Patrick and Rob interview Delphi Cleveland from the Public Service Alliance, discussing the critical intersection of women’s rights and democratic health. Delphi, a former policy advisor at the National Security Council and State Department, explores how the rollback of women’s rights—particularly through the Dobbs decision – serves as a harbinger for broader democratic erosion. We get into the “chilling effect” discouraging political participation, the terrifying rise of “tradwife” culture on social media, and the normalization of violence against public servants. Delphi shares insights from her current work supporting civil servants facing threats and harassment, and we discuss the challenges of political discourse in increasingly polarized workplaces and communities.
Episode Transcript:
Patrick: On July 2nd, 2025, while the Senate considered Trump’s big, beautiful bill that guts Medicaid and has a huge increase in ice funding and funding for immigration concentration camps, all while cutting taxes for billionaires and putting the country much farther in debt, Rob and I met with Delphi Cleveland and we had a great conversation.
Patrick: I know you’ll enjoy it.
Patrick: Please follow the podcast and visit us at signalstrength.org.
Rob: So welcome everyone to another session of Turn Signal with Patrick Sullivan and Rob Pirno.
Rob: And today we’re very fortunate to have Delphi Cleveland with us.
Rob: Delphi is currently with the Public Service Alliance, which is focused on crisis response and prevention for current and former public servants at every level of government, regardless of political affiliation.
Rob: She also works with and provides support for the impact map.
Rob: which collects, synthesizes and visualizes timely data as it becomes available on federal changes and their localized effects on local communities.
Rob: Prior to this work, she was a policy advisor for the Democracy and Human Rights Division of the National Security Council at the White House.
Rob: and spent years at the U.S.
Rob: Department of State as advisor to the Acting Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues.
Rob: We’re so glad that you’re here with us today to talk about various topics, but we wanted to start it off with talking a little bit about the status of women as it relates to the status of democracy here at home and abroad.
Rob: And maybe if you could do a little intro, Delphi, and maybe jump right into that topic, we’d love it.
Delphi: Sure.
Delphi: I’m so happy to be here.
Delphi: Thank you both for the invitation.
Delphi: And thank you for creating this podcast.
Delphi: We were just saying before the show started that it is an incredibly timely time to have a podcast.
Delphi: It’s a time to get messaging out.
Delphi: And I think the more we can talk about these issues in greater detail and from multiple angles, the better we’ll be, you know, versed in what’s going on.
Delphi: As you mentioned Rob, I came into government with a super strong emphasis on women and girls.
Delphi: My background had been working both kind of academically through my master’s degree and also in the NGO and think tank space.
Delphi: And it was really exciting to get the opportunity after having campaigned for the Biden-Harris campaign to work at the State Department as a political appointee in the Office of Global Women’s Issues.
Delphi: The office itself has existed since the turn of the millennia, and it was brought about during Secretary Clinton’s era of leadership at the State Department.
Delphi: The entire impetus for the office is with the assumption that empowering girls and women uplifts entire societies, and there is a ton of evidence to back that.
Delphi: You can look at recidivism to violence in violent contexts when you empower women and girls, whether it be through political or civic leadership or with education or with other resources.
Delphi: the recidivism to violence decreases.
Delphi: So it’s less likely that violence will continue or that violence will come back in places where it has existed before.
Delphi: We also know that when girls are educated, societies become healthier.
Delphi: And we also know that when healthcare is provided to girls and young women, societies reap the benefits both on the health index as well as economically.
Delphi: And so these reasons and so many more were kind of what inspired and empowered me to pursue this work at the Department of State in nearly two decades after that office was launched.
Delphi: We came in at a moment when the office had been decreased in size under the first Trump administration down to about 16 people.
Delphi: And by the time I left the office two and a half years later, we were back up to 40, which is about the sufficient number, I would say, to kind of get done what the mandate of that office is, to kind of take stock regionally around the world of opportunities to advance and also learn from our partners around the world and implement at home.
Delphi: Women and democracy is one of my favorite topics to discuss today because I think that it’s really germane to what’s happening in the US context.
Delphi: We have seen in the last couple of years the rollback of women’s rights in the US through the lens of Roe v. Wade and also just through a decreasing number of women
Delphi: being both appointed to political office under the Trump administration, but also a decrease in the number of women who openly express desires to take on leadership roles.
Delphi: And I think that both of those things are a reflection of a societal chilling effect.
Delphi: I think that the Roe v. Wade case, which has been discussed ad nauseam, in my opinion, for a good reason, is really scary to me because I think that
Delphi: Studies show when women are less engaged politically, democracies are faltering.
Delphi: And vice versa.
Delphi: When democracies are faltering, usually women are the first large group.
Delphi: I mean, they’re 51% of the US population.
Delphi: um from taking a step back and Patrick and I were talking before this show started about kind of his surprise that there wasn’t a larger blue wave from women from the youth from migrants and I think a big reason from that a big reason for that is this chilling effect that we’re seeing which comes from different steps being taken to
Delphi: scare or threaten or silence different populations of people.
Delphi: And when you’re talking about that being the entire population or a large subset of the population that is women in the United States, that is a gigantic group of people.
Patrick: It’s really alarming.
Patrick: I think the overturning road be weighed, as you said, has that impact and that chilling effect.
Patrick: I mean, I think it is a message to women, right?
Patrick: My mother and my sister are both nurse midwives, so they caught millions of babies and brought them to the world.
Patrick: And I kind of grew up steeped, you know, the sole boy and a family of women.
Patrick: To them, I mean, they always understand that their work was that what they were doing was political.
Patrick: On the grand scheme, midwives were there to help women take control over their own childbirth and empower them.
Patrick: And they had these battles just like on a day-to-day basis, like my mother in the 80s and 90s and Audis when she was
Patrick: Practicing just, you know, kind of fighting with these doctors, same thing with my sister.
Patrick: It’s absolutely also not just a message overturning Roe of your sister’s way, but a leading indicator of the rest of democracy, you know, kind of going the same way, you know, if you kind of pay attention to that.
