Today’s episode is an important one, and the contents will affect every woman you know. I chatted with Amanda Becker — a seasoned journalist who has covered national politics for nearly two decades — about the unprecedented nature of our current political scene.
We took a critical look at Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation, a plan proposing significant changes to LGBTQ rights, gender policies, reproductive rights, and education. We broke down who’s behind it and what it could mean for healthcare, labor policies, and American families. This isn’t just about politics; this is about the power of grassroots democracy and the importance of civic engagement. We share practical advice on how you can get involved and make your voice heard. Plus, we include powerful stories about reproductive healthcare and community organizing that I think will resonate with you. So, if you’re ready to be informed and inspired, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a 920+ page policy document created by conservative group, Heritage Foundation, that aims to significantly reshape American society based on far-right Christian ideals. The complex, multi-stage initiative includes a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch.
Key takeaways:
- Project 2025’s impact on women’s rights and healthcare: The project proposes creating a “Department of Life” to track pregnancies and restrict access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, affecting women’s health and autonomy.
- LGBTQ+ rights and definitions of family: Project 2025 seeks to redefine the concept of family to exclude LGBTQ+ individuals and families, potentially denying their legal recognition and rights. It takes the official stance that the definition of a family is that it’s made up of a married father and mother and children, and aims to redirect federal funds to support a biblically-based definition of family.
- Changes to education and labor laws: The plan includes eliminating the Department of Education, imposing strict parental permissions in schools, and relaxing child labor restrictions, which could have significant ramifications for women and children. The plan also proposes prohibiting the federal government from implementing any sort of critical race theory training, and prohibit racial classification and quotas. “They don’t even want to collect data on what it’s like for women and women of color in the workforce. If you don’t have data, there’s absolutely no way to assess whether things are fair.”
- Economic implications: By aiming to eliminate programs like Head Start and rescinding DEI efforts in the workforce, the project could negatively impact women’s economic participation and reinforce gender inequalities.
What you can do to get involved:
Participate in party primaries:
- Engage early in the electoral process by voting in party primaries to help select candidates who align more closely with your values.
- Understand your state’s rules for primary voting, as some require party registration while others are open.
Engage in respectful conversations:
- When friends or family share misinformation on social media, respectfully provide accurate information.
- Share credible sources and facts to help inform others without escalating into conflicts.
Canvassing and grassroots organizing:
- Join local canvassing efforts for candidates or causes you support, such as reproductive rights or gun violence prevention.
- Face-to-face conversations are highly effective in motivating people and increasing voter engagement.
Volunteer for Get-Out-The-Vote efforts:
- Assist with activities like helping people find their polling locations or providing transportation to polling stations.
- Participate in community programs that support voters with limited access or mobility.
Check and update your voter registration:
- Verify that your voter registration is current and accurate to avoid issues on election day.
- Encourage friends and family to do the same to ensure their votes count.
Donate time or resources locally:
- Support local organizations or initiatives where your contribution can have a direct impact.
- Consider volunteering your time instead of or in addition to financial donations.
Channel emotions into action:
- Use feelings of frustration or anxiety as motivation to take constructive actions that support your beliefs.
- Engage in activities that make you feel proactive and empowered.
Support structural reforms:
- Get involved in local efforts to improve democratic processes and combat erosion.
- Advocate for changes that promote fair representation, such as open primaries or voting rights legislation.
Notable quotes
“This isn’t just about abortion; it’s about controlling women’s bodies and their autonomy over their own healthcare decisions.”
“I don’t like to sit there and wait for something to happen to me. It’s probably not an accident that I chose the quote to name my book that I did, ‘You Must Stand Up,’ because I do think that applies across our lives.”
“Rather than just sitting around and waiting for the sky to fall, I would personally like to distract myself in those types of situations by getting out there and making myself feel useful so when the time comes, I know that I did what I could.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 00:48 Urgency of Voting in Local Elections
≫ 02:53 Project 2025: A Threat to Women’s Rights
≫ 04:51 Personal Stories and the Importance of Voting
≫ 09:41 The Role of Media in Shaping Political Conversations
≫ 14:24 The Interconnectedness of Political Issues
≫ 22:32 Project 2025: Detailed Analysis and Implications
≫ 32:41 Maternal Healthcare Crisis in the South
≫ 33:08 The Rage Behind the Book
≫ 33:42 Legal Battles and Abortion Rights
≫ 34:05 Project 2025: A Deep Dive
≫ 34:30 Political Influence and Abortion Stance
≫ 38:28 Fetal Personhood and IVF
≫ 40:24 Project 2025’s Impact on Education and Labor
≫ 45:55 LGBTQIA Rights Under Threat
≫ 48:20 Taking Action: Voting and Volunteering
≫ 53:17 Stories from the Book: Abortion Rights
≫ 58:45 The Importance of Local Elections
Amanda’s links and additional resources:
Get Amanda’s book: YOU MUST STAND UP, The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America
Project 2025 and its affect on women—see article: https://19thnews.org/2024/07/project-2025-women-education-lgbtq-workforce
Are you registered to vote? https://vote.org/
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Meet Amanda
Amanda Becker is a journalist based in Washington who has covered national politics in some capacity for nearly two decades. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Glamour magazine, USA Today and other publications. She was a 2023 fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her first book, YOU MUST STAND UP, The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America, was published last month by Bloomsbury.
Transcript:
Amanda Becker:
… across almost every facet of this plan, every department of the federal government, they would be trying to curtail LGBTQ rights. Barring the EEOC from even tracking kind of sex discrimination in the way that it’s been tracked. Eliminating collecting data on what they call DEI efforts, diversity, equity, and inclusion. They want to create a Department of Life that will collect data on people who have abortion. They would try to rescind a Biden administration guidance that an emergency medicine law that requires hospitals provide abortion care and emergency. And then getting into education. I mean, there’s just a lot.
