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- [00:00]
A
We have to move forward. You know, you asked me at one point, how do we stay engaged? We do have to wake up tomorrow and do something. So our options are accepting somebody else dictating our lives to us or insisting on retaining our agency and trying to make the world a better place. And given those two options, I think of a lot of. A lot of. Listen, nobody wants to face what we're coming up to, but what are our options to do anything other than trying to make it better?
- [00:40]
B
Hello and welcome to the Politics Girl Podcast. I'm your host, Leigh McGowan. Let's get into it Today, I'm very happy to be joined by my friend Heather Cox Richardson, the absolutely brilliant writer in intellect and author of the wildly successful substack Letters from an American. The author of seven books on history and politics, Heather is a historian and professor of American history at Boston College, having previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Since we're at the start of a new year, a new quarter century and a new administration, a lot is up in the air. So I thought I would take this opportunity to chat with one of the smartest people I know about what's going on to see where she thinks America stands in the course of history. Now, there are no answers right now about how it's going to be or how you think things are going to go, but I think if you're paying attention, we know it's not going to be great. But the question is, what do we do with that information and how do we stay informed without losing our minds? So without further ado, please welcome someone I hope has insight on that question. My guest, historian, author and professor Heather Cox Richardson. Welcome back, Heather.
- [01:43]
A
Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure.
- [01:45]
B
Well, thank you for coming. As I was just saying in the introduction, we don't know exactly how it's going to be moving forward or how things are going to look in the coming months and years under this new administration. But I think we can safely assume it's not going to be good. The question is, what do we do with that knowledge? Right. How do we continue to stay informed without losing our minds?
- [02:05]
A
So I'm going to throw that back at you and say, I don't think we can assume it's not going to be good, because as a historian, I will tell you, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know what's going to happen in an hour from now. I think that you never know what could happen. My example of that lately is if you had asked most people who were paying close attention to foreign affairs what was going to be the most important thing going forward from 2024 to 2025, how many of them would have said that Bashar Al Assad would be removed from power in Syria, which was a game changer. And so now in sort of, you can't really say, oh, we can assume what's going to happen going forward because we just don't know. That being said, we do know a number of things. And one of them is that the incoming administration, the Republicans, have control of the House, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court. And they have adhered to really regressive policies that will, for example, cut taxes for the very wealthy in corporations and cut regulations that have managed to make businesses be fairer to workers and to consumers. They have talked about getting rid of the basic social safety net. They want to stop infrastructure infrastructure. They want to stop protecting civil rights. The past certainly indicates going forward is going to be a problem. And what I would say is that one of the things I've already noticed about the Trump people is they're throwing complete confusion at us all the time and it's designed to make us exhausted. And one of the things I would say is do not follow every little twist and turn because it's designed to make you tune out because you get so overwhelmed. Recognize that there are larger patterns to watch, but you do not have to follow, follow every last tweet or post or whatever they are on Truth Social, because a lot of that is simply noise designed to get people agitated, the same way a professional wrestler's script would do.
- [04:05]
B
I actually think that's a good analogy, Professor Wrestler, because we do have one of the McMahons. I think that's been suggested for a cabinet position. But I think that a lot of how Donald Trump runs his organization, his political party, whatever it is, is a lot like entertainment wrestling and a lot like wwe. It's like these are the big, you know, villains. These are the big winners. You know, like it's all, it's all a show. And we as Americans, I think, fall very deeply into wanting to be entertained. And I think that you're right. This constant doom scrolling that we've all taught ourselves to do is not going to help us when it's coming at us like a fire hose.
- [04:40]
A
Yeah. And there's a really interesting way to look at the whole professional wrestling angle of what Donald Trump. And you're thinking of Linda McMahon, who's really interesting. There's Vin Linda McMahon. And they're really important in professional wrestling because what they did is they took what was, you know, kind of a dying industry in the 1980s that circled around something called kayfabe, which was the fact that everybody pretended as if professional wrestling was real, even though everybody knew it wasn't. That was. That was sort of the. The joke at the heart of it or the game at the heart of it. And what they did is they started. They. They first of all stopped pretending it was a real sport and said instead, it's going to be classified as entertainment because then they didn't have to worry about the taxes that sporting events have to pay, and they didn't have to worry about some of the protections for the people engaging in it.
