Can Politics Be Self-Care? (with Heather Cox Richardson)

We are so excited today to share the first episode of our new podcast How To Not Lose Your Sh!t. We’ve been hearing from women in our community that they want to get involved and make a difference, but they’re overwhelmed. They’re scared. And we hear you — we feel the same way so much of the time. 

But we have a theory: what if self-care and politics aren’t actually opposites? What if connecting with our neighbors and making real positive change can make us feel even better than a bubble bath or a manicure?

This week, we’re joined by our favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson. Heather chatted with us about how she writes her newsletter every day without losing her shit, why our connections with each other are so important, and why she’s optimistic about the elections coming up in November.

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

You can learn more about us at www.redwine.blue or follow us on social media!

Instagram: @RedWineBlueUSA

Facebook: @RedWineBlueUSA

YouTube: @RedWineBlueUSA

Transcript

Episode 1: Can Politics Be Self-Care? (with Heather Cox Richardson)

Katie Paris: Hey everyone. My name is Katie Paris. I am the founder of Red Wine & Blue. We are a community of way over half a million women together now who are working all across the country to fight back against extremism in our own communities, and we're doing it one friend at a time. And so I thought it only appropriate to ask my BFF at Red Wine & Blue, LaFonda Cousin, to join me in kicking off this new venture. LaFonda. I'm so glad you're here with me. 

LaFonda Cousin: Well, that's sweet. It makes my heart real full, Katie. Yay. In addition to being the Chief People Officer at Red Wine & Blue, I'm also a yoga instructor, and Katie's Red Wine & Blue BFF. And I'm passionate about wellness and self care, so I am super excited to talk about how we can take care of ourselves and our communities in this moment when life is a lot to handle. And so I'm just really happy to be here and get this started. 

Katie: I mean, I think that anyone who knows me can understand why LaFonda is such an essential partner in crime. For me personally and just for the whole organization of Red Wine & Blue, I would say that, um, I would have lost my shit long ago in this job if it were not for La Fonda existing as a human in my life.

So this, I just think it feels right for us to do this together and to just find our way. So that's what we're doing. Welcome everyone to How to not lose your shit. We are gonna try to figure this out together. Uh, we have heard so much from so many people, so many of you out there who want to make a difference in your community, in this country.

You feel overwhelmed sometimes. You feel scared by what is going on. And we hear you. We see you. We feel the same way so much of the time. And we feel so deeply called to this work. And so we wanna do it in a way that builds ourselves up, that builds you up. We wanna protect our democracy, restore our democracy, renew our democracy, and we don't really think that's possible if we tear ourselves apart in the process.

There are a lot of political podcasts out there, right? 

LaFonda: Yeah. 

Katie: There's a lot of wellness podcasts out there. 

LaFonda: A ton. Mm-hmm.

Katie: Tons. But the thing that bothers me sometimes is that, it's like if it's a politics podcast, then that's seen as like the opposite of something that would actually be like, good for you on a human level.

And sometimes in the wellness space, there's this, this idea that we need to protect ourselves, like let's shield ourselves from the political world in order to be well and this idea that we need to protect ourselves somehow from engaging politically in our communities. I wanna challenge that idea with this podcast. You know, this idea that doing politics and doing wellness, that they, that, that has to be, that those things are opposites. I have this theory that if done right, political and community engagement actually can be self-care. That community care can be self-care.

But the part about like doing it right is really important because if we're doing it in a way that's highly transactional, that's just about like you showing up and like being a, you know, a number to fill a seat, versus someone who is showing up in their full selves to be a part of a community doing something together that we all care about. Like to me, that kind of community care can really be self care. But. You're, you're more of the wellness expert. What do you think? 

LaFonda: Yeah, I mean, I think that sometimes you think that if you're in the wellness space or you're listening to wellness podcasts or you're someone who is protecting yourself from sort of this chaos and insanity of like what is happening in politics, it sometimes feels like you're apathetic. And I think that that is false. Right? I think protecting your sanity in these spaces and in this time is really important. 

I've been thinking a lot about, um, coming into these conversations and what it means to not only build this space of community around us to keep ourselves sort of sane and balanced. What are we getting from the community to help ourselves be sane and balanced? But I've also been thinking about what it means to not just get from the village, but what it means to be a good villager. So I'm hoping at some point we can explore that too. Like what are you pouring into the community that helps us keep each other safe and protected?