Tori Dunlap:
Hi, financial feminists. Welcome to the show. I’m excited to see you as always. I’m foregoing my usual intro because we have two weeks until the election. Now, I’ve said it before, I will say it again a million times. The presidential election is very important. Your local elections are arguably even more important. Who you elect to be governor, who you elect to Congress in your state, who you elect to city council. All of these elections are very crucial. And as we discuss with our guests today, these policies that are being proposed by the conservative right will affect every single person regardless of where you live. I live in Washington state. It is a blue state. I live in a blue city. I am not safe. This is not fearmongering, but I have to tell you, we’ll talk about it more in the episode, that these sorts of policies would affect every single person regardless of where you live, regardless of whether you’re on the coasts or not, regardless of whether you live in a blue state or a blue area or not.
I also need to implore you, your husband will not know who you’re voting for. Your father will not know who you’re voting for, anybody in your life who disagrees with you, they’re not going to know who you’re voting for. You can quietly without a lot of fanfare, vote for the type of candidate and the type of policies that protect you and that protect your children, and that protect your community, and that protect the other people in your life that you care about. You can just do it. No one’s going to know. No one’s going to know. If this is the most radical act that you can do is just with your vote, vote according to your values, I love that for you. I love that for me. I love that for us. I would really, really thank you. The community of women would really, really thank you for standing up for yourself and for standing up for other women and for standing up for other marginalized groups that need it.
We’re talking about Project 2025 on the show today. If you have not heard about Project 2025, boy oh boy, the Too Long, Didn’t Read the Project 2025, and we discuss it more in the episode, is a borderline handmaid’s tale, sweeping amount of policies and legislation aimed at control. It’s all about control. It’s about controlling not only women and women’s bodies, but controlling how LGBTQ+ people live their lives and really almost completely eliminating their rights and their safety. Talking about access to education, access to critical race theory, access to DEI policies within companies and at schools. All of this is on the line. If you know a bit about Project 2025, you might be thinking, this is all crazy. There’s no way this is going to happen.
This is in fact some of the only actual concrete policies that Donald Trump has laid out. I have concepts of a plan, this is some of the only actual plans he has laid out. So today’s guest and I get into how harmful Project 2025 would be not just for the next four years, but for lifetimes and generations to come. And we talk about how you can be informed in order to make a smart choice when you go voting. Amanda Becker is a journalist based in Washington DC who has covered national politics in some capacity for nearly two decades. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Glamour Magazine, USA Today, and other publications. She was a 2023 fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and her first book, You Must Stand Up: The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America was published last month by Bloomsbury. We talk about Project 2025 and its effect on women. We talk about its effect on young people, Project 2025’s impact for people of color, for the LGBTQ+ community, and we also talk about abortion access or lack thereof.
I’m going to give this to you right off the top too, in case for whatever reason you don’t listen to the whole episode. This is a very personal thing for me. We’ve discussed it in interviews that I did at the DNC, but my mother when she was trying to get pregnant and have a child, she suffered from an ectopic pregnancy. And what that means was the pregnancy or the egg was fertilized and it dropped into the fallopian tube but did not drop all the way down so the fertilized egg started expanding in her fallopian tube. This is an ectopic pregnancy and the only way to save a mother who is experiencing a ectopic pregnancy is technically through an abortion. The pregnancy is not viable. The life of the mother is at risk, and if my mom would’ve waited even a day to go and have received care, she would’ve died and I would not exist because I came after the ectopic pregnancy.
This is what’s happening to women across the United States right now is they are not getting access to life-saving care. They are dying, they are bleeding out, they are going through traumatic amounts of emotional and physical suffering and pain, and doctors are scared to perform these abortions. They’re scared to give this life-saving, absolutely needed healthcare because they’re worried about being prosecuted. They’re worried about their own safety too. This is a real thing. This is not a pie in the sky small group of people who are a little nuts on the outskirts, the fringes of society. This is already happening and it will continue to happen. Women like my mom are dying and I just need you to vote. I just need you to vote even if it’s privately, even if you’re scared of somebody else finding out, I need you to vote. I need you to vote, and if you can do more, donate, call.
I also want to say, and I’ve been wanting to say this for a while, there is no perfect candidate, we’ve talked about this on the show previously, but I know even so many of our audience are even more progressive than a lot of the folks running for office right now. And I will say I am included in that. I am more progressive than Kamala Harris and her policies. I’m more progressive than a lot of the current candidates at the local level, and I can see this happening where people don’t vote because of the war on Gaza, because of other issues that are important to them. And trust me, I understand, it’s something that I’ve grappled with.
I’ve said it on the show before though, and I will say it again. I view politics as a bus. I am getting on the bus that gets me closest to my destination. Politics is not an Uber. It does not drop me off in front of my house. There is no absolute perfect candidate that a hundred percent represents me. The only candidate that a hundred percent represents me is me. So if you want an Uber in politics, run for office. If you’re pissed off about your selections, run for office. Please, please run.
The other thing that has brought me comfort is an interview that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did where she talked about who do you want to organize under? Who or what system or policies do you feel safer organizing under? So if you don’t like what’s currently happening, what representatives do you feel like are more likely to listen to you or more likely to give you a voice or more likely to be competent enough to navigate a lot of the really challenging things that the United States faces on a day-to-day basis? I don’t like everything either. I’m pissed off too. I want to keep demanding change and keep demanding progress and keep demanding safety of every single person, not just Americans, and also I am choosing to vote and to get on the bus that gets me closest to my end destination. Okay. Let’s listen to the episode.
But first a word from our sponsors.
Where in the country are you at right now?
Amanda Becker:
Washington, DC.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, cool.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I always love asking people that question, but particularly now we’re recording this while the hurricanes are happening and I’m just like, I hope everybody’s safe and everybody’s okay. Really excited to have you on the show.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
You started your career, obviously continue to be a journalist, but was there a moment where you remember thinking, this is what I want to do. I want to be a journalist, this is what I want to do for my career?
Amanda Becker:
I wish I’d had a moment like that. When I was an undergrad I majored in political science. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after, and I went to Indiana University, which had a really good journalism program. And so I ended up just because I had some credits left over to do whatever I wanted, I ended up getting a certificate in journalism, but I actually was focused on the graphic design side then, which is really funny because I’ve never been involved in visuals now that I’m a journalist.
