What If AOC Took a Vow of Silence?

M onica Lewinsky has a podcast: Reclaiming. In a vast sea of them, hers stood out at the right time as she and the political world hit on the same general topic: women’s fertility.

The White House press secretary just happened to be on her podcast. Well, sort of. Allison Janney was the one who played that role on The West Wing a few moons ago in the Aaron Sorkin series. Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump’s press secretary in the real world (or the neverending reality-TV show we call that) announced she is stepping down to spend more time with her two young children. And, at the same time, a certain 36-year-old congressman, who may have presidential dreams for herself, was injecting herself with hormones in the green room of one of the Sunday shows to hyper-stimulate her egg production to freeze them. Many cynically assumed it all had to do with politics and invited all kinds of unsolicited advice. Where Lewinsky and Janney went was actually a helpful addition to what the news would cover this week: Because as the podcast hit on, for a people who have an amazing amount of information at our fingertips, we often don’t know as much as we should about the most fundamental, intimate things that impact us the most. And that’s not all fertility-related, of course. Janney seems an actress deeply devoted to her craft, extremely grateful for the opportunities she’s been afforded. And in search of something.

My heart broke for Janney early in the podcast when she and Lewinsky were discussing religion. It was brief, but clearly important, and something that they kept naturally swinging back to, albeit not obviously or purposefully. She grew up Episcopalian, only going to church on Christmas and Easter, as many do. But she was confirmed before she moved on. And she remembers having been told by an instructor that God was on the other side of a brick wall and it is her job to knock down the wall. Yikes. Imagine hearing that as a young person – I’m guessing she was something around the age of twelve. God would look mean and unreachable. And, sure enough, Janney remembers thinking it all seemed quite hard and very possibly something she wasn’t going to pull off.

So, she eventually came to lean into things more “spiritual” rather than institutional religion, as people often tend to. Although that went all “woo-woo” (their word, unconventional for the unexplainable) quickly. The gals laughed — aware of how it sounds (and Lewinsky has a fun and distinctive laugh) — not to read too much into it, but she sounds like someone who learned to laugh in the face of adversity at some point. And, yes, your guess is likely the same as mine on that. They really just seemed to mean they both like acknowledging signs, coincidences that may not be simply happenstance. As the conversation went on, Janney has lost people close to her — including her brother, who she was clearly close to, to addiction, and, it sounds like, some serious depression. Who doesn’t want to find something like evidence that he still exists that they might meet again — all the things the human heart longs for?

The reason this podcast hit the news was that the conversation between two women eventually wound up including women’s fertility — I wrote about this more in the most recent edition of The Lifeline, NRO’s weekly pro-life newsletter. Neither is married — one had hoped to be at this point in her life, the other figured that’s what you did, but didn’t feel the longing for children in the same way as others do. But in her 40s, Janney went to a fertility doctor and realized — for the first time, she says — that women aren’t typically having children into their 50s, even with assisted technology. That was news to her, as her doctor told her she had missed the biological clock’s alarms.

The broader public, of course, is really only paying attention to this moment of the Lewinsky podcast because of AOC — House member Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez — making a political news story out of her decision to publicly freeze her eggs. She’s 37, as you may likely know because of all of the press coverage, and many unsolicited pieces of advice insisted she simply have a baby at this point. But it may not be as simple as it would seem, and it might not even be the point of her doing these social-media posts and green-room injections to hyper-stimulate egg production anyway. She’s a politician — an up-and-comer, who might even run for president this next time around — so we must find an angle, and they may very well be one.

And until we know for sure — the New York Post and TMZ and right here — we’ll be talking about anything on the margins of the story until we move on to the next thing.

But the Lewinsky—Janney conversation is helpful because neither of them is running for president. The host might understandably spend her entire life avoiding anything related to the White House — she even admitted that she only watched The West Wing once she got to be friendly with Janney, for fear of intern jokes and, well, memories of that presidential culture. At one point, talking about her relationships over the years with men, Janney commented that the loneliest place can be with someone you actually know isn’t actually the one to help you follow the script, as it were. Not a good father/husband material. AOC seemed to do her own version of that in a quick-lived reel.

Prospective presidential candidates aside, Janney and Lewinsky were talking about basic human longings to return to the eternal from which we were created. We learn about a Scientology info session (Lewinsky — and it was really for a friend), doctor-assisted ketamine therapy (Janney), and a joint desire for a silent weekend retreat (more like Monica will do it if Allison finds one — and I do have ideas for them! It will be more rooted in 2,000 years and such than perhaps they were thinking, but it sounds like they are open.)

That’s probably the best of podcasts — one that eventually hits on the deepest longings of the human heart. We’re on our phones constantly, and sometimes we just happen upon people talking about what we all may be thinking about in our reflective moments: how to get to the peace we were made for, know what this is all about, and maybe see the face of God, even if that’s not exactly how everyone would put it.

Something more. That longing unites us. That’s where we have more similarities than differences, even as we have many of the latter, of which we are constantly reminded.

We were made from and for the same One. Anything we can do to help one another on that quest, we’ll all be better for.