So like getting from the village, being a part of the village, but also what are you doing to be a good villager. Um, 'cause I think that that also is a part of the conversation that sort of gets lost. People feel really bogged down by the chaos right now, and it's really hard to think about what you contribute to help everyone else keep moving. 

I think that in, in one of our conversations, someone said, “well, I'm an introvert.” And, and I think that like when we have these conversations, we talk about the protests and we talk about the places where people, um, really contribute vocally and actively, and like, what do I do from my space? I think that's a part that's really interesting and intriguing to me to think about is how everyone can contribute to being a good villager. 

Katie: Yeah. No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, no matter like where we fall on the Enneagram, right? Like it's actually, maybe it's gonna take all of us and all those types of gifts. I love that. 

You know, I've worked in political organizing really my whole adult life. And I think for a long time what it meant to like show up in politics, maybe even like in the village, and maybe I'd even like use that language. But to be honest, I don't think for a long time, I did it in a way that was necessarily very good for me. But I think I thought, “well, that's okay. That doesn't matter. I'm just hustling. I'm working hard, nonstop. I'm putting in all the hours. I'm proving myself how good I am, how good I am at this, how hard I work.”

And I just think as I get older, maybe just a teeny, tiny bit wiser, I think I'm ready to challenge the assumption that just like, giving of myself so hard maybe wasn't actually, not only is that not the best for me, but also maybe not the best for the village. 

LaFonda: Do you see my proud face? Do you see my proud face Katie? I'm very proud of you. The balance is important. You can't pour from an empty cup. It's very cliche, but like taking the time to take care of yourself, think about how you are taking care of yourself, makes you better in the village. It’s important. Taking the downtime, um, taking care of your sanity, making sure you have those moments of joy, spending time with your family, spending time with yourself, taking a nap. Those things are important so that you come fully prepared to give to the village. That's important. 

Katie: Yeah. 

LaFonda: Sometimes we feel like you have to just show up and go, go, go, go, go, go, go all the time and that's not great. 

Katie: I also think what I've learned is honestly, and look, I'm the founder of Red Wine & Blue, but I didn't totally know what I was getting into here. But I think one of the greatest surprises and gifts of it all for me is that how you go, go, go, matters. You know, I, the, the biggest surprise of all of this has been the way Red Wine & Blue has become such a community that I love both giving to and being a part of and gives me so much.

And I think that before, again, I thought like showing up, hustling, pouring it all in it. I didn't see it as like a give and take. I didn't, I never saw it as a community. I never, I just thought it was like, I don't know, more like a balance sheet, you know. How many tally marks, how many hours? And then maybe if I added all that up, like we could win an election, a policy, whatever. 

And I think I, I just had that all wrong. Not only have I found in this work working with communities of women all across this country, that not only do we win more often if the work feels good because we're doing it in a way that's supportive of each other. That’s not transactional, but maybe even transformative. We're getting those better outcomes, but also we are becoming more of like, we want to make the world a better place, but like I wanna get better on the inside as I work for that better external change as well. 

And I just, honestly, I don't know, maybe it just took being a little bit more of a grown ass woman or doing this stuff long enough to kind of get to this place and I, of course I'm still learning so much. Um, but like that's just the idea. I still feel like, and I listen to a lot of podcasts that have a lot to do with wellness and that have a lot to do with politics. And I just feel like whenever the one talks about the other, it's a little bit with this like ick factor. It's like you have to be one or the other all the time. And there's not, which is why I am glad we are doing this right. It gives people permission to do both. It gives people permission to be in both spaces at the same time. 

I mean, I'm still like, I'll, I'll get a manicure sometimes. I don't know. They've gotten really expensive, so I'm kind of more into doing them at home now. But like, I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying that actually I'm finding when I do the engagement part right, it actually feeds me more. And I hope that we can, I don't know, test that theory out a little bit, find the limits of it, in these conversations we're gonna have, and I just, there's nobody else I'd rather be exploring this with than you.

