When the Pitchforks Come for You

Surveillance, Mob Mentality, and the Cost of Public Life

There’s really nothing that I love more than a live event. I’ll go see any musician, any comedian, any sport. I like being in spaces with other people feeling the aliveness that happens when we all train our attention on a contest or performance. I go because it takes me out of myself. It centers something else, and that’s blissful. It lets me be part of the flow of life.

The crowd work at these events has started encroaching on that feeling. Venues seem to believe that we show up to see ourselves as much as athletes or entertainers. While I enjoy a kisscam as much as the next person, I’ve started wondering about what exactly we consent to when we purchase a ticket.

What do we consent to when we purchase a ticket? Or ring a doorbell? Or just live our lives in a society where everyone carries a powerful camera and supercomputer? What should we endure when we become a crime victim or run for office or serve in any public role?

We wanted to step back from the headlines today to consider these questions because they are having real, tangible impacts on our civic life. Sarah uses the phrase “grist for the mill” in this episode, which means useful for a purpose. And that’s the dynamic we’re trying to name and work our way out of: using people. We see this dynamic in the story of Kristin Cabot, who was doxxed and threatened after a ColdPlay concert, in the horror that Savannah Guthrie’s family is enduring, and in campaigns and public service.

After Sarah and I talk about our perspectives, we’re joined by the First Ladies of Utah and Massachusetts. Abby Cox and Joanna Lydgate are married to a Republican governor and Democratic governor respectively and know first-hand the risks of the spotlight. They share their call for a society where we use each other less and respect each other more.

Outside of politics, we discuss the fake warmth in a new Alexa update, which sends us in all kinds of directions about affirmation and resilience. TLDR: Life is hard, and we’re up for it.

Thank you for listening, as always. We appreciate your time, attention, and participation more than we can say. -Beth

Topics Discussed

• The Glare of the Internet’s Spotlight

• First Ladies Abby Cox and Joanna Lydgate on Political Violence

• Moment of Hope: Cecilia Giménez and the Monkey Jesus Fresco

• Outside of Politics: Alexa Updates

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Join us in Minneapolis in August! Tickets to the Spice Conference are on sale to premium members now and will open to the general public next week.

Technology, Surveillance, and the Mob Mentality

• Poem that Beth mentioned

• Sarah’s post about Brooklyn Beckham

• About The Ring commercial

• The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Coldplay Concert (NYT Gift Link)

• The Dark Reason More Young People Aren’t Running for Office (Slate)

First Ladies Abby Cox & Joanna Lydgate

• State First Ladies: Americans Reject Political Violence | Opinion (Newsweek)

• First Lady Abby Cox

• Utah First Lady Abby Cox (@showuputah) (Instagram)

• JOANNA LYDGATE (States United Democracy Center)

• Joanna Lydgate (@joannalydgate) (Instagram)

• Disagree Better - National Governors Association

Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:12] This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. One of the things that we keep circling this calendar year is how to balance the deluge of outrageous headlines coming out of the White House with all the things that are just happening to us and affecting us every single day. So today we are going to leave the headlines for a minute and talk about privacy and visibility and what it is like when you’re just living your life and suddenly you become fodder for the internet. We are thinking about that through the lens of the horror that Savannah Guthrie’s family has been experiencing. We’re thinking about the woman from the Coldplay concert last year getting death threats. These threads add to how hard it is to attract people to public life and public service. And so we are joined by the first ladies of Utah and Massachusetts to talk about political violence and how they navigate their family’s safety and their own mental health in this environment. And then Outside of Politics, we’re going to talk about how Alexa has started complimenting my grocery list. And that kicks us into a conversation about how life is hard and we can do it.

Sarah [00:01:32] Couple of quick notes before we begin. We typically release our episodes on Tuesday and Friday, but we record that Tuesday episode on Monday, and Monday is a holiday, it is President’s Day, so we will be recording on Tuesday, and the episode next week will come out on Wednesday. We also wanted to remind you that our one and only live show this year will be taking place on August 29th in Minneapolis. Check the show notes for details about all the pre-show gatherings and your chance to connect with other listeners in a very special way in a very special city.

Beth [00:02:05] Next up, let’s talk about the ring commercial at the Super Bowl, and cameras everywhere, and what that is doing to us. Sarah, in Tuesday’s episode, we talked about Super Bowl commercials and we missed one that people are really freaking out about. So do you remember the ring commercial for security cameras? It’s called Search Party where they show you how if your dog goes missing, they can look at all the ring cameras in the vicinity and find the dog. And when we saw it, I said, Chad, this is a really interesting advertising strategy. I feel like they’re saying don’t be an asshole, get a camera to help find people’s dogs. But that is not how most of the internet saw that ad. And I have been overwhelmed on the socials by posts with people saying like if this doesn’t make you want to melt down your ring camera, I don’t know what will. Because it’s just like big tech saying look how sophisticated our spying is. Isn’t that cute?

Sarah [00:03:20] Yeah, and I just think that the idea of being surveilled right now, so comprehensively, particularly if you have been watching Minneapolis closely, our listeners talk about like, well, I have to make sure this isn’t a license plate that ICE has taken a picture of yet. Like that level of attention to making sure the government doesn’t have all your information. And I’m supposed to feel good about Amazon who owns Ring Camera having this information post Washington Post where the commitment to our constitutional freedoms is maybe a little flimsy. And I just think it was like shit timing because you have this incredibly terrifying video of Nancy Guthrie’s house, Samantha Guthries’ mom, which it’s not like the Ring Camera saved her. You know what I mean? Like she’s still missing. And there’s video, but it’s not breaking the case open. It didn’t help. They knew to disconnect it. I just think that this idea that they’re watching and this piece of technology that is supposed to be in the most private space, which is your home, can at a moment’s notice become public fodder is deeply unsettling.

Beth [00:04:49] That’s what we want to really talk about today. The unsettling feeling of walking around trying to live your life and suddenly some kind of spotlight comes to you and you are instantly memeable. Whatever you are is out there for the public to grind and churn in a thousand different ways that are completely out of your control. And we want to do that looking at a couple of different case studies. And I think a good one to start with is Kristin Cabot. You’ve been talking about this profile of her for quite some time, Sarah. The New York Times wrote about the woman from the Coldplay camera where at a concert, the camera is panning the audience and you see two people just vibing and having a good time, but a man’s arms are around this woman. And as soon as they realize that they’re on the jumbotron, they split and it becomes weeks of making fun of that. Weeks of sports mascots doing it on the Jumbotron at other events. And what we learn later is that it wasn’t just that it was hilarious and embarrassing on the internet, she got death threats over it.

