On this week’s episode, former Disney Channel actress turned White House Press assistant Caroline Sunshine joins to talk about how she went from Hollywood to the White House, and how to cancel culture came for her.
Caroline Sunshine is technically the first actor to serve in the West Wing of the White House since former President Ronald Reagan. At the time of her hiring, at 22 years old, she was one of the youngest professional staff members in President Trump’s West Wing. After finding teen stardom on Disney Channel, Ms. Sunshine left Hollywood to serve her country at the White House, and her controversial arrival made international news due to her public profile. Prior to serving at the White House, Ms. Sunshine starred in the Disney Channel original series Shake It Up alongside Zendaya and Bella Thorne. People Magazine critic Tom Gliatto praised Sunshine’s performance as, “the best on the show.” Shake It Up played in over 90 countries and the show remains one of the highest-rated series in Disney Channel history and continues to stream today on Disney +. And, yes, Sunshine is her real last name.
Transcript
Beverly:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, I’m thrilled that we have former Disney Channel actress and former White House press assistant, Caroline Sunshine joining us. She’s here to discuss how she went from Hollywood to the White House and how cancel culture came for her.
Before we bring her on, a little bit more about Caroline. Caroline Sunshine is technically the first actor to serve in the West Wing of the white house since former president Ronald Reagan. At the time of her hiring, at 22 years old, she was one of the youngest professional staff members in President Trump’s West Wing, and her controversial arrival made international news due to her public profile. prior to service at the White House, Caroline starred in the Disney Channel original series, Shake It Up, alongside Zendaya and Bella Thorne. Shake It Up played in over 90 countries, and the show remains one of the highest-rated series in Disney Channel history and continues to stream today on Disney Plus, so go ahead and check it out. It is called Shake It Up. And the last thing I just want to say, Sunshine is her real last name. I’m sure you get that question a lot, Caroline. And thank you so much for joining us today.
Caroline:
How’s it going? Thank you for having me.
Beverly:
I know we’re going to jump into your career and how you went from Hollywood to the White House, but my first question to you is, is what are you doing now that there is a new administration in the White House and in Washington DC, what is the latest with you and your career these days?
Caroline:
Yeah. I remain hopeful about the future of our country. I think that probably like everyone elsewhere I’m going through a transition. I am dealing with some of the effects of cancel culture, as we’ll get into, are long and lingering, and I think that’s one of the very cruel things about cancel culture is that usually its victims are left with some long-term damage from it because everybody else moves on.
Beverly:
Well, let’s jump back a little bit, talk a little bit about your time at the Disney Channel. I explained a little bit in your bio, but tell us, how did you break into the Disney Channel itself? That’s very competitive. It’s very hard. You worked alongside Zendaya and Bella Thorne. Zendaya, of course, has had an amazing career as an actress since this show. How did you break into it?
Caroline:
Yeah. I had wanted to be an actress for as long as I can remember. It was really my passion. When I try to explain it to people, it’s like when you see a horse run or when you see an athlete on a football field or someone who loves to fly planes, like the cockpit is their space where they feel most comfortable, the football field is their space where they feel most comfortable. For me, that was always a dance floor or stage, a performing space. It really was a thing that just completely lit my soul on fire. And there’s really no reason I should have been successful at what I ended up being able to do. I don’t come from an entertainment connected family. I don’t have anybody that I knew. And I really built my career brick by brick.
I knew from an early age that it was what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to wait till I was an adult to do it, and I was just determined to find a way to break in. And I think there’s a real beauty in the way that children think, and I always try not to lose that because when you’re a kid, you don’t see all of the built-in obstacles, you don’t see all of the reasons why you can’t do something. You just see, “Well, I have this dream, and this is so far-fetched, and there’s no reason I should be able to do this, but I’m going to do it anyway.” And there’s real power in that thinking. And I watch as we get older sometimes, we lose that. Just, I think, as you get older, your relationship with fear changes, your relationship with anxiety changes, and you’re much more aware of just the obstacles. So, I think there’s a real beauty in that kind of thinking.