Patrick: Women’s rights not just being an indicator, but also kind of a reason to intervene in the world and project American power I used to think you know the only reason that we might want to be in Afghanistan would be to protect the rights of half of the Of the population, you know, and then if we were to leave then that would change and you know for me that was it Yeah, absolutely your career totally and I think what you said makes me think of kind of two separate things I’ll start with one about Roe v. Wade.
Delphi: I think
Delphi: It’s important, and I think this piece goes lost sometimes, to recognize the fact that the rollback of Rowe Wade is not only the rollback of an amendment to the Constitution or, you know, an update to our legal system, but it’s the rollback of access to basic health care for 50% of the population.
Delphi: And the fact that that is not blatantly being said, I think is part of what
Delphi: where we’re getting lost because you can have whatever opinion you want to have about whether or not access to abortion is healthcare, whether it’s right, whether it’s wrong, where you stand morally on that.
Delphi: But when you’re talking about removing legally the access to healthcare for half of your population, alarm bells should be going off.
Delphi: That aside, we don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment, so women still in the United States don’t exist as part of our Constitution.
Delphi: There is no legal mandate protecting 50% of the population.
Delphi: We’re existing back in 1776 when only white men were in charge.
Delphi: When we’re thinking about this current historical moment we’re experiencing in the United States, again, using the rights of women as a harbinger for where we’re going, legally, if people were thinking about it through those lenses, we might have already known that the rule of law was going to be in greater question if we had thought about what Roe versus Wade being overturned meant legally.
Rob: Can you expand upon that?
Rob: Because for me, I always thought that no overturning Roe v. Wade was talking solely about abortion.
Rob: It wasn’t going into, you know, obviously there’s entities such as Planned Parenthood that provide only a small percentage of their funding goes towards a thing providing abortions and a lot of it is women’s health.
Rob: But you’re saying that, you know, this is overturning the right, you know, for healthcare, essentially for 51% of the population.
Rob: How is overturning Roe v. Wade essentially doing that?
Delphi: Really great question.
Delphi: I think it goes back to the point of not having an equal rights amendment.
Delphi: There are very few laws on the books and there are even fewer laws that the Supreme Court has ruled on on the basis of women as a protected class.
Delphi: And the reason Roe v. Wade is such a huge case in the United States is that it is one of the most historic moments in which women are identified as their own class
Delphi: and are identified as a class in need of different protections than the average person or than men living in the United States.
Delphi: And so it is about abortion care.
Delphi: Don’t get me wrong.
Delphi: That is the basis of that legal case.
Delphi: But it is also a precedent for women to be looked at as not the same as men under the law, as a class of people, a group of people who are living a different
Delphi: They’re living an equitable but different life than the average man and the legal system needs to take some specific, needs to set up some specific guardrails to enable their equitable participation in our society.
Rob: So we started off talking about how women in democracy and frankly the status women in communities can elevate the democracy.
Rob: So where are we at home right now?
Rob: Because you actually said something that surprised me.
Rob: After the overturning Roe v. Wade,
Rob: I definitely remember the media coverage saying there was more women elected to office with that term period than I think any other.
Rob: There was a higher percentage of jump.
Rob: And I did go back and look at the numbers.
Rob: And it looks like in, so going back from 1980, we only have 3% of our elected officials out of the 535 members, only 3% were women, one senator, and then 16 members in Congress.
Rob: Now, fast forward, and we’re at 28%, but it’s definitely stagnated.
Rob: And so what you’re saying is that actually there’s been definitely a dip now, and a dip, which I wasn’t aware of.
Rob: I thought we were going to be more galvanized as a community, and that’s actually not necessarily happening.
Rob: It’s a chilling effect.
Patrick: It seemed like there was momentum in that direction, and then I’m like, great.
Patrick: They went too far this time.
Patrick: Now we’ve got them, and then it seemed like they kind of dissipated.
Delphi: right i think i think you’re absolutely right i think there was momentum and i think the reason for the chill is in part this historic moment and the attitudes that are swirling around our media landscape vis-a-vis women’s rights vis-a-vis women’s place in society i also think it’s
Delphi: to a point you raised earlier, Patrick, where are the youth in a lot of this and how do millennials, millennials, Gen Zs, feel about their political participation, their political power?
Delphi: Because we have a lot of women in Congress who are
Delphi: Gen X or Boomer categorized and far fewer AOC maybe being one of the exceptions to the rule who are in the younger categories who have run.
Delphi: And I think that that is really concerning.
Delphi: I think that, you know, I don’t know if you guys have been following Deja Fox in Arizona 7th District.
Delphi: She’s in her young 20s.
Delphi: She’s running for Congress.
Delphi: and she is a firebrand and I really hope that she sets the precedent for other young women and girls to aspire to run for political office because she brings an incredibly unique perspective and she brings that energy that I think we need.
Delphi: Otherwise I do fear that we will stagnate or we will dip even further because some of the older Dems especially are going to start aging out
Delphi: And we need people to replace them.
Delphi: That’s speaking specifically on kind of a congressional state level representation front.
Delphi: When we look at the demographic of our current cabinet, it is mimicking the levels.
Delphi: The numbers of women are the same between Trump 1 and Trump 2 in terms of how many women he has in his cabinet.
Delphi: So at face value, it looks like nothing has changed.
Delphi: But I think the way that women are being discussed by this cabinet is egregious and pretty terrifying.
Delphi: And the fact that we have a defense secretary who thinks that our defense will not be as lethal with more women involved is a direct reflection of the complete devaluing of what women bring to the table.
Delphi: And I worry about kind of
Delphi: how women are being represented by our executive branch currently, irrespective of the numbers.
Patrick: And the women who are in it are such gender traders, I guess is what I call them.
Patrick: I mean, they’re just like the worst examples of humanity.
Patrick: I mean, it’s like laughable, you know, the press secretary, Carolyn Levitt, right?