- [05:26]
B
And this is when we went from WWF to WWE Federation to entertainment.
- [05:32]
A
Okay, that's right. And then what they did, which I think is really reflective of politics in America today, is they began to mix real life and that kayfabe into something that one of a scholar of it calls neo kayfabe, in which you never quite know what's real and what's not. So you're constantly looking to see if there's a pattern to see. See if there's something new to see if that's a reflection of real life. And it reminds me a lot of the way people engage with conspiracy theories or as they did with QAnon, or do with QAnon, you know, is that a sign or is it not a sign? And you can see it, I think, in the modern period, in the last few days, with the man who drove a Tesla cybertruck to a Trump Tower and then apparently committed. Apparently died by suicide and then the thing exploded. And so many people are like, is this a sign? Is it not a sign? A sign? Is he signaling somebody? Is he not signaling to someone? We don't know.
- [06:28]
B
Is it just a metaphor for what we're going to have coming forward? A burning Tesla in front of a Trump Hotel.
- [06:34]
A
Exactly. And, you know, the lightning hitting the Capitol building, I forget which day it was, but everyone's like, ooh, it's a sign. It's like, yeah, it's a sign that lightning tends to hit things that are high off the ground. But people wanted to see a meaning in that.
- [06:50]
B
Yeah, I think that's why, you know, there's so much religious imagery, so much tied to the Christian nationalist movement. Like, people are looking for signs. They're looking for a bigger picture. They're looking for meaning within their own struggles. And I think you can use it against people if you are clever enough.
- [07:06]
A
Yes. And I think what you just touched on there is really important that people look for signs and the idea that the universe actually has meaning, individual meaning for them in situations where they don't feel like they're in control of their lives. And one of the things that I really like to emphasize about this moment is in the United States of America in 2025, we have extraordinary powers, individuals. We have agency to affect our world. And I always like to compare that to this scene from the Puritans, who were the people who settled in European North America after the Pilgrims. And they were intensely religious people, and they believed that the Bible had patterns in it and that God would follow those patterns. So if you saw something happen, could immediately make analogies to things that had happened largely in the Old Testament. And they're literally fighting as a community at one point in a church, and it's hot and the door is open. And while they are sitting there fighting, trying to decide what the community is going to do, a snake comes into the aisle and it turns toward one side and away from the other side. And they're like, that's it. God has spoken. And now we know we have to go that way. We don't have to live that way in 2025.
- [08:23]
B
Yeah. But I think that the snake does speak a lot in 2025. And I think a lot of people are like, well, you know, the snake has spoken. I think one of my concerns with. When I tell you, like, what happens with Project 2025 or something like this, when I say I can assume it won't be good, and you're saying, don't make assumptions, we don't know how that's going to be. But if I look and read something like Project 2025, and I know what the Christian nationalist ideas are, and I know how they want to rule, and I know how organized they are. Like, Trump himself might be a disorganized person who's surrounding billionaires and yes men, but the Project 2025 people who really have JD Vance under their power, they have a full plan and a full way to get things accomplished, and it'll be very hard to roll back their problems. I think sometimes I wonder if we won't be better off if these people fight each other. Do you think that that's gonna happen? Because the Republican factions already seem to be fighting with each other, you know, Steve Bannon versus Elon and Vivek regarding the necessity for H1B visas, or Laura Loomer versus Elon over who controls MAGA. What's your take on these internal conf. Sometimes I think that might be our only shot.
- [09:28]
A
Well, and that's, that's actually a really good point that you brought up. When I say we can't assume everything's gonna be bad. I do think we have reason to believe that people are gonna get hurt. I mean, that's the whole point here. And Trump was elected with the idea he would hurt people and he's gonna try to hurt people. But the other side of it is exactly what you identified, that there is enormous infighting already among the Republicans who did not win 50% of the vote. More people voted for somebody other than Donald Trump than voted for him. And in the down ballot races, the Republicans did not do well, who have razor, razor thin majorities in the House and the Senate and who have the real problem of the fact that Donald Trump promised contradictory things to different groups of people. You can't both increase immigration as Elon Musk and what people are calling the doggy faction want and cut immigration as MAGA Republicans want. You simply can't do both of those things at you can't protect the right for states to decide about abortion within their borders and push through a national abortion ban. He has promised both to different factions. So, and I think as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo, Trump doesn't care. He wanted not to go to prison. That's why he ran to become president. He doesn't care how any of this comes out. He's already accomplished what he wanted. He's 78 years old. He just wants to be on the golf course and eating food at Mar a Lago. Right. So there is going to be extraordinary confusion among the Republicans, Republican Party, and there's significant places where Republicans will push back on Trump. So, for example, the Wall Street Journal did an interview with a bunch of CEOs earlier in December in which they said, what do you want? And literally the first two things they said were, we don't want tariffs except as they are targeted the way Biden did them. And we don't want mass deportations because.