Moved to New York City, was working at a law firm. Every liberal arts grad who doesn’t know what they’re going to do except they’re thinking maybe I’ll go to law school, realized law school was not for me and started interning in a magazine there called Absolute that’s no longer around. It was kind of a magazine about culture and fashion and all of that, and that was the clarifying experience that I had that I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. Now if you ask my mom, she will tell you that she’s known since I was five years old I was going to be a writer in some capacity. I wish she’d let me in on that because it took me a lot longer to figure it out.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s very, very funny. When we’re looking at your work and the state of the country at this particular moment, for context we were recording this October, it feels like I have to say the exact date because so many things change so quickly.
Amanda Becker:
Yes. Who knows what could change by [inaudible 00:11:37].
Tori Dunlap:
Truly, it’s October 10th. How does the covering this election season feel different compared to previous election cycles?
Amanda Becker:
Wow. I mean, well, nothing about this election cycle has been normal. This is my third or fourth presidential election. I covered 2012 a little bit, but then really started covering presidential politics in earnest in 2016. And that was of course, I was embedded with Hillary Clinton’s campaign for two years. She was the first woman to be a major party nominee, so that in and of itself was an unusual election, and that was obviously the rise of Donald Trump and the election of Donald Trump. This cycle, I mean, the period of time from mid-July to the end of August was just wild. Who could have seen any of that coming? I mean, we had an assassination attempt.
Tori Dunlap:
Assassination attempt.
Amanda Becker:
Biden stepping down from reelection and the party coalescing behind Kamala Harris in a way that I’ve never seen Democrats be so organized the entire time I’ve covered politics, really. The Democratic Party is by nature what they call a big tent. It’s pretty messy. There’s a lot of different groups. There’s a lot of coalition building, and I’ve just never seen across coalitions, them coalesce behind someone this quickly.
And then we went into a convention where I write about gender and women and politics and policy all day, and even I never thought in my career even working for the place that I work for, which is called The 19th, named after the 19th amendment, which is women voting, I never thought I would be in a convention hall where person after person was taking the stage talking about issues like sexual assault, abortion, IVF, fertility treatments. It’s been like nothing I could have anticipated.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I was there at the DNC and I had the same feeling where it was one, historic of nominating a woman, woman of color, especially as quickly as that happened, but then really talking about the policies, that was the thing that really struck me was just how many conversations were happening around all of the issues that affect women, including not directly women, but so many of our audience’s mothers, and they’re worried about gun violence, they’re worried about sending their children to school. And that was a massive, massive part of the DNC was talking about gun control and I was similarly moved thinking, wow, okay, we’re really talking about this stuff in a way that’s really significant.
Amanda Becker:
Never seen anything like it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. When you talk about in your work the connective tissues of our democracy, can you share what you mean by that?
Amanda Becker:
I think too often when we cover politics as a profession, so just speaking broadly about journalists and newsrooms, everything is kind of siloed. You have somebody assigned to cover Harris’s campaign. You have someone assigned to cover Trump’s campaign. You have someone assigned to cover the White House, you have someone assigned to cover reproductive healthcare, you have someone assigned to cover education, but the reality is there are groups and entities and people in this country that are working across all of those fronts. And so that’s what I mean by the connective tissues. It’s like you can’t understand, for example, an issue like abortion rights and reproductive rights without looking across those things because it’s all interrelated at the end of the day.
And it’s also related to our structures of democracy and things like gerrymandering and the electoral college and lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. All of these things converge to create policy, and so I think we really do everyone a disservice by looking at things in the siloed way that sometimes we do. And I understand why that happens, but it’s a much more complicated story to kind of look at it across all of those things. But I do think it’s really necessary to understand our democracy and why things are happening in our democracy.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I couldn’t agree more with that because one of the things I think about a lot running this show, we have always said that we’re a feminist show that talks about money. We’re not a financial show that happens to be feminist. So we’re talking about any issue that affects women, but abortion, let’s take that. People want to silo that as a woman’s issue or reproductive freedom, and yes, that is an issue of healthcare. It’s also a financial issue. Getting an abortion and access to abortion is expensive. Traveling state lines, having to take time off work, having to put yourself in a hotel for a night to get the care that you need, that is a financial issue.
The climate change, a financial issue, it costs billions and billions of dollars. We’re recording this as hurricanes are happening, that is a financial issue. Gun control, we lose billions and billions of dollars to the lack of gun safety in the country. All of these things, you’re exactly right, I get the black and whiteness of organization of like, okay, it’s easier to cover this beat, but at the same time, all of these issues are interwoven and interconnected and they all affect the economy, which people are vastly saying is their number one issue this year for the election.
Amanda Becker:
Absolutely, and you know what, I was talking about this with some colleagues recently in the context of polling showing that overall the economy is the number one issue for voters. It’s almost always the number one issue for voters. But I think within that, what people are thinking about when they think about the economy is different and I think it’s actually probably gendered. And unfortunately I’ve looked for polling that kind of breaks this out and none of them are asked in the exact way I would need to delve farther into this. So the economy could mean what is the Fed going to do with interest rates? The economy can also be, are you able to afford childcare? And so I think probably when a lot of people in this country are looking at those polls and checking off kind of what is the most important thing to me, they have very different ideas about what the economy is.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I’m the nerd that listens to all the political podcasts and reads all the polls and all of that. And the interesting thing especially, I mean this is every single election, but particularly this election, is the people who say they’re undecided. They say things like, oh, I don’t like Donald Trump. He’s too bombastic, he’s racist, he’s whatever but the economy was better under him. And what they mean by the economy is they mean their own lives. They think their lives were less expensive. They’re not looking at the rate of monthly jobs added. They’re not looking at what the Fed did. They’re worried about what is the cost of eggs and what is the cost of rent and what is the cost of childcare?
