After the Files
Power, systems, and imagining a future worth protecting
Like pretty much every woman I know (at least in the US), I lost hours of my life last week to the Epstein files.
I don’t think this batch of the files were dumped just to distract us from the horrors of ICE. And obviously, this dump is not in service of justice for the victims - Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche have explicitly said there are no plans to follow up on any potential leads.
The horror of it all has finally shaken me out of my fear of writing about politics in public. Here we go…
Long Disclaimer - feel free to skip!
I used to know what I thought about political things… I literally have two university degrees in politics and worked on a major political campaign in my 20s.
Then I had a long, deep yadda yadda yadda healing journey and became far less sure how to talk about what I thought about the issues of the day. NOT less interested, to be clear. But I found it much harder to talk about what I really think in public.
Partly, I now find it almost impossible not to love the humans on the other side of almost every topic. Partly, that I treat pretty much every shot of righteousness-fueled that dopamine shoots through my system as deeply suspicious - something to be interrogated, not acted upon.
So while I’ve brought a lot of politics and purpose to my coaching practice, and my life, even as I have become more public, I haven’t “gone there” very much. I draft something every few months and then my perfectionist tendencies make me pull back from every post… mostly I worry that my more activist friends will think it’s too little, too late.
And my goal today is just to be willing to be seen in the messy middle of my thinking on some of the great issues of the day. To stop trying to say something definitive and just share where February 2026 has landed in me as I live through this gross soup of early-stage authoritarianism meets AI meets climate collapse meets there-is-no-justice-for-the-pawns-of-the-rich.
So.
In the wake of being mentally carpet bombed with just a sliver of the horrifying extent of the Epstein-circle predation on and carelessness for the lives of women. Plus, the sheer fact that so many men the world admires and continues to admire just don’t really think women are people… here’s where I’ve landed.
TLDR; there are three things I want to do and invite you to do too:
Keep the faith that most people are good - we gotta resist cynicism
If you have structural power, wield it (wisely) - let’s resource those good people and their ideas
Stay connected to our own agency, and avoid/manage our overwhelm
1. Keep the faith that most people are good
Yes, even most billionaires and even many politicians. I know this is a provocative stance in February 2026.
I say this with the certainty of someone who knows a few billionaires professionally and personally. As someone who used to work in politics and has known a fair number of political power brokers up close.
I’ve checked — none of the people I know well, or even a little, are in the files (a few are mentioned in passing, in the way that Epstein clearly liked people sending him gossipy emails about other powerful people).
Remember, systems can be corrupt and people can still be good.
This is important for a couple of reasons:
If it calls to you, I really really want you to aspire to wealth, power, and influence. These are not inherently evil; they are volume dials on your values. If you are committed to fairness and willing to face your own darkness, you will do good things with the money and influence you accrue. Promise.
We need kind, conscious people with wealth, power, and influence to feel “called in” in this moment. Vilifying everyone rich isn’t helpful. History teaches us that authoritarian regimes are typically ended not by popular uprising, but by disenfranchised countervailing elites. I.e., they’re taken out by more liberal rich people who want to push out the not-liberal regime.
And cynicism serves only those who want us to tune out. That is not our path.
In the last week alone, I’ve spoken with four senior women executives who are actively moving from fantasising about getting out of the system to doing something about it. And all of them, on paper, have highly paid, sexy, and ethically sound roles. These are not women on the margins. These are women who have “made it” by any conventional measure. I don’t think it’s an accident that this was the same week this tranche of the Epstein files dropped. Something is breaking through for people who have spent years contorting themselves to systems that were supposed to reward them for their contortions. They aren’t naïve. They aren’t disengaged. They are tired in a very specific way — the kind that comes from realizing the game itself may be rotten, and that staying inside it has a psychic cost they’re no longer willing to pay.
2. If you have structural power, (wield it wisely)
If you’re reading this and you have structural power — meaning wealth, platforms, institutional access, or real decision-making authority — here are a few places we need you to devote your resources and relational capital.
Figure out who is doing good work to protect the midterms and resource it. It’s a long shot at this point, but it seems like our best bet for a peaceful resolution to this shitshow.
Protect our children — all of our children. Support organisations that thwart harm to children and invest in healing victims of all kinds of abuse — including sexual assault, trafficking, ICE brutality, poverty, and environmental poisoning. Without a strong next generation, what are we all fighting for anyway?! (I have linked a couple of orgs I have donated to in the last year, in case you just want to click and do something this instant.)