LaFonda: Same. Same. I mean, we talk about this internally, right? We talk about it when we hire. We want people who take this work seriously, but don't take themselves too seriously. Right? Because that's, people feel like, well, I have to take this work seriously because it's so serious and we have to be serious all the time. But you can't take it seriously all the time. You will go crazy. You don't wanna go crazy. So we want people to take the work seriously. But you can't take yourself too seriously. You gotta find a joke in it somewhere. Cause it's, I mean. If you don't laugh at what's happening every now and again, you will absolutely go crazy. Sometimes it's a little bit too… I tell my sister all the time, like, honestly, we live in a Saturday Night Live skit. You have to wake up sometimes and be like, “yeah, this shit's not real.” So that's what I'm gonna tell myself so I can make it through today.

Katie: Haha yes. Okay. Alright. I am very excited actually, that we got to start this podcast by having one of the most favorite women from the Red Wine & Blue community join us as a guest. I'm talking about Heather Cox Richardson, the rockstar historian who has more followers on Substack than any other person who writes about history or politics.

Here's the thing that I thought was so amazing about the conversation with her that we're about to share. So. I think that people see Heather writing her letters every day and they think, “oh my gosh, how does she do it? She's exhausting herself.

Is she okay? Is she okay?” And the woman, yes, she is working her butt off and for that we are so grateful and she is a great American for what she's doing. What I got out of this conversation was a little bit unexpected though, like when we explored what the experience is like for her, to me, what really stuck out is that writing her letters actually are, which is clearly community care but also self-care in two distinct ways. 

One, she said, you know, she wants to be doing something. She can't just sit back and let this, you know, parade of nightmares just happen in our country. So for her it's a coping mechanism. It's doing something. But then the even cooler part, I thought, is that she talked about it as a creative expression for her. That she loves writing, that she can, like when she really nails a paragraph or an ending and how it almost feels like a lyric or a song and like…

LaFonda: It's art.

Katie: It's art. 

LaFonda: I love it. The art is a, I mean, the art aspect of it has been inspiring to me 'cause I have, I mean, I've been consuming a lot of art over the last few weeks. Like I've done shows and I've done art walks. I did Pilates in an art gallery the other day. Like that has been where I've been surrounding myself in the last few weeks, and I just felt like… she’s so smart and she's so, you know, involved in making sure that we are educated and we know what is happening in the world and we are connecting it to history. So we know what is happening and we are prepared and we feel like we can take the next right step, right? 

But we also need to have permission to consume the things that bring us joy and understand that art also helps move us forward through history, um, and is very, very critical to helping history move forward. So I just felt like I had a lot of permission to consume a lot of art because of Heather. And I just, I left our conversation like, “yes, I'm gonna go to a gallery. I already have that planned, and Heather said, I can do it. So. I'm doing it.” 

Katie: I love it. I love that so much and I need to, I need to get out for more of that. It made me think about the work we do in communities day in and day out, that like for some people like, cooking is their art. And so how beautiful is that, to like make an amazing casserole and show up at the community meeting and feed the people? You know, for other people, like they are, I don't know, painters and artists and like, you know, being able to like beautify a community space. Some people, their creativity is like actually in a fricking spreadsheet. Like, there's different ways that people express themselves and have passions, music, art, but also all these other different things.

And I just think sometimes remembering that the things that feed us can also feed others quite literally with the awesome casserole, but also just like through all of these other forms of self-expression. And I think there's so much truth to it when people say like. You know, find your passion and focus on that thing.

And sometimes I think they're saying, okay, we'll figure out what issue you're most passionate about and go work on that. Mm-hmm. But I think sometimes then people go, okay, but then what do I have to add for that? Yeah. It's like, okay, well maybe you're passionate about that issue and you're also passionate about, you know, cooking. So show up for that community meeting with that nourishing meal. And so I am looking forward to conversations with women out there who are finding their way of doing that, their version of doing that. 

LaFonda: finding your place in the village. What are you bringing that makes you a good villager?

Katie: I see what you did there. You brought it all back. Okay. With that, let's bring on Heather Cox Richardson. 

LaFonda: Yay.

