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Did we really elect this group of leaders to make us sicker and hungrier and poorer, only to use our own money to create an unaccountable secret police that are killing people in custody? ICE recently dragged a pregnant American citizen out of her car and across the pavement on her stomach, and she lost her baby. The party that cares more for unborn fetuses than any living child killed a baby in utero. For what Optics. Hello and welcome to the Politics Girl Podcast. I'm your host, Leigh McGowan. Let's get into it so I am in my playroom because I'm at home and I recently took a break from making content for a couple of days over the holidays, which is a big deal for a full time content creator like me. Those of us who follow the news don't really get breaks and it becomes incredibly exhausting. A bit overwhelming. And with what our news is like these days, it's deeply depressing. Should you also be a person whose life is based in morality? The whole world has become quite demoralizing because the bad guys are winning, lies are winning, predators are winning. We spent years talking about the inappropriateness of Obama's tan suit, but Trump comes in and bulldozes the east wing of the White House to the ground and we just move on. We impeached Bill Clinton over a questionable but consensual relationship with a 20 year old, but we aren't impeaching our current president over child rape. I am struggling to explain that to myself, let alone to other people. And I'm having difficulty understanding how my fellow Americans are okay with our government changing systems, say the world order with America realigning itself with Russia and Hungary and North Korea abandoning Europe, abandoning NATO. I am blown away that Amnesty International published a paper on how America is torturing innocent people at Alligator Alcatraz and it wasn't front page news. The American government is torturing people. They're not feeding them, they're making them drink toilet water. They are putting them in two foot by two foot cages in the blazing hot Florida sun. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, then go look it up on Amnesty International's website and then ask yourself why you didn't hear about it in the news. Our country has become sitting ducks in a propaganda and surveillance war where our government is allowing a handful of billionaires to take over every aspect of our nation, from the media to corporations to the tech industry and to the economy. And if we allow this consolidation to go on unchecked for the Next three years, the entire country is going to be run by like six people. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. And none of those people give a shit about us. These men don't even think we should have countries anymore. They believe the world should be divided up into corporate city states where they are the leaders with total control and we are the serfs in their techno feudal empires. Does that work for you? Because it doesn't work for me. You know what else doesn't work for me? What is happening to women in America. As a woman born in 1975, I came into existence after the passing of Roe v. Wade. I watched movies like Dirty Dancing as a period piece where in the past a woman's life could be destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy, where a man could abandon her in crisis, and the dangerous steps a woman would have to take and the life threatening risks she would have to endure to regain control of her own body and life. Fifty years later, we live in that world again. And the powers that be seek to strip even more of our autonomy from us. I was raised in what I thought was the last generation of women who didn't have a choice. Growing up, I was told I could be anything. I could do anything. I didn't have to just be a wife and a mother. I could follow my dreams. Over time, while I realized that I could have it all, I realized I couldn't necessarily have it all at the same time. In the mid 2000s, I took a break from acting, a career that I had dreamt about my whole life, but which had been derailed by what we would now call MeToo. During that time of uncertainty, I worked with a life coach. Yes, it was very la, but it was also very helpful working together. I said maybe I thought I should pivot from being an actor to being a producer. That I knew. I was organized and I was driven and I had a way with people and artists and I understood the entertainment business and I could probably thrive in that field. And the coach listened to me and she asked me, okay, that sounds great. Do you want to be a mother? And I said yes. And she said, okay, well what kind of mother do you want to be? And I said, I don't know, I mean, a good one. And she was like, I understand, yes, a good one. But do you want to be the kind of mother who puts her kids to bed, who reads bedtime stories, who does bath time, who goes to their games and school events? And I was like, yeah, I Totally want to be that kind of mother. And she said, okay, well then you can't be a producer because those things don't work together. You're going to have to be at work late. You're going to be reading the trades when you get home. You're going to miss concerts and parties for shoots and castings. You will definitely be missing bath time and stories. And I sat there for a long time with that information because it felt so unfair to me. I didn't even have a child yet and I was already expected to give up things for it. But she was right in making a decision about my career, which I wanted. I also had to consider how I planned to show up as a mother, which I also wanted. And while I could be both, reality changed the trajectory of what I could strive for. So I chose to go into photography. I made my own hours I could be flexible with when I worked. I was good at it and I did it for years, but it didn't really fulfill me. In fact, taking something that I loved doing and trying to make it into a business actually took a lot of the joy out of it from me. And when I did have my son, I was kind of happy to let that business just sort of drift away. And I tried