But I really built my career brick by brick. People always look at overnight successes. I was really lucky with… Shake It Up was a successful show. And when you’re on a successful show, people think it all just happens overnight. But at that point, I spent a couple of years going on audition after audition, getting no after no, and really having to build that brick by brick. I remember my final audition for Shake It Up, you go through so many rounds of auditions, it’s really not a process where you go in for one and then they’re like, “Great. Here’s the part.” You really go through several auditions, several hurdles to get a part on any show or any project.
And I remember the part for this particular show was a Russian foreign exchange student, and she had to have an accent. And I am from Southern California. And I had made it to like this final round where they cast a wide net. They start with 10,000 people and they whittled that down to 100, and then they whittled that down to 25. And then maybe down to three. And I was at the point where they were three of us, and I’d really fallen in love with his character and I really wanted it. And part of the heartbreak of acting and performing, it’s in other industries too, is you fall in love with these things and you want them so bad, and then nine times out of 10, it doesn’t work out and you feel heartbroken.
So, I really wanted this character. I knew that I had made it to this last round. And I’m sitting next to this really brutal… I think it’s a brutal industry, a brutal sport for a lot of reasons. Part of the brutality comes from the fact that when you’re in this audition room, you have to sit with your competition. You’re sitting there with these other people who you know want the part just as bad as you do but have worked just as hard as you. I really work hard not to let it get in your head.
And so, I’m sitting next to this girl and I’m feeling good, I really felt like I was in my zone, I was just ready to get in there and do my thing. And she’s sitting there with her mom and she starts talking, and she’s speaking like truly like Romanian or something. She is straight out of an Eastern European country, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is it. This is over. They want a Russian foreign exchange student, and here she is like, this is her. They’re not going to pick the girl from Southern California.” But lo and behold, that was one of those… There are a few phone calls in your life that can change your life. My grandpa always used to say that, for better or for worse, and that was a phone call that definitely changed my life for the better.
Beverly:
And you talk about loving to perform and loving to be on stage. You kept the stage, but you changed it into a new occupation, and that was going from acting to politics. Politics is a profession that involves a stage. What made you make that transition, and was that transition already happening even before Trump became president?
Caroline:
So, I had, as I said, acting has been my primary passion, and I felt really fortunate that I had been able to have success with Shake It Up. When you’re auditioning and auditioning and you have a successful show, it really changes the trajectory of your career. It’s a life-changing thing to be on a show that has success, that has a fan base, that has good ratings, that it is a completely life-changing experience. It introduces different things into your life that weren’t there before. And I had always wanted to continue with that. I’d really loved comedy and I’d love comedic actresses, and my goal was to keep carving out this comedic career for myself. I have just always loved the courage and the bravery of comedians and female comedians in general. And that was really early on in my career. I had had success, but of course, you want to keep building on that.
And at the same time, I thought, “I want to be a Renaissance woman. I want to be a Renaissance person. I have multiple interests. I want to be able to do all those things too. I have a lot of energy. I have a real zest for life. I want to do a lot. I have this energy. I’ve been blessed with a healthy mind and a healthy body. I want to make the most of my life.” So, I had chosen to go to college while simultaneously still acting. I was still doing films and then taking my full course load in college. I happened to be in Washington DC when President Trump was inaugurated. I was there on a school trip, actually. And I remember it was myself and one other classmate that went to the inauguration out of like 25 of us. Everybody else decided not to go. And as a sidebar, I was there at the inauguration, I was there with my friend, who happens to be a Korean-American. I was there with my cousin and his boyfriend. So, it was like two gay guys and two women at President Trump’s inauguration.
And I bring that up not so people can be like, “Oh, diversity points.” No, it really shows you that, from what I knew early on, there was really a diverse political coalition supporting the president, and I knew that from the get-go. That was my experience. And that day of the inauguration, I mean, I was just like a face in the crowd. We got the tickets from Democrat offices because I think they all clearly thought that he wasn’t going to win, and so a bunch of people didn’t show up. And so, it was the Democrat offices that had the best tickets. We were college kids who were just like scalping tickets through the inauguration and ended up getting pretty good seats from just calling around. We’d heard from somewhere that you could get them from members of Congress. We would just call up these offices. We got some tickets. We actually ended up sneaking into a section that I don’t think we should have been in. It was like one of the few times I think I’ve ever snuck in somewhere.