- [11:18]
B
It'S bad for the economy. It's terrible for the economy. And like, they know that. The question is how upset will the base be if they don't get what they want. I heard recently and know if it's true, I hope it's true that the Democrats were thinking of putting together single issue bills based on all of Trump's promises. So it's like we're Gonna give you better health plan, you know, and then they put it together and they say, okay, give us the thing you said they would and make the Republicans vote against it over and over again. All of their promises at once, but as single issue bills to point out. And I thought that might be interesting because I think a lot of people are gonna be disappointed. I mean, I saw an interview you did recently on PBS and you were talking about election results where the of Americans were voting because they were saying they were unhappy with higher prices or they were unhappy with the economy post Covid. But what they're going to get is something completely different than what they voted for. You're saying, you know, the economists are like, don't do this tariffs thing, it's going to make everything more expensive. So if you voted for the cost of eggs and then everything goes up in price, you're going to be like, hold on, wait a second. And you were pointing out on PBS that the people who paid no attention to political news went 19 points for Donald Trump, but the people who were truly informed about the economy and crime and things like that went one for VP Harris. So what do we do about that? Because it seems like the uninformed swayed this election and being truly informed is not going to get any better under Trump. It's only going to get worse. Well, maybe, or maybe again start making assumptions, Lee.
- [12:51]
A
Well, you know, I think that that's exactly what happened in the 2024 election, is that people thought, and by people, I mean people like me, people who were in the Biden administration. I assume people thought that if we did a lot of interviews and if we told people that the government really was working, that the numbers of people who were being able to unionize had gone up, that real wages were the highest they'd been since the 1960s, that the economy was the strongest by two times than any other country in the G7. I mean, I could keep on going down the list that they would say, oh yeah, Covid was a problem, but we came out of it better than anybody else thanks to having competent people in office. But what we learned was that the Trump Republicans, who I always like to emphasize are not traditional Republicans, they're not true Republicans, had built an alternative media and it was an alternative media that didn't engage with legacy media. Because if you watched legacy media or read the legacy newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, which has a very right leaning editorial page, you voted for Kamala Harris. If you watch the Fox News Channel or anything within that right wing media ecosphere you went 19 points, well, between three and 19 points for Donald Trump. And if lived in a news desert where you didn't have access to any newspapers or any news really at all, you went as much as 54 points for Donald Trump. So I think the real message going forward for people who want a reality based government, again, and by this I don't mean necessarily Democrats or independents, but Democrats, Independents and Republicans who want to live in a reality based community need to make sure that we create a reality based ecosystem. And I would include people like the bulwark in this who are true conservatives. A reality based ecosystem that reaches into these news deserts. And I see it happening, you know, again, I look at you and me, you know, we weren't doing this in 2016.
- [14:53]
B
No, it's true. I just think, you know, I think that people are very misinformed. They're already misinformed. They're spun up on lies, they're spun up on disinformation and propaganda and it's, you know, meta's rolling out their AI creators right now, which are like fake people, to tell us what they think about whatever. Elon's just turned X into a full cesspool. The Trump administration is treating anyone who won't kiss the ring as an enemy of the state, including media. So I'm, I'm nervous about that because you've got Trump's nominee to be head of the FBI saying he wants to prosecute the press and political enemies. You know, so I just, I wonder how we're supposed to find this reality based ecosystem if we know, first of all, it's going to be skewed the way it is now. But, but you know, super sized. And then we know our next government will simply change the narrative to fit the reality they prefer. You know, like, what do you do with a government who doesn't care if they lie or if they're caught in a lie, who actively uses lies to benefit themselves? You know, like if the crime rates go up, they can just stop gathering the data or say it's gone down. You know, if they don't want to deal with the climate crisis, they're like, great, we'll defund Noah and we'll get rid of the EPA and we won' people that it's getting worse, right? Stop reporting the facts altogether, make up numbers, ignore factual reality. You know, the migrant numbers are down, the borders closed now. You know, like no one was killed in that roundup that you saw on tv, you know, even though people were, I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with that, and that concerns me. Historically. I'm sure you've seen the lying press before. I'm sure you've seen propagandists and authoritarians in history that have used information against people. What do we do when it's being used against us? 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What do we do when it's being used against us?