Patrick: Oh my gosh.
Patrick: with her, the person is the message, right?
Patrick: You know, the same thing with, you know, Kristi Noam and any woman who is allowed to even, you know, speak at all in this administration.
Patrick: It’s just like, here’s what our vision of what women should be, you know.
Delphi: Right and what women look like and I think you guys are both parents to amazing daughters and you want your daughters to look up to women who are speaking their mind and not being just mouthpieces and who are aspiring to have their own place in this world and be empowered and pursue their own dreams as opposed to the dreams that are being set by someone else or the standards that are being set by someone else.
Delphi: It’s really concerning to see, I don’t know, if you’ve been watching the trend of tradwives.
Delphi: Are you familiar with this?
Delphi: Treadwives.
Patrick: Explain that, please.
Patrick: I’m not following it, because I’m so revolted by it.
Patrick: Yeah.
Patrick: Apparently, that’s, you know.
Patrick: You can explain it.
Patrick: No, no, no, please explain it.
Patrick: Well, if you are a female and you fire up TikTok or Instagram or whatever, the algorithm will start showing you tradwife content.
Patrick: And it’s essentially like women back at home waiting for the kids with a tray of cookies.
Rob: I’ve spent my 50s.
Rob: This is not working.
Delphi: Right.
Delphi: Like a complete glorification of domestic labor, which I have to say there is nothing wrong with being a homemaker.
Delphi: I think it’s one of the hardest things you can ever possibly do.
Delphi: My dad was the only homemaker in our home for a while and
Delphi: I think he sets an amazing precedent for it being a genderless job, but the idea of Tradwives is
Delphi: an algorithmic trend on social media, which encourages women to stay at home, make sure their home is perfect, make sure their children are dressed perfectly, this kind of beautified domestic sphere, which I also have to say is unpaid.
Delphi: And so not only are you convincing women and girls to buy into a lifestyle in service to others, you’re encouraging them to go into a lifestyle where they will be financially dependent on someone else.
Delphi: because you’re not paid for care work.
Delphi: And so one of the things that we were working on when I was at the National Security Council but working closely with the Gender Policy Council was trying to develop ways and economic structures for care labor to be more valued both here in the states and also around the world.
Delphi: And there’s kind of a lot of steps to figuring out how to make that happen.
Delphi: No society, no economic structure, country to country is exactly the same.
Delphi: And so you have to kind of work with what you have.
Delphi: But I do think that one of the concerning aspects of the Tradway phenomena is the subtle turn away from women being economically sustainable on their own.
Patrick: You said it’s algorithmic, and it definitely is.
Patrick: But it’s not just algorithmic.
Patrick: There’s this couple somewhere, and they’ve had a million kids, and they’re all about having a million kids.
Patrick: And they’re just media hungry.
Patrick: And the Times and the Post just love them.
Patrick: And all the time, they’re just writing them up.
Patrick: And these, you know, they’re trolls, you know, like the lady even dressed up as what’s the Handmaid’s tail outfit.
Patrick: You know, it’s funny.
Patrick: It’s like, no, it’s not funny.
Patrick: It’s terrifying.
Patrick: But it’s, you know, I mean, there’s kind of some kind of express intent to present this as and normalize it, not just from the algorithm, which is like, oh, yeah, people click on this, but from like people.
Patrick: Editors who increasingly are click-driven and algorithmic.
Patrick: I mean, yeah, I’ll click on that because I’m hate clicking on it, right?
Patrick: But at the same time, it’s like, this is really irresponsible, like this is horrible.
Patrick: And then Rob and I had touched on this, but the other thing, like as a father of daughter is the plastic surgery is so disturbing to me.
Patrick: really the message is like okay if you want to be up here you know you’re gonna have to change your face but it’s not good enough what it was you know and not just change it in a way that prolongs your you know appearance of youth or whatever you know it’s there’s something new going which is like this kind of weird convergence on the injections and that you know the lips and like if you
Patrick: where all these women who are elevated by this administration and this weird creepy new milieu are starting to look the same.
Patrick: I mean, the message clearly involved.
Patrick: This is where women are valuable.
Patrick: And we’re not even interested in the diversity of different appearance of women.
Delphi: Right I think we’re in a really scary moment for the metrics of success when it comes to what it means to be a successful woman and I think that social media is playing a huge role in that and the women who are being elevated on those platforms who.
Delphi: can come from a variety of different places, but who typically have a lot of time on their hands to become influencers or who already exist with a significant status or wealth or what have you, are able to elevate themselves
Delphi: through these methods of social media, TikTok, et cetera.
Delphi: But their metric for success is, on the one hand, the clicks and also this very bizarre and warped and kind of, I think, capitalistically driven image of beauty, which is completely self-fulfilling in that they will get brand deals with, you know, whoever is doing their lip injections.
Delphi: And so they’ll get more lip injections and them getting more lip injections.
Delphi: is giving their millions of viewers at home the idea to do the same thing.
Delphi: And I do find it really disturbing, and I found it really disturbing for the few months that I spent in the Trump administration at the beginning of this year.
Delphi: Everyone looks the same.
Delphi: There are not many women to kind of just lay the groundwork, but the women who are there all look the same.
Delphi: And I was even told at one point that my heels were not high enough.
Delphi: which I found really funny because I’m a very short person to begin with and I wear heels almost every day and I can’t imagine wearing heels that were any higher than the ones that I already had on.
Delphi: I would have to be on stilts.
Patrick: I can’t imagine saying that to anybody.
Patrick: And if somebody at my company said that, they would be terminated from employment.
Rob: That would be
Rob: Just curious, is this a woman telling you, this wasn’t a man telling you this.
Delphi: This was a man.
Rob: This was a man telling you this.
Patrick: This was a man telling me this.
Patrick: This is revolting.
Patrick: But I want to go back because we were talking about that momentum, right?
Patrick: We thought, okay, that horrible thing just happened, you know, Rover’s wave was overturned.