And then, I had no way of knowing that really a year, about a year later, I would end up working in the West Wing of the White House for President Trump and traveling all around our country and the world on Air Force One and getting a chance to really serve our country, which has been one of the greatest honors of my life.
Beverly:
So, obviously, being in Washington DC and having the honor of being at an inauguration, definitely piqued your interest in this political career. How did you reach out to the White House? What was that transition like for you to then go over there and start working as an intern for the White House?
Caroline:
Yeah. At the time, I definitely wasn’t thinking about a political career. I still really am not like… I’m not that. I never have been. I don’t think I ever will be. It’s not in my nature. I wasn’t looking to climb the ranks of Washington DC. What I saw in President Trump was someone who had a very powerful message, who was talking about things that I knew I was talking about amongst my friends and my family, but nobody else was really talking about. And like I said, I was in college at the time. And so, one of the things I learned from being an actress is you have to be really tenacious. And like I said, I was looking at stories of people who built things brick by brick because it inspires me, and as I said, I didn’t really come from a connected acting family or the kind of just situation where someone could pick up the phone and make a phone call on your behalf and get you a job or get you an opportunity. That was never really my story.
And so, because of that, I think when that’s not your story, you learn to be extra tenacious, you learn that you have to pick up the phone and you have to cold call and you have to line up for the audition and you have to work harder and smarter and build it yourself. And so, I applied through the website of the White House internship program, and I think a lot of people wouldn’t have done that, would have just thought, “No way. This is a website that leads to a black hole somewhere. Nobody gets a White House internship spot unless they know somebody who knows somebody.” But I was, I guess, naive enough to just think, “Nope, I’m going to try.” And the first time I tried, I actually got rejected because I… So, that’s a really good story in like try, try again. I got rejected the first time. It was such an important lesson, actually. It was almost embarrassing, but I think you have to tell it.
I submitted the application a minute after the deadline, and to this day, I don’t know why I did that. Right? It’s inexcusable, especially now having worked at the White House, I would have been like, “Well, clearly this person isn’t worth hiring because they can’t even follow a deadline.” So, I’m not upset about it at all. I mean, I was upset about it at the time, but I completely understood like, “All right, come on, Caroline, this is on you.” Anyways, I remember thinking, “Okay, it’s a minute. Come on. They got to honor it.” So, I emailed some generic email to they wrote back, and they were like, “Yeah, no, sorry. You missed the deadline. We don’t care if it’s by a minute. No.” And I was like, “No.” I was really bummed, but I was like, “I’m not deterred. I’m going to come back. I’m going to come back.” So, I reapplied, I obviously honored the deadline the second time around, and I ended up becoming a White House intern in the press and communications office. And then about… Yeah.
Beverly:
I was just going to say, and so you start as an intern and you did work your way up from intern to a paid staff position. Did you expect, when you went through this process of applying for an internship, obviously you don’t know where it’s going to lead and that you would have a full-time position there, did you at any point suspect that there could be backlash for your choosing to work for the Trump administration, or that it would be so controversial that you were doing this, that it made international news? Was that even something you thought could potentially happen?
Caroline:
No. And I’m sure people won’t believe me when I say that. I wasn’t in that headspace. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was really just thinking, “Gosh, this would be an extraordinary experience.” My head wasn’t there. And that’s why when I was hired and became a full-time staff member, my first week on the job, the news broke that I was working there, and it really was shocking for me. I mean, of course, I knew the Trump administration was, yes, somewhat controversial, but you have to remember, this is a couple of years ago. Cancel culture now I think is in full force, but at the time, it was almost like the first wave of it was hitting. It was almost like I was in one of the first waves of it.