very hard to throw myself into being a full time stay at home mom. I did the mommy and me classes and the my gym play dates. I was the chauffeur and the teacher and the chef and the housekeeper. I devoted my life to my child and his needs and I loved it and I'm glad that I did it. But I can honestly say I was completely unfulfilled. My brain was screaming for a challenge. My ambition was drowning in these mundane daily tasks I was responsible for. I tried so hard to throw my whole personality into being the best mother I could be. And I think, honestly, I think I did a really great job. My kid, who's turning 18 this year is absolutely awesome. He's the best thing I ever did. But I met mothers during that time that I was a stay at home parent. And they were enjoying things like building entire murals out of fruit. Like the Serengeti with all the animals and the trees and the African Sahara, but made out of like blueberries and orange slices and dragon fruit. And they were so fulfilled by that and it was so impressive. It just wasn't me. But that's the point of feminism, right? It's the choice. Women should be able to choose what they want to do with their life, what fills their cup. I was so Glad to be there for my son's childhood, but I was also so glad to get back to work. When I started my first blog, In Case I'm Gone, I found an outlet that fed me and not just my child. When I moved on to teaching civics on YouTube, I finally felt that I had a bigger purpose. I would be able to educate and inspire people about their government because I knew that their government really mattered. When I started doing my kitchen rants during the pandemic, it gave me an outlet for my brain and my rage. In a world of sourdough starters and Donald Trump. I have been a stay at home mother and a career woman. I grew up with a stay at home mother, raised by a stay at home mother, both devoted but genuinely unhappy and unfulfilled. I grew up in a world where women suffered in their marriages. If their husbands were awful, there wasn't much they could do if they left them. They had very little money and very little choices. So they all played the role of this caretaker servant where their needs were not met, but they were responsible for everybody else's needs. The world I grew up in appeared perfect. I had a great childhood, but even when things weren't great, we all knew to pretend that they were. Because aesthetics and perception were everything. Only those on the inside knew about the cracks. The outside, like everything you're seeing in this trad wife social media world of today, looked perfect, but if you lived through it, you knew it wasn't. I had a great dad, but I think I actively sought out the opposite of him in a partner. I wasn't looking for a breadwinner. I was looking for a friend. Someone who would respect me as a person and not just as their wife. A man who wouldn't expect me to serve him. A partner who considered me equal. Because the days of being less than your husband were over. In fact, for almost my entire young life, I told my mother I was never going to learn to cook because I didn't want anyone to expect me to do it. It wasn't until I was a parent that I really took any interest in cooking at all because my child needed to be fed and I wanted things like holidays and special traditions to be, you know, the way they had been when I was little. And a lot of that was built around food. But because I married an actual partner, I have never done any of that alone. Even if I still think the women of my generation carry the lion's share of the mental load for the household, a lot of us chose actual partners. The Thing is, I thought we were advancing past the way women were treated, but I'm horrified to say that it appears that we are regressing instead. I mean, look around. America seems to be actively trying to push women back into the home, in the kitchen, to reduce us to baby makers and companions for lonely men. We aren't just undermining the autonomy of women's bodies, but of our minds. Repealing the 19th amendment and a women's right to vote is something people feel unashamed to discuss openly in 2025. Turning Point USA has basically turned into a megachurch since Charlie Kirk's death, using his bedazzled widow as some sort of siren to get young women to embrace their own oppression again. It's like living in the Upside down, watching it happen, everything I have known in my life to be true. Women are equal to men. Racism is bad. The Holocaust was a horror that can never happen again. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. America is good. Nazis are bad. Rapists should be punished. It all feels false, like the tables have been turned and everything I thought I knew is wrong. The world I grew up in would not have the US Military murdering people in the Caribbean without at least a very good cover story for why they were doing it. The world I knew would never have the U.S. military used against the U.S. people. The president of the United States wouldn't call half the country scum in his Christmas message. I appreciate that people are being funny and calling themselves radical left scum as a joke, embracing this moniker to take the sting out of it. Like all these radical left scum can meet over here. Or pointing out that being called rebel scum means you are the good guy if you've watched a single Star wars movie. But I can't get past the fact that it is atrocious that our President would refer to us like this, that my son might think this is how leaders behave. Quite frankly, I find it distressing that a third of this country doesn't see that. Or that his 200 other messages on Christmas Day were a weird red flag problem. When did it become okay for for our leader to demonize his political opposition like this? He puts us in serious danger. For what? Wanting people to have affordable healthcare and a living wage? Wanting to feed schoolchildren and treat other human beings with respect? Why are people okay with this? Are we really going to keep playing this game where we have to watch what we say and walk on eggshells and lose our vote? Where we just continue to work until