Patrick: Now we’ve got some momentum.
Patrick: You know, more people are running and then it kind of faded away.
Patrick: Anyway, we’re in a similar moment now with this bill.
Patrick: And it looks like it’s going to pass.
Patrick: And I mean, it’s going to result in a lot of people losing their Medicaid, losing all kinds of benefits.
Patrick: And I think that there is an opportunity for a slingshot effect or a pendulum swing.
Patrick: How do we keep that momentum?
Patrick: I was so disturbed when I read yesterday, 30% are against it, 30% are for it.
Patrick: The rest have never heard of it.
Patrick: How are you not paying attention to this thing which is absolutely going to affect your life?
Patrick: I don’t know, you tell me, but with women’s rights and abortion, after that, I mean, obviously, a lot of people lost access to abortion, but maybe they weren’t the people who have a voice who have access to abortion because nobody who had enough money to get the next state over, maybe two states over.
Patrick: did lose their right to an abortion.
Patrick: They could go somewhere else and get it, right?
Patrick: It was just really the people who couldn’t even do that.
Patrick: And so I wonder is, maybe that explains some part of it, right?
Patrick: Is it going to be the same way here where the people who are really getting fucked by this bill are not, they’re just not part of society that people really listen to at all.
Patrick: So it’s just going to kind of fade away too, I don’t know.
Delphi: I think you’re touching on two really interesting things.
Delphi: I think the first is a level of political apathy that we’re dealing with right now, which is entirely in the favor of people who are currently in federal office.
Delphi: I think the Trump administration is doing a phenomenal job at scaring people, at stressing people out.
Delphi: And when people are scared and stressed out, they don’t read the news because it just furthers those negative feelings.
Delphi: And so we’re existing with a population that is becoming more and more afraid of reading up on what’s going on.
Delphi: I think that’s on purpose.
Delphi: I think that this administration knows what they’re doing.
Delphi: They know that they’re creating chaos and that that is resulting in people going inward, which has a very negative outcome on community building, which is the bedrock of grassroots revolutions or revolts.
Delphi: The second part of what you’re saying I think speaks to the fact that a lot of the impacts of bills like this one that has just passed or is about to pass is that it makes people feel lonely in their experience while simultaneously them not having the time to
Delphi: seek resources or access resources or do the research to find any solution to what they’re going through.
Delphi: It is affecting people who are working three jobs, people who aren’t getting enough sleep to begin with, and people who don’t have platforms or resources to tell their stories.
Delphi: And I think that that ties back to the apathy and the need for community.
Delphi: I think that what this moment needs more than anything else
Delphi: is for person-to-person connections on the basis of how are you, are you okay, and a ripple effect of those questions to be asked and posed because
Delphi: The only way to stop what’s going on is for those stories to be told and heard.
Delphi: And I think we were talking about the Ezra Klein episode I was listening to earlier this week discussing Mamdani.
Delphi: And he said, one of Mamdani’s best traits is that he’s a listener.
Delphi: He’s not just a speaker.
Delphi: He’s a listener.
Delphi: And the whole premise of his initial TikToks were, hey, what’s wrong with New York?
Delphi: You tell me.
Delphi: I’m not going to tell you.
Delphi: You’re going to tell me.
Delphi: In a healthy democracy, that’s what’s supposed to be happening.
Delphi: The people are supposed to be the ones telling the elected officials what they need.
Delphi: And we’re at a moment where that very baseline premise of democracy has been lost in that the Trump administration is somehow telling us what we need.
Delphi: And the American people are so tired and so stressed out that their voices have faltered on being able to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, that’s not what we need.
Delphi: That’s not what we need at all.
Delphi: We need actually the opposite.
Patrick: Right.
Patrick: Where are you getting that community and plugging in?
Delphi: I love my soccer team.
Rob: Soccer team?
Delphi: I love playing soccer with Rob.
Rob: For those who don’t know, Delphi is a superstar on our soccer team.
Rob: We’ve been playing for 16 years in the District of Columbia.
Rob: And Delphi has a sub five-minute mile.
Rob: That is so impressive.
Rob: So we just yelled at Delphi to go get the ball.
Delphi: In a while.
Rob: As we age, we tell Delphi to go get the ball.
Patrick: So she gets it, and then you kick it to the goal?
Patrick: She usually passes it, you know, or dribbles around someone.
Patrick: Just run circles around, takes another, run around the neighborhood and, you know, where is she?
Patrick: Who gives you guys a chance to have some water, stretch a little bit.
Rob: It took her like 20 minutes to find our office, right?
Rob: So she actually walked around the building a few times.
Rob: She just wanted to get some labs.
Delphi: I was doing some labs.
Delphi: No, my soccer skills are subpar.
Delphi: I think the value add that I bring is just that I
Delphi: tend to run a lot and that pays off on the soccer field from time to time.
Patrick: I understand that the soccer game is just phase one and then generally you all retreat to some place.
Patrick: I know you drink raw but you guys all get together.
Delphi: Exactly.
Delphi: It’s a really beautiful community and I think I was saying this to Patrick too before.
Delphi: I didn’t know the legacy of
Delphi: political engagement that the team had when I joined it took me about a year to determine that.
Delphi: Almost everyone we play with is somehow plugged in at some level and so it’s an excellent example of how community can you know player role in your civic engagement or encourage you to become civically engaged and I think even some of the conversations we have we have such a.
Delphi: fascinating group of people, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who, you know, never hesitates to bring up whatever the hot topic of the day is, and then we just talk about it like friends.
Rob: Do you remember one of our first episodes?
Rob: I think Senator Cory Booker, he was asked like, what can people do?
Rob: And he highlighted what you can do is building the bonds of community.
Rob: Like right now in that time of fear, which you absolutely hit like on the head, it makes sense because I’ve
Rob: completely gotten rid of social media.
Rob: I only have LinkedIn.
Rob: I still obviously still connect with with the news and New York Times, I suppose.
Rob: And yes, I go on Fox News just so I can see what they’re spouting.