Propel more women and folks with diverse experiences into AI leadership — especially engaging with the ethical concerns. We need more transgenerational thinking, more concern for children, less rush to make a buck. It’s the wild west out there and we’re literally playing with our own capacity for intelligence.
Accept that we may be in a post-democratic world. Not just because of recent fascism (though certainly that), but because it’s unclear to me that democracy works in a world with increasingly persuasive AI and no “public square” or shared facts. I don’t have good answers here. But I want to know that folks with relevant expertise are being funded and interesting work is being shared. (If you know of folks I should support here, send them my way.)
Support small- and larger-scale experiments in new ways of organising our society, work, and money — all of it. The current one isn’t fit for purpose; the last iteration wasn’t either… and when it comes time to install something else, we need a menu to choose from. There is so much good thinking on this atm — but the vibe is very intellectual think tank and/or nerdy sci-fi. We need to mainstream this stuff culturally.
I want blockbuster TV shows about matriarchal societies operating on gift economies.Major actors in films set in utopian worlds with regenerative practices.
People can’t demand better ways of living when they can’t imagine them.
And what of those with less structural power?
3. We must stay connected to our own agency
All of us have influence that shows up through culture, community, spending, care, and attention.
Most of us are not going to be political or activist leaders out in front of the resistance — and that’s ok. We need a lot of different types of people, and I think many people could use their gifts in the service of building what’s next and nurturing what we need to protect to get there.
But each of us owes it to the people who are putting themselves on the front lines of the resistance to support where we can. Leaders need followers.
So:
If someone is up to something smart, jump on it and fan the flames.
See a GoFundMe? Don’t overthink — donate a little something.
See someone in your community doing something good? Excellent. Support it. E.g. My friend Meggie decided to host a “call your senator” evening, and I invited a bunch of women to her house. Is calling our senators going to do much at the point? Unclear. Is spending the evening talking with a bunch of women to heed the call and show up to that kind of thing a great first step to feeling less at the mercy of it all? Yes!
At minimum, each of us can redirect our spending to organisations that align with our values (Scott Galloway’s Resist and Unsubscribe is a good place to start - I’m moving our weekly grocery delivery from Whole Foods to a local store.). And we can make sure our peers know where we stand on issues of the day — and don’t assume we are bought into this insanity.
My deeper frame
Above all, I truly believe we each hold a puzzle piece of the future.
We are each on this earth now, at this moment in history. This is not an accident.
Most of us are so disconnected from our own power and agency that we can’t feel this essential truth. We grew up in the last decades of a crumbling paradigm, taught to disconnect from the parts of ourselves that would show us what our piece of the new one would look like.
Culture, school, and work encouraged us to trade our sovereignty for “success” and certainty — to learn how to become good cogs in a capitalist machine, even as that meant distancing ourselves from our passions, our natural human impulses to love, care, and rest, and our inherent creative gifts.
Personally, I believe my biggest part to play in all of this is to help as many people as I can find our way back to these parts of ourselves.
To listen again to our intuition and our desire.
To show that our weird and wonderful edges could be central to the coming era — not liabilities to sand down.
Then we’ll deprogram outdated cultural conditioning and embrace our inherent artistic, entrepreneurial, and communal wiring. All of which I believe AI and new technology can augment — but used wrong, we risk dulling our human magic even further.
And we’ll find ways to live, work, and — yes — make money that foster a new era of more human expression.
…
Finally.
While I don’t think each of our puzzle pieces is full-on, leading-the-charge activism, I do believe we each lose something essential if we fail to look out for our neighbours.
There comes a point where the priority shifts from the bigger paradigm-level shifts to human-in-front-of-you care.
Where the work is making sure every kid in your class can get to and from school, has food at home, etc.
I have thought through what I’ll be doing when or if the ICE threat comes for my neighbourhood. You should have a plan for that too.
With love and care,
KCH x
PS. If you are wondering where you fit best in this moment of breaking and remaking the world, next week I will share my preferred structure for thinking that through. Stay tuned! (and sign up if you don’t subscribe yet!)
PPS. My January retreat was a big success - 10/10 “would recommend this to a friend” from everyone who came. I am wildly proud of myself! It was about exactly this deeper frame… four women each took two days out of their busy lives to slow down and hone in on their purpose at this moment in time: professionally, personally, from the perspective of their ancestors and the people their love today. I am going to do a bunch more of these, and potentially other locations.
Interested? Please fill out this short form to help me decide where and when to do the next one.