- [21:15]
A
Well, listen, I'm an Americanist, and the best examples of that are from other countries. And I would answer in a couple of ways. I would answer by starting with Tbilisi right now. You know, people who are living in the country of Georgia are throwing off a government that had a very heavy hand in their country and who had that kind of oppress there, and they exchanged real information and have risen up against that government, and they're in the streets all, you know. And look at Syria. Look at Syria as well. But in the United States, we had, in the late 19th century, oppressed that very much kowtowed to one party or the other, and usually to the people of huge wealth, the people that. That Teddy Roosevelt would call in that era the malefactors of great wealth. And one of the things that interests me in this moment, and I think this is, like I say, I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, but I also don't think the path is set. And one of the reasons I say that is because of the way that Americans reacted to the man who allegedly murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. Because one of the things that has always been an issue since the rise of the Reagan Republicans in the 1980s is that they managed to make people look the other way, recognize that the policies they were putting in place were moving $50 trillion from the 90% of Americans to the top 1%. And whenever people sort of were starting to say, hey, wait a minute here, we're losing our training programs, we're losing our education, we're losing all this stuff, they would convince, you know, they would say, oh, well, that's communism. Or look at these black Americans doing this and welfare queens and women who want abortions. I forget, what did Rush Limbaugh call them? Feminazis.
- [22:55]
B
Feminazis, yeah.
- [22:57]
A
And they managed to continue to get into press by building a bigger and bigger and bigger demon that said, look, we're stopping that person. Please don't look while we're picking your pocket. And it worked. It worked for a very long time. And I frankly, was shocked at the American reaction to that CEO murder. Not that CEO murders are all or any kind of a murder is unusual in the United States. We are a very violent country, always have been. But. But that there was such an outpouring of fury at the insurance industry and at people who benefited from that insurance industry. And that, to me, really suggested that there is an undercurrent of Americans who are mega Republicans, as well as people all the way through to the far progressive left that are really upset about our economic system right at the moment, that Trump is sitting there putting billionaires into office, right and left, and whose presidency was bought by the richest man in the world. That's a game changer. Or it could be a game changer. So there is that. And then in terms of the way that people manage the media in the period that looked very much like this in the late 19th century was the rise of new media. And we keep reading everywhere that the legacy press is dying and that people are canceling subscriptions and so on. What they're doing is they're going to much newer, more authentic media that they trust because it appears to be honest. And that's exactly what happened in the late 19th century. Got the rise of all kinds of new newspapers and all kinds of new ways of communicating that gave people a window into the way that the country was really working. And out of that, if you think about the late 19th century, in 1896, there's a really dramatic election in which the Republicans win with William McKinley, who is the big business candidate, and they say that everybody else who is running against him is a socialist, is the word that is a socialist, maybe a communist, they're anarchists, they're going to destroy America, the whole thing. 1896, McKinley wins. He's reelected in 1900 in a little bit of a funny election, because there's just been the gold strikes in the Yukon. And that meant that a lot of money came into America. So the economy rebounded in a way it probably shouldn't have and wouldn't have without the gold strikes. But by 1912, so just 12 years later after that, all three major candidates running for a president in the United States were all progressive candidates. And it was in that election that a socialist did better than in any other election in American history. Eugene V. Debs got almost a million votes in that election. So in 12 years, you went from anybody who is a labor organizer, anybody who wants to get the lead paint out of children's candies or stop them from throwing rotten meat into sausages and all that stuff, is a communist to I think we gotta clean up this entire country. And I just am not convinced we can't do it again. Because, listen, we have to move forward. Forward. You know, you. You asked me at one point, how do we stay Engaged. We do have to wake up tomorrow and do something. So our options are accepting somebody else dictating our lives to us, or insisting on retaining our agency and trying to make the world a better place. And given those two options, I think of a lot. Of a lot. No, listen, nobody wants to face what we're coming up to, but what are our options today? Do anything other than trying to make it better?