BREAK

Katie: Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson, for joining us on our very first episode of How to Not Lose Your Shit. We wanted you to come here because you know about community, you know about communities of women. An entire community of women, and I guess a few men too, read your letters every single day and you bring them balance, you help them make sense of the world. And as we try to make sense of the world and try to not lose our shit at the same time, you're just obviously the person who needed to be the first guest. So thanks for coming. 

Heather Cox Richardson: Wouldn't be anywhere else. Congratulations on the new venture. And let's see what we can do here. 

Katie: Alright. This morning at the gym, a woman asked me if I wake up every morning and read the news and just totally lose my shit. I'm not gonna share with you quite yet what I said because I want to ask you that very same question. You, as the woman who reads more news coverage every single day than perhaps any other person in America.  

Heather: Well, can I just start with, your problem might have been starting the day at the gym, I have to say. But listen for me, I get anxious if I don't know what's happening, because I feel like if I understand what's happening, I can make a plan to either ignore it or to deal with it or to walk away from it. I understand the world and it, it, it makes it so that I can get my mind around what's happening. 

So I would much rather me take a look at what is in the news and understand it than ignore it. And the thing that I have an advantage on is quite literally, this is what I spent my entire career doing, reading the news and then digging down to see what that meant in our history. And what historians study is how and why societies change. So, you know, for me it's just a continuation of what I do and what I have always loved to do, which is watch how human beings create a society, which is what we're doing around us. 

Katie: I am a hundred percent with you. Doing this work... I love it because I can see a tangible difference that I'm part of making, but it is also a coping mechanism for me. For sure. I find it creates much more anxiety within me to feel like these things are, dare I say, completely out of my control. But if I can exercise just a little bit of agency and control, that does help me cope. 

However, I will say that what I told this woman this morning was, “Oh, oh, I, I don't wake up and read the news,” and that is true. I wake up and I check... I mean, if I'm really good, I'll actually say hello to my husband or one of my children, you know, first. You know, that's if I'm being really good here. But I will wake up and I will look at messages from my team and see how I can support them in how they are showing up and supporting women all across this country who are working in their community to make a difference. In addition to that, I go to a special channel on Slack that we have where people share videos and photos from events from the evening before. Cause we've had over 3000 events already this year. And you see women connecting with each other, feeling seen and heard by each other. And that is like, a hope injection straight into my veins. And then I read the news.

LaFonda, when does the news come in for you?

LaFonda:  I don't, I can't watch or listen to or read the news early in the morning, 'cause I feel like if something has happened that is chaos, then I feel that chaos throughout the day. Right. I am pretty bad sometimes about reaching for my phone and like scrolling social media and I have had to get out of that habit. But I do try to get up, walk around, drink water, try and like mentally prepare myself for the day. Yeah, I don't, I don't watch the news or um, look at the news early in the morning 'cause I feel like I get sort of sucked into it. 

Katie: Some of the advice I often give people is, you know what? Consume less politics, do more politics. Now, Heather, you are the unique case in which you consume politics in order to do it because you're translating it and giving that to millions of people so that they can understand and then do. But I think all of us need to find our ways of, of doing more, connecting more. And certainly we gotta get rid of that doom scrolling. 

Heather: Well, I was gonna say there's a difference between reading the news and doom scrolling. So, you know, one of the things that I do when I read the news and I read a lot of news, is that you start to see patterns of who's saying what and what matters and where the pressure points are and so on. And sometimes they're not things I can write about because they're so in the weeds, by the time I finished explaining it, everybody would be asleep on the couch. Right? So there is a lot of repetition for what I do, but you, but you can see the patterns if you do it. 

That's different than doom scrolling. Where you're just looking through your phone, um, scroll or through your social media and it's just one horrible thing after another. And you, you do start to feel incredibly paralyzed. I think the, the one of the things that we need to learn, and I think many people get this from their lives, when you feel like you're in that pattern of immobility, you simply can't do something 'cause everything is so terrible or overwhelming. You gotta put the news down, you gotta put the phone down, you gotta put aside whatever it is, if you possibly can, find a friend and do something positive. 

LaFonda: Can I ask you about the connection to your letters and self-care? Because I journal and a lot of women use journaling as a form of self care and reflection and personal growth, and almost like cleansing and reset like you're talking about. Do you think that your letters are a form of self-care in that way? Do they help you sort of, you know, not lose your shit in some ways? 