Rob: But I can tell you see, and you know, I keep on telling people, you know, Donald Trump only got 32% of the electorate.
Rob: The electorate.
Rob: Only got 32%, 31% or 30.5% went to, you know, Senator Kamala Harris or Vice President Kamala Harris and 37% didn’t vote.
Rob: Didn’t vote at all.
Rob: So it really is when you think of it.
Rob: I mean only 32% of people agree with this guy and not even not anymore.
Rob: So it gives me a little bit of hope but I think what you’re saying about the fear is absolutely working and he is a chaos president.
Rob: He wants to be that.
Rob: and it is it is making people retreat and just shrinking their community so that it’s like a lot more other and it’s affecting other people it’s not affecting me so much i do think this new bill that is going to really slash potentially 12 million people with medicaid i’ve been on medicaid at a point in my life i mean it’s it’s absolutely
Rob: It’s bipartisan.
Rob: It’s Trump voters.
Rob: It’s everyone voters.
Rob: And it’s just so, it’s so, you know, let’s give a huge tax credit.
Rob: Let’s continue to extend this tax, make this tax credit permanent if possible for the wealthiest folks, but then get rid of food nutrition programs and reduce Medicaid benefits.
Rob: And I mean, it just, it doesn’t make any sense for Trump voters, but I don’t think they’re paying attention, like you said.
Rob: And
Patrick: And the silencing is so real.
Patrick: I think it’s new that you didn’t talk to people about politics at work.
Patrick: And I think that the reason you can’t talk to people about politics at work anymore is that it’s so mean now, you know, brought down by, you know, it’s so personal, you know, Hillary was
Patrick: not just, you know, someone you disagreed with, but she’s a criminal.
Patrick: Right.
Patrick: And, you know, there’s something sinister about her, you know, Benghazi, you know, like, which I never actually understood what the fuck that was all about.
Patrick: I don’t think anybody did.
Patrick: You know, that was not the point of it.
Patrick: Understanding, like, what it was that you are accusing her of and her, you know, aid of committed suicides and like,
Patrick: Okay, that was kind of the start of it.
Patrick: Anyway, Trump comes along, he had been all along, just been, you know, up turd.
Patrick: But, you know, it made it so that you could no longer, I mean, all those issues were just rattling off.
Patrick: Are all issues that we have to deal with at work like, I mean, I’m an attorney, like, you know, we, I have to deal with, you know, we get questions about, you know, things like benefits and about, and also the things that happen outside of work, affect you at work,
Patrick: But now you can’t talk about it because it’s so broad, you know, and people are so angry.
Patrick: So even though we’re together and I like my coworkers and a lot of them, you know, I know voted for Trump and I still like them.
Patrick: We still can’t talk about that, you know, this.
Patrick: And so it’s like,
Patrick: It’s not even just being alone.
Patrick: It’s even being surrounded by other people that you can’t talk about this with.
Delphi: Yeah.
Delphi: I think that’s a level of disenfranchisement, right?
Delphi: Yeah, it is.
Patrick: Because, again… It rocks you have your ability to be a citizen if you can’t bring that conversation wherever you go.
Delphi: Totally.
Delphi: And it’s another reflection of a broken democracy.
Delphi: If you can’t have a conversation of disagreement that is not fraught with negative hostility towards one another, then we’re in a pretty dire place.
Delphi: And I think it’s really interesting too.
Delphi: I’ve noticed, and maybe this is me projecting to a certain extent, but I do think that the stress that people are feeling right now comes out in a very personal way.
Delphi: and that even in the day-to-day interactions, people are predisposed to expecting the negative from someone else as opposed to expecting a friendly face.
Delphi: I went to get my nails done yesterday and I really just needed them to fix one nail and so it was going to take all of about 10 minutes and I told them, you know, I’ve already been in here.
Delphi: Can you please just do this really quickly?
Delphi: And they said, of course, so sorry this happened.
Delphi: But I did cut someone in line to get those 10 minutes and that was not lost on me.
Delphi: But the negative comments that I got from this one woman who was sitting at the front of the nail salon and had been waiting her turn
Delphi: They did not feel reflective of the moment.
Patrick: There’s something else going on there.
Delphi: She must have been having a really bad day.
Delphi: And I, of course, after the fact apologized and I said, you know, thank you so much for letting me get in and out really quickly.
Delphi: I really appreciate it.
Delphi: And I just got kind of this like, you know, shrug and I went on with my day, but I think that
Delphi: Something that I always have loved about DC as a place is that people are friendly and people are typically predisposed to thinking for the community as opposed to thinking for themselves first.
Delphi: I’ve just noticed in the last couple weeks and I do think it’s a reflection of the hardship that people living in the District of Columbia and the DMV more broadly are facing.
Delphi: People are stressed out and that stress unfortunately typically comes out in a pretty negative way.
Delphi: And so kind of back to the point of disenfranchisement.
Delphi: I wonder what the solution is.
Delphi: I wonder if we should be having those tough conversations.
Delphi: I wonder if friendliness is helpful or harmful.
Delphi: And I’d be curious in your experiences with your attorney colleagues.
Delphi: Where are the avenues of connection?
Delphi: Like, what are the things you can talk about if you can’t talk about politics?
Delphi: And is there a way that we can build upon those to rebuild our level of community overall?
Patrick: You two are going to have to tell me because it’s sports.
Patrick: Unfortunately, it’s fucking sports.
Patrick: I don’t know.
Patrick: I don’t like sports.
Patrick: I have bad memories of playing sports when I was a kid.
Patrick: But so, yeah, we just got by another company and our new CEO is coming in and he’s like, he’s like, hey, you know,
Patrick: Rob’s going to be our new director of finance and Rob’s bummed because he’s a big oiler span and you should have seen what happened to them and our creator and then, oh, Stacy, you know, she’s, uh, whatever.
Patrick: And it’s just like everybody like, like, oh my God, fine, you know, just do this thing.