we die so we can afford food and shelter, and then we pay taxes to a government that doesn't anything back to us in return. They're cutting health care and public schools and failing to repair our roads and bridges. They are cutting investments in affordable new energy and regulations that keep workers safe. They're cutting the CDC and the FDA and the things that keep our food and drugs from poisoning us. But we're going to continue to pay so we can what, Invade other countries for oil and protect child rapists? What are we doing? How long are we going to keep playing this game? Alexandra Ocasio Cortez hit the nail on the head recently when she said, I want to remind you what the real crime is. It's the oligarchs taking 170 billion of our dollars from health care and food assistance and public programs and funneling it into a secret police program. And she wasn't wrong. Did we really elect this group of leaders to make us sicker and hungrier and poorer, only to use our own money to create an unaccountable secret that are killing people in custody? ICE recently dragged a pregnant American citizen out of her car and across the pavement on her stomach, and she lost her baby. The party that cares more for unborn fetuses than any living child killed a baby in utero for what optics to let those who aren't white know they have no rights in America, so they better just get out. This is all the work of Stephen Miller, the deputy Chief of staff of the White House, the architect of the childhood separation policy, the author of the Muslim ban, and now this attack on immigrants and non white Americans. It's Stephen Miller calling anyone who questions his tactics a domestic terrorist, who is now saying that if you film ICE agents in action, you are committing a crime. That it's anti American to be anti Trump or critical of capitalism or not supportive of Christianity, which is, of course, incredibly ludicrous in a country that was founded on the freedom of religion. The Trump White House says that radical gender ideology is domestic terrorism. So if you believe in gay rights or trans rights, hell, if you believe in human rights, you can be labeled as a domestic terrorist in Trump's America. Likewise, if you show hostility towards traditional values or the traditional family, I mean, that's insane. It's a war on single mothers and single fathers and the LGBTQ community, and it's a prison for anyone that's trapped in a bad marriage. We are a country with a thrice divorced, twice impeached, adjudicated rapist, 34 count felon who tried to overthrow the 2020 election and is the most prominent player in a decades long child sex trafficking ring as president. And we are being told that we are domestic terrorists if we hold any hostile views to their version of traditional values. What planet are we on Now? I'm going to take a quick moment to thank the sponsors who allow this show to continue and I'm going to be right back after this. A new year means a clean slate. Are you committed to working out this year? Then you're going to want to make sure you rehydrate after your workouts. Are you thinking of eating healthier? Then you might want to add and carry healthy snacks with you on the go. I have talked about IQ Bars for a long time because they are packed with clean, delicious ingredients to keep you physically and mentally fit like magnesium and lion's mane. But I haven't talked as much about the IQ Mixes, the zero sugar drink mix that mixes with water to hydrate your body with electrolytes, improving your mood and boosting your clarity. 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Our listeners are going to get 15% off by using the code politicsgirl@ra.com just head to A R E Y and use the code politicsgirl and you are all set. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Please support the show and tell them that we sent you. Now back to the podcast. And we're back. One of my favorite online writers, John Pavlovitz, who authors the Beautiful Mess on Substack, recently wrote that the Epstein files have fully exposed the right that we know eventually what those files will have in them will tell us the atrocities of Jeffrey Epstein. And as John says, they will also expose the monstrous human beings who who collaborated with him and did irreparable harm to an untold number of girls and young women. But we will also see a sprawling network of perverts and deviants who use their collective influence and wealth to violate humanity in ways that are unthinkable to decent human beings. What these files will ultimately expose, yes, President Trump, whose presence in them has only become more obvious by the pages of black bars and blocked out pages. But until that day comes, the Epstein files that we need to see will expose a lot more than that. John makes the case that they've exposed Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has spent months bastardizing her position over the legal system to prevent their release, knowing full well that Donald Trump's name is all over them. They have exposed speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who has wielded his power over Congress, to continue to obstruct their release to proving, as John so eloquently puts it that his Christianity is nothing more than fraudulent performance art. They have exposed the White House press secretary, Carolyn Levitt, who, to quote John, directly, stands before the nation each day, a cross dangling from her neck as she lies and gaslights the American people on behalf of a serial predator. And it has exposed the Republican party as a vile and morally inverted cadre of broken humans who. Who are largely marching and voting lockstep to protect predators and pedophiles and laughing in the face of the survivors. John goes on to say that the Epstein files have exposed the moral bankruptcy of the conservative Christian church, whose religious convictions have suddenly evaporated when given the choice between exposing rapists or ensuring themselves future power. They have exposed religious leaders like Franklin Graham, who have continued to fight hollow culture wars against things like the LGBTQ community while