And even after the first election, it was the New York Times, the Run-Up podcast interviewed a couple undecided voters, and Kamala Harris during the debate was talking about, oh, we’re going to give a credit to first time home buyers, we’re going to do all these things. And she was talking very particularly about these economic policies. And one of the couples that were interviewed that were undecided were an older couple, and they’re like, okay, all of that sounds great, but that doesn’t affect us. That’s like, that’s helpful, but it doesn’t affect us.
And I think, not to get too far into it, because I could talk to you for three hours about this, but I do feel like it’s very interesting in such a individualized country where we often don’t view ourselves as a collective. We view ourselves as individuals or as family units. It’s very easy to look at, okay, well that policy is not going to help me as opposed to, wow, that policy does help somebody and I want to vote for policies that help people. I don’t know, can you talk to me about that collectivism versus the individual of like, okay, but what exact policy is going to help me and my life?
Amanda Becker:
That is a very American thing. But one thing that struck me when I was looking at polling, and this is probably six or eight months ago, when you ask people how is your financial situation? How is your family’s financial situation? They would actually say it was pretty good. And then when you start to ask more questions, they would start to say, but I don’t think it’s as good for other people. It might not be as good for my neighbors or the people who live down the street.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, interesting.
Amanda Becker:
And so that to me showed that on some level, people were thinking beyond kind of their own selves and their family unit about other people. But you’re right, there is this particularly American thing sometimes of, well, I had to struggle to do this, so why can’t everybody else just do the same? It’s kind of like, well, wouldn’t it have been nice if you didn’t have to struggle.
Tori Dunlap:
I also mean it in the fact that a lot of the issues that feel very important to this election don’t feel as acute to people. Abortion is a huge issue, and there’s a huge chunk of people who are like, that’s not my primary issue because it’s not affecting my life. I don’t need an abortion at this moment, or I’m not thinking about access to that as an immediate need, but I am thinking about paying my rent. And so I think that is an interesting viewpoint and something that I think is really difficult is one of the main issues that Democrats are running on is abortion, and it feels acute, I think, to a lot of women, but it doesn’t feel acute if that’s not an issue that’s directly impacting you on a day-to-day basis.
Amanda Becker:
And I think the reason we’re seeing people who have had personal experiences with abortion come onto the stage at the DNC and in commercials that we’re watching is what they’re trying to do is drive home for people that this might not be you now, but it could be you next month. It could be you next year, it could be your daughter in a couple of weeks. It could be your son’s girlfriend in a couple of months. It could be your wife when she can’t get life-saving miscarriage care because they’re worried about it showing up as an abortion in a state with a ban. And so that’s why we’re seeing people tell these personal stories in a way that we’ve rarely seen in this country. People talk about their reproductive healthcare like this because they are trying to connect it back to this might not be a concern you have in this moment, but it will affect you at some point.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, Amanda, the big reason you’re here today, and I wanted to lead up to this, is to talk about Project 2025. And I think it’s one of those things that feels very acute and also to a certain group of people feels like a pipe dream. It feels unrealistic, like that’s never going to happen or that doesn’t affect me right now. So this is a really big focal point in the election cycle, especially on social media. First of all, how have you seen platforms like TikTok and Instagram play a part in shaping the political conversation and really mobilizing youth who are typically maybe disinterested about these issues?
Amanda Becker:
So I wrote my first kind of big story on Project 2025 back in July. And I will just say it had been on my radar because I am, for better or for worse, kind of a DC Insider at this point. I live in the swamp, I cover politics. It had been on my radar for a while. And I had been talking about it with my editor and she was saying, “This just seems kind of Inside Baseball. I’m not sure that this is something that people are going to care a lot about. Our audience seems really insider-y.”
Because on the one hand, this is a document that the Heritage Foundation has put out, it’s called the Mandate for Leadership. They’ve been putting it out since the early 1980s, so this isn’t a new thing. We’ve never seen it come to the fore like this. And I think there’s a few reasons why it’s different this year. First it’s very extreme. It’s very, very far to the right. It’s very kind of white Christian nationalists in kind of scope. Two, we’re in a campaign where especially on the Republican side, we don’t have a lot of policy details from the campaign. If you go to the Trump-Vance website and look at what their policies are, it is a list with bullet points and none of them are filled in. And then it links to the Republican Party’s platform, which is-
Tori Dunlap:
I have concepts of a plan.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah, a couple pages. So this is a couple page document that we’re supposed to extrapolate how the entire federal government would be run.
Tori Dunlap:
Great.
Amanda Becker:
So people are turning to Project 2025 as more of an insight into what his second potential administration might do in the absence of those details. Now, he’s tried to distance himself from this, and so I think as it started to catch on, it was people responding to the extreme nature of this, the lack of details from former President Trump and also his disavowal of it. Because this was created by hundreds of people who served in his first administration so if you haven’t put out your own policies and you have people who were in your last administration who are probably high on the list to serve in a next one, putting out a 920-page document that goes into very, very minutiae details about what they would like to enact across the federal government, I think people started to pay attention.
And then it was starting to be mentioned on award shows and on late night television, and it just kind of took off from there. And that is when I was seeing it take off on social media and I was like, okay, clearly this is something people are paying attention to so I want to get out an analysis of the most essential parts of this for our audience because it’s the most insightful look we have into what a second Trump administration could be like.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, so let’s get into it. Let’s talk about the Too Long, Didn’t Read, Guide to Project 2025. What are the big takeaways? What are they trying to do within the document?
Amanda Becker:
Yeah, okay. So I actually pulled up my story here because I myself though I’ve read all 920 pages, cannot remember all of it. So a big one is they’re very focused on gender and gender identity, LGBTQ people. Across almost every facet of this plan, every department of the federal government, they would be trying to curtail LGBTQ rights. This would take a number of forms and it also would be implemented in ways that would affect straight cis women because it’s, for example, barring the EEOC from even tracking sex discrimination in the way that it’s been tracked.
It is eliminating collecting data on what they call DEI efforts, diversity, equity, and inclusion and women are often included in that. On the front of reproductive rights, they want to create a Department of Life that will collect data on people who have abortion using, and this is a quote, “every available tool including the cutting of funds to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” They would try to rescind a Biden administration guidance that an emergency medicine law that requires hospitals provide abortion care and emergencies.