Sarah [00:06:15] Yeah, she was doxed. She was getting 500 or 600 calls a day, death threats. When the internet churns something like that, and I think there’s this paradoxical situation where there is this sense that we’re in it together. Like when something goes that viral, it’s a shared experience, which I think people are hungry for. But even with this one, I was like, I see everybody’s having a good time. But this makes me deeply uncomfortable. These are people that did not ask for this. The truth is, it’s toxic if you did ask for it. I was watching an Instagram video about Princess Beatrice and Eugenie, the daughters of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. And the way that Sarah Ferguson like both of their parents used them as pawns in these emails with Jeffrey Epstein to gain access, Sarah Ferguson asked for money. And I thought like they didn’t ask for this. They’re public figures, they’ve been raised to be public figures their whole life. But how horrifying to have your parents’ close relationship with a child predator exposed and that you as young girls were taken to his house as pawns in the transaction. And it’s like they’re are public figures and this is truly, truly horrendous. And she wasn’t, she’s not a public figure.

[00:07:42] And so I understand that there is this sort of delight, but I think there is always a price to be paid when someone is fodder at this point. Because if you were public fodder in like the 50s or the 60s or even the 80s and some story became national news, there was an end to it and you could escape it. Like the cameras left. I experienced a national news story through the shooting in the nineties and to show up the first day after the shooting with the line of cameras and to see myself become part of the B-roll was deeply traumatic. You felt exploited. The anger people will still feel about like Matt Lauer in my community because of the way he questioned my principle, like you felt exploited. But they left after like a week and we didn’t have to continue to be... And it was like the news was over, the today show was over and that was it. There wasn’t this place where people continue to use my community and our faces and our lives as grid for the mill. Like that just wasn’t what was going on. And so I think that’s the inescapable part of the way public conversations happen now because of the internet means that if you become a part of that public conversation, there is no escape. There is absolutely no escape.

Beth [00:09:20] And we haven’t adjusted for that reality in any meaningful way. I was thinking about is the kiss camera worth doing anymore? Are these panning the crowd, the celebrity lookalike things, which can be kind of mean sometimes. Like if I buy a ticket to go to a basketball game or a baseball game, they do this so much at baseball, it’s a long game, they got to have things to do, right? But am I consenting to be made fun of on the Jumbotron? Am I consenting for someone to not just make fun of me at that event, but for someone else to take a video of it and then that video goes viral and then has this forever lifespan on the internet? I don’t think so. I would like some kind of examination of what we’re doing here, given that we’ve seen this over and over again now. And I feel like when we first started talking about the TikTok man, what we heard from people is, I don’t care if anybody spies on me, I have nothing to hide. But haven’t we seen enough now to know that it doesn’t matter what the reality of a situation is, it can look like anything. It can be clipped and packaged and altered where it still seems very real and it can look anything. This Kristin Cabot profile in the New York Times was so valuable because it demonstrated that we had no idea what was going on in that story. No idea. The only people who can understand what was happening there were the people who knew both parties and both marriages. And that was a very, very small number of people.

Sarah [00:11:02] I don’t know if it’s just our version of mob mentality. I just read The Hunchback of Notre Dame and there are several mob moments where they want blood. And I guess it’s an improvement that now you just get death threats and we don’t actually burn people at the stake or put them in stocks or hang them, which we used to do. Like that was our favorite activity as a group of humans is like who could we turn on and make us public sacrifice of? I don’t know if this is just our modern equivalent of that. It sure feels that way. It sure it feels like we just need to pour a little blood on the altar so that everybody can calm down. The Kristin Cabot, I was like, who is this? Who are the people that are like sending death threats to her? What did she do that’s punishable by death? I know that’s about the person, not about her, but it does feel like the internet makes it so easy to make someone’s life miserable, to call for violence, to make them pay the price that you think they deserve to pay. And so I guess it’s just the modern equivalent of the pitchforks, the people with the pitch forks. The most interesting part of that article is she said the women were the meanest. But hands down women were the absolute most hateful to her. And I think that’s important. I think women can get really in a space where we’re better than men. We’re more empathetic than men. We’re kinder than men. We’re emotionally intelligent than men. They’re the violent ones. They’re the reason for all the chaos. And then you hear a woman like this go, no, it was women who were coming for my throat. And I just think counter evidence is always important to take in to keep ourselves humble and in check.

Beth [00:13:00] And I think that has to be true in part because cheating is so prevalent. That moment became so big because people felt so many feelings about it. And a lot of those feelings were very personal. And that’s the problem. When you throw something out on the internet, it is going to have all these chain reactions and they’re going to get very divorced from whatever the initial thing is and become about something else entirely. And then what do we do when actual violence is part of the origin story? So I’m thinking about that so much with Savannah Guthrie’s mother being kidnapped, just this nightmare that this family is having to live. And I have seen people making jokes about it and turning the family videos where they’re just pleading with the public to help them with whomever has their mother to bring her home. They’re turning that into punch lines.

Sarah [00:14:01] Yeah. The first thing I thought when this happened is I am afraid because again we’re talking about sort of two different things simultaneously, which is the exposure of a private figure suddenly becoming public and then the exposure of a public figure and what that does even if you have chosen this life. But then the people around you haven’t. I mean you’re definitely going to hear this in our next conversation with the first spouses of both Utah and Massachusetts that I thought we’re going to see more of these. If income disparity continues to grow in the way it is and you have these people that are trillionaires and billionaires-- and look, that’s not Savannah Guthrie, okay-- but people are going to, I am afraid, do more of this. They’re going to find wealthy people who they think are exploitable through kidnapping or ransom. And especially because Bitcoin (that’s what these people ask for immediately) makes it so easy to accept. It’s not like you have to work through some sort of suitcase exchange, right? You just put the Bitcoin in a wallet and they’re gone and you can’t ever trace it and it’s over. And so I think I’m afraid we’ll see more of this. I think if I was a celebrity, I would be... It’s scary enough if you’re not a celebrity. If you are a celebrity, God, it is terrifying because now you can’t be famous without like losing all exposure to public life because the fear of violence is going to be so high.

Beth [00:15:39] I learned about this story while I was with my parents. I was at their house when this story was breaking and my mother loves the Today Show. There is no more loyal Today Show watcher than my mom. She records it so that she makes sure she can see absolutely all of it. And so it really affected her a lot and it affected me to be in her house just thinking about what if someone came here and took her? And what if I had to not only navigate the horror of that, but also deal with people who didn’t take her trying to scam us and pretend that they did, and people making jokes about it, and people talking about what effect that would have on my career, and people using things that I had done previously that are all over the internet to make some kind of statement about how I’m handling it. That’s awful. And I don’t know what we can do to start to pull some of this back because I deeply believe in free speech. Like I don’t have a policy proposal here. I just have a societal concern that this has gone so far and you see it culminating in this really specific way. It just breaks my heart open, and I want to have a proposal. I want someone to lead us through this and say here’s what we can do. Not so that nothing bad will ever happen again to anyone, but so that we can walk around in the world and not have a sense that we are one video away from living in such a nightmare situation.