Patrick: But that is something that people like to talk about.
Patrick: That’s fine.
Patrick: I mean, I don’t want to, you know, make people, I know they like it and it’s also kind of,
Patrick: It is an outlet for that kind of tribalism where they can like, you know, I’m this and you’re that, like, ha ha ha, you know, but it’s still friendly, you know.
Patrick: Maybe that’s how it used to be.
Patrick: I don’t know.
Patrick: I’ve never worked in a workplace where there was, you know, a diverse array of political views where people did talk about politics.
Patrick: I’ve certainly worked in a series of workplaces where we’re all a bunch of Democrats and of course we talked about politics and
Patrick: I’m sure that on the other side that that’s happening too but you know in grown-up companies now we have people who are Democrats and Republicans and but unfortunately it’s just totally taboo.
Patrick: And you can’t even talk about things that are attached to politics.
Patrick: That’s the problem.
Patrick: I can’t talk about so.
Patrick: We might have to reevaluate that our company benefits in light of the fact that some of the people are gonna be affected by this.
Patrick: It’s like, oh, that’s a very sensitive conversation all of a sudden, because it’s attached to politics, right?
Patrick: At a company, a publicly traded company, it is natural for there to be a skepticism about the role of the FTC.
Patrick: We went through a big merger and the question was, was it going to be approved?
Patrick: And that was something our conversation we were able to have.
Patrick: I don’t know.
Patrick: Sports.
Patrick: The answer is sports.
Patrick: I don’t know if it’s going to be in other third spaces or whatever.
Patrick: For me, we’ve been going to the Quaker meeting here in DC.
Patrick: I’ve actually kind of taken a step to get a lot more involved and put my hat in the ring for to be the liaison from our meeting, which is the Friends Meeting of Washington.
Patrick: We’ve got a nice Quaker meeting house where we all sit
Patrick: And listen, listen for God, right?
Patrick: Or whoever.
Patrick: Listen.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Delphi: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m listening.
Patrick: I’m
Patrick: There are these venerable Quaker institutions, the American Friends Service Committee.
Patrick: Another one is the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Patrick: There’s a lobbying group.
Patrick: I have done some volunteering for that and I’m hoping to get more involved.
Patrick: But that is not going to be a space where there’s a diversity of political opinion.
Patrick: Well, it’s not entirely true, because this is a Christian organization.
Patrick: And so one thing that just kind of has not been on the slate of things is women’s rights.
Patrick: I think that’s actually going to change a little bit.
Patrick: especially if we’re gonna be attracting younger people because this is the oldest bunch of white hairs you’ve ever seen sitting in Quaker meeting hall, you know, but because there are, you know, the FCNL is representative of Quaker meetings all over the place and, you know, a lot, you know, it’s a religion, it’s a Christian religion.
Patrick: And so there is kind of a
Patrick: Absolutely, and I would say maybe even the majority of Quakers are pro-women’s rights when it comes to abortion.
Patrick: But it’s still not a kind of universal.
Patrick: There are things that everybody can agree on.
Patrick: I mean, pacifism, nuclear disarmament, immigration in general, that Quakers were super ahead of the curve on abolition and civil rights in general.
Patrick: Civil rights are universally.
Patrick: So there’s a lot there.
Patrick: But again, I mean, and I’m super looking forward to that.
Patrick: And it’s also like, I love it.
Patrick: It’s like the things I say.
Patrick: Now it’s not just Patrick.
Patrick: He’s got the power of God behind him.
Patrick: This is not just my opinion.
Rob: You and Donald Trump, right?
Patrick: Trying to stay out of the pit, right?
Rob: So with that, I really want to bring this full circle now, Delphi.
Rob: And so going forward, how do we not only elevate women, but frankly, youth in our community?
Rob: You did talk about this young woman, I think who’s running.
Rob: You said in Arizona is maybe seventh district.
Rob: And so also talking about like forms of messaging that stick and how do we see a path where, I don’t know, people engage again.
Rob: And we get the right people, frankly, elected in office and energized to vote.
Rob: So what do you think?
Rob: What are the steps for?
Rob: What’s the magic?
Delphi: Yeah, well I’ll try to answer your question and touch on two things that Patrick just said also.
Delphi: I think that going back to one of my initial points at the beginning of the podcast, kind of how we think about women and girls within the scope of policy, it’s really important to think about it not only from a moral perspective, that it’s the right thing to do, that if you think otherwise you’re wrong,
Delphi: but also see it as the strategic imperative because, like I mentioned in some of the stats at the top, countries are better off when women are more equitably represented and they’re better off when women are safer from violence and healthier.
Delphi: point blank.
Delphi: And so I think that on the policy front, we need to keep doubling down on supporting women who are not a monolith and who don’t all want the same things, but supporting their ability to succeed as both a moral, but also a strategic imperative for the United States as a country to be with its best foot forward.
Delphi: That’s on the policy front.
Delphi: I think on the more personal and civically galvanizing front, it’s gonna take some creativity and it’s gonna take some thinking because women in women’s rights are not a monolithic issue and they’re not an issue that only affect women.
Delphi: They’re an issue that affect women, men, non-binary people, the like.
Delphi: And I think that that is something that is often lost in communication of
Delphi: our need to advance the status of women or protect the rights of women and girls.
Delphi: Protecting the rights of women and girls is like we started this conversation by exploring a real harbinger for the rights of people in a society.
Delphi: And if we look at the United States, you know, taking away the rights or infringing upon the rights or limiting the saliency of legal rights of a certain population is
Delphi: a really bad signal for a democracy because it means you’re silencing a voice that would otherwise be included in the chorus of voices that is making the democracy run.
Delphi: I think I love Deja Fox and her ability to speak to her district in Arizona and she’s doing it through majority social media engagement and I think that in her district that’s becoming really palpable and people are responding well to that.
Delphi: I don’t think there’s a one size fits all model and I think that it’s going to take a lot of different kinds of outreach to meet the needs of all the different kinds of districts that we have across the United States.