They would ask the FDA to reverse the 2000 approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone. And then getting into education. I mean, there’s just a lot. They would rescind a Biden era revision to a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination by educational programs. So that would include discrimination against women, that would be rescinded. And education directly relates to your economic outlook for the rest of your life, going to college and what degrees you have and what training you have. Would rescind the public service loan forgiveness program. So that’s people who work in federal, state, local, or tribal governments or for a nonprofit. Guess what? That’s teachers, that is a field that’s disproportionately staffed by women. So really the scope of this cannot be understated. It is a vision to remake American life, kind of in the view of far right Christians.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things I’ve also heard with Project 2025 is they want to track pregnancies.
Amanda Becker:
So that’s the Department of Life that I was talking about. And yes, that would apply, and what they’re going to try and do is use that data to curtail abortion. So this is even in states where it would remain legal because right now it’s an issue left up to the states. So it doesn’t matter if you’re in California or New York where abortion is protected and will remain so for the future probably, they would also be collecting data on you to use to try to stop abortion.
Tori Dunlap:
A quick aside, and then I have more questions for you, but I think some of our listeners know this. My mom had to have an ectopic pregnancy because one of the fertilized eggs did not drop from the fallopian tube, so it had fertilized and was growing, so she had to have a medical abortion. The pregnancy was not viable. It was at a risk to her life. If she would not have gone to the hospital as soon as she did, she would’ve died. She would’ve died. I would’ve obviously not been born afterward.
This is something that feels very acute to me because this is what’s happening. We’re having women die in their cars or bleed out because regardless of if you want to terminate a pregnancy for other reasons, but this specifically this is truly life-saving healthcare, and they are trying to either completely eliminate it or restrict it to the point where, and this is already happening, where doctors do not feel comfortable performing these procedures because they’re worried of legal repercussions. So this is already happening because of the overturning of Roe, V. Wade, and with something like Project 2025, it’s only going to get worse. I don’t know if you have anything to add there, but I always like to make the document very personal, and this is very, very personal to me and to my family,
Amanda Becker:
And this is very real. I mean, just this week that we’re recording this, it’s just a few days after Supreme Court said it wouldn’t take an emergency appeal out of Texas. To break that down as simply as I can in 30 seconds, the Biden administration had challenged Texas’s abortion ban, which is a very strict abortion ban saying even though you have this abortion ban, there’s still this federal law on the books that hospitals that receive federal funds have to treat people in emergency situations, sometimes in an emergency situation that means providing abortion care. And Texas said, no, that’s not how we interpret our abortion ban. And so it’s winding its way through the federal courts right now because it’s related to a conflict between a state abortion ban and federal emergency medicine law and what the Supreme Court did by not taking that at this point, it left an injunction in place where women in Texas and people who are pregnant in Texas do not have access to that emergency medical law.
So if you present at a hospital and maybe you’ll survive this but maybe you won’t, they don’t have to give you an abortion right now because it’s already been through a couple stages of the legal process, presumably according to the lawyers I’ve talked to, that would apply to that circuit in the federal system. So it’s now in theory, in place, it hasn’t been challenged, but it’s in theory also in place in Mississippi and Louisiana. So that’s already three states that by the way, have abysmal maternal healthcare outcomes, particularly for women of color in those states, where you can show up in an emergency room and not know if they’re going to be able to help you.
Tori Dunlap:
I just got to take a breath. I’m really mad.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, writing my book, everyone was like, wasn’t it depressing? I’m gesturing because it’s behind me, but it actually filled me with rage a lot of days when I was writing this book and listening to what people have had to go through in order to both get care and, because my book focuses on doctors on to a large extent, what they’ve had to go through to continue providing care to their patients.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and while the courts are debating whether or not it’s going to be legal or not, women are dying or women are having traumatic events.
Amanda Becker:
Well, the depressing joke of it all is Alito wrote in the Dobbs decision, Justice Alito wrote, well, this now removes the question of abortion from the courts. Now the courts won’t have to be involved anymore. And obviously what we’ve seen is the exact opposite.
Tori Dunlap:
Exact opposite.
Amanda Becker:
There are dozens if not hundreds of cases pending right now across this country related to abortion bans.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Okay, so we talked about this before. Project 2025, it just seems nuts. It seems crazy. It seems so backwards. I think it can be very easy then to go, so this is so crazy it’s not going to happen. Or it’s a small group of people. This is very serious, everybody. This is not one of those things that is like a small group of people have these crazy ideas. These are the people who are donating to Donald Trump and other conservatives’ campaigns. These are people who are swaying those kind of elections. So debunk that for me. Oh, it’s too crazy. So it’s never going to happen.
Amanda Becker:
I mean, as I said, there’s 140 or more people who worked on Project 2025 that served in some capacity under Trump. One example, Roger Severino with the Heritage Foundation because the Heritage Foundation is the organization that puts out this report every election. He was his DHHS secretary, department of Health and Human Services, so that would be the federal entity that oversees things like healthcare, which would include reproductive healthcare. Who’s to say he wouldn’t be DHHS secretary again? It’s hard to say that second H because there’s also a Department of Homeland Security, so DHHS. And who’s to say that he wouldn’t implement the vision he’s just laid out in Project 2025. So Donald Trump and JD Vance are doing all they to distance themselves from Project 2025. But the reality is Trump employed a lot of these people before, he’s likely to do so again. He rides on private planes to go speak at conferences to these people. He’s on video praising Project 2025 as they were working on it, and what a vision it would be.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and don’t get it twisted, the reason he’s trying to distance himself from it is everybody’s like, this plan is crazy.
Amanda Becker:
Yes. Well, it’s wildly unpopular. This is not in line with what the American people want.