Sarah [00:17:28] I think all of the time about Ashley Judd in the book where when she went public and she was the first celebrity to do so with accusations against Harvey Weinstein. She described herself in the books as sober from her own coverage so she doesn’t read anything about herself or her family. And when that story came out, she went off the grid. Like she left. She was like in the mountains. No cell signal. And I’m like that’s what you’d have to do. If you got swept up in something like this and hope to God you have the resources, you would need to leave. You got to go. And honestly, the closest I’ve ever come to that is when I was running for office and they accused me of cheating during the debate because we weren’t supposed to have notes and I was a busy mom of three and didn’t check the rules. And so I had a notebook in front of me. With some talking points I’d printed out. And they spun it into this like Sarah’s a cheater. It was ridiculous. And just by happenstance, my husband and I had like a hike in the mountains planned for that weekend. And we peaced out and I left. And I think it was like super protective of my mental health that I was not on Facebook, looking at the comments, looking at people saying nasty shit about me. I think that’s what you’d have to do. If you found yourself in something like this, you’d have to just absent yourself, just be like, I’ll take my phone. It’s probably like a moment of time before I get doxed anyway, so just take my phone, let’s move on.

[00:19:10] And I think the small bright side to me is that this has happened to so many people at this point. I think Monica Lewinsky has done some really incredible work. There’s the guy that wrote the book, like, so you been publicly shamed? And he wrote a book about like this is what this feels like, this is how you survive it. There’s more and more people that are going to have this experience. But the experience itself is always changing. Before, if you went “viral” you’d be on the nightly news and maybe you’d end up on L, you’d been on TV, right? But then the TV shows would end and people would move on. And then maybe you went viral because it was all over Facebook. And now it’s like but you have to be sort of churn through the sausage machine of TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and the internet generally. And so it’s, like, there’s just so many different ways in which you become grist for the mill that I think the experience of having that spotlight of becoming public fodder is going to continue to change. But still to know that you have to hold on to your humanity as tightly as you can because that’s what’s being stripped from you. You’re being turned into a pixel not a person.

Beth [00:20:36] And we’re doing it to kids. I think a lot about the little girl who was eating Prince Harry’s popcorn. That’s going to be on the internet for her whole life. Like it’s cute. People share it because it’s cute, it’s heartwarming. You can see that Prince Harry knows that she’s eating his popcorn and he keeps kind of looking away so she can keep eating his popcorn. It’s a feel good thing. We think of it as a feel-good thing. We have no idea if it was safe for that little girl to be on camera. Like we don’t know what else is going on in her life. And there’ll probably be a day, many days in her life where she wishes that that were not everywhere, that that’s a part of her story that she can’t shake. And she certainly didn’t consent to it. That ability to go away, you said you hope you have the resources for it, is kind of a good segue to our third case study, which is running for office. There is an article out about how a number of people in Gen Z who’ve run for office have had really, really terrible experiences and have found that they don’t have the resources to insulate them from the vulnerability created when you run. And they find that they’re constantly defending their qualifications. They’re being attacked for things like living with their parents at any point. They’re having to beg for money to run their ads anyway, but also to have enough money to live while they’re going through the process. And the article makes the point that the financial precarity of that situation is another form of exposure. You’re going under the microscope and you don’t have what you need to protect yourself along the path.

Sarah [00:22:16] Yeah, I mean, I’ve been talking about this since I ran myself. Like, unless you just want rich old people as your politicians, something’s got to change. We have to pay people more. And there needs to be especially the Congress at this point should come with security. Like, that’s something that needs to change. That nonprofit that’s been set up, that’s has been helping politicians with security risks and they don’t turn anybody away and they’re helping everyone and like how it’s gone from like 50 people a year to like 3,000 people a year, that is a flashing red sign. People should not have to sacrifice their financial independence, their careers and their safety of themselves and their families to run for office. That’s not sustainable. That’s not sustainable unless you just want heirs and heiresses representing all of us in public life.

Beth [00:23:13] And I feel like we have a number of top of the fold stories right now telling us why that’s a bad idea. The only heirs and heiresses representing us is a very bad idea, not what anybody wants. But it is a real strain on our democracy right now that anyone would think I cannot afford the public relations aspect of just running, whether it is for the Senate or my local mayor’s race. The potential for me to say or do something or just find myself on the wrong end of someone’s camera is so great and so ruinous potentially that I’m not going to put my name forward to serve my community. And I feel like that’s where we are. And so we wanted to spend some time talking with people who serve anyway and people who have experienced threats and very personal moments of worrying for their physical safety and their family’s physical safety. To do that, we are joined by First Ladies Abby Cox and Joanna Lydgate. They are spouses of the Republican governor of Utah and the democratic governor of Massachusetts. And they are here to tell us about their experience with political violence, with threats, and with just trying to protect their mental health in this environment.

Sarah [00:24:48] Abby and Joanna, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.

Joanna Lydgate [00:24:51] Thank you for having us.

Abby Cox [00:24:52] Thank you so much.

Sarah [00:24:54] Thank you so much for coming. Here’s how I would love to kick this conversation off. I thought your joint editorial was so good. I don’t think the majority of Americans, like you cite in the editorial through polling, would disagree that the polarization has gone too far and that political violence is a predictable fallout. What I worry is that because we are all so soaked in the polarization and in discussion of polarization, particularly where it involves public officials, we have become desensitized, especially because there is such a hardened attitude for those in public service. And what I would love for the both of you to do is to really make what this means in your lives real for people. What does it look like to be a real human being on the other end of this? What did you expect going into these roles? What caught you completely off guard? Like make it real if you can over the internet. That’s the best we can do here. Like what does this look like in your life? Abby, let’s start with you.

Abby Cox [00:26:10] Well, right off the bat, when Spencer and I came into this position and were elected, it was literally the night of our inauguration. And it was January 4th of 2021. It was a crazy time. We had to have our inaugurations with very few people and at outdoor venue in Utah in January. So a little crazy, but we ended up doing this in the Lieutenant Governor’s hometown. We did a little event in our hometown. And then we did a little event in the Lieutenant Governor’s hometown and ended up literally somehow on the back of a fire truck in dark. And there were protesters up and down this parade route, screaming at myself and my children. And I was so naive and not experienced about all this stuff at the time. Today’s me would have never gotten on the back of that truck. But just literally from day one, you have these experiences where there is anger, there is violent rhetoric aimed toward you and your family that is frightening. It is scary. I think people are so used to seeing things on screen, seeing things on the TV, and they just don’t look at you as a human. And I think that’s the scary part is when we start to dehumanize someone because we disagree with them in one form or another. That is the dangerous point for public officials, for their families because a lot of times-- and we’re seeing this more and more sadly-- is that anger that they are pointing towards a screen comes into real life and that’s the scary part.