And I remember, obviously being an actress on Disney Channel, had a public profile and I have social media profiles, and I remember just them getting flooded with comments using this word canceled. And I was like, “What does this mean? What does this mean?” Today, everybody knows what that word means, but a couple of years ago, I was like, “Canceled?” I was like, “What is this? What does this mean?” And I kind of, “All right, this is some internet troll trend. It just means they don’t like what I’m doing or something, but it’s going to blow over in a day or two. They’re going to forget about it.” It’s a joke. I kind of, “Okay, it’s a joke. All right, whatever. They don’t like it. Cool. It’ll pass.” And then you find out cancel culture is no joke. It’s no joking matter.”
Beverly:
And so, in what ways were you canceled? What were the attacks like? How have those attacks even impacted you today in your career?
Caroline:
I think one of the things people don’t talk about is the psychological impact of cancel culture, and it’s taken me a lot… This is, I think, one of the first interviews I’ve done in a few years that I’ve granted because I think, to be honest, it’s taken me a long time to understand what exactly happened. It was also happening to me simultaneously as I was starting a new job in the West Wing of the White House, which is just like a responsibility in and of itself. So, it’s almost like I didn’t even have time to sometimes process exactly what was going on and what was happening. It was all happening so fast. And then on top of a very fast-paced, stressful, intense work environment.
But when I say people don’t talk about the psychological aspect of it, there are some people that talk about cancer culture that have never really actually experienced it, in my opinion. I think some people use it as a talking point. I think some people almost like… I don’t want to say they almost want to get canceled, but they kind of love the sparring aspect of it. And I would say those people haven’t actually been through the real thing. Because if you’ve been through the real thing, you know it’s an entirely different animal. It’s not fun. As I said, it’s taken me a little bit of time to learn how to talk about it because I also came from an upbringing where you were taught never to be a victim, and I never wanted to look at myself as a victim. And I felt like, “Okay, come on. If you open up about what this has felt like and what it’s been like, you’re being a victim, you’re playing the victim. That’s not who you are. Don’t be that.”
But for people who haven’t experienced it, I would say it’s like, it’s the equivalent of having like a mob come after you and rough you up, dust you up, kick you a little bit, laugh, and then they move on. They move on to their next victim. It’s all like haha joke to them. They move on. And you’re left with the damage, and you’re left with… Cancel culture makes you feel unwanted, unwelcome, insecure. It’s degrading. As I said, it’s become this talking point in our culture, but it’s actually an incredibly cruel practice and it’s really no way to treat your fellow human beings. And it’s no way for free people in a free country to behave.
And so, for me, it was a Swift process. Like I said, at first I almost didn’t completely realize what was happening, but it was very swift and very brutal, very fast. I’d had a fan base from my time on Disney Channel, that very quickly turned on me. When I really think about some of the things that hurt the most, it was things that weren’t even about me. It’s like with cancel culture, they don’t see you as fully human, they just see you as a target, and when you see somebody as a target, nothing about them is off-limits. And so, I remember comments, sure, about me, “Go kill yourself,” “jump off a bridge.”
But it was the comments that crossed lines that were like, “I really hope your grandparents die.” And I was like, “Well, they’re already dead.” Do you know what I mean? And comments about, I have a brother, and my younger brother served in the military, and it was commented about like, “I really hope your brother dies,” and, “Your brother is a murderer pig,” and things like that. And it’s like, that one cuts at you because you’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, now we’re talking about somebody that’s not me. If you want to come after me, come after me. But now you’re coming after my little brother and you’re hitting on a very real fear that I have. Obviously, I think anybody who has a sibling or a loved one that serves in the military, of course, is hard.
Beverly:
And let me jump in here. And I think that completely makes sense when it’s the attack against family and people that you love, and that just made me think of how your family supported you during this time. What was it like for your family to be attacked? That’s got to be hard for them to go through, as well.