- [26:28]
B
Yeah. There's a great cartoon from Garth Sherman who has a man who is standing underneath a sign that says, welcome to 2025. Choose a door. And there's two doors. And one says, disengage and hope it turns out for you. And the other one says, fight for what's right. And the man is walking through the fight for what's right door. And I think that, like, that's the choice. Right? You can either ostrich or you can stand up for what's right. And I mean, I'm interested that you were struck as well by this fallout of the healthcare CEO being shot, because I do think that there was a sea shift there. And I do think something is happening. And I think that the way that people are reacting is fascinating because they're not reacting the way we're being told to react, because the media is telling us that we should be shocked that someone would walk up to someone in the middle of the street and shoot someone. And I know the Atlantic keeps pushing an article, and I love the Atlantic, but they keep pushing the same article every six hours online that says celebrating a murder and turning an accused killer into a sex symbol and cult hero, and modern day Robin Hood is just an astonishing level of dehumanization. As if we don't live in the world where this CEO made billions of dollars a day by literally dehumanizing Americans and turning their lives into numbers on a spreadsheet. Right? So not only does United Healthcare dehumanize their members who pay for health insurance so that when they get sick, they can be taken care of. The humans that used to review those claims were replaced by AI because the computers were better at denying claims. Honestly, the whole thing is dehumanizing. So I think it's so interesting that, like, sort of the. The billionaire class, mainstream media part, the people that own those things are trying to push at us that we need to be outraged about this one man being shot. When people are like, people walk into our children's schools every day and kill 25 kids and we're all like, oh, there's nothing we can do. You know what I Mean, but we're gonna do a full manhunt with FBI money and all the NYPD and everyone out for this one killer. And people are like, hold on, there was 10 other people killed within that same hour. Why aren't we looking for those murderers?
- [28:32]
A
I think it's interesting for me, the thing that really jumps out, and I am not at all defending any murders ever.
- [28:40]
B
Of course not, no.
- [28:42]
A
But the fact that. And it was a very deliberate effect of the Republican Party, the fact that we did not respond to Sandy Holland, which was the place where the children.
- [28:53]
B
Were murdered in kindergarten.
- [28:55]
A
I don't think you can make a big claim about an adult being shot in the way he was without sort of saying, why aren't we talking as passionately about those kindergarteners? Yeah, again, who knows what's going to happen. But if you think about how angry the old MAGA is at the billionaires and how disillusioned many of them seem to be by the fact. And you know, I've been watching right wing Twitter and to some degree true Social recently.
- [29:28]
B
Good for you. Very brave.
- [29:30]
A
And they, well, but they're really angry. They feel like they were used. They say, you know, you got our vote and lots of profanity. And now they're being tossed overboard. If they lose interest in maga. I'm not suggesting that suddenly they become, you know, the, you know, know Eisenhower, but that they seem to me to be perhaps accessible to those people, like, you know, maybe Sherrod Brown, who was talking about, you know, we gotta protect workers from the very wealthy and who actually picked up a lot more votes in Ohio in 2024 than Harrison Walls did, or the like, John Tester who picked up a lot more votes in Montana than Harrison Walls did there. There's a lot of mal over issues of class now that could once again go back and trump issues of race and culture the way that they did in the late 19th century. Same shift happened back then.
- [30:29]
B
Yeah, well, I think race and culture have been used deliberately to make sure we don't pay attention to the class warfare that has been happening for so long. It's like, if you can. What's that old expression? If you can convince the lowest white man to hate the lowest black man, you won't notice that. That their pocket is being picked. Right. I mean, that's what's being happened for forever. And I feel like the billionaire class is almost nervous about the response that the, you know, us normies aren't buying what they're selling anymore. And Peter Thiel was Visibly rattled after that event where Luigi killed the CEO and he could barely string together a coherent sentence. And the man is very eloquent. And he basically said, you know, violence isn't the answer. We need to be having a conversation. As if people haven't been trying to have a conversation about healthcare for years. And, you know, you look at someone like Elon Musk, he literally seems to be wearing one of his children as a human shield. At every event he's at these days, he's got that kid in his shoulders everywhere. You know, it doesn't make any sense unless you think, well, I'll get less likely to be shot if I'm wearing this child around my neck.