Sarah [00:28:08] Had you experienced anything on the campaign? Like, did you think, oh, okay, I can see this? Or did it feel completely different once you were officially sworn in?

Abby Cox [00:28:17] Not really. And especially my husband was lieutenant governor before that. And you know you see little things and of course I’ve been always told to stay out of the comments, don’t worry about the comments. So, no, I you personally didn’t see that. We had engendered a lot of goodwill. You’re a new candidate. You don’t have that background of people and you know as lieutenant governor it’s just a little bit different. We run on the same ticket so it’s not like it’s like the president vice president model here in Utah. And so we really didn’t have that. Of course, we saw that aim toward the governor a little bit, but it just, I don’t know, it felt like something changed during the pandemic and it just got worse and worse. And so I just feel like that’s really I don’t know why it was that catalyst. There was a lot going on in 2020, there’s George Floyd, there’s a lot of things going on where people were feeling very angry and for some reason just felt like lashing out towards public officials, they’d been given permission for that.

Sarah [00:29:18] There’s like a sense of ownership.

Beth [00:29:20] Joanna, I saw you nodding when Abby said that she’d been told not to read the comments. And I was thinking as she was talking about how the comments for everything are so harsh now. It’s part of that desensitization that Sarah was describing at the beginning, right? About an hour ago I was sitting in parked traffic on a highway and someone yelled at me on the highway. Everybody’s senses were high. That physical experience of being yelled at in person is pretty different than the internet comments. So I wonder what this has felt like for you and what experiences you’ve had that kind of trigger that fight or flight in your nervous system.

Joanna Lydgate [00:29:59] Yeah. I mean, look, I think everything Abby said is exactly right. And certainly I think people feel a sense of empowerment, given the anonymity that the internet provides and being able to say sort of whatever you want to say without having to actually stare someone down. It’s a scary time in our country. It is certainly a scary time to have a spouse in elected office. It’s also just a scary to be a parent, to send your kid to school every day. For us, we have kids who are in middle school and high school, and we don’t have the luxury of not talking about this because our friend the governor of Pennsylvania’s house is set on fire. We have neo-Nazis who come and protest on our front lawn at night. We can’t look away from it. And certainly having to navigate this as a parent has been a tricky thing. I repeatedly to friends like Abby to try to figure out how to do that. It’s interesting because we’ve had these protesters at our house and we had a group of neo-Nazis who came and they all wore ski masks. They all wore masks that covered their faces. I wanted to say to them take your mask off. Say it to my face. The same is certainly true with a lot of the vitriol and the hatred that we see online. But the thing I really want to emphasize is that the vast majority of Americans are not okay with this. They’re not okay what they’re seeing. They’re not okay with extreme partisan violence. It’s like less than 1% of the population that condones it. And I think sometimes the reporting and sort of the stories that we read can lead us to believe there has been an increase in political violence in this country. There has been increase in tolerance of it, but the vast majority of Americans really stand against this. And I really try to remember that every day, especially when I do every so often read the comments.

Beth [00:32:01] At your house, I just think about our governor had people on his lawn and like walked up to his porch during COVID and sort of at the height of regulations. And I remember just looking at my own porch and thinking, what would that be like to have people on my porch yelling about my policies?

Joanna Lydgate [00:32:20] In Massachusetts, we actually don’t have a dedicated governor’s residence. We just live in our normal house.

Abby Cox [00:32:25] Which I think is kind of crazy.

Joanna Lydgate [00:32:26] I know. Like you’re a normal house.

Abby Cox [00:32:30] Because we have a big fence, but we are a small property. A lot of the governor’s residences have a huge footprint, five to 15 acres in some areas. And we have really small footprint, and we’re right downtown in Salt Lake City. But still, we have it. And we’re actually in the process of making it much, much more secure. But I can’t imagine what [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:32:54] Well, here’s the thing, I totally agree with you that most people don’t want this. I don’t think anybody quite knows what to do about it. And I think there is a sense of powerlessness that feeds the fear and then the fear feeds the sort of threat response, scarcity mindset that then feeds the polarization that then feeds the violence. Like we have this really sort of toxic cycle. Now, this is a disclaimer. I’m not comparing you to this woman, but I just could not stop thinking about it. The profile, the interview with the woman from the Coldplay video, if you remember that over the summer, the woman who was caught. Abby, do you know what we’re talking about at the Cold Play concert? You don’t?

Abby Cox [00:33:37] No, I do.

Sarah [00:33:39] Okay, I was like there’s no way you missed it.

Abby Cox [00:33:41] [Crosstalk] and I was like, wait, what?

Sarah [00:33:41] I know you’re very busy, but there’s absolutely no way you missed this. The reason I bring it up is because it was like all this like lark we saw on the internet and she was talking about the number of death threats she got. This is no stakes. Like policy at least has some stakes perhaps in your personal life. No stakes. And I’m like, what’s happening? And I think it’s what you were speaking to with the internet. Like, because you have to, you feel so anonymous which is sort of helpful but also you feel anonymous and you feel you have to escalate to cut to break through to get someone’s attention so it’s why on a just a trigger response we’re going to death threats for the lady in the Cold Play video? Like I’m just trying to think like how do we break that? Like we can’t shut down the internet. Like what are we going to do to like de-escalate that threat response when it is a scary time whether you’re in public service or not. Because I do think it’s about our politics, but I also think it is about the psychology, which both of y’all pointed out, of the internet and that anonymous response that both protects you but also pushes you to escalate to breakthrough.