Delphi: And so I would almost turn the question around on the people who are interested in running or the people who are interested in growing movements or creating change where they are.
Delphi: And I think it really just comes down to listening like get out there and listen what do people in your district want what do you want for your district and what are the steps that you can take whether it be through running for office or just pouring back into your community that can really build up kind of the type of world that you want to exist.
Delphi: starting with like your own backyard and your own home.
Delphi: I think also kind of touching on something else we’ve talked about.
Delphi: One of the scariest things is that kids are not getting educated on what civic engagement means.
Delphi: They don’t learn how to call their congressperson.
Delphi: They don’t learn
Delphi: the three branches of government anymore.
Delphi: I mean, it’s really, we’re at the brass tacks level of what people know when it comes to the role of government in their lives.
Delphi: And I think it’s really scary that it’s being dissolved into or distilled down into Democrat or Republican because
Delphi: it’s it’s neither of those things i mean civic engagement doesn’t even have to be blue or red it can just be your your service to the public and i think that’s lost on a lot of the american population right now and
Delphi: learning that or kind of coming to understand what public service really means is going to be an incredibly important piece of building back our democracy.
Patrick: I think service is absolutely and that’s like a capital S word and you know Quakerism.
Patrick: But I think it’s absolutely right that there’s only one way out of this.
Patrick: There’s really only one thing that makes you feel better about everything and it’s helping other people.
Patrick: And it’s actually feeling like you’ve done something.
Patrick: This is why I value Rob and the work we did together, our fundraising work so much.
Patrick: It’s like, oh, we helped.
Patrick: it’s not just about a feeling like knowing, yeah, what are the three branches of government?
Patrick: That’s the prerequisite.
Patrick: But what is your role and how can we get people into a cycle where they’re engaging in the country and the politics of the country, exerting their right and then having them feel good.
Patrick: So they want to do it again and again and again and again.
Patrick: Right now, it’s
Patrick: It’s a privilege.
Patrick: I think that’s kind of a theme we’ve been talking about here.
Patrick: When you’ve got three jobs, this is the last thing on your mind.
Patrick: And if you don’t feel like anything you’re going to do is going to make a difference, then again, why even bother to familiarize yourself with this big, beautiful bill?
Patrick: You’re just going to brace yourself for the next
Patrick: shitty thing that’s going to happen to you.
Patrick: And it’s just so sad and so un-American.
Patrick: So I think we just need to continue to brainstorm how to get people engaged, not just in one conversation, but to pull them in and make the message.
Rob: The messaging really matters and the folks that are doing it, I think, are showing success.
Rob: And with that, because I know we’re almost at time, but I definitely wanted to hear a little bit about the Public Service Alliance, the Impact Map, what you’re doing there, and how that’s really necessary right now, especially.
Rob: And I guess they’re pretty new organizations that I understand it.
Rob: So maybe if you could touch on that, Delphi.
Delphi: Yeah, happy to.
Delphi: The entire premise of Public Service Lions is to bring saliency to the fact that there are many, many, many millions of Americans who work for the government, who work for public service, who are not political at all, and who do this work because
Delphi: I mean, obviously everyone needs livelihood that aside.
Delphi: They do this work because it matters to them and because they see the greater purpose of a government that supports its people.
Delphi: And that’s everyone from your local police officer to your public school teacher to your city council representative, all the way up the chain to people who are working at the State Department or working at the Department of Homeland Security or whatever agency you name it.
Delphi: And we’ve seen really dire trends in threats and harassment against this population of people because there is a misconstrued understanding that they are somehow political actors.
Delphi: We’ve also seen really scary trends in increased violence against judges and against elected officials.
Delphi: We saw the Minnesota attacks a couple weeks ago, the violence against Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania.
Delphi: And we’re becoming really familiarized with violent threats against people who exist to serve our country.
Delphi: And the Public Service Alliance exists to support those people.
Delphi: We are building a marketplace of resources to backbone civil servants across the United States at any level of government.
Delphi: which include access to legal support, access to security resources and coaching, and access to job hunt and job coaching resources as well.
Delphi: It is in a bit of a beta stage.
Delphi: We’re building it as we fly it.
Delphi: We’ve serviced a couple hundred people to date.
Delphi: So what does that involve when you serve it?
Patrick: How do you help people, individuals?
Delphi: Really great question.
Delphi: So we’re in the process of building a quiz that will help kind of gamify, help people figure out what sorts of resources they might need given their current threat environment.
Delphi: But for people who are experiencing active threats or who are coming to us with pre-existing knowledge that they might be targeted or that they have lost their job as a result of their
Delphi: political affiliation or suspected political affiliation, we’re able to put them in touch with lawyers directly if that’s what they want.
Delphi: We’re able to provide them with a myriad of third-party resources in the security space, so whether it’s erasing your data footprint from online or
Delphi: giving you access to greater cybersecurity systems for your home or for your families.
Delphi: The kind of myriad of resources is continuing to grow.
Delphi: We have an excellent partnerships team who has really done phenomenal work to that end.
Delphi: And we’re also sourcing responses from civil servants at different levels of government to inform the products that we’re then able to provide.
Delphi: The current model is that it’s a flat rate that gives you access to all of the products on our marketplace.
Delphi: We’ll be launching kind of a fuller version of the marketplace later this fall, which will include that gamified kind of quiz for people to better understand what they might need given where they’re at.
Delphi: On the impact project side, that is more of a research study that has morphed into a database.
Delphi: It has, I think, at last count over 5,000 different dots, which are each reflective to a cut or a change in funding at a state level vis-a-vis the decisions that have been made here in Washington.
Delphi: So what that looks like in practice is a map of the United States with color coded dots that reflect the sector of impact.
Delphi: So whether it’s industry is impacted, legal reforms have been impacted, different sectors of industry have been impacted, and then it says the dollar amount that has been affected and the number of people that have been directly affected.