Heather: Some, but when I write, um, I love to write, by the way. And that doesn't mean it's easy, it's extremely difficult. But the words, if they are right for me, make patterns. Is it a form of self-care to try and create art? Probably. I will say it, it isn't always pleasant. I mean, you know, it's a lot of work. But things that feed that sense of pattern are my form of self-care. 

Katie: That is so interesting to hear how you think about writing. And it reminds me of how another author we love so much around here, Martha Beck, talks about how creativity is truly the antidote to anxiety. Because if we are in that sort of creative state, we actually can't feel anxiety. 

Heather, you and I met on Facebook, I DMed you. 

Heather: Did we? 

Katie: Yeah. Well, I, I DMed you on Facebook. It was like five years ago now. 

Heather: Katie, we've known each other forever. No, no, no, no. We've always known each other. 

Katie: It was, it was 50 years ago! Haha. And yeah, we, we, we were doing the Facebook Lives on the regular, a lot of community building that, um, we've both done, started there. And at the same time, I think something we're feeling increasingly acutely is that Facebook is not a space where... of course, we, we never have controlled it, but we are feeling that lack of control more these days with Mark Zuckerberg's sort of pivot to overt Trump allyship post 2024 election. He controls Facebook, he controls IG. We're seeing a billionaire Trump ally in Ellison trying to buy TikTok. How do we build community when the people that control our online spaces allow disinformation, trolling, and outrage to flourish? 

Heather: Well, I have some ideas about that, but what do you guys think? 

Katie: Well, to me, we have to leverage the ways in which we connect online to do things in real life. I mean, this is my urgency around having online spaces be the beginning of the conversation. I think of it as the front stoop to the home in which we all meet and we find our rooms of the things we're passionate about to organize and learn from each other and figure out how to use my skills and her skills and your skills to achieve the thing that we're trying to influence in the world. Because that's how we live our lives is through digital forms of communication, social media spaces, and real life. I hope. And I think we have to have that real life. 

LaFonda: Yeah, I would say the same. It's like trying to be intentional about real life spaces because I mean, as somebody who is a natural introvert and who would love to just talk to people through a screen or through text message, I have certainly in the last month specifically tried to be way more intentional about actually finding the time and the space to be with people in person. Because that online space gets really, really heavy. Um, so for me, I think it's just really making the time to be really, really intentional about being face-to-face with people. That in-person community, I think, is important right now.

Heather: So I think of it like a web. I mean this is somewhat complicated, and I will throw some history here, but I think of human communications and politics both as a web, and we need all of those spaces and people in all of those spaces to make that web create a way to think about our country. 

And I'm gonna come back to that, but one of the ways I think about this actually comes of all things from the John Birch Society in the 1950s and the 1960s. Lots of people didn't pay attention to the John Birch Society because it tended to organize around small groups of what were called coffee clatches. People would have their neighbors into their home to meet for coffee and talk about all the horrible things the John Birch Society stood for. But it was a sense of community. And then if they got too big, they would hive off and they would form more, more things. 

And you know, people organized community around horrible ideas. And I think there is a lot of that actually in MAGA. People found community there and they found caring there and that certainly is the case of the people who used to follow Trump around where rather like he was Phish or the Grateful Dead. Where they would say, “yeah, I've been to 21 of these things” and you know perfectly well you did not go see Jerry Garcia because you were expecting him to break new musical ground every night. You went 'cause your friends were there and it was a community and you loved each other and so on. And we do that as human beings.

We are now in the process of creating those kind of webs around the values that, to me, are truly American values: caring for community, caring for each other, crucially, crucially, believing that everybody in, and I would say the world, but we'll stick with the United States of America, is equally valuable. Nobody is less valuable and nobody is more valuable. We are all equally valuable. And those are actually really popular ideas, but they're ones that I think for many years we took for granted because our laws were arranged around that idea, even if our practice was not. 

And so when we think about engaging and not engaging, and how do you engage over social media and elsewhere, one of the emphases that I've been making is I'm trying to branch out onto a lot of different social media spaces in case one of them goes the same direction that Twitter did, so that people can find each other, but it's worth remembering that all the nodes of these webs matter.