Abby Cox [00:34:54] Spencer and I spent an entire year at the NGA, thinking about this and studying this and then finding solutions. And truly, honestly, because of some of the political violence, our organization, we’ve actually kept it going: Disagree Better, and it really is teaching people how to disagree. We have to disagree. Like, that’s the way our country was founded. We were founded on principles of profound disagreement. And so that’s actually a good thing, but it’s the way we disagree. And I think we’ve gotten a way from learning how to disagree. There are a lot of studies that show that kids in middle school and high school, if they are taught actual debate skills and do debating the way debate is supposed to be, not what we see in politics today, but actual debate skills where you have to pick a side and it may not be the side you actually believe in and you actually have to defend that and you have to understand the other side. The study show that those kids turn into adults that are much less polarized. And so, obviously it needs to start young but we can start right now by there are so many incredible skills that we have just not learned as a country recently. And it really is like being curious, understanding our own emotional responses, like really trying to elevate the good behaviors that we see. And really if you see a leader modeling that, we need to say that. We need to say, I love the way you did it. Even not in politics, it can be your boss, your CEO is doing something like handling something really well, a disagreement really well. And you say I love the way you handled that. That was perfect. And I feel seen because of the way you did that, even though I don’t agree with you. So there’s so many of these really incredible skills, but we as a country have to start making sure that we are elevating those leaders that are modeling that kind of behavior and making it so that people see like, no, if I go to my city council, instead of just going and screaming about my issue that my dog is, whatever, say to the city council how are you treating each other? That’s what I would like to know. And make it an issue. It has to be an issue of like how are we doing this? And I’m going to elevate and vote for the people that are doing it right.

Sarah [00:37:38] Well, and I also just wonder if we need online civics courses. Like, okay, fine if you want to disagree on Facebook, this is how we’re going to do it. It’s a part of our civic life like it or not.

Beth [00:37:49] Joanna, I know you think a lot about elections in your professional life. I wanted to ask you if you think that there are structural changes that need to be made to go hand in hand with this push for civility. We’ve talked over the years. Sarah and I have been talking about disagreeing well the whole time we’ve had this show. We’ve written two books about it. We are the choir here, we are with you. We also sometimes just wonder about open primaries and like ranked choice voting, like how can we bake this into our system?

Joanna Lydgate [00:38:20] Yeah, well, let me say just one thing as a parent first, if I can, because I think that the point that Abby made about needing to learn how to interact with people who are different from you, who hold different values from you, that requires us to really spend a lot more time in person. And so a small thing that I’ve tried to do as a parent is to make sure that my kids are doing as many things that put them in situations where they’re interacting with their peers in person and that’s sports and it’s theater. It’s music or it’s just like playing with friends in the neighborhood, trying to stay off screens, trying to remember that just that small act every day of having in-person engagement is something we’ve really moved away from in this country. And certainly the pandemic played a role in exacerbating that. When it comes to elections, my day job is running an organization called States United we’re a bipartisan organization that focuses on protecting democracy and elections. And I have the good fortune of getting to spend my time every day working with an incredible group of election officials across the country who are Republicans, who are Democrats, who are Independents, and who’ve spent their careers protecting the foundation of our democracy, which is elections. I think that there are certainly things we could think about in terms of structural reform that might get us closer to a place of learning that we all have multiple choices to make and this shouldn’t be kind of a black and white thing. But for right now, I’m actually just really focused on this year and getting through these midterm elections and in this environment and with the rhetoric that we’ve seen and some of the tragic events that we’ve seen, especially over the past year, making sure that we have not just a free and fair, but a safe election next November. It’s going to be a really critical one. And against this backdrop, I think working with those election officials and also with our law enforcement leaders to make sure that people know that voting is safe and that voting has actually safe in practice is really important. We did some research last year. And found that there were a lot of people who didn’t vote in the last presidential election because they had the perception that it might not be safe because they read about threats because they were sort of experiencing this climate of political violence, and especially women and people of color who decided to not go make their voices heard. So I think it’s really important for us to send that message that voting is safe and to do the work to make sure that we’re protecting the most important part of our democratic system.

Sarah [00:41:00] Do you ever worry about that? Like when I was growing up I was a survivor of a school shooting. And now we know, like, you need to be really careful around talking about the shooter because it can feed this kind of cycle. What do you guys think about this? When you were talking about the election, I was like, yeah, because we’re all talking about civil war. In fact, there was a movie on at the theater is called Civil War. Like, how do you think about that? How do think about talking about the problem without feeding a perception that it’s unsafe. Like how do you break those two things apart?

Joanna Lydgate [00:41:39] Yeah, I think when it comes to elections it’s really reminding people first, what I said earlier, which is that Americans resoundingly in huge majorities reject political violence. This is not what we’re about as a country. It is a very fringe thing and a fringe behavior. That voting is safe and it has always been safe in this country. We have an incredible team of election officials and law enforcement leaders who spend months preparing for an election and preparing to make sure that everything goes smoothly, and it has over the last few election cycles. So, luckily, we have a great system and a great infrastructure in this country. And I do think that working with law enforcement here is really important because we also have to make sure that there’s accountability. Whether people make threats or whether they actually take actions, making sure that they are immediate consequences. And luckily we’ve seen that with respect to recent events.

Beth [00:42:40] To that media role, Abby, since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and you’ve had some time to process that, you wrote this op-ed as part of that processing, I wonder what you think was missed in the coverage of that story? It’s hard to imagine that anything was because there was so much coverage for so long, but something’s always missed, right? When you’re in a place experiencing the thing, it feels different to you than it does to us in our homes in Kentucky. So I just wonder with some distance, what you want people to hear about that?

Abby Cox [00:43:13] No, that’s a really interesting and great question. There was a 60 Minutes piece done, as you may have seen, that they came out and we were on the campus of Utah Valley University shortly after the shooting. Spencer and I were there. One thing I guess that they actually didn’t put in the piece, which I was really sad about, was that we sat down with about 20 students from UVU and had a whole conversation, which I was kind of surprised they didn’t put in there, really elevating these kids’ voices. We just sat down and we sat down with the president of UVU, Astro Tuminez, and so it was the three of us, and we just let them talk. We asked them questions. It wasn’t them asking us questions. It was the opposite. And we just said, what do you think about this? How are you processing this? And you would just be so heartened and hopeful hearing these kids and their message. They said we’re not okay with this. This happened to us here on this campus, and that’s not what we’re about. I mean, not a lot of people in the world knew about Utah Valley University, and now they do and this is what they know about it. And they were devastated that this happened. This wasn’t anything, that wasn’t a student. It wasn’t one of their peers. So they just felt devastated that this was how they were being perceived. They were incredibly gracious. They were incredibly kind to each other in disagreeing. They have different political views and they were still connecting and feeling love for each other. And so to me that I think is what’s missing. We see these big horrible events and yes we need to report on them, but like Joanna’s saying, that’s not the vast majority of people. But when we sit there and just elevate that part of it and not say look at these kids, they are rejecting this. These students are saying, no, we’re not okay with this. And so, to me, that’s what we’re missing in the media. And I think it’s helped because of what happened. Again, Disagree Better has become a bigger part of people are supporting it. We just did a big event in the National Cathedral. And so there’s been this longing and hunger for something different. And it’s that 70 plus, 80, however many percent that says, no, we’re not okay with this. Like give us something different and media has to respond. And every time we say like this is the big thing, again, of course you have to cover it, but cover all sides of it and show that people are not okay with it.