- [31:31]
A
I never thought of that. Wow.
- [31:33]
B
I'm telling you, if you don't think it's weird now, he's been wearing that kid since that shooting. It is the most bizarre thing. But I think historically, what you're talking about is basically like what was coming out of the Gilded Age, where you could treat your workers however you wanted, you could treat women however you wanted. You could have your entire shirt factory burned down and be like, build a new shirt factory. Get new workers. Like, they don't matter. And I think eventually people get very. They catch on and they say, we don't like the conditions we're living in. And it also goes with, you were saying, the rise of new media, but back then, in the early 1900s, it was the rise of investigative journalism and, like, taking photographs inside of these meat factories and showing the people what it looked like, and it would outrage people. It was a huge shift in what the public could see, what they were aware of. And I think it's beholden on people like you and I who are out here doing independent work to make sure people still get the right information, which I think is so great that people. So many people follow Letters from an American, your substack. And I hope more people will, because you're getting real information within the context of how we sit here and history.
- [32:37]
A
I do worry that it'll be hard for me to do my job because I do the federal government mostly, and I do rely on government statistics, on government reports. And the Biden administration was very, very good about transparency. I'm very concerned that I'm not going to be able to continue to do it at that level. I will say that one of the things that if you look at the collapse or apparent collapse of legacy media that doesn't get as much attention is that you do have a lot of new local newspapers springing up new local podcasts, new ways for people get local information into these news deserts. Because, you know, at the end of the day, my brother's an educator and he always says, listen, humans are wired to learn because if you didn't learn, you'd get eaten by a saber toothed tiger. So we're wired to learn. The question is, what are we learning? And the people who care about a reality based community, I think, have assumed that people would find that reality when in fact, when it's just easy and easier to turn on the TV or to listen to a long podcast, that that makes you outraged that people turn there. Now, one of the interesting things that one of the people who studies disinformation has discovered is that there is nothing that makes people engage more with media than outrage, except inspiration. Inspiration also makes people engage with media. Those two both are equally attractive to people. And we always talk about how fear sells and hatred sells and outrage sells, which totally does. If you watch Facebook, for example, you will see they constantly are trying to gin up outrage. Constantly. But also think about how people react to inspiration and they do a very similar thing. And I thought that was a really interesting observation in terms of reaching people who otherwise have been beyond the reach of that reality based community.
- [34:35]
B
Yeah, you're right. It's the people are, you know, they're clicking hard on things that make them outrage, but they also click hard on like the saving the dog from the river in the stories, you know what I mean? Like when humans come together and do something good and pull the baby elephant out and give it back to its mummy elephant? People love that stuff. They want to see good things happening and we could give them more of that. Before you go, as we come up on this inauguration, what do you think Biden should be doing in these last days? You know, should we be pushing for amnesty for anyone Trump is threatened? Should we be looking at mass pardons for people like Cassidy Hutchison who, who doesn't have the protections of the speech and debate clause, like someone like Liz Cheney will be. Should we be ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment? What are the kind of things you think we should be doing in these last days before this switch over to, like you said, you're not sure where, if you're gonna even get the right information with the next administration?
- [35:27]
A
Personally, I wish we had more information easily available on things like missteps that the previous Trump administration made with foreign governments. I would like, because I want that material that we can carry forward to the public and, you know, things like The I would really like to see the report from Jack Smith about the classified documents that got taken down to Mar A Lago, things that there that probably won't get acted on legally, but people in America still own the government and they might like to know those things. That's what I would like to see. There are problems with the idea, for example, of these blanket pardons because there is not always, but usually in American history, a presumption that if you accept a pardon, you committed a crime. You don't accept a pardon if you didn't commit a crime. And that's not there's a lot of wiggle room in that. But one of the reasons, and Biden answered this to a reporter last night, lawyers have said you don't need to pardon these people because they didn't commit a crime. And it becomes sort of murky. If you pardon some people and they accept a pardon, then if other people don't get a pardon, did they commit a crime? So you can see not wanting to touch that the ERA is a little bit more complicated because, as you know, when they put forward this version, the era, Congress put a deadline on when the states had to ratify it by and a number of them did not make the deadline. And while we were waiting for those to do it, a number of other states rescinded their ratification of it. So there are legal challenges to it. And the national archivist, who's actually a pretty important figure in the way we do laws and amendments to constitutions and counting of electoral votes, said I do not have the authority to do this because some of it happened after the date. Now, that being said, Senator Gillibrand, Kristen Geller Brand from New York has said, forget it. Go ahead and list it anyway. And then make Republicans say no.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah, make them justify it in, in, in Congress. Make them justified even in court. You know what I mean? Make them say women don't have equal rights to men in this country. Make them make the argument. I kind of agree with Senator Gillibrand on that because that is how the Republicans would play it. That is how they got the Supreme Court. That is how they won Congress through gerrymandering. They said we're going to make these changes and then you fight us on it and we kept losing. So in this case, I think the women of America deserve at least a shot at having equal rights. Even if it's going to be fought, at least allow it to be fought in broad daylight. Where you see Republicans fighting against women having equal rights going into an administration that is clearly anti woman.