In fact, um, I'll use an example here. For stupid reasons to me anyway, my email has been just swarmed with hate mail, swarmed with hate mail, and really vile, nasty stuff. And I was in, I live in the middle of nowhere and I went uptown today. And, um, I ran into somebody I'd never met before, probably you'll never see again who was in the area and she was just talking about what she is doing and how what I do fits into that. And like it really cheered me up. And you know, she did not wake up this morning and say, “I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make sure Heather Cox Richardson feels better.” She contributed to this entire project just by saying, “you know, I've been showing up to my school board meetings.”

Katie: That's the hit of hope I know I get every morning too, that I was talking about seeing those photos of people showing up at their school board meetings. We had a couple just this morning in our Slack, didn't we La Fonda? 

LaFonda: When I think about social media and finding community, I…. where I have felt a little stuck and I could maybe use some advice, maybe. We've seen a lot of silencing of descent. The other day on Instagram, I saw one of those on the street style interviews and two people were being asked a question and one of them was visibly afraid to share their honest opinion. Um, and that was really alarming to me. So if more people start to become afraid to speak up, how do you see that shift and that sort of crackdown on free speech as a threat to the idea of community? Particularly what we're talking about, this idea of community online. Because if you're building that community online, it's hard to build it and then bring it offline. 

Heather: It's worth remembering., I think, that the kind of values we all are talking about are not partisan and they are extremely popular. They are extremely popular. And aside from looking at the polls or looking at the great support for the kind of values that we stand for, education and taking care of each other and community and so on. It's worth taking a look at how people are reacting to that. The anger and the fury coming from those trying to silence people like us shows that they are not in control and they are not in power.

And that, you know, that it, it's, it's kind of paradoxical that if you control the spaces, you don't have to yell at anybody. You don't have to scream at people because you already are in power. It's when you recognize that you are losing that you have to just spread vitriol everywhere and try to silence people. And you can think about it in personal relationships, you know, where people who feel they're losing control of a situation start screaming. So the trick to this is not to permit yourself to be silenced. 

And during Reconstruction, the sheer numbers of people who wanted to protect. Black voting who wanted to protect equal rights and so on were actually quite high. But all it took was the members of the KKK and organizations like that to threaten them. Like there's a, there's a fascinating series of interviews that are done in 1879 in which a number of Senators actually ask people in the American South how many lynchings they have seen. And the answer is almost nobody has seen one, but they've all heard of them and they're all afraid that they could be next, and that to me is obviously terrorism.

But had those people been able to make the connections that we can make nowadays over social media, in person, over the telephone, over, over video… to be able to say, “Hey, wait a minute here, there's 15 of us on this call, and that expletive down the street, there's only one of him.” Had they been able to make those connections, they might have been able to stop the horrors that happen in the American South and across the rest of the country from about 1874 to 1965.

So it's important I think, in this moment, to recognize that the people screaming are screaming because there are so few of them. They're committing violence because they are afraid that they are losing control of a situation. And that is a way to remember that speaking up helps people recognize they're part of a larger community and speaking up then is really important.

I would add though, there are people in our country right now who are legitimately afraid of things that could be done to them, and this is what I have said for people like me, an older white woman whose children are grown, I have a lot of liberty that other people don't. And this is my moment, and I hope other people like me, to step forward in front of those people who are legitimately frightened for their safety or the safety of their children and say, “come at me first” rather than go for those people, 'cause I've got a hell of a lot less to lose. 

Katie: That's beautiful. Heather. Thank you. 

Heather: No, it's just, it's not beautiful. It's just the way a community works. It's what moms do.

Katie: Yeah. Well when a community's working right, it's the most beautiful thing possible. 

Heather: That's fair.

Katie: Okay. Before we wrap, speaking of people speaking up and making a difference exactly from where they sit, I think your most famous line from your most recent book, of course, Democracy Awakening, is that “democracies die more often at the ballot box than at gunpoint.” Heather, if democracies die more often by the ballot box, can they also be resuscitated that way? I ask this because we're about to have elections in just a few weeks coming up that first Tuesday in November of this year, 2025. There are 52,000 open seats. We're talking mayors, city council, school boards on the ballot this November. What is the opportunity that we have in these coming weeks to make a difference in our communities and send a message to those 52,000 open seat races?