Sarah [00:46:04] Joanna, what’s giving you hope right now?

Joanna Lydgate [00:46:07] Well, before the op-ed that Abby and I published together came a letter that was signed by, I think, Abby, almost 40 first spouses across the country. And it was a joint statement condemning the violence. And I will say, it’s hard to get that many states to sign on to anything. And it was the first time I think that I’ve seen first spouses come together in that way. So I think to Abby’s point we have to remember just how united we are against these kinds of acts against this kind of rhetoric and environment. And I also think it’s really important for each one of us to use our platform. Abby talked at the beginning about our leaders and certainly they have a very important role to play, but each one of us has a platform, whether it reaches 10 people or 10 million people. And, look, Maura and I don’t agree with many of the things that Charlie Kirk stood for, but we came out immediately and forcefully condemning that assassination. And I think that’s a really important piece of this too, is just to be sounding a constant drum beat about what’s normal, what’s American, and to come together country over party, and to really be denouncing this and working on it together.

Beth [00:47:26] So we are about to record an episode where we try to consider patriotism in a pretty deep way. I wonder what patriotism means to you when you’re serving at personal risk and thinking constantly about your family’s safety. Abby, can we start with you?

Abby Cox [00:47:44] Yeah, I think patriotism has become a word that has lots of meanings and some not great for some people. If I use it in a certain way, then somebody that disagrees with me might hate that word or might not love that. And so it becomes sort of this like a lot of our vocabulary, sometimes it’s weaponized. We’re just about to celebrate 250 years of this grand experiment that started really in Joanna’s state in Massachusetts, which I have many ancestors from there. So I feel connected. But I was born almost 50 years ago in this month, and so I was a bicentennial baby and my mother named me Abigail after Abigail Adams.

Sarah [00:48:39] Oh my god, that’s amazing!

Abby Cox [00:48:41] So I felt very patriotic, but to me, it started like at birth with that namesake and me learning about her and thinking about what that means to me. And I just think it’s such a powerful moment that all of us, it’s a such a grand experiment, it had never happened before and we really have this beautiful thing that I think that’s patriotism is when we can look back and say we all came together from disparate places and different ideas and different ways of living and different ideologies and different religious traditions. And we embarked on this grand experiment. To me, that’s patriotism. And, to me, also I had a grandfather that was shot on Iwo Jima. And he tells the story of watching the flag being raised on Mount Suribachi as he’s fighting. So, that’s the kind of patriotism I think about, but I also think about loving my neighbor that I disagree with as patriotism. Like, just because I wave a big flag doesn’t make me patriotic. It’s the way I behave and it’s the way I treat my fellow citizens to me that is the most patriotic.

Beth [00:50:01] What about you, Joanna?

Joanna Lydgate [00:50:03] First, I’d just like to say we have on the record that Abby said that this democracy began in Massachusetts, so when our friends [crosstalk].

Abby Cox [00:50:13] I’ve been to Braintree and I’ve felt things.

Joanna Lydgate [00:50:19] Look, I think you’ve got me and Abby here today, we seem different. We’re from different parts of the country. Our spouses, our governors from different parties. Abby grew up on a ranch. I grew up in a city, and I think as with so many things, there’s so much more that unites us than divides us. And one of my favorite things about being first lady is getting to meet people all across the state who have totally different views, experiences, political affiliations from me. But you know what, when we’re serving meals together for Thanksgiving, or we’re lighting the State House Christmas tree, or we are honoring our service members on Memorial Day, none of that matters. It really doesn’t matter. I remember the first time that we really spent time with Abby, and it was when we’ve traveled to Utah for a National Governors Association meeting, and she invited me and my kids to lunch. You know what, my kids still talk about that. And they have no idea what Abby’s political views are. They don’t care at all. They’re just like that was the person who was so warm and kind to us. So I think it’s really just trying to remember that we have so much common ground. I have the good fortune of getting to run a bipartisan organization, which reminds me every single day of how united we are at least on protecting democracy. And there’s a minority in this country trying to undermine it, but the rest of this country really does not agree with that.

Sarah [00:51:49] Well, thank you so much for sharing your perspectives for the work you’re doing together and separately from your very disparate but essential parts of America. Thank you so for coming on Pantsuit Politics.

Abby Cox [00:52:02] Thank you.

Joanna Lydgate [00:52:03] Thank you for having us.

Beth [00:52:06] We appreciate the First Ladies joining us today. Sarah, you have a moment of hope to end this conversation. And we’ve been talking about how difficult it is to be a public figure, and to be shamed, and to fodder for public commentary, but it doesn’t always end up horribly.

Sarah [00:52:25] Yeah, I found this obituary of Cecilia Jimenez. She passed away at the age of 94 in The Economist. I almost never read those, but I just happened to read that one because I recognized the picture. She is the one who painted Monkey Jesus. Do you remember Monkey Jesus?

Beth [00:52:41] I didn’t until I read this article. And then it kind of vaguely rang about.

Sarah [00:52:44] Yeah, it was this woman who was supposedly like restoring a fresco in her town’s Church of Jesus. And what actually happened is she like wasn’t done. She started it and then she had to like go out of town and then people thought it was done. And then of course it became grist for the mill. It got on the internet. People were making fun of it because she like “ruined” this fresco. And this woman lives such a community-driven connective life. All she wanted to do was help her church. And so of course, at first she was devastated, just wouldn’t leave her house. Like she was the joke of the internet. She was the butt of the joke. And it was so, so sad to read about how she just wanted to help and like they didn’t have the money to fix it and she’d been painting and she thought she could start helping it. It about destroyed her. Except what ultimately happened is that this meme became a draw for people to come to the town. And, ultimately, this new iteration of the fresco became sort of beloved. It saved her town, like all the influx of tourism to come see the monkey Jesus ended up infusing her town with all this tourism dollars and investment. And she sort of became a hero ultimately. And I just thought it was so beautiful that something that threatened to tear her down ultimately ended up saving this place that she was working to contribute to anyway. And I just thought, well, okay, that makes me feel better because sometimes that’s what happens with the internet. We hear the negative aspect of the meme or the story and because there’s no connective tissue between one viral story and the next, it’s just like onto the next thing. Well, what happens ultimately? And I thought this was such a beautiful story that like, well, sometimes ultimately, this sort of exposure can have benefits. And it was a nice reminder that what can seem like a universally negative aspect of the internet isn’t always universally negative.

Beth [00:55:00] We always end our show talking about something on our minds Outside of Politics, at least sort of. And since today we’ve been talking about how technology and particularly these big tech platforms make it pretty brutal to be spotlighted, I wanted to talk about those big tech platforms pretending to like us Outside of Politic. Sarah, we updated our Alexis.

