because of what we do, we take in so much information. What is new to other people is not new to us. Like we don't talk about everything that's like interesting to us on the show. There's not enough time. And so a lot of times people will send me like podcast episodes that I think is like breaking through to them, but I've been there for a while. So it's not interesting to me. For better or for worse, that is why Ezra keeps me. Because I think he's just about where I am at on so many kind of topics, debates. Not that I agree with him, but he's always pushing the envelope to about where I'm at. So it's like that's why it keeps my attention. But I think our attention is both fried and also incredibly demanding at the same time.
Beth [01:30:31] Here we are again, supposed to be doing Outside of Politics and it is all connected, the whole discussion.
Sarah [01:30:36] This is so true.
Beth [01:30:37] And we're so grateful that you give us your attention in these times when everything is scarce and we've given you a lot. So thank you for being with us. We will be with you all week on Substack and back here for a new episode on Friday. I really do take comfort in our community in times like this when the whole of the internet feels pretty painful. So we appreciate you very much. Until Friday, have the best week available to you.
I don’t think you can separate Charlie Kirk like string cheese. This is the racist strand, the xenophobic strand, the Christian Nationalism, here’s the family man strand, here’s the believer strand. All that and more made him who he was.
I condemn his death period. Also the hagiography that is being created is out of place. He wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t a saint. He was a person of like me.
I never gave him much time. Mainly because I didn’t see the value. I despise what 47 and their clan are doing taking advantage of the situation to advance their agenda. I think this works because his message was a financially stable white nostalgia dream. One that apparently can only be achieved inside homogeneity.
I had therapy yesterday (best place to process all this, but that’s beside the point). The thing my therapist said after my expressions of such deep despair and the complexity of my feelings about systemic and individual hypocrisy as to this and so may other situations was “it’s so good you are feeling all this. It’s so good you aren’t numb.” She said the truly concerning thing for her is the staggering number of young people in particular who are numb—because they’ll articulate “I’ve never known anything other than this.” Not known anything but constant school shootings, and active shooter drills, and Trump/MAGA influence, and demonizing the “other side” (a phrase I truly wish I could eternal sunshine from everyone’s brains and never hear again), and social media performance, and fake news, and on and on and on.
So I’m just here to say: how wonderful this community is, to be a space where we can all still FEEL. To share the feelings, to work through the ick, to pull each other out of the numb.
My therapist’s advice to me was, find something every day that you have agency over. Because I think what a lot of us are struggling with, and the thing that puts us at risk of “numb” is the feeling of powerlessness over all the pain and division and problems we see and live. So small acts with intention to remind us we aren’t fully out of control of our own lives are a means of resistance. For me, it was making an appointment with my menopause doctor to talk about changing my hormone therapy. I can’t fix political violence and extreme rhetoric and toxic techno culture, but maybe I can work on getting some sleep that isn’t disrupted by marathon runner levels of sweat.