Tori Dunlap:
And the same thing with abortion rights too, which is directly related to Project 2025 is the reason this man is so wish-washy on abortion is because he goes wherever the money is. He goes wherever the money is, and a lot of the money is in Christian nationalists, evangelical Christians, who do not want any kind of abortion access or want it so limited, but the vast majority of the American people don’t want that. So that’s why he’s so back and forth about all of these things because he says, no, I’m pro-abortion, or I’m pro this week number of weeks. And then everybody who’s donating to him, his campaign gets mad so he has to backtrack.
Amanda Becker:
I have started saying former President Trump is not trying to have it both ways on abortion. He’s trying to have it all ways. And look at IVF is a really good example, and he’s not the only one doing this, by the way. A lot of Republicans are doing this. The Republican Party in their platform, there was only a few lines on reproductive healthcare. You might’ve seen headlines, Republican Party softens its stance on abortion because for the first time in a long time, they didn’t have a line in there that said something like, and Congress should pass a 20-week ban. They just left Congress out of it. During the one debate that Donald Trump had with Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the only accurate things he said in the answer on abortion was that neither one of them were likely going to have the votes in Congress to pass either legislation protecting abortion rights or banning abortion federally.
That’s probably the case, unless there’s something on the radar with the Senate that no one is seeing thus far. Now, they could change the filibuster, but that’s a whole nother conversation. So they don’t need to have in their platform anything about federal legislation if it’s not going to happen either way. But what they did have in their platform, and he has complimented the platform and said it’s beautiful, I believe is the word he used, is that they would love to see states and that they will support states enacting 14th amendment rights for everyone after 51 years, which is a direct reference to Roe that they couldn’t do this when Roe was in place, and to draw the straight line for everyone. 14th amendment rights for fetuses, embryos, and sometimes even fertilized eggs, depending on who you’re talking to in the anti-abortion movement, would basically mean that those embryos and fetuses have the same legal rights as you or I under the Constitution.
And so that is something called fetal personhood. That’s how you often hear it talked about. They don’t like to use those words anymore because fetal personhood is not popular with the American people. But so if you start to bury it under legalese and constitutional rights for everyone, well of course that sounds amazing. It’s fetal personhood. Then in the third part of that sentence, in the platform it says, but we also support IVF because we saw what happened earlier this year when the Alabama Supreme Court said that their fetal personhood law in that state prevented IVF.
You saw the Republican controlled legislature in that state scramble to try and fix it because IVF is very popular among people. And so you have a variety of Republicans right now, including Donald Trump, saying, well, don’t worry we support IVF. But it is fundamentally impossible according to legal experts to support fetal personhood and support IVF. So when you saw those headlines potentially after that platform came out, Republican Party softens its stance on abortion, they’ve just changed the path that they want to restrict abortion. They haven’t changed the underlying goal, and it would absolutely prohibit, or at best case scenario, make it very difficult to get reproductive healthcare services like IVF.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the other big things in the plan is that they’re suggesting in Project 2025 to eliminate the Department of Education and impose strict parental permission in schools. So child labor restrictions would be relaxed under the plan. This could cause some huge ramifications, especially for women and children. What is the end goal of this part of the plan?
Amanda Becker:
I mean, it’s hard to say what their end goal is, but if you look at all of the evidence, I’m not in their brains, I don’t know what they’re talking about when they’re in groups of twos and threes and there’s no cameras or recording present, and we heard this a lot from particularly JD Vance, Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention, this is a plan to remake what constitutes an American family, how families function, who has power within those families, how you can build your family, what type of family qualifies as a family.
And it skews to being nuclear intact, heterosexual families led by a man with a woman who the government will incentivize to stay home by either making it harder to work or by making it easier to stay home, sometimes both. Part of the Project 2025s plan for education is to get rid of Head Start, which is a program for early childhood education up to five-years-old that is people for low and middle income, and if you’re having to then pay for childcare for three to four more years than you would’ve normally, that affects your ability to be in the workforce.
If you can’t afford, childcare is like $2,000 a month in expensive cities, and so if your kid can no longer go to Head Start when they’re three-years-old and four-years-old, that’s two more years that you’re going to have to cough up $24,000 a year to put your kid in childcare in order to work. If you’re not able to participate in the workforce, you lose power. You not only lose earnings, you not only lose paying into your social security and your retirement, you lose power in how our world functions by not being able to do that.
Tori Dunlap:
And that’s one kid, right? That’s the cost of one kid.
Amanda Becker:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
If you have two kids, if you have three kids, you have four… Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about the financial side of Project 2025. You’ve kind of already dropped some things, but let’s talk about ways this potential legislation would impact women financially.
Amanda Becker:
So I just opened up the workforce section of my story. So Project 2025 believes that there has been a quote, “DEI Revolution at the Department of Labor,” and they want to undo it. And this is a quote directly from Project 2025. “Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.” So what does this mean? They want to prohibit the federal government from implementing any sort of critical race theory trainings, prohibit racial classification and quotas. They want the EEOC to stop collecting employment data based on race and ethnicity. They want to prohibit the collection of this data from both private and public employers. They don’t even want to collect the data on what it’s like for women and women in color in the workforce.
If you don’t have data, there’s absolutely no way to assess whether things are fair. That’s why the EEOC exists. Discriminating against women would be easier if they’re not collecting the data because there’s no data to back up your claims when you try to bring a case. So that’s just one of the many, many ways that could have tangible impacts on women’s ability to participate in the workforce and care for their families. I mean, it also, as you mentioned earlier, would relax restrictions on child labor and “amend its hazard order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.” So there was a series of stories this year last year by the New York Times about minors working in hazardous conditions in meat packing plants. These are rules that we put in place related to children a hundred years ago that they’re now trying to undo.
And so a hundred years ago, we had children working in dangerous factories and things like that. We decided as a country that’s not something we wanted to do. They want to take us back to that time where children are able to perform that work and would feel probably pressure to perform that kind of work because households are going to need other sources of income if they don’t have access to Head Start and they don’t have access to all these other programs. And it’s a mom who’s saying, maybe my thirteen-year-old needs to go to work, my fourteen-year-old needs to go to work to help even just fund the childcare of the younger kids.
Tori Dunlap:
We mentioned briefly the impact to LGBTQ+ folks. What other concrete things is Project 2025 trying to do to control this particular group of people?