Sarah [00:55:28] She keeps trying to get [inaudible] and I just keep saying, no, thank you.

Beth [00:55:32] Don’t do it, because here’s what happened. The thing I use this for more than anything else, I play music on it and I make my grocery list. Okay, that’s why I have an Alexa in my kitchen|: to play music and make my groceries list. So I’m bopping along in my kitchen and I say, “Alexa, add Romaine to the shopping list.” And this new voice goes “Got it, Romaine added. Your salad game is on point.”

Sarah [00:56:01] Gross.

Beth [00:56:01] And I was like, excuse me? And then I had to add a few other things and there was a comment like that congratulating me on my fine choice of ingredients every time I added something to the shopping list. And I finally said, “Alexa, can you stop commenting on my grocery list additions?” And it said, “Okay, I’ll keep it chill from now on.” I was just like I hate it here. I want to melt this thing down. This is the worst.

Sarah [00:56:32] If someone has an audio kitchen timer, like a timer that you just say, “Set a timer for this much” and it’ll do it, and it will do nothing else, please send it to me. Because that is the primary reason we do not get rid of Alexa. I have moved our record player into our kitchen area. I got a record. I have a big record collection. I moved all the records. I got like a special holder so that we can play. I like the records because it’s not endless music. It kind of like it works almost like a timer. But the only reason I haven’t like fully pulled the Alexa is because of the timer because it is so nice to be able to speak. I don’t want to have to keep my phone in there. So if somebody has that, then I could cut the cord because I am looking for ways to cut Amazon left, right and center. I’ve started ordering all my books off eBay. Hot tip, works great. Or I’ll just use Amazon as a search, I’ll find the product I want, and then I go buy it from the retailer directly because I canceled Prime. And it’s because of that sort of it feels like jumping the shark. We talked a little bit about this on the Spicy Bonus Episode. The desire to exploit my data to make my life seamless has just made my life Icky. Like you’ve overshot the mark guys. Like it’s just icky. And even with AI generally, first of all, I recommend everybody moving between the models because I think that is the best way to remember that they’re tools and they’re competitors and not your new best friend. And Claude is so obsequious. And so I find myself using Gemini more and more because Gemini is clinical. Gemini will give you what you want, not much more. Which I enjoy. And so just thinking about the ways that I can remember these are tools and also just dial back the data sharing and the surveillance. Like I’m seriously considering, especially after our last conversation, like do I need a ring doorbell? I never use it. I never use the video component of that almost ever. Like, I’m just like kind of starting to think about all these things.

Beth [00:58:58] Well, and I’m just thinking about do people by coming to my porch consent to be on camera?

Sarah [00:59:03] Well, these poor delivery people are being surveilled enough as it is. They’re eyeball tracking. Gross!

Beth [00:59:10] Yes, it’s awful. And the fake warmth from these devices I think is really backfiring because it’s so absurd. It’s so absurd. My kids hate it, the more they try to make the voice sound conversational, the more my daughters despise it. So I hope it’s all kind of backfiring. I agree with you that I think it’s helpful to sort of move between worlds and see different features and realize these are all just programmed choices. But I’m also spending a lot of time talking to my kids about how this kind of affirmation is not love, approval is not love, like from your friends, from the technology, like don’t get it twisted. Don’t be looking.

Sarah [01:00:01] Don’t you know a person, don’t your children have friends whose parents praise everything they do? They’re the worst people to be around. The absolute worst. They grow up looking like Donald Trump. You know what I mean? Like when everybody tells you you’re great, it’s not great. You turn into grody, mushy, ego mess.

Beth [01:00:24] Yeah, I can’t remember if it was Dr. Becky or Mary Van Geffen, but a couple of years ago I saw one of them talking about how when your child shows you their artwork, there’s this urge to go, oh my gosh, it’s amazing. And the better thing is to say, how do you feel about it? You’re the artist. Do you like what you’ve created here? What do you like about it. And I’ve really tried to take that to heart because I do want it to mean something not necessarily when I give a compliment, but I want I want them to know that their compliment is the most important one for themselves and not to be seeking that external validation constantly, especially from a stupid device.

Sarah [01:01:04] Well, and I would just say even further than that I watched an Oprah show because guys I can watch the Oprah show again. I don’t know if you guys knew this. I know Oprah doesn’t need a commercial but the Oprah podcast is in video form and you can just turn on at four o’clock every day like it’s the Oprah Show and I’m better. Do you know what I’m saying? Like my life is better. It’s like I’ve been able to go back in time to a better time when the Oprah shows on four O’clock. Anyway, she did a show about going no contact. And the woman who wrote Adult Children of Emotionally Mature Parents, who’s like always at the center of these conversations was on the show. And she was talking about the importance of your subjective emotional experience. And I was like, no, I disagree. I don’t want to teach my children to center their subjective emotional experiences because then they’re going to be at the mercy of their emotions. And that is no life to live. And I think this sense of like how you feel and let me cater to how you feel is just a recipe for unhappiness. Like my friend Kate says all the time like I’m honest. If you show me a piece of art and I think, I say, that’s sloppy, you could have done better. When you do good and I say that’s great, you’ll believe me because I haven’t said everything you’ve done is great. So when I tell you it’s great, you’ll know I mean it. Like that’s the power of real compliments do. Like, they trust you. It’s like we don’t believe Alexa. And even when we do that to our kids, they don’t believe us. When you praise everything they do, they’re not stupid. They know everything they do isn’t great. I wouldn’t ask Amos that as an artist because Amos is exceptionally hard on himself as an artist. So I know what he’s going to say, it sucks. I hate it. And so I just think this idea that as long as everybody feels catered to every moment of every day by the robots and anybody else, I just want to be like, again, are we just trying to get to the WALL-E spaceship as fast as possible? Because sometimes that’s what it feels like. We’re just on a dead run to get to the WALL-E Spaceship, which haunts my dreams.

Beth [01:03:26] The conversation around here that we’ve been having about your subjective emotional experience is just what we talk about in our books. Like, it is real. The fact that this is hard for you. I’m not arguing you about, it’s hard. What I want to communicate is you’re up for that. You’re up for it being hard. You are up for feeling rejected by people at school. Your subjective experience of that is correct. That sucks. It’s the worst.

Sarah [01:03:57] Yeah, do you want to live in pluribus where everybody loves you? Everybody agrees all the time? Gross. That’s also would set off every alarm bell you have. It’s like, Michelle, listen, heart’s not bad. Heart’s just heart.