- [38:02]
A
Yeah, this will be the first. There'll be fewer women in the House this year than there were last, and there will not be any women in charge of House committee committees. That being said, I agree with you on that, but I'm going to push it a little bit further and say even if Biden doesn't do that and I don't know what he's going to do, he's given very contradictory signals. But, you know, again, you don't know what's going to happen in the future. I think that's a point that women really have to be making going forward, is that there's obviously a huge element of misogyny in the Republican Party. There's this attempt to write women out of American history, to write us out of the current moment, to make it in some states that women can't cross state lines out of fear that they'll obtain abortion care. In other states, I mean, that's a really scary thing. And this is a place that I would really suggest that people should exercise their agency and say no. Women really make up a little bit more than half of the number of people in the United States. And you must take us seriously and you must treat us equally because as we know from many countries, once women's rights start to slide away, everybody's rights start to slide away, the economy starts to tank, nothing goes in a good direction. And that, I think, is going to be a major fight in the next four years.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. Well, from one woman to another, let's get loud about that. Thank you so much for joining us today, Heather. Please tell people how they can follow your amazing work moving forward because they really do need you.
- [39:34]
A
Well, I'm on substack with Letters from an American. I also posted on Facebook. They're always free, by the way. I do webcasts on Facebook and I will be expanding in 2025 as well, hoping to do more of this with people like you. And while we're at it, happy 2025. Let's make it a good one.
- [39:51]
B
Happy 2025. Let us try very hard to make it a good one. That is a very hopeful way of looking at it. I'm going to go with you on that. Thank you, Heather.
- [40:01]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [40:03]
B
So that was Heather Cox Richardson reminding us that we don't know the future's not going to be good, that we can't assume anything because we. We don't know what's going to happen. We know the next administration's policies and Plans are designed to hurt people, but we don't actually know how that's going to play out. Look at the reaction to the CEO shooting. People from all sides of the political spectrum were outraged, but not at the murderer, as expected, but at insurance companies in American health care, which was unexpected. That's an interesting development that's worth watching. As Heather says, keep your eye on on the patterns, the big trends. Don't overwhelm yourself with every little slight because the actions of this next group are going to be designed to exhaust us and make us tune out. We need to stay in. We just need to do it in manageable chunks. I want to thank Heather for joining us today and you for caring enough about America to be here. Remember, that outrage might capture our attention, but so does inspiration. So let's try to add more of that second one to the mix. Until next week. PG out. Before you go, I just want to say if you're a premium member of this podcast, thank you. And if you're not a member, please consider supporting my work. As Heather said, the rise of new media is essential in this political landscape. We need to support the newer, more authentic voices that will give us the truth amidst the for profit propaganda. We know the mainstream media is not going to be a reliable source of information going into this next phase of American politics. And the right wing extremists are already at an advantage because their side invests in their messaging for so many years. So if you aren't a member of Politics Girl Premium, please consider going to politicsgirl.com and signing up. The beauty of supporting me is that you will get this podcast ad free along with all my short rants sent directly to your inbox. So even if my work is silenced on social media, you will still get access to the truth. There's a link to sign up in the bio of this episode, but also on politicsgirl.com thank you again for all your time and support. The Politics Girl Podcast is written and performed by me, Lee McGowan in partnership with the Midas Media Network and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.