Amanda Becker:
Yes, so right off the bat, the plan calls for the newly named agency, which they’re referring to as the Department of Life, which would be the new name of the Department of Health and Human Services. So DHHS, I won’t have to figure out how to say that acronym anymore because it’s going to be the Department of Life. They want that department to take the official stance that the definition of a family is that it’s made up of a married father and mother and children, and to redirect federal funds to support a biblically-based definition of family. It calls for replacing policies related to LGBTQIA equity with those that, “support the formation of stable married nuclear families.”
Real-world impacts. It would protect the ability of adoption and foster care services to refuse to work with LGBTQ couples. Their plan states that children should be raised by their “biological fathers and mothers” because the quote “male-female dyad is essential to human nature.” So they want to literally deny the existence of LGBTQIA families under Project 2025. They equate the act of being transgender to pornography and declare that it should be outlawed.
Real-world impact. They would cut federal funding for gender-affirming care for both children and adults. At the Department of Justice Project 2025 suggests revisiting the Biden Administration’s assertion that transgender minors have the right to gender-affirming care when their parents are on board. So they’re actually trying to take away choice from parents of children who are LGBTQIA, particularly trans children, to get them the healthcare that they need because they’re denying that that is a gender identity and equating it to pornography.
Tori Dunlap:
This episode needs to come with access to a rage room. I talk to you, I go smash a few TVs. Okay, I ask this whenever I’m fucking pissed off at everything going on at the policy level, which is what can we do about it? The most obvious thing we can do about it is vote and to volunteer for campaigns that don’t support Project 2025, what else can we do?
Amanda Becker:
It’s too late for this one. But I would say that to the extent, especially depending on what state you’re in, participating in party primaries is really important. If you’re out there thinking, I’ve always considered myself a moderate, maybe even conservative leaning, but I really can’t get on board with some of the things that I’m hearing from the Republican Party right now a really good way to impact the future of your party, which therefore impacts the future of your country, is to get involved in party primaries because that is where Republicans who are more moderate, who look like the Republicans we had 10-years-ago or 20-years -ago or 30-years-ago when our parents were coming up, they’re having trouble getting through their primaries because this far right wing has all these kind of litmus tests for them and these hurdles that they have to jump over.
And then we’re getting candidates in some cases that are pretty extreme. Now, states have different rules about this. Sometimes anyone can participate in primaries, sometimes you have to be registered as a party. So I would first and foremost encourage people to figure out what the situation is in your particular state and going forward, participate at that earlier time. That’s the easiest lift you could possibly do in terms of upping your engagement in politics. Since we’re past the primaries, other things you could do. First of all, when you see your friends and family sharing misinformation or disinformation on social media, find a way to respectfully get them better information or share better information with the same group of people. This doesn’t have to turn into a fight. I’m like, probably a lot of you, I kind of just avoid Facebook during election seasons because it can just get to be too much and I’m watching everybody argue.
It does seem a little bit less this year than it was in 2016, which is interesting to me. Maybe just the algorithm is different, so I’m not seeing some of it. But try and get good information to the people in your lives because, we will get into this in a second, but kind of face-to-face conversations about politics and policy are the most effective way to motivate people and get people out and engaging in politics beyond your own immediate circle.
Go canvassing, find a candidate or a cause that you really care about. And again, face-to-face conversations or the best way that you can communicate on politics and policy and canvassing tends to work when the canvassers going door to door are a member of the community or related to the community in some way. So if there’s an issue you care about, whether it’s gun violence or reproductive rights and you don’t see yourself as somebody who would do that for a candidate, go out with people working on that cause and talk to your neighbors.
Go to the neighborhood over, it’s really easy. In my book actually, I follow two women in Kentucky who were doing that ahead of a ballot measure there a couple of years ago related to reproductive rights. One of them had done it before, the other one had never done anything except for vote and post on Facebook. And she just decided, this feels so important to me, I can’t stay on the sidelines anymore. And so she showed up on a Saturday, spent a couple of hours with her friend. It’s really easy. Most of the groups have a thing, it loads on your phone, like a list of addresses. You have limited information about the doors you’re going to, and they tell you some facts. They arm you with information so you can go and talk.
Because it’s much easier to ignore someone on Facebook than it is when they’re at your door and they’re your neighbor and they’re a member of your community and they’re willing to talk to you and engage with you. And so I would say primaries and getting involved in that kind of grassroots work of democracy, it works better than phone banking, it works better than writing postcards. And I don’t give money to anything political because I’m a journalist, but even when my family asks me, what should I give money to? I actually say more important than sending 50 bucks to some national organization is getting involved in your community to the extent that you’re able and you have the resources and the privilege to do that.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to touch on your book because you share story after story of abortion care and what it looks like when that access to care is barred. Is there a story that you found the most impactful that you’d like to share with our audience?
Amanda Becker:
I think Arizona, because the book is called You Must Stand Up, that’s actually a quote from a doctor in Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, who you may hear on other news shows. I just was listening to a podcast this morning and I heard her and I was like, I love starting my day with Dr. Goodrick. She owns a reproductive healthcare clinic in Phoenix. This was a state that had three different anti-abortion laws in place when the Dobbs decision came out. Not even the Republicans could agree on which law was in place. There was a 15-week ban, there was a personhood statute, and there was also a law from before Arizona was a state that was a full abortion ban that had been on hold because of Roe for close to 50 years. And that state has gone through multiple iterations of access just in two years.
And I really think abortion impacted the outcome of their governor’s race that year. The Democrat barely won. I’m talking by hundreds of votes, not thousands, so again, vote every time. But they have an abortion ballot measure on their ballot this year that is polling phenomenally high, in the high seventies the last time I looked. And so that is a situation where people in a state decided this isn’t what we want, and they organized and it looks like they’re going to do it.
My home state of Ohio is another example. So the Republican legislature had just gotten rid of this August special election around the time Dobbs was decided and no one was voting in them, low participation, and they decided, let’s just stop doing this. But then after Dobbs abortion rights supporters, and this is a red state by the way. This is a state that used to be a swing state that is now a conservative leading state, abortion rights supporters started getting signatures to put an abortion rights amendment on their November ballot.