Beth [01:04:10] Well, and you will get stronger from knowing that you can make it through this. And this will not be the hardest thing that life gives you. And the next hard thing is something that you’ll get stronger from and then the cycle will just continue that way. And I wish that there were shortcuts around that, I guess, but there aren’t.

Sarah [01:04:33] There are if you want to become an asshole.

Beth [01:04:37] Well, I guess that’s true. And I think that’s what the technology is doing right now. Like it kind of bugs me that Claude is embracing that Anthropic is using this keep thinking slogan. Because I’m like keep thinking sort of. Like when I’m using AI, I’m thinking sort of. When I drive my car with driver assist on, I’m driving sort of. And I don’t want to live my life sort of. And I’m just trying to figure out where am I okay with these tools coming in and helping me and where am I not? And I want to make that from a clear-eyed place, not a place where they’re going, “Oh my God, you made such an amazing choice by turning me on today.”

Sarah [01:05:19] Well, I remember vividly with Griffin, probably sometime in middle school, and he was freaking out about something. Who knows what it was. And I said, what you’re feeling is pressure. That’s it. The pressure will increase on you. That’s what growing up means. The stakes will get higher. The requirements will get harder. It will require more effort of you in your life because everybody doesn’t get to stay eight years old. So the pressure, you’re not doing anything wrong. This is what happens. The pressure increases. And I do worry that we’re in this space where a lie is being sold to us that you shouldn’t feel pressure, ever. And there should be no tension and there should no anxiety. And here’s the thing, here’s kind of where I came out of the no contact, which we sort of touched on a lot in our audience when I wrote the thing about Brooklyn Beckham and everything. If everybody right now, if we were seeing this trend towards happiness and fulfillment and belonging, if everybody choosing their own families and crafting their own bliss and all this was like indicative of some positive trajectory we were on, that’d be one thing, but it’s not. The tensionless existence, the accommodating anxiety around dating that we see a lot around school, around listening to this professor talk about how people are going to AI to script out conversations with their professors or with their dating profiles, stop. Halt. It’s not going to work. We cannot escape the fundamental pressure of a lived existence. There’s no way out. I’m sorry. Well, there is, apparently, if you live in Canada. You know what I mean? Like, stop. This is a road to nowhere. Life is hard. It is full of pressure and hard choices and failure and suffering and thank God, because again, I don’t want to live on the WALL-E ship. I don’t want to exist inside Pluribus. I want people to be in high stakes, connective communities where people piss you off and you piss people off and you say things that are messed up and so does everybody else. And then we get up the next day, we do it all over again. I am so worried about the way this technology seems to be feeding all our worst interpersonal instincts right now.

Beth [01:08:25] Yeah, and I think that every time I see something that’s obviously been written by AI to try to resolve a difficult situation, it makes me lean into kind of the Alexander Hamilton talk less, smile more. I’m just trying to be in more spaces where I’m like I’m going to be here with my body. This isn’t going to get resolved with words, but I at least can communicate through my physical presence. I’m staying here. I’m not trying to run away from this. I love this poem. We’ll put a link for it in the show notes. It actually says I want to know if you can be with pain, mine or your own without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. But I think about those phrases all the time now and just how can I not try to hide or fade or fix? Because that’s what I feel. When Alexa says that my salad game is on point, I feel that control of like everything’s great all the time and I’m not here for that. But I want to be here for the fullness of the human experience. And maybe that means I need to shut up more and just be present for it.

Sarah [01:09:36] Everything is not great all the time. Halleluiah!

Beth [01:09:41] It’s not.

Sarah [01:09:42] I don’t want that. I don’t want that for anybody here. And the reason I’m not doing a million disclosures, well, I know some of you might actually need to have gone no contact. And I know some of might need to have like-- because if that’s true for you, then you don’t need me to affirm that. That’s being grounded in your own experience. I’m not doing that. I don’t do it here and I’m going to do it and I know some people wish I would, but I’m going to. Because if that’s true for you, then you don’t need me to affirm that. Like, if you know that your situation was different, then you know that. You don’t need me to say it. And if you do, then I can’t fix that for you. If you need me say it every single time, then that’s a bigger issue than me. That’s with you. And I think we got to start saying hard things to each other and just dealing with it in the fallout. The stakes are high. Yeah, of course they are. Aren’t we glad? Do we want to live with there are no stakes? That’s boring as shit. I feel this, and I feel that crumbling. It feels like right now in so many ways, to the Spicy Bonus about the Trump administration and the parade of incompetence, to the public spotlight, to the artificial intelligence. You know how when you’re driving a car sometimes and you like something’s wrong and it starts to rattle that’s like really, really rattling and there’s like a vibrating and you can just feel like things are starting to maybe like fall off. I don’t know, like a hubcap or something. Like that’s what it feels like. And in kind of an encouraging way, it does feel like no one thinks the car is running well. Even the people who are broadcasting (like we talked about on the spicy) from Facebook that everything’s great, thou dost protest too much. There’s a reason Shakespeare still hits 400 years later. You don’t think it’s great either. That’s why you’re yelling so loud that it’s great.

Beth [01:11:49] And I hope that rattling finds some outlets this year, finds some places through an election, but also just through the work people are doing in their communities and their families and their lives, their relationships. I hope the rattling finds lots of really positive expressions. We hear about those expressions in comments to our episodes and emails to the show. We really appreciate the hard conversations that are had around our show. It feels very real to me here and it feels real to me in a lot of different pockets of my life and I’m grateful for that.

Sarah [01:12:28] It felt real this week with Bad Bunny. Okay, it is possible to be under that amount of pressure and spotlight and have an answer. Like, I don’t know who in the comments called it joyful confidence, but I thought tattoo that on my forehead. Like, that’s all I want right now. I don’t care who you are or what you are doing in your life, but if you are exuding joyful confidence, I bet you feel like a pool in a desert to those around you because that’s what that feels like. You just want to gulp down because you’re like, yes, that’s what I need. Because we are living with the mirror image of this, this dark ego, like a bully. The opposite of a joyful confidence is a bully. And we have such a clear manifestation of that. And I think it’s just showing up in so many places so that when somebody hits that joyful confidence note, it’s like you can just hear the choir go, amen. Like it just hits the note. It really does.

Beth [01:13:38] Yeah, to see that the wedding matters, the nail salon interaction matters, the dominoes matter, like the sugar cane field, like just the stuff of life is important and is where we should center our experiences. And we don’t need Alexa or any other thing affirming that for us.

Sarah [01:13:59] I hope we have joyful confidence here at Pantsuit Politics. I certainly, certainly do.

Beth [01:14:04] That is the aspiration, for sure. Thank you all so much for spending time with us today. We will be back here with you next Wednesday, not Tuesday, just a reminder. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

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

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

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