Caroline:
I mean, I’ve always had an incredibly supportive family. I’ve always been really fortunate. I think one of the things that made it difficult was that at that time, my family wasn’t really able to be supportive. It was a great test. There’s a lot of lessons that came out of it for me, and there’s a lot of lessons and personal resiliency that came out of it for me because at the time, my family was going through something intensely private and an intense struggle. My parents were in the middle of a really tough divorce. And my father had realized later in life that he was gay and had come out, and that had caused a divorce. My father’s struggle with self-acceptance, which is a very real struggle for a lot of people, led him down a dark path with mental health and substances. And it was a really privately, very messy, very painful time for my family.
Through no fault of their own, they weren’t able to meet up for… and especially my father who had been probably one of my biggest champions, one of my biggest supporters, my best friend, my source of energy. I always say he was this battery for me. My dad was just such a life-giving force for me. And not having him in that way during that time was difficult, for sure, and I really kept all of that internal at the time. Because I just thought, “Man, I’ve already got this thing going on.” I felt protective of my family, as well, where I just thought, “Okay, I don’t want anything… There’s already a lot going on here.”
Beverly:
You felt like it could have been a burden if you were sharing everything that you were feeling and how… Which you don’t even fully know because it’s just coming at you so quickly you don’t even know how to process it. Did you?
Caroline:
Yeah. Absolutely. You’re protective of your family.
Beverly:
One of the things I wonder… Yeah. You’re protective of your family, of course. And you want to be there for them, as well, when they’re going through something that’s a big change in their lives and has it’s hard.
Caroline:
And there’s is so different. Right? Right? What we were going through as a family was on such a different level, as well. As bad as cancel culture is, there’s also some real stuff that happens in life that I now have learned, being more open with people, that everybody goes through challenges with mental health. Everybody goes through just… Nobody makes it through life unscathed. And most families go through some very real, very hard times, and everybody’s adversity comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes.
Beverly:
So, you did work for the former Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. She has-
Caroline:
I did. Yeah.
Beverly:
… of course, been a victim of cancel culture. She’s had horrible things said about her ever since she became the White House Press Secretary, and still does to this day. Did she ever give you any advice? Did you find people within the White House to lean on, to get advice from, as you were going through this?
I think it was my choice to keep everything I was feeling very private to me. I really realized that I was there on taxpayer dollars, with a taxpayer-funded salary, and so even though I was feeling all of these things, I just thought, “You’re here to do bigger work. There are people who are going through bigger things, and you just need to suck it up and keep it together and keep it to yourself.” And so, I kept everything to myself. And in hindsight, I think I wish I would have been more open, but I think my default setting is you lock it down, you soldier on, and you do your job. You’re here to do a job. This is a workplace. People have entrusted you with this honor and with this responsibility, and don’t make it about you. You are here to do exceptional work and take that very seriously.
So, I kept everything that I was feeling, at the time, very much just in my space. But I’m glad you brought up Sarah because I think Sarah, having been somebody who served under her, will be a phenomenal governor for Arkansas because I think she has genuine pride in her state and a love for its people. And I think that’s one of the most important qualities, if not the most important quality, in a leader, is you have to love the people that you lead. And they always said that about General Patton in World War II, that he loved his men and his men loved him right back. And because of that, they followed him into the depth of hell.
So, I think you have to love the people that you lead, because if you love the people that you lead, then you’ll be willing to fight very hard for them. And Sarah is very tough, and she led by example in that sense. She’s tough enough to be in that ring, she’s very resilient, she has a spine, and she led by example. You’re right. She had some brutal run-ins herself, right? I mean, getting kicked out of a restaurant, I remember all of that vividly. And she really led by example by soldiering on. She has a spine, and she’s taken her fair share of punches. And she’s a very resilient leader.
Beverly:
Two questions, if I could keep you just a few minutes longer, that I want to ask and get in. One is about the dress that you wore to the 2018 White House correspondence dinner. So, basically, you wore a dress, the bodice of it had clippings of different things that have been said about you either through Twitter or the news. Why did you choose to do that? And did you find that that was empowering for you to do, a way to fight back at your haters?
Caroline:
Yeah. So, for people who are listening, to probably get the full effect, you’ll probably just have Google it so you can see what it was. But yeah, I mean, obviously I said when I joined, my first week into this new job at 22, there’s all of this backlash and controversy. Everybody felt like they had an opinion about me. I just have a really dark sense of humor, I guess. I think that’s probably just… I think humor and faith are flotation devices through life. I think those can be things that really when you need to put on the life jacket, your humor and your faith will be the things that pull you through.