tying themselves to a man whose resume is nothing but moral filth. John points out that the files have exposed the mainstream media, who have, by and large, continued to bend the knee and don kid gloves when it comes to the most lawless sitting president in history. And he brings the whole thing home by saying that perhaps the most infuriating and hard, heartbreaking of all is that the Epstein files have exposed the tens of millions of Americans, Dads and moms and grandmothers and uncles and teachers and pastors and soccer coaches and business owners and neighbors who have continued to move the goalpost for what they deem morally allowable when it comes to their vile and ignorant and spray tanned cult leader. Those are John's beautiful words. And I get that. I mean, how can we ever look at the people who continue to support this man and this party the same? How can we ever bring our families back together after this moral sickness has been excused? The victims deserve justice, yet the most important people in this country are working overtime to make sure they don't get it. And a third of our fellow citizens are cheering them on for doing that. As many people have pointed out, it is entirely possible the Epstein files are only the tip of the iceberg, that this is a tangled and disgusting web of lies and criminality that run through our entire society. And it is possible that 2026 and beyond will bring about some sort of societal breakdown as we realize that the foundations on which we built our entire nation are both cracked and decrepit. Which is why I believe we need courage and imagination as we go into this next year and the years that are going to follow. Many of us can tell you what we don't want, but we need to get really clear and loud. About what we do want. As far as I'm concerned, I am on Team Morality, Team Civility, Team Common Sense. I am on Team Rule of Law. I have given up honestly on both parties. I was a proud Democrat for years, but they have become feckless and enabling. They refuse to elevate the next generation and they continue to capitulate to the status quo. There are people in the Democratic Party who are trying to change it from within and I believe those people deserve our support. But the party itself and what leadership is doing, they are not up to the task of this moment and we need to replace them and we need to demand more, better. The Republican Party, however, is dead. It is over. It is an anti Democratic Party. They have proved that they are more than willing to throw the entire country and its people to the wolves for continued unchallenged power. That they favor one skin color, one religion, one mindset over the rights and humanity of any others. That they don't care about the world order or the rule of law. That they are ready to abandon the Constitution and the Republicans public and they should be punished by every patriotic American for their treachery. Should I be lucky enough and have the hustle to sell another book this year it will be about defining where I think this country should be walking, what I believe we should be doing to improve all of our lives. Because this country needs leaders, people to emerge out of the ashes of what we have destroyed, to try and build something better. And those people need direction and they need support and they need funding and I want to advocate for that. We need to be clear that the only people truly being funded right now are the most corrupt. There is a reason that Turning Point USA continues to grow. Why the Federalist Society had the power to take over the courts, particularly the Supreme Court. Why Leonard Leo is now running Teneo to do what he did to the courts, to the rest of society. Why Peter Thiel could create a J.D. vance and Elon could buy Trump an election. There is a reason the Heritage foundation is writing all of our laws and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro are all fighting for influence or supremacy after Charlie Kirk's death. Because there is so much power and money in the right wing machine. They don't care if they lie to us. They don't care if the country gets destroyed or they damage our international reputation. They are winning and they are profiting and they are creating the world. They want to be in some sort of techno free feudalism, Christian nationalist, nihilistic capitalistic world that most of us will fail under we need an opposition party with the stones to fight fire with fire, with the power and courage to not only beat this regime at the ballot box by stepping away from the status quo, to promise and then deliver the things people really need like universal health care and a living wage and a just and fair society safety net, but also the guts to destroy this entire regime to impeach these people that belong in jail and then prosecute them. We need leaders who aren't afraid to hold people accountable for the crimes they have committed against others, including against the entire American people. And if you find yourself out here justifying or siding with these abusers, then you're telling on yourself. Vice President J.D. vance said last week at the Turning Point America Festival that people don't have to apologize for being white anymore. These people's supremacy is just on full display now. And as a white Christian myself, I want to be very clear once again that the far right is creating and then solving a non existent problem. No one ever told me I couldn't say Merry Christmas and I have never once felt that I had to apologize for being white. This is a bullshit issue made up to keep people distracted by hating others so they don't notice that the real issues are out there being perpetuated by the same people are the things that are actually destroying their lives. AmericaFest went in hard on white Christian nationalism because this group is working overtime to solidify their power before they lose their golden goose, the man who is quickly and publicly going off the rails. They are seeking a new way to keep and grow the base as they lose part of it to Mike Pence and Mitt Romney Christians because the Epstein files and Nick Fuentes are just a