Heather: Well, that's a really important piece right there because you are talking about local races, state races, places where it is still possible to cast a ballot and to make a real difference. The other piece of that, of course, is the people who are trying to take away individuals’ right to vote are the ones who are afraid that they can't win in a free and fair election, and that we're seeing at the national level.

But, you know, a lot of people worry about where our country is politically with very good reason. But the way you change the ship of state, if you will, is by changing the way people think. And one of the things that's happened since the 2024 election is that Democrats are overperforming significantly in every election. And while this matters, certainly in terms of the policies that are enacted at these different levels, and that really matters at the local and state level, of course. 

What it also does is it sends a message to legislators on all levels, including the national level, that if they wanna get elected, they had better stop worrying so much about the MAGA vote, which they cared a lot about because they turned out in huge numbers and they were, you know, you couldn't go against them as in a certain moment in the Republican party. And you should be worried about the people who are showing up to elect progressive voices, or at least not MAGA voices, in those spaces. And you can already start to see it happening. The overreach of the Trump administration has forced a lot of people to take a step back, so it's a way to get involved in community and also make people understand that the vast majority of us, Republican, Independent, or Democratic, really want the same basic things, and we don't wanna be hijacked by extremists as we have been. And we'd really like to get our democracy back. 

And, you know, this is, I I hate to go all historical. No, I don't. I love going all historical. 

Katie: You love it. 

Heather: You know, you think about the late 19th century, the era of the robber barons, right? And they ran everything, right? Literally think of that very famous image of the fat Senators, um, the overlooking the, the Senate, and they all have the names of corporations on them. That seemed like a done deal, that the country had become an oligarchy. 

And yet, from within the Republican party, which was the one that was really cheering on the robber barons, you got the rise of leaders like Fighting Bob Lafollette in Wisconsin and Theodore Roosevelt in New York and Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts, and they came up through the Republican party and said, “Oh wow, we got a problem.Because the Democrats are winning all the time here, and if we want to get those votes, we have got to start backing progressive legislation.” And that's how we end up getting the progressive era in the early 20th century. Because the voters spoke up, showed up, put up new kinds of art and new kinds of literature and, you know, new kinds of sculpture and, and started getting involved in the public sphere in a different way than they had been before.

They said, “Hey, wait a minute, we shouldn't have children that are working in factories and don't get to go to school and we shouldn't have milk adulterated with formaldehyde and chalk, and we shouldn't have poison in our streets. That will destroy the country by creating a world in which nobody can be a fully informed American citizen.” And that kind of rejuvenation truly comes from the streets and from the country and from the people. And I think we're seeing it. 

Katie: Okay. So I think that we have on this very first episode of How to Not lose Your Shit… we've solved it! So Heather is going to consume and read all of the news every day, grounded in history, continue with the letters, and we are going to get out there into our communities, and we are going to win the vast majority, representing the majority of the American people. We're going to win these elections coming up in just a few weeks on the first Tuesday of November, 2025. And in the midst of it, we're gonna stay connected to each other. And just for now, just for the moment, that actually feels like that's how I'm gonna not lose my shit. 

LaFonda: That feels right. That, that's given me hope. I feel a little bit of hope with that. It feels right. I can find some art because art is gonna give us hope too.

Heather: Art is really important right now, but you know, uh, the, the, the big piece that I have here is that it feels to me, you know, that's subjective, but it feels to me like people are starting to remember that our government and our country is based on we the people. It is literally based on we the people. And this is not about friends and enemies, the way that the MAGA is trying to divide us. It's about we the people versus an autocratic system that is trying to rise. And, you know, we've done this before, we've done we the people against the king before, and we know how to do it.

And you know, basically there's an awful lot of us who don't like to be told what to do, so. I don't know. When I, when I think about where we are right now, literally in my head I see that scroll go by from the Constitution that says “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” And it's our moment to remember that it is our country and we the people need to remember that.

Katie: Amen to that. As my Hamilton musical obsessed children would say at this point, “What time is it, Showtime.” So let's do it for our country and for each other. 

Heather: Well, congratulations on this and, and good luck with it. 

Katie: Thank you, Heather. 

Heather: Thanks for having me.