And so, I needed to laugh. And some of what people were saying about me was tough, some of it was fair, and some of it was downright funny to me. And I felt like everybody wanted to put this scarlet letter on me or this scarlet T. They really wanted to brand you as, “Well, you’re this now.” And I was like, “Fine, you want to give me a scarlet letter? I will wear that scarlet letter and I’ll look really good doing it.
And I had a lot of respect for the fact that I cherish the First Amendment, I cherish our right to express ourselves, to say what we want, even if they’re going to say dumb stuff about me or about me, let’s do it. This is part of the beauty of the First Amendment. And that dinner was about the First Amendment. That’s the pillar of the dinner, is like the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, so I just thought, “I’m going to take this nasty thing and I’m going to turn it into something that’s fun, that helps me just not take it all too seriously,” which I think is a way that I sometimes cope with different things. Just try to have a good laugh in there somewhere.
And I think it’s a testament to the woman that I partnered with to create the dress. I was 22 at the time. She was also about 22. She was a brand new designer, barely out of design school. And I told her the truth about who I am and where I was and where I was working. And we did not share the same political beliefs at all, and she was willing to work with me. And we created this really cool piece of art together. And I just think that’s my favorite thing about that dress, is that it was this really beautiful creation of two people that don’t see eye to eye on politics at all, and we were able to create this really cool thing together. And she’s still somebody who I think is a really talented artist and who I just hope blows up as a designer, because I think she’s so talented.
Beverly:
And it became one of the stories that evening. People can easily Google your name just to see the dress if they want to see the image. It was beautiful. And like you said, it was a way to support the First Amendment and the rights of free speech, but also have a little fun, as well. And so, this leads me to my final question, you used the word coping, that was one of your ways to cope, looking back and having some more time to process this, do you regret your decision to work for the Trump White House because of the cancel culture? If you do, love to hear about that. If not, why not, and what advice would you give to somebody else who either is being canceled or is afraid to speak up because they’re worried they may?
Caroline:
Great question. Absolutely not. I don’t regret my decision at all. Serving at the White House for President Trump and for the Trump administration was one of the greatest honors of my life. I am a better person. I am a better American for the time that I spent there. I met incredible people, incredible leaders that you will never hear their names, you will never know about what they do, but they are patriots. And our country is a better place because of the work that they do. I don’t regret my choice at all.
My younger brother is a lot wiser than me, and he always talks about finding you’re why, having a why for what you’re doing. And I really believe that the work that we were trying to do there made an entire group of Americans who didn’t feel seen and heard by their government feel like they were seen and they were heard and they were respected. And people are going to twist that and say, “Oh, an emboldened White nationalist,” or whatever. That’s not what I’m talking about, and they know that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the segment of Americans, many of whom are my family and my friends, who did not feel like a government that’s supposed to be formed by the people was representing their interests. And it was an honor to be in that building for the days that I was there, feeling like they were your why, and they still are why.
I think there are some people, as an aside, that want what happened at the Capitol on January 6th to be the Trump legacy. I think they’re going to try hard to make that the Trump legacy. I haven’t really like, again, done interviews and things like that, so I would say, first of all, any act of violence or any illegal acts that were committed that day does not represent that legacy. It doesn’t represent the work that I did in that building and the work that the teams that I worked on did in that building. If you committed an act of violence that day, if you committed an illegal act, you brought shame to yourself, to your family, to your country, and the people like me who risked their careers to fight for you and to fight for that movement. I think the Trump legacy and the work that we did in that building is about showing what happens when you give the people a voice back into their own government, and I think trying to play offense, not really defense.