Delphi: And they’re building that out in
Delphi: real-time response to decisions that are being made here but also through real-time interviews with people who are being affected.
Delphi: So the individual stories of people who are losing their jobs or whose funding is being cut or whose industries are being affected and they’re calling all of that through first-person interviews and also through a lot of news kind of calling at the state level.
Patrick: That’s so cool because it actually solves the problem that we’re talking about about
Patrick: Driving home why a certain piece of legislation exactly your life and why you might want to be paying attention to it right you know and then wait a minute That’s what my people are you know just voted for you know, it’s like well, maybe next time there’ll be somebody else there.
Patrick: Yeah, I mean It is it’s a huge commitment of time to even even if you’re voting on it to read this thing nobody’s actually meant this thing right and
Patrick: So how are you going to know?
Patrick: It takes teams of folks.
Patrick: I think AI is going to be huge for this.
Patrick: Absolutely.
Delphi: Yeah.
Delphi: Yes.
Patrick: You can build tools like that, you know, like really fast.
Patrick: Like I actually, we got a list of all the people from the go to my daughter’s school and I used AI to plot them on a map so that we could figure out like who to reach out to for carpooling.
[SPEAKER_03]: That’s brilliant.
Patrick: That’s really smart.
Patrick: Even like your location is just one thing, but you know you could be so you’re similarly situated based on where you are But you could be totally you know differently affected based on other things So you could really use that the person logging in to do a quiz and then like here’s here’s the Ordered list of how this thing’s making your life worse, you know, right, right?
Patrick: That’s that sounds like a really good cool tool and
Delphi: We hope so.
Delphi: We really hope so.
Delphi: I think it’s gonna help both kind of in an industry sense, like know where the gaps are to fill given cuts, but also to understand kind of the immediate political impacts that some of these bills and rulings and doge cuts are having on everyday Americans.
Rob: Right, yeah.
Rob: And to highlight again the post-service lines, what I think is so fascinating about it is that a lot of our elected officials in public service and civil servants, and we’re not talking on the federal stage sometimes, we’re talking state and local folks that are making $20,000 a year in a part-time job that are now facing like fear of retribution.
Rob: They don’t have the resources that Governor Shapiro does.
Rob: Obviously that was horrible and it’s won everybody as the resources.
Rob: But like so an entity like public service line said I wasn’t aware of something like this existing that now okay you can be part of this team that actually has you know group together resources to provide you with assistance okay what do I need to do if if you know I literally felt a threat and you have lawyers that consists with this and and also security I think apparatus is too as well so.
Rob: Yeah, I hope that that just takes off and and because what we’re seeing now it’s it’s just so unfortunate right in our schools I still remember like when Columbine occurred back in gosh, I think it was like early 90s and it’s and if you Google from there on out It’s just every single month.
Rob: You have a new shooting right and that’s become normalized.
Rob: Well now unfortunately I think what’s becoming normalized is violence against elected
Rob: So the servants and it’s just it’s absurd and it’s what we saw on TV happening in other you know countries and now it’s it’s happening here we’re here.
Rob: So it’s nice to see that you know there are entities out there that are trying to prevent at least it provides safety because I think we do need to.
Rob: Get people back engaged and and running for election people that are good listeners and then are good messengers But oh my goodness who wants to go into civil service?
Patrick: He wants to be like a visual like I don’t um, so I really want to support people Yeah, well it used to be that you know this this was like the ideal job and I always thought about like yeah You know like you want to know what a good job looks like it’s a federal job It’s like the last job that had a pension, you know, and it should be like it should have been
Patrick: For the private sector, it was like, okay, well, if I’m not going to have a pension, what else are you going to do for me?
Patrick: I better be making more money then, or I better have, et cetera.
Patrick: Oh, my quality of life is going to be worse.
Patrick: You’re going to be calling me all hours.
Patrick: That was the standard.
Patrick: I think that somehow people that got weaponized, like, oh, look at these.
Patrick: They’re sitting pretty.
Patrick: They go home at the end of the day, and they don’t have to worry about whether they’re going to be able to eat when they’re elderly.
Patrick: How bad do things get?
Patrick: But I think part of the value of that federal job and those kind of uniform federal benefits were just an example of this is to the private sector, this is how it should be.
Patrick: I think in terms of political violence, that may be something that everybody can agree on, that we don’t want to go there.
Patrick: That is a horrifying thing.
Patrick: How do you keep it?
Patrick: Like you said, school shootings have become normalized.
Patrick: That should be something that we could all agree on.
Patrick: And it’s somehow escaped that special status of being something that’s nonpartisan.
Patrick: It is.
Patrick: I mean, it’s amazing.
Patrick: It’s a trick of the human brain that you can
Patrick: bend yourself to just think that that’s acceptable then.
Patrick: So I think same thing with women’s rights and you know that loss of the social safety net you know I mean it’s like there’s somehow this where people are a little bit hypnotized that these are outside of the realm of discussion and action anymore you know.
Patrick: Anyway, thank you for all that cool work that you’re doing with those organizations.
Patrick: I mean, that sounds like it really is going to help.
Delphi: We hope so.
Delphi: I really hope so.
Delphi: We always say, our CEO is always saying, I wish we didn’t have to exist.
Delphi: But it’s a privilege to exist.
Delphi: And I think in this moment, hopefully our existence can be a positive response.
Delphi: And we can get to a point where we’re not needed anymore.
Delphi: And that’s down the road.
Delphi: Fingers crossed.
Rob: Well, I guess we’ll leave it at that for today.
Rob: Delphi Cleveland was our guest.
Rob: She’s currently with the Public Service Alliance, also supporting the impact map.
Rob: And we need smart people like this talking, listening, and I think she’s also a good messenger too, right?
Rob: So maybe she gets involved in local elected official, maybe on the federal side too.
Rob: We’ll see.
Delphi: Thank you guys so much.
Delphi: This has been a real treat.
Delphi: A real treat.
Delphi: Great conversation.
Patrick: Thank you.