bridge too far for those people. If you ask me, Charlie Kirk was a sacrificial lamb. They needed to bring that flock in line when someone is murdered. The most logical question we have been taught for decades of watching police procedurals is who had the most to gain from his death? And I'm telling you it clearly was not the Democrats. I think Charlie had to go down for them to rise up. And it is working. Vicki Hobbs recently wrote that there's no point at which this is over, that there is no return to some elusive point when democracy stood still. Much of the damage that has been done can never be undone. There are only two choices in the long arc of how this future unfolds. We will either rebuild the government and society under the framework of a social democracy through a soft or hard revolution, or we will Decline further into a racist authoritarian state held hostage by the ruling triumvirate of techno Christian oligarchs. Looking around, it seems as if the billionaires have chosen rapid societal decay because they think they can benefit from it. The alternative would be for enough of us to demand a different path. One that is responsive to all of humanity and not just the exclusive elite. The elite are currently inoculated from accountability and that has to end. We see it very clearly with the Epstein files. They believe, because it appears like it is true, that they are above the law, that laws and rules only apply to us and then they can change those laws and rules whenever they want to and we should just be grateful to we are not Currently the group being rounded up and killed. It is working for them right now, but it is unsustainable and they know it. There is a reason they are all building huge underground bunkers right now. And it's not to hide from the aliens. It's to hide from us and the fallout of their own terrible decisions. Personally, I don't want mass plagues or state collapse or war. I believe there has to be a different way. We are living through a full on breakdown of humanity. So we need to get really ambitious about what we want to come out of this. A creator online that I really like that goes by Straight outta Salem recently questioned if we can't stop societal collapse, we can dream of what comes after. Ask yourself if I could have the world any way I wanted it, what would that look like? Because dreaming a new world into existence is actually just as important as living through the breakdown. At the end of the day, the regular people we might be down, but we're not out. The 2025 elections were a bloodbath for this current administration. The New York mayoral race was a wake up call to the democratic establishment. Unions continue to grow, people continue to march, to disobey, to help their neighbors when the government abandons them them. Our institutions might be failing, but the people are stepping up. We have been abandoned by our government, but we haven't been abandoned by each other. The year ahead is uncertain, but we are still here. We are still fighting. This administration wants our silent compliance. We can't give that to them. We have to survive this moment and then the moment after. We either capitulate this tyranny or we oppose it. I personally vote for resistance. Our country has crossed the Rubicon. We are not who we thought we were. The question is could we be? And how hard are we willing to fight to be it? Now listen, I Like woo woo stuff. So I'm going to leave you with this. Tara Isis Garris writes about how we are ending the Chinese Year of the Snake, which is also the end of a nine year cycle. To grow, a snake has to shed its skin. It's not the ending, but a beginning. It's not the collapse, but the last layer releasing its grip. What is coming loose to make room for what will be. So we have to discard what it is that we no longer need. Garris writes the shift starts not through chaos, but through subtle signals, tension on the surface, a sense of outgrowing something you once accepted as fixed. A quiet awareness rising in the body even before the mind can comprehend. If you think what started in February 2017 is reaching its final chapter in February 2026, that those patterns that were set are finishing their arc and the lessons are revealing themselves, should we choose to learn them, then what have we grown beyond? What is loosening, what can be sloughed off? We are moving on. This is the nature of a cycle, a cycle that is completing itself. And I believe that what no longer fits will fall away. And I think more and more people are waking up to that. According to the ancients, we aren't actually falling apart right now. We are in the final stages of shedding before renewal. So let's look at it that way. It's no longer good enough to say what's wrong. We have to grow and imagine a future where things are right. We have to accept that we are never going back to what it was that this man and this administration, and maybe even capitalism itself, perhaps even American Christianity, has been captured in and it has destroyed what we had. The question is, what comes next? If maximum profit is the sole goal, most of us will not survive. And that can't be acceptable to most of us. As Robert Reich recently said, people forget that poverty is a policy choice. Concentrated wealth is a policy choice. None of this is natural or inevitable. We have power to build a system that serves the many and not just the powerful few. And we have to remember that and then we have to act on it. So go into this new year with grit and determination, because it is going to be hard. Go into this new year with curiosity and imagination because we have to create something new. Finally, go into this new year allowing yourself to let go of what was, to make room for what could be. I believe there is a world that is better than this. We just have to believe in it and each other in order to build it. And part of that is clearing out anyone and anything that would get in our way of doing it. So Happy New Year, my friends. Until next year. PG out. The Politics Girl podcast is written and performed by me, Lee McGowan, and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.