California voters will soon decide whether to recall the judge who sentenced Brock Turner,

and conspiracy theories seem to be taking over our public discussions.

We're talking about institutional trust and accountability as well as discussing the brutal physical realities of gun violence in today's episode.

This is Sarah from the Left and Beth from the Right. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.

No shouting, no insults, plenty of nuance.

Welcome everyone. We are excited to share a lot of listener feedback, which sometimes the news doesn't allow us to share.

If you want our thoughts on the state of the union, we were live sort of blogging through the comment section on Patreon and shared a bonus episode.

So you can go on a Patreon.com and become a supporter of the show.

We're pretty tired by the end of it all, but I think we had some thoughts about the state of the union.

I don't know what else there is to say really because we don't want to analyze it as a speech that's divorced from all the facts and circumstances.

So we could do like an hour of picking it apart, but this is a president who is what he is and a speech doesn't change that.

So I think we did the best that we could under the circumstances.

I saw a Twitter, I don't know if it was a moment or just a tweet where people are like, he says it's the biggest data the union audience in history.

That's not true and I just thought, no, no, I'm not doing that. I don't want to do that anymore. We're not going to do that.

Like, almost I feel like at this point, and this is a realization I've had recently, I think we had to be so focused on the tweets and his behavior because there wasn't enough reality of his governance, of his administration to deal with.

We have plenty of that now. We sort of know where they've been and have an idea of where they're going.

And I would like to stay focused on that and not his buffoonery surrounding reality show perspective ratings obsession, etc.

So, my thoughts on that.

The one thing that is interesting to me about the state of the union has nothing to do with the president.

I think we should have a discussion about what the state of the union should be and the theatrics of Congress associated with it.

Because in a lot of ways, what frustrated many people is that this was a very typical state of the union in terms of the behavior of members of Congress.

I certainly felt frustrated by the fuzziastic, almost, you know, sports arena and time.

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