The Republicans in the State House who are overrepresented because of gerrymandering, Ohioans have had to vote with maps that are unconstitutional they’re so bad, they’re like, this is going to pass if this gets onto the ballot. And so they were trying to figure out ways to actually circumvent the people. So they immediately brought back the old special election that they’d just gotten rid of so they could have another ballot measure that would make it harder to pass ballot measures. So it would make it harder to get them onto the ballot because signatures from various counties, and it would change that equation, and then it would raise the threshold for passage. So they actually tried to circumvent the will of the people, make participating in direct democracy harder. Ohioans batted that down, and then they went on to pass the abortion rights amendment.
And so in my book, I look at it, yes, it’s about abortion on its face, but it’s really using the issue of abortion to examine democratic erosion in our country and how various places in our country are addressing that erosion and making sure that our democracy returns to being at a healthier place. And so that is what Ohioans did, in my view, by rejecting that attempt to make it harder for them to participate in their own democracy and make sure that Ohio to some degree still answers to what the electorate in that state wants.
That is a high point, I think. And also seeing what’s happening in Arizona, and back to the voting in primaries advice that I gave earlier, Arizona is a really interesting electorate. It’s a third Democratic, it’s a third Republican, it’s a third independent. Those independents aren’t necessarily moderates. They’re kind of all over the spectrum politically. They have partisan primaries. So there’s actually also an effort this year by a bipartisan coalition to open up the primary process so it’s nonpartisan because right now there’s a third of the electorate that can’t help pick the candidates that end up in general elections.
And so other states like California have addressed that by having what’s called a jungle primary or top two primary. I’ve never understood why it was a jungle primary. It’s a top two. So if you’re voting in the primary, you don’t need to pick one Democrat or one Republican depending on your party, you just pick who you like the best, and then the top two vote getters move on to the general election. So these kind of structural reforms that I see happening around our country are really exciting to me because I think the more people participating in politics the better, at the most levels. And those are kind of two bright spots that I just mentioned.
Tori Dunlap:
My last question for you, we’ve said it on the show many times, I want to highlight, presidential elections are important, local elections, I would argue for the day-to-day person or your day-to-day life is going to be even more important. We have less than 30 days until the election. Give us a pep talk. The next 25 days. What are we doing? How can we feel when we’re feeling really potentially angry and dejected and stressed? Get us through this next 25 days. That’s a lot to put on you. I’m sorry, but please help me.
Amanda Becker:
I generally think, at least personally, I like to do something. I don’t like to sit there and wait for something to happen to me. I mean, it’s probably not an accident that I chose the quote to name my book that I did, You Must Stand Up because I do think that applies across our lives. You have to stand up for yourself and politics and personal situations, everything. Find a way to do something. Find a way to get out there and work for something that matters to you. So no matter what happens, happens in November, and know that we probably won’t know the results right away and people need to just hang in.
But until election day, people are already voting early, get out there and find a way to be involved, help do education, help do GOTV get out their votes. In the last couple of weeks before an election it’s a really important get out the vote time. It’s making sure people know where their polling locations are, helping drive senior citizens or people without transportation to vote. There’s programs like that in every community. So rather than just sitting around and waiting for the sky to fall, I would personally like to distract myself in those type of situations by getting out there and making myself feel useful so when the time comes, I know that I did what I could.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ve been doing the same thing. That’s my same thing. If every time I feel stressed or anxious, I do something. I donate a little money to the campaign. I post on social media. I sign up to phone bank, I volunteer somewhere else, locating my nearest polling location. Those are all things that make me feel a little bit better, knowing that, okay, regardless of what happens, I did everything I could.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah. And also make sure your plan is in place to vote, your own [inaudible 01:01:25]. You’d be surprised. I actually checked mine the other day, so I work for a place called The 19th. We are involved in kind of good government like voting efforts, like check your polling location, check your registration. I checked my own registration. I’ve been marked inactive and I have no idea why, because I vote.
Tori Dunlap:
Mine was at a different address. I checked it two months ago. It was at a different address.
Amanda Becker:
So I had to call the Board of Elections, get it updated. Now, luckily DC has liberal voting laws and I mean that in expansiveness, not in a political sense. So I think I could have just cast a provisional ballot on election day had I shown up, but I would much rather not have to do that, and so I made sure that my registration and now, if I was not a journalist covering this campaign, once I got my own voting plan in place, I would be making sure everybody around me had their voting plan in place.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Thank you for your work. Thank you for being here. Tell me about your book. Plug away my friend.
Amanda Becker:
Yes, so it’s called You Must Stand Up: The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America. It is on pretty much any website that you would buy books. It’s on Bookshop.org. If you want to support your local bookstore, it’s on Barnes and Noble. It’s on Amazon. It was even on sale on Amazon because it’s been a couple of Prime days recently. Those will be over by the time you’re listening to this. It’s in a lot of your local bookstores depending on what area of the country you’re in. People have been sending me photos from library shelves, so reserve it at your library or ask your library and then they can order a copy if they don’t have it. I cover politics in this election for 19th News nineteenthnews.org. We’re covering not only the presidential, but a lot of the competitive Senate and House races, gubernatorial races, and also has information on a lot of our stories about how to check your registration and make sure you’re ready to go.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Amanda Becker:
Yeah, loved it. Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Amanda for joining us and her incredible work. You can get her book, You Must Stand Up anywhere you get your books, especially at your local bookstore. Please support them. Team, can’t wait to see you with polls. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting our show. Please send this episode to someone in your life who you feel like could use this information. I’m just with you. I appreciate you. I want to hold each and every one of you. I also need to be held, so that would be nice because I’m stressed. I just appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the show, supporting the show for always giving me space and hearing me out, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. We’ll talk to you very soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant, research by Sarah Sciortino, audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf, marketing and operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonnar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram, and Meghan Walker, promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, please visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