Cancel culture is so real. It’s still real. It’s gotten even more real, and it’s terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. I mean, I remember being terrified about my economic livelihood. As I said, I wasn’t looking to climb the ranks of government. I was an actress. I was a performer. And it was terrifying to know that someone was coming after my economic livelihood, in addition to the things I was intensely passionate about. So, I know how terrifying it is, and I know exactly why people are afraid to speak up and to take a stand. And as hard as it is, it won’t work until everybody collectively does it, if that makes sense. If you’re in a workplace… I know so many people are in workplaces right now where they don’t feel comfortable speaking up, and they’re smart too because they know that they could lose their economic life. And losing your economic livelihood is no joke. It isn’t. It’s absolutely terrifying to know that you can lose your economic livelihood overnight because of canceled culture.
But what I was saying about the scarlet T thing, I think everybody collectively has to stand up and be like, “Okay, well, if you’re going to brand her with a scarlet letter, then we’re going to brand you too, and you too, and you too, and you too, and you too. And it has to be that chain of people saying, “No, this isn’t right.” Right? And I think it’s such a force, cancel culture is such a force, and it has to have an equal force to counteract it. And that force can’t just be five people, that force has to be a collective group saying, “Okay, well, I’m one of them too,” or whatever it is. And that’s how you get people to back down, but you need a force that’s equal to that. Because, again, this is not how free people behave.
And I’d be saying this if this is the other way around, too. If this was the other way around and it was some of my liberal friends or liberals that I respect who were being treated this way, it would still be wrong. It doesn’t really have anything to do with politics, except the fact that it’s obviously very one-sided, but it’s just a wrong practice in general. And unfortunately, it has gained such momentum that I really don’t think it will stop until there’s a large collective force of people saying, “Okay, this is a team sport.”
Beverly:
And I lied. One more final question, if I can, because I would be remiss if I did not ask you this. There has been a push for those who worked in the Trump administration to be left out of any future jobs, where people are saying, “Don’t hire them.” So, there’s this cancel culture of just anybody who worked in the Trump administration. When you think about how many people work in administration, we’re talking about thousands of people. Have you faced that yourself, and what is next for you?
Caroline:
I think I feel like a lot of people collectively in the country right now, where you feel like you’re in this No Man’s Land where you’re looking around and just thinking, “Okay, where are my interests represented? Or where am I represented? Where’s my voice in all of this?” It just feels like this No Man’s Land. And I’ve had so many conversations privately with people who feel the same way, where they go, “Both parties don’t represent me. I don’t feel like I’m represented in the media. I don’t feel like I’m represented here. I’m just not liking the world that I’m living in.” And I’m not liking the world that I’m living in. I’m not. There’s plenty of things about the world right now that I am not liking, and I think I have a lot that I still want to do.
I want to change the world. I want to have fun doing it. I don’t take a single day for granted. I see the world for the way it is, but also the way that it could be. And I have more that I want to do and more than I want to create. And I am sure that I will be met with resistance, but I just hope that I can live my life in such a way that it brings honor to my family, that it brings honor to my country, and then at the end of it, God. I’m very spiritual, but I rarely speak about it publicly because I never want to mess it up. It’s something that’s too important to me. And I always feel like, “Gosh, I’m never going to explain this in a way that it conveys what it means to me,” but I just hope at the end of my life, God will say, “Well done good and faithful servant.” And so, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m on stumbling and finding my way through it, probably like a lot of people are.
Beverly:
Well, we do appreciate that She Thinks is one of the first podcasts where you came on to talk about your experience. I appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing your heart with this. And I just want to say, I feel like I can speak for IWF on this, is we love supporting women who stand up for saying what they think and for thinking the way that they want. I think that’s what you have done. And while cancel culture is a horrible thing to have happened, I do believe that the tides are going to turn because it’s happening to so many people. I’m hopeful that there will be enough people standing up and saying, “Regardless of what you’re being canceled for, it’s just not a good thing to happen, that it’s not acceptable. It’s not what makes us American.” And so, I’m excited to see where you go next. I know we’re all rooting for you. And again, Caroline, thank you so much for your time today.
Caroline:
Thank you so much. Thank you to you, thank you to your listeners. Take care.
Beverly:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. And last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes. It does help. Also, we’d love it if you shared this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening.