Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast

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We opened with a clip from former Vermont Governor Howard Dean announcing his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination in Burlington, Vermont on June 23, 2003.

Today’s theme music is “Go, Go, Go,” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, copyrighted music licensed through Likd. Neil and I are off until after Labor Day—but there will be plenty of bonus content in August!

Back in the spring of 2007, I was teaching at Wesleyan University when a student in one of my lecture classes dropped in to ask if I would advise his senior honors thesis in American Studies. When I asked what he planned to write about, Ryan McLaren answered: “Something about the history of Vermont. I love Vermont!”

Who could resist such a request? This was also an ambitious guy. Most members of the football team didn’t write an honors thesis. The time they devoted to the sport, even at a Division III school, made it hard to fit a rigorous independent study—one that required intense research focus in the fall—into their schedules.

Ryan graduated with honors in American Studies in the spring of 2008, and I learned a lot about the history of Vermont, and that state’s distinctive place in our democracy. Get acquainted with Vermont’s commitment to civic excellence and it won’t surprise you that it is one of four states to have produced two presidents, Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge; that it has supported a Senator, Bernie Sanders, who has reshaped the Democratic Party; or a presidential candidate, Howard Dean, whose investment in a digital strategy, revolutionized how campaigns are run, something I discuss in my book Political Junkie.

After he graduated from Wesleyan, Ryan devoted himself to contributing to his state. I’ll let him tell you his story, but that path included AmeriCorps, coaching, working on schools and Democratic Party politics—working for Governor Peter Shumlin, and as a staffer for Senator Peter Welch. That upward trajectory was interrupted by a 2017 catastrophic spinal injury which left Ryan disabled in body but not in spirit. He’s still that same sunny guy I met back in 2007, still an athlete, and still devoted to public service—so much so that on Tuesday, August 11, he will be on the ballot for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.

Photo courtesy of Ryan McLaren for Vermont

You can read more about where that campaign stands here, and an in-depth interview with Ryan here.

Short takes:

“We’ve been living under the penumbra of Trump for so long that it can feel as if we will never escape it,” Lydia Polgreen writes at The New York Times. “But the battle over who will succeed Trump as the Republican nominee in 2028 is well underway.” One of those aspirants is billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, currently running for Governor of Ohio. What could give him a chance? That he left the second Trump administration almost before it began. In fact, Ramaswamy seems to want to pretend that MAGA is already over—and maybe never happened. In a recent appearance, “he steered clear of culture war topics altogether. Indeed, far from leaning into Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, he emphasized his immigrant roots as emblematic of the American ideal. And though he praised the success of other Republican states, Ramaswamy had little to say about the Trump administration’s record. He hardly mentioned Trump, and only in passing.” (July 31, 2026)
If you know someone in New York City who owns a condo or co-op worth more than $1 million (and believe me, that isn’t hard) or a townhouse worth more than $5 million (a heavier lift), you know someone who is pissed at Mayor Mamdani. “The ownership of every property in New York City is public and searchable through a funky website that takes a minute to master,” Adriane Quinlan of Curbed wrote about the preliminary, and flawed, rollout of the city’s pied à terre tax. Problem? Of the thousands of properties on the list, many are primary residences. “The residential properties on the list that could be hit by the tax included a bunch of media catnip, too: Anna Wintour’s Manhattan house was included, for example, and she certainly seems to live there. Councilmember Gale Brewer found her own home on it, the one she’s lived in since 1994.” (July 31, 2026)
At The Forward, Alyssa Katz reminds us that charges of antisemitism in the New York City Mayor’s office aren’t new. During the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict between a largely Jewish teachers’ union and a Black community demanding Black teachers, “Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him.” Hiring Black teachers in significant meant firing Jewish union members from jobs they had held for years, however. “Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.” (July 30, 2026)

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We began this episode with a February 2016 clip of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham speaking to the Washington Press Club Foundation. In a darkly funny speech, Graham warned journalists about what a danger Donald Trump posed to the GOP and the United States—and offers to jinx Trump by endorsing him.

Our theme music this week is Knocking on Heaven’s Door, written by Bob Dylan and sung by Bryan Ferry, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

The late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the Oval Office with Donald Trump on February 3, 2026. Photo courtesy of The White House/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

Perhaps responding to President Donald Trump’s claim that 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Governor Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey has publicized the fact that the state has removed 6,600 noncitizens from the voting rolls. Added by computer error under the previous governor Phil Murphy, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that these individuals “were erroneously registered to vote when they applied for driver’s licenses and identification cards from June 2023 to June 2024. Fewer than 400 of those people, registered across the state, actually voted.
On Wednesday morning, Trump celebrated a MAGA sweep in the Arizona Republican Party primary, as if the November results were now predetermined. “THE DUMOCRATS ARE DUMBFOUNDED,” he crowed. Election-denying Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ-22) will challenge incumbent Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs. Alexander Kolodin, sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar for his role in the lawsuits filed by MAGA activists in 2020 will oppose Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes for Secretary of State. In AZ-01, a tossup district that includes a chunks of liberal Scottsdale and Phoenix, Trump-endorsed former NFL kicker Jay Feely IV won his primary in AZ-01; he will face ER doc Amish Shah, not the DCCC pick, in what is projected to be a potential pickup for Democrats. Finally, in AZ-04, Democratic incumbent Greg Stanton handily dispatched Democratic Socialist Kai Newkirk, ensuring that Democrats will hang onto that seat.
In Michigan, where voters will select candidates on August 4, we have a brawl in the Democratic Party for the Senate seat being vacated by Gary Peters: progressive physician and public health official Abdul El-Sayed and Congresswoman Haley Stevens (MI-11) are leading the pack. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is the most recent endorser to sign on to El-Sayed’s campaign, while Leader Chuck Schumer has endorsed the more moderate Stevens. This is an important Senate seat to hang on to; Trump won the state in 2024 by a point and a half, and the winner faces a strong opponent in former Representative Mike Rogers.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

A proof of life photo issued by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s office earlier this month that has failed to stem rumors and conspiracy theories about his health.

News focus:

As of last week, the Senate is missing two notable figures: Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, died suddenly on July 11 at the age of 71 of an aortic dissection,. Meanwhile, former Leader Mitch McConnell was last seen in the Senate on June 11; supposedly he remains in care at a rehabilitation center from a fall and pneumonia. Although aides released a statement under his signature on July 12, and a photo of McConnell holding a newspaper was released on July 13 (along with a statement that he is doing Senate business and intends to return), rumors have circulated that McConnell is fatally compromised.
Graham’s death also exposes how much he had lost control of his own story. He was regularly derided by some on social media for being an allegedly closeted homosexual, something he denied his entire life. In the immediate aftermath of Graham’s death, memes of this genre proliferated: was that homophobia really just a political smear? Hunter Biden says no, alleging on a recent podcast that there’s a closeted gay Republican “mafia” waging culture wars to protect themselves.
The sudden absence of two very senior Senators has once again cast a spotlight on how old this body is. Let’s start with a little arithmetic: the average age of the Senate is 64. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is 92; Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are both 84; Jim Risch (R-ID) and Angus King (I-ME) are 82; and Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is retiring is 81. A third of the Senate is over 70. One aspect of this longevity may be that the last party to have a Senate supermajority was the Democrats in 2009, and both parties are using incumbency to hold seats. Senators are not required to reveal health status, and the seniority system has long made it advantageous to keep Senators in place, regardless of age: remember that Lindsey Graham replaced 100-year-old Strom Thurmond in 2003.
The current alignment in the Senate is 45 Democrats, two independents who caucus with Democrats, and 53 Republicans. With Graham’s passing and McConnell’s incapacity, the GOP was temporarily down 2 votes; with the appointment of Graham’s sister, Darline Nardone, to fill out his term, that is now one vote. However, there are also five other Republicans in play on any given day for the next 18 weeks: Maine’s Susan Collins, Texas’s John Cornyn, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.
To complicate matters, Graham was up for re-election this year. There will be a special primary in August to choose a replacement. Former representative Trey Gowdy has been mentioned as a strong candidate, although he has said he doesn’t want to run, as has Lt. Governor Pamela Evette. And while Darline Nardone, an optician who has worked on behalf of disabled people in state government, was initially seen as a placeholder, she has announced her candidacy: Trump has endorsed her.
Does Graham’s death create an opening for pediatrician Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate, in the South Carolina Senate race? Unlikely. At the time of his death, Lindsey Graham was only up 3 points, but South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Fritz Hollings in 1998, and Trump won the state by 14 points in 2024.
It has not been uncommon for wives to replace their husbands in the House and Senate; some were then even elected in their own right. But Graham didn’t have a wife; his sister, however, was a prominent supporter and element of his political biography.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story of what it means for senior Senators to suddenly drop out of that body’s business. Although McConnell has been failing visibly for over a year, until this illness he chaired the Committee on Rules and administration, was on the Appropriations Committee (chaired by Susan Collins), and the agriculture committee. McConnell cannot be easily replaced, and not without testing the constitutionality of the recently passed law that bars Democratic governor Andy Beshear from doing so. Until McConnell returns, his seat on all these committees also remains vacant, since replacing him requires a vote of the full Senate.
Similarly, Graham, a Trump critic turned loyalist, chaired the Budget Committee, and was also on the Judiciary, Appropriations, and Environment and Public Works Committees. While Nardone can cast votes, she cannot fill the role her brother played in the Senate, particularly in foreign policy, national security, and jamming through key Trump nominees like Todd Blanche, currently in hearings to be confirmed as Attorney General.
Naturally, at a moment when trust in government could not be lower, there are conspiracy theories about both Graham and McConnell! Laura Loomer and George Santos used their platforms to assert that Lindsey Graham was murdered; and Kash Patel assured everyone he was on the case. Mitch McConnell is rumored to be variously dead or in a coma: Loomer claims that he is “brain dead.” These rumors were fueled last week when Governor Beshear said he had received two phone calls from agencies saying that McConnell had “passed.”

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to watch “The Predator of Seville” (Netflix, 2026), about a man who ran excursions for American students abroad—and used that position to prey on women at their most vulnerable.
Claire wants you to read Rebecca Egan McCarthy’s account of horse racing’s slow collapse in the United States, after one of New York City’s two storied venues closed at the end of June: “The End of Aqueduct Race Track,” July 21, 2026.

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Dear subscribers: This post was supposed to go out last week, but due to a family emergency I had to suspend writing and publishing temporarily. All paid subscribers will receive an extra week in their billing cycle to compensate for the inconvenience.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Maine Senator Susan Collins has long been positioned as a persuadable moderate Republican who nevertheless has a strong record of voting for extremist policies and Trump nominees. Here, Collins meets with Ketanji Brown Jackson on March 8, 2022, who was successfully confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court with three Republican votes: Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah. Photo credit: Renee Bouchard/Wikimedia Commons

Our opening clip is from a 2020 interview in which Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine up for re-election this November, expresses “concern” about then-President Donald Trump’s remarks that he would not accept the election results if he lost.

Democrats targeted Collins’s seat as part of their plan to win the Senate majority. So, when Democrat Graham Platner, dogged by scandal and credible allegations of sexual violence, I knew Amy Fried could help us think more insightfully about what had happened in Maine, that state’s political culture, and whether a new candidate has the time and savvy to win.

Fried is Professor Emerita of Political Science, and the former John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science, at the University of Maine, and a former President of the New England Political Science Association. She has served as the Policy Advocate for the Rising Tide Center, funded by a five-year National Science Foundation ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant Frored co-wrote and for which she served as Co-Principal Investigator. She is also an alternate delegate to the Maine convention that will pick a new candidate to replace Collins.

Neil and I began the political obituary for Platner here in case you missed it. Our theme music this week is “Susie Q,” written by Dan Hawkins and Robert Chaisson, performed by Johnny Savage & the Riders, and licensed through LickD.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Claire Potter: I am here with one of my favorite political scientists, and definitely my favorite political scientist from Maine, Amy Fried of Political Sightlines. Amy, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your Substack?

Amy Fried: I decided to start it about a year ago: I always knew I would be writing some about Maine politics because I’ve lived in Maine since 1997; I thought I’d write about other things as well. But somehow, with everything that’s been going on in Maine, particularly the Senate race. But there’s also this interesting race in Maine’s second congressional district, one of the few competitive house races really out there; it’s a Trump district with a now a very conservative Democrat who’s not running again.

It seems like Maine has taken over.

It certainly has. Last week, Neil Young and I talked about the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign. Before that, when the sexting scandal occurred in May, I wrote a post called “Who’s Afraid of Graham Platner,” in which I talked about whether sexting was a political issue or not.

It turned out there was a lot more bad stuff out there, which a number of political journalists told me on X, and it makes me think that some of these stories were more well and widely known than Democrats who endorsed and supported Platner had imagined.

Well, that’s certainly possible. I heard various rumors over time as well. I think that when the earliest controversies about the tattoo and the Reddit posts came out, Platner had a whole narrative about how he had changed, how he had worked through a lot of things in his life—including a lot of anger. The tattoo he just attributed to being drunk in Croatia with a bunch of his buddies, even though the social media posts were afterwards.

Platner created this whole redemption arc, and Americans like that sort of thing a lot, I think. It always seemed to me to have certain kinds of Christian overtones that I didn’t necessarily relate to, and Maine’s a very secular state. But it’s in the cultural water currently, right? So, a lot of people were willing to say: That’s fine. That was in the past.

They could believe Platner’s story because they liked other things about him. They liked his message. And he certainly was exciting. Lots of people were going to the town halls, and he got tons of volunteers. It fit a political moment in which people are somewhat anti-establishment.

In addition, Platner’s major opponent initially was Governor Janet Mills, who’s 78 years old, and people don’t want older politicians. So, voters were willing to let a lot go when the campaign began. I think when that started to change was the sexting story in May, these texts between him and his various partners after he got married. After that came the first story, from Lindsey Fifield, about abuse. But with the sexting story, I started to see some people pulling away from him.

Finally, there was Jenny Racicot’s allegation that Platner raped her. And I think the big difference, even before that, was that we had gone from things that happened a while ago, in words primarily--messages on Reddit and such--to behaviors, and they were more recent. All of those incidents—the sexting, the alleged violence towards women—were within the last five years.

I agree with you: I think it escalated, as you’re saying, and on a certain level, the early scandals allowed us to become inoculated to later scandals, and then that too crumbled. With the Nazi tattoo, I thought, I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gone into the Marines. I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gotten weird tattoos when they were drunk.

Platner doesn’t have a whole lot of formal education, so it also seemed plausible to me that he really had thought it was just a tough guy tattoo. And then that level of believing and making excuses takes you to the next level: sexting. Is this really something a voter should be concerned about? Isn’t this something his wife should be concerned about?

Two other red flags that I think many people like me missed. Apparently in 2024 there was a Facebook post by Jenny Racicot on a Facebook forum where women identify men that might be cheating on them or might be married while trying to date them. Racicot saw his picture, wrote the woman and said: This is a problem, PM me.

But the other red flag, and this allows us to turn to your post this week about misogyny on the left, was that very early on, a woman who was very high up in the campaign resigned.

Genevieve McDonnell resigned in October 2025 after the Reddit posts and the tattoo came out.

That should have been a signal for the rest of us to step back and look a little more coldly at this, right?

I think so. And you know, people sometimes say Maine is just a big, small town. I don’t live far from Genevieve McDonald; probably an hour and a half away. I know people who know her and they said to me, I really trust her.

Very oddly, it turns out that someone I know also knows Jenny Racicot: Jenny was her massage therapist. So, there are all of these like connections. But one of the things Genevieve was upset about was that the vetting was so poor. She said, I would have never joined this campaign if I knew they hadn’t really checked him out. She was also upset because of the way she was being treated by the consultants. Because even though they tried to create this flavor of it being very homegrown main campaign, Platner was recruited by people from out of state and that’s who was really running the campaign.

Right. And there’s a lot of money in political consulting. I mean, some political consultants routinely recruit candidates who they actually know aren’t going to win because of the fundraising. If you raise ten million dollars, the political consultant gets about twenty-five percent off the top, the media people get another twenty-five percent, and so on. So, there’s a lot of money passing through political campaigns.

But the political consultant, and maybe you can remind us of his name, had also been part of the Sanders movement since 2015, where had misogynist elements, and this guy apparently had been kicked off Summer Lee’s campaign for sexually harassing people. So, as we were all focused on “should we or shouldn’t we” with Graham Platner, there was other evidence we should have been looking at.

Absolutely. The one who had this sexual harassment thing from the other campaign is Daniel Maroff, and he was one of the two main recruiters. He had been involved with Sanders, involved with Fetterman and a number of other people. and interestingly, Platner wasn’t even his first choice. They were first trying to get this guy who is a labor leader in Bath, where naval ships are built. It’s one of these things which is very important, a local part of the military industrial complex. And Susan Collins is always bragging about getting the contracts for Bath Ironworks. But it’s also a place with very strong organized labor.

And so initially, they had tried to recruit this labor leader, and they found something in his background they thought could be a problem. So, they decided to go find someone else and they ended up with Platner and didn’t have much time.

Now, why didn’t they have much time? Because they had a schedule they wanted to follow. They wanted him to launch by Labor Day. To launch by Labor Day, you then have to make the launch video, you have to get some training, you have to get some of the legal stuff set up so they can start taking contributions.

So, it meant that they were kind of pushed up against their own self-imposed deadline and they went ahead with him. Maroff, after his first conversation with Platner, called Mo Katz, who’s another one of these consultants, and was very involved in the Zohran Mandami campaign. Actually, the Democratic Socialists recently came out with a statement saying maybe this isn’t a good guy to work with because he doesn’t do things very well, they didn’t really vet him. They did this super-cheapo job: normally it takes at least a month to do a full vetting. They create a whole big book, hundreds of pages, so you don’t have any surprises—or you may even decide not to run.

At least you know what’s in the person’s background. But instead of doing a month-long one that would cost at least twenty thousand dollars, they did a cheapo one that took three days and it cost about, I don’t remember, $4500, something like that. That shows kind of an arrogance and a lack of seriousness.

Well, let’s talk a little bit also about this fictional outsider candidate who’s supposed to be the magic man for Democrats, something I don’t remember being a thing in politics until Donald Trump was so successful, or maybe right before—the Tea Party.

The problem of a sketchy political consultant is amplified when the candidate is also not a politician, or an experienced campaigner. People who have run before are aware of what a good campaign looks like or doesn’t look like. Platner himself might have thought, in all of his inexperience, that none of these things in his background were that important, and been very willing to take the political consultants’ opinion that he had something special that would override his vulnerabilities.

Do you think the political consultant even knew about these things?

I think that there’s a lot they didn’t know, but they should have known more because they should have done a serious job in looking at his background and asking him questions. One thing that struck me about the sexting story was that it was a few days after the campaign launched when Platner’s wife Amy Gertner told Genevieve McDonald about it.

They shouldn’t have waited until after the campaign started to find these things out, and it shouldn’t have been up to the candidate and the wife to just volunteer the information. That should be something that someone running a campaign would ask about. Do you have a history of XYZ? You go through a whole list of possibilities, have them tell you about it. and then decide what to do about it.

The flip side of this is that we have someone in the White House, Donald Trump, who has been convicted by a civil jury of sexual assault. We have Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, who allegedly committed Biblical sins against his marriage. We have former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who engaged underage sex workers. There are any number of Republicans about whom various ugly sexual shenanigans, some of them illegal, some of them immoral, have been revealed.

One of the things I remember hearing from people is that Democrats lean too far towards punishing masculine misbehavior. The phrase they use is “HR Lady politics:” you know, “Democrats are just too sensitive and Republicans let men get out there and be men and the voters love it.”

Maybe the Democrats need to sort of adopt some tolerance for human error and flaws, but they draw the line with violence against women. In point of fact, it looks like Maine voters did care: Platner was leaking support even as he was winning that primary by such big numbers, right?

His numbers did start going down in the matchup with Collins. He started out being ahead by eight, ten, maybe even more, points. Then, by the time of the primary and immediately after, it was much closer. There was even a poll with Collins ahead. So, I think this information really made a difference.

I heard a lot of people saying during the campaign, Well, there’s Trump out there, so we shouldn’t care about that. But I think there is actually a different ethic among at least many Democrats where they don’t find this sort of thing acceptable. People didn’t know him well, and I think a lot of people were worried about what was going to happen next, and what was going to come out next. Platner kept saying there’s nothing more, there’s nothing more—then something new would happen. Voters just really lost faith in him.

About that big primary win: I think that in some ways it’s being misinterpreted. By election day, Janet Mills had suspended her campaign, and it was essentially an uncontested race. There was one more person on the ballot, David Costello, who was really not doing much of anything—no events, he didn’t have much money. Very few people knew about him. Then there was a write-in candidate who was trying to get some purchase, but how do you do that when your name isn’t even on the ballot?

So, I saw news reports, both interviews and in print, with some voters who said: I do have concerns, but he’s going to be the nominee and I’m going to vote for him.

So, some portion of the people who voted for him weren’t necessarily hard-core Platnerites. And, putting my little political science hat on, there’s some interesting research about what is called “mandate construction,” in which after an election, the person who wins tries to make a case for why they won that will be politically useful.

For example, Ronald Reagan said: I won because people wanted a tax cut, so let’s cut taxes. But in fact, a lot of people voted for Reagan because they were upset with high energy prices and inflation. It really it wasn’t a big anti-tax moment. In the same way, Platner and his supporters have said he won because everybody supported everything he had to say. And I don’t think that’s quite right.

But then there was the charisma argument. I remember listening to an interview that Platner did with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and up to that point, I hadn’t been impressed with him. I’d thought, this is Maine, I vote in Massachusetts, and I don’t have to be impressed with him. But the interview was deeply moving. I remember him talking about his friends being killed in Iraq and he started to cry and get very emotional. The video in which he dropped out of the race was also extremely emotional—and a little scary.

He has something that a lot of male candidates don’t, which is the capacity to at least appear to be projecting an authentic self. But that too was a problem, since he presented himself as working-class when, in fact, that wasn’t true.

There was a lot of discussion about that, and part of it got into: what does it mean to be working class?

But Platner didn’t come from a working-class family, that’s for sure. His father’s an attorney, and his mother had been very involved in Democratic politics and owns a pretty upscale restaurant. Then, they tried to get their son, in a way all parents want to, the best education they could. They sent him to fancy boarding school; then he came back and he went to a prep school in Bangor—and a lot of people who go to there aren’t fancy because they attend for free. If you don’t have a local high school in your school district, the state of Maine will pay for you to go to private school.

Wasn’t there a Supreme Court case about that?

Yes; it had to do with a Christian school taking public funds that didn’t want to hire gay people.

Let’s pivot back to your post about misogyny on the left. Platner in fact stayed alive as long as he did in part because so many people, perhaps outside the state of Maine, were willing to tolerate bad behavior from men. I remember at one point this phrase sort of popped up about Graham Platner being a “bad boyfriend;” I think around the Lindsay Fifield revelations. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed her, because she was a Republican political operative, I still thought: That’s not being a bad boyfriend. That’s being a really screwed up, violent and scary person.

So why did it satisfy some on the left to say that Platner was just a bad boyfriend?

Young men moved decisively towards the Republican party in the last presidential election. Since then, there’s been a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to recapture them. Now, one thing I can say, as someone who follows polls, is there’s not that much you have to do right now, because those same young men who moved towards Trump now can’t stand him. They’ve totally flipped.

But I think there is still an interest in trying to bring those folks into, or back to, the party, even though women have been the democratic base for a long time. Women became more democratic than men in 1980. In 1980 that, for the first time, the Republican Party platform opposed Roe—and the Equal Rights Amendment, which they had supported when it was first introduced in the early 20th century.

Right. The gender gap.

So, there’s been this recent interest in getting someone with a particular kind of style, a swagger, to appeal to young men. But I think it goes over a line at points, and I wrote the piece with that in mind after that abuse story. That’s when Platner went on the Chris Hayes show and said, “I was a bad boyfriend.” I thought: Is he just totally misunderstanding this? If so, he needed to take women’s studies 101 because he doesn’t understand gendered violence and abuse, and he doesn’t understand how it affects women’s lives.

Is there also something in our current culture that makes it possible for Platner, and/or his political consultants, to ignore misogyny?

Yes. Feminists used to talk a lot about what our experiences were. Whether it was in consciousness-raising groups or whatever, people talked about what it meant to live in a female body and how they were treated by men, experiences that have included sexual harassment and too often, sexual assault.

I think a lot of the feminist movement is now professional and institutionalized. We focus on policies, or on these other things run by organizations. Somehow, we’ve stopped talking so much about the day-to-day experiences of women. There’s a lesson there, because I think the debate over Platner would have been different if feminism had been part of the overall conversation.

Instead, Platner’s campaign was so focused on class, class inequality, the oligarchy, and then relating policies to that, with some focus on war and peace. But mostly it was about Medicare for all and other things we could be getting if we raised taxes on the rich and decided to care about ordinary people. Platner talked only a little bit about race and really did not talk about women at all. When the anniversary of Dobbs, the decision that overturned Roe, came around, he did talk about abortion; and he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action.

Then of it turns out that he’s also the guy who’s been accused of taking his condom off in the middle of intercourse and thinking that was really funny, which—maybe because I’m gay—I’ve never heard of before. It’s just an awful, cruel, dangerous and disrespectful thing to do.

Let me add some other cross-cutting themes. The Maine Democratic Party has all of these great candidates who are popping to the top to do the Kamala Harris thing: you know, 100 days and go!

Chuck Schumer stepped on a lot of those candidates during the primary campaign because he wanted Janet Mills. So, for me, one of the cross-cutting themes is age versus youth. I am a great admirer of Janet Mills. How she stood up to Trump for trans kids and won is a lesson for all of us. She’s obviously smart and a great fighter. She is also 78.

I have very strong feelings about how old the Senate is. We’re seeing the Republicans are kind of suffering from that now, having lost two of their most senior members to illness and death. In addition, it never seemed to me like Janet Mills really wanted it. She was obviously very popular with a range of Mainers, but I didn’t feel like she had that campaign in her.

Having watched Mills in two other campaigns, I think she was different. You know, she got a late start. She could have declared much earlier, before Platner created a different dynamic. If she had declared a month after that whole “see you in court” confrontation with Trump, she could have been way, way ahead.

But she didn’t do that, and then she took her time. And yes, there were a lot of people who were thinking of running. I’m not sure if the ones that are in it now are those people, because they claim they always wanted to be governor and not a senator, but who knows? Other people were waiting for Janet to decide and then all of a sudden, Platner bursts upon the scene.

Mills also didn’t campaign terribly hard. She did a lot of very small events. She didn’t push very much or remind people of things she had done, which I thought was kind of a problem. You can’t expect these days for people to know.

There were also some things that people on the left were unhappy with her about. She had vetoed some labor bills. And tribal sovereignty is a really big issue in Maine: while she had taken a lot of steps towards expanding that, the push was for full tribal sovereignty and she didn’t support that. She had a legalistic reason about an agreement signed decades ago, and believed Maine was acting within that.

So, there were a lot of people on the left who called her racist because of it, and those two things really threw the entire campaign. That said, she signed a sweeping reproductive rights bill: Maine had been pro-choice, but this protected women up to the point when any doctor would say it is acceptable to have an abortion, which meant that women with dangerous pregnancies or non-viable fetuses late in a pregnancy could have abortions in Maine.

That was a big step, and she was very good overall on trans rights, which was very controversial. he Maine Christian Civic League was talking about going out and getting signatures for referenda to overturn those two things, which they didn’t end up doing.

My point is: it’s not like those were like necessarily easy things to do. Yet even though she had done a lot of things like that and signed a state-level Family Medical Leave Act into law, she had these other problems. A lot of unions were unhappy, and I think that is really part of how the Platner candidacy came to be, because union people were interested in finding someone to run against her.

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So, that’s another backstory that actually explains the elevation of Platner in a way that that maybe people who aren’t from Maine wouldn’t understand.

Yes, and I think ties that intersects with the lack of attention to women’s issues. Obviously, a lot of unions have women, but with when the voter base is in places like the Bath Ironworks—this is a very male union. You have all these electricians, pipe fitters and welders, jobs which tend to be male. The Maine Education Association was another big union backer, and I don’t know them directly, so maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think they really had women’s issues on their mind either.

When all of this started coming out, like that thing about being a bad boyfriend, I wrote a piece about how Platner should learn more about gendered abuse and harassment in women’s lives. There were people who tried to get that to his campaign to get them to listen: one told me that she thought women in the campaign felt the same way, but there just was no response.

The phrase “bad boyfriend” is so trivializing. It’s very different from saying “I was a bad man.” Saying you’re a bad boyfriend kind of conveys: “I was I was late to the restaurant all the time, I didn’t open doors, I forgot the flowers, blah blah.” It really does trivialize the nature of these charges.

I think what you’re saying about labor is very interesting too, because of course one of the big struggles nationally over working class votes is when both parties say they support workers, they really do mean white men. They don’t mean Hispanic people. They don’t mean Black people. They don’t mean women or LGBTQ+ folks. Which is nuts, because there is a labor tradition of supporting marginalized workers. Alan Bérubé wrote about a maritime union that was very pro-gay, and we’ve seen a lot of really good queer and feminist politics coming out of labor unions.

If, in fact, you’re saying this archetypic typical working-class voter is really a white man or a young white man who can’t get the training to be a pipe fitter or something like that, you’re really not dealing with the history and, in many ways, the present of labor, right?

And Frances Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman in the job, is from Maine.

Right. Maine is a really interesting state for labor because there are so many different kinds of workers. There’s the big maritime trade, there is the interior, there’s the seasonal trade: what I am getting at is that a lot of people who I’ve been talking to about this race, I think fundamentally misapprehend the political culture of Maine. Maine is not Connecticut; it’s not even Massachusetts. Maine is a place that, in my understanding and in my experience campaigning there for Sarah Gideon, cares about itself as a kind of state culture, a set of values organized as a state.

Susan Collins has been expert at mobilizing that. I mean, I know somebody, a Democrat, who used to work with her in the Senate who said she’s a really good person. And she’s a really moral person. If the worst thing they could think of to say aboutCollins was that she started dating her husband before he left his previous wife, that really doesn’t hold a candle to a Nazi tattoo.

Sure, sure. When I moved to Maine, which now is almost 30 years ago, what people told me about the political culture was that it had a big emphasis on civility and bipartisanship, and that people liked to be able to talk to each other and be kind of reasonable with. They liked people who would be respected and independent in Washington.

That’s the tradition. In the 1950s, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, made a speech questioning McCarthyism, so she has all these things named after her. The federal courthouse in my town, Bangor, is the Margaret Chase Smith courthouse. You walk in, and there’s a quote from her 1950 speech, the Declaration of Conscience, which is about standing up for certain values and not giving way to fake scandals and calumnies; not attacking people for no reason. Maine has elected other Republicans in that vein—Bill Cohen, Olympia Snow—and independents who caucused with Democrats.

Maine voters are calm and even-handed. You may not agree with them on everything, but they’re willing to talk. In a way, I thought when Platner first came along that might be a problem, that he was too hot, and Janet Mills was a better fit.

The national misapprehension of Maine political culture is interesting to me at a moment when so many races nationalize. When it was clear that Platner had to drop out, but hadn’t done it yet, the New York Times wrote a piece in which they had three or four politicians they thought might succeed, a couple of businessmen, and then actor Patrick Dempsey and historian Heather Cox Richardson.

You know, Heather’s great, but I thought: no, she is not running for Senate. Then she put out a video explaining why she wouldn’t. But I thought: only in New York would they believe that the name recognition of a Patrick Dempsey or a Heather Cox Richardson would be the thing that Maine voters were actually looking for.

So, what do what do Maine voters want in the Senate candidate who is going to be picked by the July 25 nominating convention in Augusta?

I think that there are some things they want that Platner had. They want someone who’s going to be aggressive and is going to challenge the Trump administration. In the policy vein, they want a person who are going to stand up for policies like Medicare for all. They want to raise taxes on the rich, preserve social security, and oppose foreign wars. And I think they also want somebody who in some ways is going to run a campaign like Platner did, with lots of town halls.

Because it is true, the kind of thing that Platner did in terms of always getting out there, talking to voters—we really had not seen anything like that. It’s also very rare nationally. The only person I can think of who at least I knew something about doing that was Beto O’Rourke in Texas when he ran for Senate. He did a lot of big events, rallies with Q and A’s.

So, Maine Democrats will want someone who’s going to be accessible and come off as strong. Being less intense and having a little more experience and knowledge may be helpful. That is something that tends to be good for the swing voter in Maine, usually an older woman, either working class, or an educated worker like a nurse. You know, someone with a very like practical, day-to-day, job. They know what that job is and how to do it.

In the past, folks like that have tended to like Susan Collins, and they realize that they would be losing some seniority if he she’s replaced. On the other hand, her popularity has gone down, and I think someone has an opportunity, if they can both keep the energy that Platner had and persuade some of those voters. By the way, in the last New York Times/Siena poll before Platner dropped out, which had him ahead only by two points, he was only winning 4% of Trump voters. Collins was winning 10% of Kamala Harris voters.

So it wasn’t as though Platner was doing what he said he could do. If a new candidate could pick away at more of those Harris voters, they really could win.

My experience on the Gideon campaign six years ago was that voters would say, Of course I’m voting for Joe Biden—and I’m voting for Susan Collins. So, there were all of these ticket splitters who didn’t dislike Sarah Gideon. They were nice about her, but the big line was: She’s not from Maine. She just moved here twenty years ago and she’s not from Maine. Susan Collins is really from Maine, and she really gets us.

I guess I want to end on this question. I can’t imagine what the attack line is on Susan Collins. We’ve hung Brett Kavanaugh around her neck. I don’t think that really grabs people anymore, so what does?

I think the line has got to be that she’s not the Susan Collins you liked before, that she’s done good things, but she’s not the same person. That’s a very different tone than “Susan Collins is a bad person,” which was the Platner line. Say it more in sadness than in anger. She’s not the same person. She’s voting with Trump more than 90% of the time. Collins said she would have so much power when she was chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and yet she doesn’t, because she lets them run roughshod. She put this guy into power at the OMB who didn’t really believe that Congress has any power and that the President should run everything. She voted for him; she’s voted for all these terrible people. She’s not really using her power the way she said she would.

Yes, the Collins campaign can keep running all these ads about how Susan Collins got money for a firehouse here and there or did this little thing, but in the big picture she’s not doing what she should. She voted for the One Big Beautiful bill to proceed, then she voted against it. Before she voted against it, she got a little bit of money in the bill for this rural hospital fund, which is much less than what Maine lost under the bill. Then she runs ads about how she got all this money for rural hospitals.

When people said, But she she’s responsible for the One Big Beautiful Bill passing, one of the fact checkers came out and said, No, she’s not, because she voted against it. But she did vote for it to proceed. So, it’s very hard sometimes. She can be very, very slippery. And I think when debates happen, she will pull that sort of thing. With Kavanaugh, it is an old story. I think the way to frame that is that she either completely misjudged him, so she has poor judgment, or she was not honest about what she thought.

Neither of them is good.

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We began this episode with Graham Platner’s announcement on Wednesday that he will step down as the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine.

Our theme music this week is Born Again, written and sung by Jelly Roll, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

Former president of the Maine Senate Troy Jackson and Senate primary candidate Graham Platner at a Portland Hearts of Pine match on September 27, 2025. Jackson is now a candidate to replace Platner on the ballot. Photo credit: MAINEiac4434/Wikimedia Commons

In the news:

On Wednesday, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who ran a construction crew in Houston, because the most recent casualty of Donald Trump’s deportation machine. Araujo was approached by ICE agents, who claim he was in the United States illegally, and that he assaulted them. The evidence remains vague: Araujo’s son has suggested that his father was alert to being robbed for his tools and may have believed that the agents were thieves. The Office of the Inspector General and the FBI have taken over the case, sidelining local officials: the family has asked for an independent investigation. The Washington Post reported this morning that agents did not have a warrant for his arrest and had mistaken him for another.
Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair ends today. Billed as a “A world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair” clustered around the National Mall, by all reports it was slightly better quality than the 2017 Fyre Festival. It featured, among other things, a piece of the stage falling on a troupe dancing to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” Meghan McCain’s new game show streaming to an empty crowd, massive amounts of junk food, Kash Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins stepping in when nearly every other performer pulled out, 10 no-show states, at least one Confederate battle flag, and a baptism pool that fairgoers used as a swimming pool. It is said to have cost $68 million, funding run through a third-party, and was organized by a long-time Trump vendor, Event Strategies, Inc of Alexandria, VA. Freedom 250 is claiming that 150,000 people attended: by contrast, the Minnesota State Fair claimed almost 2 million visitors in 2025.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has asked Republican Senator and former majority leader Mitch McConnell’s staff for an update on his health. McConnell has been publicly declining for months, has sometimes appeared to freeze in public, and has fallen in the Capitol. McConnell has not been seen since an emergency medical call to his home on June 14, reportedly because of an “unconscious person.” Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Whip John Barasso (R-WY) each claim to have had “substantive” 20-minute conversations with McConnell on the phone, but no one—not even his wife, former Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, claims to have seen him—and some are speculating that McConnell is in a coma and/or brain-dead. However, his absence throws the Senate Appropriations Committee into a deadlock around requests from the Trump administration for enhanced military spending to find the war against Iran.

Your hosts:

Platner’s Senate campaign headquarters in Ellsworth, ME, following his victory in the Democratic Senate primary in June, 2026. Photo credit: Quintin Soloviev/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Graham Platner is forced out of the Maine Senate race

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner ended his insurgent candidacy last night after suspending it on Wednesday. The final straw was former girlfriend Jenny Racicot detailing rape allegations from late 2021 to a reporting team from Politico. Racicot was one of three women, including Lindsay Fifield, a Republican political operative, who had spoken to the New York Times about violence in their relationship with Platner prior to the primary. At the end of May, Platner’s wife Amy spoke to the campaign about Platner sexting with other women.
The Wall Street Journal’s reporting team supplied a timeline of Platner’s rise and fall, highlighting a 2024 Facebook post by Racicot that should have been a red flag, and an ambitious pair of progressive political consultants, Daniel Moraff and Morris Katz; Moraff has had close ties to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for a decade. Platner’s social media posts and his obfuscations about his motives, and understanding, of a tattoo that was a Nazi symbol, were an even earlier issue.
In the aftermath of Politico’s story, new allegations have emerged from Fifield that Platner also removed his condom while they were having intercourse, knowing that she was not on birth control.
That day, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim appeared to be questioning Racicot’s account, inferring that she had invited Platner over: Drop Site apologized on Thursday, and Grim appears to have removed these posts.
Here is a complete list of candidates who might replace Platner. In the first round of speculation, the New York Times included actor Patrick Dempsey, as well as historian and Substacker Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson then published a video explaining why she is not interested in running for Senate.
The state party is planning a nominating convention to choose a new candidate.
Did Democrats, in their eagerness to win the Maine seat, create a situation in which better candidates were ignored and Platner seemed like the most vigorous alternative to Susan Collins?
In October 2025, when the news about the Totenkopf tattoo emerged, feminists Moira Donegan and Tressie McMillan Cottom both warned that Democrats were too infatuated with the illusion of working-class authenticity to heed the warning signs about Platner. Monica Potts, Katha Pollitt, and Rebecca Traister have added feminist voices to the discussion.
In the past two years, a Senate candidate has only been replaced nine times, and in only two cases—Arkansas Republican Tim Hutchinson and New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg—has it been successful.
That said, Nate Cohn argues that Platner was losing support, and that a new candidate will boost the party’s chances.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Rose Horowitch’s tale of American literary apocalypse, “The End of Reading is Here,” (The Atlantic, July 8, 2026).
Claire wants you to read, or listen to (as she did), Sarah B. Franklin’s tour de force about twentieth century publishing, The Editor:How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (Atria Books, 2025). Jones edited and cooked alongside Julia Child, Marcela Hazan and other great cookbook, as well as major authors like Anne Tyler and John Updike.

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We began this episode with a June 30 clip of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responding to the United States Supreme Court decision to uphold birthright citizenship. In a feat of MAGA cognitive dissonance, DeSantis was at The Villages, an age-restricted adult community in Central Florida, to unveil a statue of President Abraham Lincoln.

Our theme music this week is Redemption Song, written by Bob Marley and sung by Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

It was a big week at the Supreme Court. In addition to the birthright citizenship case, the court declined to take Donald Trump’s appeal of the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case, and Carroll’s attorneys have asked the judge to release the $5 million damages—now $5.8 million. Here’s a summary of the full term by three experts assembled by the New York Times. The court also upheld existing state bans on transgender girls and women participating in sports designated for women—here is what the ruling has, and has not, settled. The court also rejected the Republican National Committee’s bid to override state laws on the counting and timing of mail-in-ballots.
Colorado held its primaries this week: the well-funded Michael Bennet will return to the Senate after State Attorney General Phil Weiser ate his lunch; at hte time we recorded, the Republican contest between Barb Kirkmeyer and Victor Marx was still too close to call; today, Marx appears to have taken the lead.
Also in Colorado, Democratic Socialists of America are still on a little roll: Melat Kiros, a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate at UC-Denver, toppled 68-year-old progressive incumbent Diana DeGette. Support for Israel appears to have been one issue, but Democratic voters discontent with the party establishment may be a bigger factor.
A series ads attacking Ken Paxton feature the Texas GOP Senate nominee’s moral failings as a husband. Presumably they are an attempt to heighten the contrast with Democrat James Talarico, a devout—and to all appearances, socially proper—Christian. This week, Talarico himself distributed the Daily Mail’s story about Paxton on his social media: not yet divorced, Paxton appears to have traveled to Iceland with a woman not his wife (a different one than the woman who appears to have precipitated the marital split.) But wouldn’t a high focus on 20 years of corruption be more effective?
A new Times/Siena poll reveals that Republicans are in a dogfight to hang onto the governors’ mansions in two red states, Iowa and Ohio, a bellwether state for 2028. Incumbent Republican Senator Jon Husted leads former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown 50% to 47%, while tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy and physician Amy Acton are in a dead heat for the governor’s mansion—except that Acton is up by three points. That same poll indicates that control of the Senate is up for grabs, with six seats in play: Democrats must take four.

Your hosts:

Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott, who filed concurrent suits for their freedom in 1852. The Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision on the grounds that, as enslaved African Americans, they had no claim to citizenship, and that—as property—to free them violated the Fifth Amendment. Image credit: The Century Magazine/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Birthright citizenship survives the Trump administration—for now

Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the principle of birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara. The vote was 6-3 on the constitutionality of the executive order, but 5-4 on the core constitutional question: does the Citizenship Clause protect the children of people who are temporarily or illegally in the United States?
Two Trump-appointed associate justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, voted with the majority on the EO; Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision, and Clarence Thomas wrote a 91-page dissent: Alito and Gorsuch wrote dissents; Associate Justice Jackson wrote a concurrence rebuking Thomas; and Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence in which he joined the minority on the constitutional question, and urged Congress to pass a law to amend birthright citizenship. You can read about it all here.
Caveat: much as Republicans promise that they will introduce a law to ban birthright citizenship outright, that too would be dead on arrival because of Barbara. The Constitution itself would have to be amended. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) claims he plans to spearhead that effort, while other Republican Senators vow to take up Kavanaugh’s invitation to legislate on the question of temporary or illegal status.
Why does birthright citizenship matter to our democracy? Here is how the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment of the Constitution has been commonly interpreted; here is the Trump administration’s argument against it.
Claire and Neil discuss history of birthright citizenship, how the concept has evolved legally since the Dred Scott case in 1857, and the importance of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). In that case, the Supreme Court affirmed that Asian Americans born in the United States whose parents had been barred from naturalized citizenship were entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection. Nativists then turned to anti-immigration laws to limit the non-white population: the reform of these statutes began in 1952 with the McCarren-Walter Act.
Perhaps the most important reform, and the one most despised by today’s MAGA zealots, was the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which eliminated the racist quota system, prioritized highly skilled immigrants, and had a provision for family reunification. Today, most Americans support birthright citizenship.
It is this last provision that white nationalist Republicans have spun into a vast conspiracy theory, contending that the only way Democrats can win elections is by importing and “breeding” voters. It was Jeb Bush, as a presidential candidate in 2015, who promoted the myth of the “anchor baby,” a phrase that first emerged in 1987 in relation to a wave of immigrants fleeing communist Vietnam.
Since 2009, and the rise of the Tea Party movement, a Republican party moving right has leaned in hard on the idea that immigrants defraud the American people, and at the heart of any social and economic problems that may exist.
Trump-aligned forces are now elevating the harm of so-called “birth tourism,” and are vowing to stop all pregnant women who are not citizens at the border. Coming to the United States exclusively to give birth, and registering that child as a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, is already prosecutable as visa fraud and is a rare crime.

What we want to go viral:

Neil just binged season three of “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders” (Netflix, 2026), which follows this hard-working squad through the pains and gains of a new season’s selection process.
Claire wants you to read Louisa Thomas’s piece, “Serena Williams Returns to Wimbledon,” (The New Yorker, July 1, 2026) which delivers the sad news that age really does impose limits on the best, most ambitious, hardest-working, and most gifted of athletes.

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We begin with a June 22 press conference, in which Donald Trump blames faceless, nameless enemies for the failed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

Our theme music this week is Dirty Water, written by Ed Cobb and performed live by the Standells; copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on the National Mall as it appeared on June 16, 2026, chokes with algae and with bits of the liner floating to the surface. Photo credit: G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

On Monday, a federal judge in Minnesota unsealed a ruling that six elected officials in Minnesota, including Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, were improperly subpoenaed in relation to resistance to federal immigration enforcement last winter. Patrick Schlitz, a George W. Bush appointee, said there was no plausible justification for this investigation aside from political retaliation.
New York City’s primaries are over: we saw big victories for candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, several of them dramatic upsets. Former city councilman Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman for the nomination in NY-10; Assemblywoman Claire Valdez defeated Antonio Reynoso in NY-07; and in a major upset, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a doctoral student and pro-Palestinian activist, defeated Adriano Espaillat, a five term incumbent in NY-13 and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In NY-12, Micah Lasher dashed the dreams of multiple candidates, including Jack Schlossberg, in a $26 million primary mostly focused on the future of AI.
Yesterday, in a perhaps unprecedented act of petulance, Donald Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a major bipartisan housing bill that seeks expand the residential housing stock and limit the number of units that private equity companies can stockpile (hello, Jared Kushner!) The event was set up in the Capitol when, 90 minutes before it was supposed to start, Trump announced he would not sign it until Congress passed the SAVE Act, federal voting legislation that lacks the votes to pass in either chamber. Both majorities for the housing bill are veto proof—but will Republicans have the courage to not reverse their votes?
In Texas, nine protesters prosecuted as terrorists received decades-long sentences for a protest at a federal detention center that turned violent. They were prosecuted under a September 2025 executive order that designated “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. The sentences were longer than any sentence handed down for J6 defendants.

Your hosts:

Claire’s favorite social media meme about the Reflecting Pool

News focus: President Renovation Strikes Again

Donald Trump has committed over $1.2 billion to 18 different construction and renovation projects around Washington: he has produced conflicting statements about where the money for them is coming from, has made his projects a destination for donor money at the same time as taxpayer dollars are diverted to meet ballooning budgets. The historic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is only one of Trump’s efforts to put his stamp on the Capitol. It is an effort that has precedent: during Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms, he made Washington D.C. into a modern metropolis with federal dollars.
The Reflecting Pool has also become a metaphor for the President’s slumping popularity. Here is a timeline of the project, beginning on April 23, that has produced acres of green sludge and detached fragments of flag-blue pool liner.
A firm tied to Trump donor John Cafano got the no-bid contract, the bill for which came to over $16 million: Cafano, who resembles drag king Murray Hill, is a Mar-A-Lago neighbor. His company, Greenwater Contracting, won a no-bid federal contract last year to clean the Tijuana River—also a failure. The Reflecting Pool has been plagued with problems since it was created in the 1920s, and a new liner and filters were unlikely to address them.
Having claimed that the new pool liner was indestructible, Trump now blames vandals for the problem. He has surrounded the tourist attraction with security personnel, and threatened 10-year sentences for the mysterious figures he believes are responsible. U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro has vowed to prosecute the culprits. As the Anonymous X account pointed out, the Reflecting pPool is surrounded with security cameras, and any vandal should be easily detected; in other words, there is no evidence that this is anything but a renovation failure.
Yet, according to the Associated Press, in a court filing today a National Parks Service official attested that the liner was cut with a knife or other sharp object.
For historians, this is a relaxing, old-fashioned scandal: Claire and Neil point to Mayor William “Boss” Tweed’s court house at 52 Chambers Street in New York City, opened in 1881. Initially budgeted at $250,000, the Board of Supervisors began to smell a rat when the bill went over $3.1 million; an investigation showed that the project was a pass-through for payoffs and graft. Tweed was convicted of corruption in one of the unfinished building’s courtrooms in 1876.
However, it also seems like Trump, frustrated by problems of his own making, is returning to his roots to create the illusion of success. In 1975, in his first major Manhattan project, he bought the decrepit Commodore Hotel over Grand Central station and built the Grand Hyatt; and in 1986, he took over the renovation of Wollman Rink in Central Park.

Another gag at Donald Trump’s expense found on social media.

What we want to go viral:

Claire wants you to read (or listen tomorrow which is what she is doing) Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St. Martins, 2026.) Don’t miss our conversation about how this book does, and does not, teach us about the politics of gender on the Christian fundamentalist right, and why conservatives are so committed to the gender binary.
Neil is repping Spencer Kornhaber’s article about why a rapper is trying to take America back to the 1990s, “Vanilla Ice Knows When America Was Great,” (The Atlantic, June 24, 2026.)

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We begin with a clip from the June 14 2026 UFC event on the White House Lawn, in which MMA fighter Josh Hokit declares that Jesus Christ is greater than Hulk Hogan and Michelle Obama is a man.

Our theme music this week is Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

President Donald J. Trump and Dana White, President and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship at the mixed martial arts event on Sunday, June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo credit: Andrea Hanks/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

Georgia had its primary on Tuesday: health care executive Rick Jackson beat out Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, and incumbent Senate Democrat Jon Ossoff got the opponent he wants: extremist Mike Collins. Ossoff also got an obscene new nickname from Donald Trump, who has now dubbed a sitting senator Jon Oss(jerk)off. The Jones loss is being read as an upset and a defeat for Trump, since the President endorsed him: but is it really? Since Jackson claims to be embracing a softer version of MAGA, that would mean that Trump, and the movement that brought him to power, are becoming two different things. In other news from The Peach State, election denier Vernon Jones lost his bid to represent the GOP on the Secretary of State ballot line.
Could the District of Columbia be putting a Democratic Socialist mayor right in Donald Trump’s back yard. It looks like it! Democrat Janeese Lewis George has took an early double-digit lead in the primary to replace centrist Muriel Bowser, and never let go of it: her opponent, Kenyan McDuffie, conceded earlier today. Lewis George currently represents Ward 4 on the D.C. Council—and as we know, the Democratic primary is basically the whole race.
Republicans have told us nonstop that cuts to the social safety net are just about fraud and waste, but ProPublica reports that as of this week, over 770,000 children have been cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), born in 1939 as a New Deal program commonly known as food stamps. Altogether, almost 1.7 million people have been dropped from federal food assistance using a common tactic: increasing the paperwork necessary to receive the benefit.
In yet another attack on LGBTQ+ people timed for Pride Month, on June 12, the Department of Veterans Affairs ordered VA hospitals to end gender-identity based initiatives, and to dismantle networks and services designed to support LGBTQ+ veterans. This includes mental health and cognitive behavioral health programs designed to help former service people cope with homophobia, as well as removing the presence of LGBT+ folks from the website.

Your hosts:

Podcaster Joe Rogan interviews UFC Fighter Ilia Topuria at the ceremonial UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins on the Ellipse, Saturday, June 13, 2026. Photo credit: Sgt. 1st Class Brittany Primavera/Wikimedia Commons.

News focus:

On Sunday, Donald Trump celebrated his own birthday and launched a series of events intended to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with an Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed-martial arts extravaganza on the White House lawn. It cost at least $60 million, which is said to have been absorbed by sponsors and by the UFC (Dana White, the CEO of the UFC, is a long-time friend of Trump’s.) It’s unclear whether this includes the $700,000 in security provided by the District of Columbia Police.
First of all, what is the UFC—and why do Trump—and other MAGA celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—identify with it? The audience is largely male, and Trump has been involved with the sport since 2001, when he owned the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. UFC has also been welcomed to David Ellison’s new CBS: a televised event three months ago drew almost 2,5 million viewers. The UFC is worth over $1 billion, and has an overwhelmingly male audience.
The event sparks memories of other Presidents staging other controversial events at the White House. In 1837, Andrew Jackson installed a 1,600-pound block of cheese in the entrance hall of the White House and invited “the people” to come in and hack away at it; Jackson’s inauguration also turned into a riot, where the guests refused to leave and had to be lured out of the building with ice cream and whiskey punch. During the Senate inquiry into the Teapot Dome Scandal that began in 1923, it was revealed that President Warren G. Harding held smokers in the White House that featured illegal alcohol and fight films. In a different vein, Theodore Roosevelt was at the center of an uproar when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House. And there have been several presidents who have been characterized as rubes: Abraham Lincoln, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton spring to mind.
The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg, thought it was significant that the UFC fight occurred on the same day that a memorandum of understanding was signed with Iran to end a needless and unprovoked war that has left the United States, and the world, in a worse position than it was before the conflict. Both things, she argues, indicate the nation’s decline. Here’s what the MOU says (it pretty much gives Iran everything they might want in exchange for nothing.)
There are risks to having high-profile events at the White House: the FBI claims to have made four arrests of people allegedly conspiring to attack the event with explosive drones. Apparently the investigation is ongoing: as usual, Keystone Kash announced it, presumably to nudge the Secret Service, which owns the operation, out of the limelight. Fourteen other people were arrested at the event for crimes like disorderly conduct and drug possession.
Hope Reeves, a liberal journalist, wrote about taking her teenage sons to the event, and their love for UFC fighting: what’s the argument about this being an entertainment for kids that isn’t so terrible?

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Matt Flegenheimer, “New Yorkers Are Living in a Peculiar Harmony. Thank the Knicks” (New York Times, May 29, 2026).
Claire wants you to read Claire Hoffman’s “The Gospel of Erika Kirk: Leaning In with the Christian Women of TPUSA” (Rolling Stone, June 13, 2026).

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We begin with a clip from an ad circulated by Lone Star PAC that asserts Democratic candidate for Senate James Talarico is “too weak and weird for Texas.”

Today’s theme music is “Lola” (2020 Stereo Remaster) by The Kinks; copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

On February 12, 2026, New Yorkers rallied at the Stonewall National Monument to protest the “de-gaying” of the federal site bu the Trump administration. Christopher Penler / Shutterstock.com

In the News:

They still have almost half the ballots to count in California, but the field for the general election is starting to shape up. Republican Steve Hilton is currently leading the pack in the governor’s race, with Democrat Xavier Becerra, former Secretary of HSS in the Biden administration, a close second, and self-funded billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer a more distant third. Incumbent Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has made it to the general election, but again—with almost half the ballots left to count, Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt and LA City Council member Nithya Ramen are battling it out for the second spot. Becerra’s success was the big surprise in this election, with some observers claiming that Democrats are embracing establishment figures again.
In Iowa, paralympic athlete and Democratic state legislator Josh Turek soundly defeated his progressive colleague Zach Wahls for the Senate seat left vacant by Joni Ernst’s retirement; he’ll face Representative Ashley Hinson (IA-01), a self-described conservative mom who says she wants to make Washington D.C. run more like Iowa.
Late last week, a federal judge in Miami re-opened the settlement in Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, saying that the lawsuit itself was “a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the court.” The White House seems to want to make another deal, signaling yesterday that it has abandoned a plan for a $1.8 billion fund to compensate the President’s various allies for their legal troubles. Both Republicans and Democrats have labeled the proposed compensation “a slush fund,” as has the libertarian Cato Institute; it is to be created as part of a large reconciliation bill currently on the House floor. Acting AG Todd Blanche was back in Congress defending the settlement on Tuesday.
Also last week, the Trump administration released new proposed guidelines by which all federal grants would be held to the litmus test of President Donald Trump’s political priorities. The guidelines turn Trump’s various executive orders into a federal regulation, and prohibit (among other things) grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” or initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration. Grants could also be terminated if the administration finds they are not in “the public interest.”
On Tuesday, we learned that Bill Pulte, a long-time Trump ally and currently head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will become the acting Director of National Intelligence when Tulsi Gabbard departs in July. Pulte has no national security experience. At all. Pulte is independently wealthy, and came up with the genius scheme to go after Trump opponents Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and Lisa D. Cooke for mortgage fraud.

Your hosts:

USNS Harvey Milk, a John Lewis class replenishment ship in December, 2024. Named after gay activist Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran and the first openly gay man to be elected to office. On June 26, 2025, his name was stripped from the vessel and replaced with Medal of Honor winner Oscar V. Peterson. Photo credit: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Maxwell Orlosky/Wikimedia Commons

News focus:

Last week, when the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, James Talarico, confirmed that he is in a relationship with a woman, Congressman Wesley Hunt (TX-38) quipped: “What’s his name?” Republican attacks on Talarico’s masculinity, sexual orientation, and gender identity beyond the fact that he defended LGBT+ people in the Texas legislature: they are part of a larger cultural attack on LGBT+ people. The ACLU is currently tracking 530 bills across the United States that attack LGBT+ rights.
Project 2025 took aim at policies that promoted LGBT+ equity and human rights. The document criticized USAID for imposing an LGBT+ “agenda” on African nations, referring to it at one point as “bullying.” It criticized HHS for LGBT+ family equity, saying such policies should be replaced with new rules that encouraged “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families;” and that the agency had unjustly penalized those who had opposed pro-choice and LGBT equity policies on the grounds of conscience. It also argued that Trump should rescind ant-discrimination policies that prohibited “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order eliminating federal recognition of transgender people: buried in that document were five orders to eliminate federal guidance on harassment and inequity by sexual orientation in schools and the workplace.
But LGBT+ people are also literally being erased from patriotic sites. In June, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth renamed the USNS Harvey Milk, commissioned in 2021: he replaced Milk’s name with Medal of Honor winner Oscar V. Peterson, saying that he was “taking the politics” out of the military.
Since then, states have gone into motion to suppress discussion of LGBT+ people. Seven states have banned the teaching of all LGBTQ texts and topics from publicly funded schools (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina.) Arizona, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma ban discussion of LGBT+ sexuality in sex ed; while Florida, Texas, Utah, and Iowa ban LGBT+ books from public and school libraries. All in all, 19 states have at least one law of this kind.
Utah, Idaho and Montana ban the flying of Pride or Black Lives Matter flags on public property; there are similar bills pending in Wisconsin, Tennessee and Ohio. Florida and Texas have prohibited street art, painting crosswalks, and bridge lighting with Pride themes.
Other than a 2019 Twitter thread, Donald Trump has never recognized Pride Month: in February, 2026, the National Parks Service removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument (it was restored after protests and a lawsuit.) However, references to transgender people have been removed from the physical site and the website, and NPS has put a pause on any donations to or research at the site.
But this year, MAGA has gone further, by choosing June as the month to celebrate heterosexuality, patriotism, and “traditional” values. In Arkansas, on May 27, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared June to be “Fidelity Month,” during which Arkansans are urged to commit to fidelity to God, family, community and country, all of which contribute to human flourishing and support a stable society. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee signed a proclamation in April that designated June “Nuclear Family Month.” Mike Braun of Indiana and Spencer Cox of Utah have signed similar proclamations.
Attacks against lesbian and gay people on social media have also accelerated. Representative Andy Ogles (TN-05) celebrated Pride Month by posting on X “Homosexuality has no place in America,” although he later claimed the post had been put up by an errant staffer. Meanwhile, South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who will face Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette in that state’s Republican primary, has issued a campaign ad charging that Evette’s consulting company “took millions from the woke mob” to implement DEI. The ad is decorated with Pride and Trans flags.

What we want to go viral:

Neil updates us on right-wing influencer and conspiracist Candace Owens’ new passion: Russia! In “Why Candace Owens Went to Russia” (The Free Press, June 3, 2026), Parker MacDougald digs into an infatuation that is becoming more common among MAGA dissenters—who may be running a massive propaganda operation on behalf of a foreign state.
Claire wants you to read Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “In Plain Sight” (The New Yorker, May 18, 2026), about a Guinean girl named Djena who was trafficked by her father, first to a highly placed political family in Guinea at 8. They then trafficked her to the United States at the age of ten to work as an unpaid servant for their daughter and her family. Important fact: over 70% of people trafficked to the U.S. are brought not for the sex trades, but for coerced labor.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into this video live!

In this bonus episode, recorded yesterday as a Substack Live, Princeton sociologist Paul Starr and I discuss his new article in The American Prospect, “Stephen Miller’s Impossible America:The ethnonationalist strategy for white replenishment won’t work” (May 26, 2026). Starr shows how multiple policy threads—pronatalism, deportation, and so-called “remigration” of ethnic Americans born and raised in the United States—support a fantasy that the United States can be the “white” nation that it never was.

Listen and:

You know how I am always asking you to support me? Well, do me a mitzvah and check out The American Prospect. A progressive journal of ideas, politics and power founded by Starr, Robert Kuttner, and Robert Reich, it is available online for free: this spring they eliminated intrusive programmatic ads. So, if you liked this conversation:

What I’m reading:

Ling Ma, Severance (New York: Picador, 2019.) As far as I can tell this novel has nothing to do with the television show of the same name, and because it was written before Covid-19 pandemic, the deadly fungus that travels the globe to devastate American society is a figment of Ma’s imagination. The novel imagines an apocalypse created be unrestrained global capitalism, and which leaves virtually nothing but trash behind. It’s also a great read—which I can vouch for because I almost never read science fiction or futuristic fiction, I can’t put it down, and it won a basket of prizes. Also it’s pink!

Short takes:

Democrats have plenty of good ideas—but unlike Republicans no coherent view of what the future should look like. “It is not that these policies are bad,” Jamelle Bouie writes at The New York Times. “Most of them, from what has been revealed, are good: worthwhile plans to break up utility monopolies, support child-rearing, regulate social media and artificial intelligence, and curtail corporate abuse. But none of this reflects or represents a far-reaching or comprehensive idea of what the nation might be.” (June 3, 2026)
Can the left rediscover the hope inherent in patriotism? Many on the left say no—despite the fact that social change has often appealed to the founding ideals. “That most Americans continue to be patriotic only demonstrates to these progressives their blindness to, if not complicity in, evils wrought by the men and women who rule the imperial state,” Michael Kazin writes at The Atlantic. “Leftists already have such harsh critics on their side. If they wish to govern, though, they will need to win over the majority of Americans who love their country but also believe that it needs to change. As the late Todd Gitlin, an erstwhile leader of the New Left, wrote a year after the attacks of 9/11: ‘It is time for the patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays, not catechisms or self-congratulation. It is time to diminish the gap between the nation we love and the justice we also love. It is time for the real America to stand up.’” (June 3, 2026)
Where in the world is Gregory Bovino? You remember Bovino—the Border Patrol guy who marched around Minneapolis in Nazi-adjacent gear? He’s in Portugal, according to Marion Soletty at Politico, mingling with “European far-right activists who advocate the mass deportation of immigrants and their descendants,” otherwise known as remigration. “In an interview with a far-right website ahead of the summit,” Solely continues, “Bovino — who didn’t wear his controversial coat — referenced Nazi Germany’s lead general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure and offered his help to end what he described as a ‘creeping horror,’ echoing racist terms used by far-right extremists to describe migrants.” (May 31, 2026)

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We begin with a clip from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’s 2013 press conference, where he presented the autopsy on Senator Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign.

Today’s theme is Luck Be a Lady written and performed by Frank Loesser. Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

DNC Chair Ken Martin speaking at a Minneapolis, MN campaign event in November, 2020, when he was chair of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor party. Photo credit: Minne2020/ Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard became the most recent bowling pin (and the fourth woman) to fall in Donald Trump’s cabinet. Late last week Gabbard announced that due to her husband’s cancer diagnosis, she would leave her post at the end of June. Narrowly confirmed, Gabbard’s 15 months in the job have been without accomplishment or even visibility, unless she was promoting conspiracy theories. Deputy Aaron Lukas will serve in an acting capacity until a new DNI can be approved by the Senate, which might be never, since the Senate will be out of town by June 31. Bets on Trump using recess appointments on this one for the rest of his presidency?
In April, a new Super PAC called “Lean Left” filed paperwork with the FCC. But, as Judd Legum reports at his Popular Information Substack, observers have picked up peculiar spending patterns. Based at a P.O. Box in Tallahassee, Florida, Lean Left seems to only spend money on whacko candidates in swing districts: one of those candidates was Maureen Galindo, who was denounced by the DCC for making antisemitic remarks and suggested that pedophiles—probably also Zionists, in her view--be castrated. She lost a runoff in Texas 35 to Johnny Garcia this week—decisively. Democrats are outraged—except, of course, that they did the same thing 2022.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that two Trump appointees at the Treasury Department have been waging a campaign for over a year to create a $250 bill with Donald Trump’s face on it. Created by a British artist, the mockup would also feature “America 250” branding, and possibly the colors of the American flag. No living person has appeared on American currency since a Treasury employee put his own face on a 5 cent note in 1866: Congress prohibited further self-commemorations; a law reversing that is floating around in Congress.
Finally, in the week’s retribution news, yesterday we saw a report that the Department of Justice had opened a perjury investigation of 82-year-old journalist E. Jean Carroll; today it appears that the funding for the litigation, provided by tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, is the administration’s primary target. Carroll successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual assault, winning a $5 million judgement in 2023. Carroll won another $83.3 million in a 2024 defamation lawsuit. Both cases were upheld on appeal. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has recused himself from the case, since he was Trump’s defense attorney at the time.

Your hosts:

Image credit: Svet foto/Shutterstock

News focus:

Here is a link to the DNC draft autopsy, otherwise known as an “internal audit” or “post-election review” of the failure to elect Kamala Harris president in 2024.
Released by Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, the report is much delayed and incomplete: here are five takeaways from the report and a response by political strategist Paul Begala.
Much of the blame has fallen on Martin, who was already under fire—despite the fact that Democratic candidates have been successful at the ballot box and are surging in the polling in many races.
Political parties have studied their losses since the 19th century, but these were rarely public documents. The first use of the word “autopsy” was in 2012, when the Republican National Committee released a report on Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss that stressed broad inclusion; yet, Donald Trump ran hard in the other direction and won in 2016.
But what if we included other insurgent documents in this history? For example, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not An Echo (Regency, 2014; orig. 1964) was a populist battle-cry that positioned the GOP’s failures as part of a larger problem: its unwillingness to attend to American conservatives. Then, there is Paul Weyrich’s famous challenge to the Republican Party in the fall of 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote;” and Donna Brazile’s Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (Hachette, 2017), that dissected the failures of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign?
Similarly, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 created a template for governance that it promised the Trump administration would deliver.
Most prominently, what the autopsy does not address is voters’ lack of enthusiasm for party politics, or at least the choices they have been given.

What we want to go viral:

Neil is simultaneously catching up on his true crime and art obsessions with Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Penguin/Random House, 2023), a chronicle of a man who stole art for art’s sake in Europe’s lightly guarded collections.
Claire wants you to read Princeton University sociologist Paul Starr’s “Stephen Miller’s Impossible America:The ethnonationalist strategy for white replenishment won’t work” (The American Prospect, May 26, 2026) to understand what the Republican racial agenda is, the history it is steeped in, and how pronatalism and immigration restriction combine to forward the new white supremacy.

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We begin with a clip from an interview with the content creator and looksmaxxer Clavicular, a.k.a. Braden Peters broadcast on CBS Australia last month. Clavicular ended the session early when he was asked about his relationship with Andrew Tate, an indicted felon and MAGA influencer.

Copyrighted music licensed by Likd: Le Freak (Original Mix) by Diego Forsinetti and Suki Soul.

Braden Eric Peters, known online as Clavicular, after his arrest for illegally discharging a firearm in the vicinity of an alligator on March 26, 2026. Image credit: Broward County Sherriff’s Office/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

Primaries this week have demonstrated once again that Donald Trump has a solid grip on the 70% of Republicans who support him. MAGA voters in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District knocked off Thomas Massie and mustered behind State Representative Andy Barr, who defeated outgoing Senator Mitch McConnell’s pick to replace him. In Georgia, former Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger will not be the Republican nominee for Governor, while two Republican incumbents fended off well-funded Democratic challengers for the State Supreme Court. After these successes, Trump urged candidates aligned with him to jump into a primary against Lauren Boebert (CO-4) at the end of June, however the deadline has passed and she will run unopposed.
Despite these primary successes, Trump still faces a bleak midterm outlook: Democrats need only four flips to take control of the Senate, and they could get more. One will come in North Carolina, where Governor Roy Cooper is kicking Michael Whatley’s behind; there are three toss-ups (Maine, Michigan and Ohio); and reaches in Georgia and New Hampshire. After Trump announced he was backing Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate runoff, the Lone Star State may be in play for the first time since Lloyd Bentsen was elected in 1988. Republicans in the Senate are distressed and angry that Trump has undermined a key member of their leadership team. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, is currently leading both Republicans in the polling.
A California judge has barred the New Jersey-based nonprofit with an ear worm jingle, Kars4Kids, from advertising in the Golden State. As it turns out, the proceeds from donated cars do not go to children more broadly, but to a charity called Oorah, which gives some of its money to some kids. A faith-based Jewish nonprofit that spends primarily in New York and New Jersey, Oorah does not identify itself in the ads as religious, but most of its spending goes to programs that take youth of varying economic backgrounds to Israel and a Jewish dating service. Recently, the organization also purchased a $16.5 million building in Israel.
In academic news, Harvard University’s faculty voted yesterday to limit the number of A’s awarded in any given class to 20% plus four. In the 2024-25 academic year, 2/3 of grades awarded were A’s. No other grades will be capped: 201 faculty voted against and 458 voted for. Here are some reasons why experts think that grade inflation matters. As faculty members Jason Furman and David Laibson wrote in The New York Times today, the generic A makes it “hard for truly exceptional students to stand out from their merely successful peers.”

Your hosts:

In early April, Clavicular appeared to be overdosing in a club while doing a Kick Livestream. Image credit: screenshot by author/YouTube

News focus: Clavicular and MAGA masculinity

From Trump on down, the MAGA movement is preoccupied with masculinity, good looks and power—but not with any of the virtues that might be associated with adult manhood. Journalist Jill Filipovic calls this “the adolescent style in American politics:” an ecology of influencers has grown up around the idea that they can sell wealth, beauty, wellness, and power to young American men adrift in the economy.
Here’s a recent profile of Clavicular from the New York Times. Born Braden Eric Peters in Hoboken, New Jersey, Clavicular became interested in looksmaxxing—a dedication to raising oneself to the highest standard of masculine beauty-- as a young teenager. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 14-year-old Clav became addicted to online incel and looksmaxxing content and began injecting himself with testosterone he purchased on the dark web. By 2025, he became a top TikTok streamer: he has almost a million followers.
Looksmaxxing appears to be a form of body dysphoria that emerged in 4chan in the 2010s and has now gone mainstream. Young men seek to “ascend”—or gain social power—by refining their personal appearance and gaining wealth; they are particularly focused on their faces, and on becoming lean. It is mostly associated with right-wing manosphere, the incel community, and white supremacy, although there is a small and embattled subset of Black looksmaxxers.
Looksmaxxing is about male dominance—specifically, power over women, but also power over other men. This dominance, or “mogging,” which can be learned and is theoretically available to all, offers a path out of irrelevance and failure.
But looksmaxing, while it draws on fitness culture, is specific to the internet, and is the most recent form of self-improvement ideology that has been an aspect of American masculinity since the 19th century. But it also derives from gay culture.
Although he claims he is not political, Clavicular has been associated with Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes; he draws his constituency from online far right and gamer communities, and is a descendant of the shock-jock ecosystem that elevated Donald Trump in his first campaign. He is on the Kick platform, which is controversial for its promotion of online gambling content and relaxed moderation policies towards violent language and harassment.
Another connection to politics is how Clavicular mirrors the do-it-yourself “healthmaxxing” of RFK, Jr.’s MAHA coalition, an ecosystem of health and beauty influencers who make significant incomes through sponsorships and subscribers. Clavicular is said to be making $100K a month.
Clavicular is open about his drug use, particularly methamphetamine and testosterone. He has also had recent run-ins with the law: police were called to a Fort Lauderdale Air BNB in February because of a fight between two women that he instigated or staged, and in mid-April, he appeared to overdose in a restaurant while streaming. Later in April, he was arrested for shooting into a swamp, allegedly at an alligator, which he settled last week in a plea bargain.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Katherine Stewart’s new essay, “A Very Authoritarian Semiquincentennial Celebration” (The New Republic, May 15, 2026), where she points out that instead of celebrating American Independence this summer. Donald Trump and his white Christian Nationalist allies are asking us “to settle for a festival of corruption, lies, bigotry, and divisiveness.”
Claire wants you to run, not walk, to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 (David Frankel, 2026) starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. A sequel to the original move of the same name, it takes on the demise of journalism, America’s new Gilded Age, and is a tribute to the pleasures of work for ambitious women.

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Here’s a shout out to new subscribers Richard Russell, Josha Crabtree, Jen Aleric, Romano Scaturro, mlc257 (rest of email redacted), Hope Munro, Michael Koenig, and mondojohnson. Thanks for hanging out with us!

Today’s theme is Home Life by Avocado Junkie, and we begin our episode with this clip, in which Barney Frank recalls coming out to Speaker of the House Tip O’ Neil in 1987.

Representative Barney Frank embraces then-Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren on November 1 2012, five days before she defeated Massachusetts incumbent Republican Scott Brown for Senate. Image credit: ElizabethforMA/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

On Tuesday, we learned that Representative Jen Kiggins, a Republican incumbent in a tough fight to keep her seat in VA-02, cosigned conservative talk show host Rich Herrerra’s observation that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should “keep his cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.” They were discussing redistricting, and what it would take to unseat the entire Virginia Supreme Court after it nullified the successful redistricting referendum. After Democrats responded that the comment was a racist dog whistle, Kiggins backtracked. But other Republicans insisted that since whites had also picked cotton, the phrase was not racist, and the outrage performative.
Conspiracy much? In a YouGov poll released yesterday by information watchdog NewsGuard, 25% of Americans believe that the attempted mass shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were more likely to believe this than older people: only 45% believed it was real, and 32% were not sure. The poll is roughly the same as one taken after the 2025 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, PA. Fewer people believed that the 2024 shooter arrested at the Trump International Golf Club was fake—but a similar number were unsure. Should we blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the fact that so many Americans in both parties have difficulty with reality?
Yesterday, attorney and financier Kevin M. Warsh was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-45 vote as the next chair of the Federal Reserve Bank: Democrat John Fetterman crossed the aisle to vote yea. The Fed, under the leadership of outgoing chair Jerome Powell, has up until now maintained its independence from Donald Trump. Warsh has signaled that he wants the bank to be less active in the economy, and elevate the use of interest rates—rather than buying government debt—to backstop the economy. Warsh has challenges ahead, prominently a war in Iran that has pushed inflation to a 3-year high. Trump wants a rate cut, whereas the economy points to higher interest rates.
The Food and Drug Administration has lost two top officials to resignation following the Trump administration lifting a ban on flavored vapes. A vehicle for nicotine, vapes were banned in 2020 on the theory that they were a gateway to smoking. The ban was controversial at the time: some critics said that banning flavored vapes eliminated a tool to help smokers quit.

Your hosts:

On January 19, 1995, Republican Representative Dick Armey (TX-26) called Barney Frank “Barney Fag” in a radio interview: Armey later apologized, but claimed that he had simply mispronounced Frank’s name. Image credit: Joe Hoover/Wikimedia Commons

News focus:

Last week, former Congressman Barney Frank (MA-04) made the news by announcing he was in hospice care for congestive heart failure, and by giving several interviews about the future of the Democratic party from the home he shares in Maine with his husband, Jim Ready.
Frank, a legendary progressive politician and the first national lawmaker to voluntarily come out as gay, grew up in a working-class home in Bayonne, NJ, graduated from Harvard College in 1962, and participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer while in the Ph.D. program in government at Harvard.
Leaving Harvard in 1968 to become Chief Assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White. In 1972, Frank was elected to the state legislature, where he served for eight years. During that time, he completed a degree at Harvard Law and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. Simultaneously, Elaine Noble ran successfully for the Massachusetts State Legislature as the first “avowed homosexual” in the nation to be elected to office. In 1980, a year when Republicans ran the table nationally, Frank toppled the Republican incumbent to take his seat in Congress, endorsed by Father Robert Drinan.
In 1981, Frank was one of eleven House Democrats who filed a civil lawsuit to end the Reagan administration’s aid to the military junta in El Salvador: another member of that lawsuit was Barbara Mikulski (MD-03), a closeted lesbian.
Frank was outspoken from the moment he arrived on the Hill. He made his reputation as a supporter of liberal policies: the separation of powers, financial regulation, consumer protection, and opposition to tax cuts intended to shrink federal spending on social programs. When New York Mayor Ed Koch urged Democrats to return to the center, Frank said: ‘’I don’t think we should plead guilty to a caricature.’‘
Frank’s career almost ended in 1982 because of a gerrymander, retribution for bucking the Massachusetts Democratic machine, that put him in a race against moderate Republican Margaret “Pirouetting Peggy” Heckler. That win secured his seat until he retired in 2012.
In 1987, Frank publicly came out as gay, ahead of a burgeoning scandal: a sex worker, friend and personal assistant living in his apartment was operating an escort service there. On LGBT civil rights issues, Frank was persistent, but famously incrementalist: he defended Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t tell military policy, and urging activists to slow-walk demands for gay marriage.
On January 19, 1995, Republican Representative Dick Armey (TX-26) called Frank “Barney Fag” in a weekly meeting with radio journalists, and had to apologize on the House Floor. Armey also apologized privately but blamed the media for repeating what he claimed was a mispronunciation of Frank’s name. Frank did not entirely accept the dishonest apology.
In 1998, Frank defended President Bill Clinton vigorously during the Judiciary Committee hearings that led to impeachment proceedings in the House.
In 2010, with Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Frank wrote a bill that overhauled the financial system that led to systemic financial collapse in 2008.
As trans liberation moved to the forefront of LGBTQ politics in the 21st century Frank resisted folding them into lesbian and gay rights, a position he continues to hold today. In 2007, he stripped gender identity from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) so that it would pass the House. In the 2009 and 2011 versions of the bill, those provisions were restored; in 2013, it passed the Senate, but then failed in the House.
Recently, Democratic Representative Sarah McBride (DE-01), the first trans member of Congress, has also argued that the trans rights movement does not have the broad support it needs to pass equality legislation.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Claire’s new piece, “Kill Canvas. Now” (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 2026), an essay about higher education’s dangerous dependence on an edutech platform that serves the interests of neither faculty nor students.
Claire is fascinated by Ava Kofman’s reporting on 64-year-old Chinese oligarch Guojun Xuan and his wife Silvia, who have arranged for the birth of more than two dozen children via surrogate motherhood in less than a decade. The first story, “The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion” (February 9, 2026) tracks the history of this odd, and ultimately somewhat sinister, project and its intersections with a surrogacy industry in the United States that is almost unregulated. The follow-up, “The Fate of Twenty-One Los Angeles Siblings” (May 11, 2026) talks about the resulting legal case when the children under the Xuans care, as well as 6 other babies still in uteroin five other states, were taken into the custody of Child Protective Services.

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This week, I want to welcome new premium subscribers Elwood Watson and Kate Ma, as well as free subscribers Vivek Asija, Marc Tretin, Roberta Smith, Kay Pashos, Peter Philbrook, Renato Rojas, Richard Wattanbarger, Alejandro Echeverry, Laurie Novo, Shelly Reusser, Robby Yakk, Kay Pashos, Kathi Kern, and William Weitzer.

Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her son Jack Schlossberg, August 3, 2023. Photo credit: U.S. Embassy Australia/Wikimedia Commons

We begin with a clip from this interview, and our theme this week is Sparkling Eyes by Afternoonz.

In the News:

Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to decline. The latest polls have him at 34%, the lowest level in his second term. According to Pew Research, one of the steepest declines are responses to the statement “Trump keeps his promises,” to which only 38% of respondents replied in the affirmative, a five point drop since August 2025, and a 13-point drop since he was elected. Most importantly, Trump is losing ground with Republicans: only 72% trust him to use military force wisely, down 11 points since last year. His support in the under 35 MAGA demographic has dropped 30 points, he has lost 27 points with Hispanic voters, and 14 points with White voters. In our conversation about whether the controversies around TurningPoint USA are part of this melt, Neil mentions the rumor that Erika Kirk is stepping down as CEO of TurningPoint USA: in fact, she is stepping back for a brief period of personal recovery.”
However, Trump’s popularity among die-hard Republicans is still enough to quash dissent in the party. Tuesday’s Indiana primary saw 5 of the 7 GOP incumbents in the state legislature defeated by Trump-backed candidates, with two races too close to call at the time we recorded. Some observers note that Indiana is one of the last states where the contest between MAGA and a GOP establishment still dominates the political landscape.
That said, places where MAGA has dominated, or delivered surprise wins in 2016, seem to be vulnerable. The Democrats have added eight candidates to the 36 they are supporting in the “Red to Blue” campaign: they hope to flip seats in California, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Maine. In Ohio’s post-primary polling, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy faces a tough race against Democrat Amy Acton in the governor’s race, while in the Senate race, former Senator Sherrod Brown is well within striking distance of incumbent Republican Senator Jon Husted.

Your hosts:

President Joe Biden greets Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and her son Jack Schlossberg after delivering remarks at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, September 12, 2022. Photo credit: Adam Schultz/Wikimedia Commons

News focus:

John Kennedy Bouvier “Jack” Schlossberg is one of dozens of candidates running in the primary to replace Jerrold Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district. In addition to Schlossberg, top candidates are Alex Bores, George Conway, Micah Lasher, and six other people: Schlossberg is leading all of them at this point, except for one outlier poll that has Bores with a 1-point lead.
The Kennedy “legend” is political lore across the political spectrum. For example, QAnon supporters believe that JFK, Jr. is still alive; RFK Jr.’s MAHA Moms are GOP swing voters. Here is a full list of Kennedys who have run for office. Most have devoted themselves to public service, or have been married to politicians: Caroline Kennedy has been ambassador to Japan; Kerry Kennedy has run a human rights organization and was married to Andrew Cuomo; Maria Shriver was a television news star and was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger; other Kennedys have been active in public service nonprofits.
Part of the Kennedy legend is that the career emphasis is always, for men: when will you begin your ascent to the presidency? This is certainly a big theme of the soapy Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s 2026 truly terrible series on FX about JFK Jr. and his tumultuous marriage to Carolyn Bessette—but there are other themes too: the idea that Kennedys are American royalty, the tug between public and private, and the many Kennedys who have died too young.
The idea of political dynasty itself seems to compel Americans more than politics themselves: for example, the consistent effort to brand the Trump family as the second coming of the Kennedys. Don Jr. has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible 2028 candidate, and there was an effort to push Barron onto the stage in 2024 as a Florida delegate, which Melania quashed. Ivanka and Trump’s eldest granddaughter, Kai (a 19-year-old college golfing recruit at the University of Miami) have also been mentioned as potential presidents. Joe Biden also imagined his son Beau as a future President, and Michelle Obama is occasionally mentioned as a viable candidate.
Jack Schlossberg was born on January 19, 1993, the youngest of Caroline Kennedy’s three children, and the only direct male descendant of President Kennedy. Jack’s sister Tatiana died of leukemia late last year, publishing an essay in the New Yorker criticizing RFK Jr., and the Trump administration, for destroying the nation’s medical and scientific research infrastructure. Rose is an artist and filmmaker.
Educated at The Collegiate School, Yale College, and Harvard Law, Schlossberg has mostly worked as a writer; he has been exposed to politics as a Senate page and intern, and has worked on campaigns. But has very little experience doing politics. Schlossberg, has dabbled in acting, writing, and non-profit work; he has passed the New York State Bar, but never practiced law; and is perhaps most famous for his wild social media presence on TikTok and Instagram.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has been a kingmaker, but not a politician in her own right. In January, 2008, she endorsed Barack Obama in a New York Times Op-Ed titled “A President Like My Father.” She briefly ran for the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton in 2009, but dropped out: her uncle Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer shortly after she launched a campaign she was favored to win.
Schlossberg has also been carefully platformed in the Democratic Party. In 2020, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention by video feed with his mother; and he spoke alone at the 2024 DNC.
Last week, Schlossberg was endorsed by Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi, something that Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait was baffled by. Indeed, Schlossberg seems to be struggling to articulate who he is as a candidate. His campaign rollout was rocky; his issues, as articulated on his campaign site seem vague; and his presence on traditional media seems awkward, uncomfortable, and scripted compared to his social media presence.

Jack Schlossberg interviewed by Katie Couric, April 15, 2026: it’s a very different vibe from his videos. Courtesy: YouTube.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read philosopher Aaron Nebur’s “What Is a Beagle?” Public Seminar (April 30, 2026), an essay about how far-right anti-science activism has horse-shoed with left-wing animal rights concerns. A review essay about Brad Bolman’s Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Nebur also asks: how did beagles become the quintessential lab dog—and what is a beagle, anyway?
Claire is fascinated by Amelia Tait’s report on adults who go into debt to marinate in childhood fantasies, “Are Disney Adults the Happiest Debtors on Earth?” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2026). The essay explores the millions of adults who retreat into a world of childhood romance—for which Disney is happy to bleed them dry.

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We begin with FBI Director Kash Patel’s response to a reporter on April 21, 2026, asking if the allegations that he has been AWOL from his role at the Bureau, and repeatedly intoxicated, are true.

This week’s theme is King Tide from Tiger Gang.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel pose with a Formula 1 driver at the Las Vegas Grand Prix in Las Vegas, Nevada, Nov. 22, 2025. Photo credit: Tia Dufour/Wikimedia Commons.

In the News:

The latest Cabinet member to fall is Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who has been plagued by abuse of power allegations that include misappropriation of funds, having an affair with her bodyguard, and a husband who reportedly wandered the building pestering women for sex. Chavez-DeRemer was not fired on Truth Social, but resigned. Notably, of all the incompetent souls with disorderly personal lives in the Cabinet, Trump has dispensed with women.
In a narrow decision on Wednesday, a Federal appeals court ruled in favor of a Texas law mandating that the Ten Commandments be clearly visible in every publicly funded classroom. The law has several twists, presumably to undermine a certain First Amendment challenge in the Supreme Court. Schools are not required to purchase these posters, but they must accept donations of them (and there just happens to be a non-profit set up to do that.) Here’s a copy of the official Texas version being sold on Etsy; here is the King James version: there are some significant differences between the two.
We have had a number of resignations from the House of Representatives in the past ten days: Democrat Eric Swalwell (CA-14) departed in the wake of multiple sexual assault allegations; Republican Tony Gonzales (TX-23) also resigned amid an ethics probe into sexual relationships with two staffers, one of whom took her own life. Just yesterday, Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL-20), accused of misappropriating $5 million in campaign funds, resigned 20 minutes ahead of an expulsion vote she was expected to lose. The one we didn’t get? Republican Cory Mills (FL-07), accused of both financial crimes and of criminal harassment of women: among others moving for his expulsion are GOP colleagues Nancy Mace (SC-01) and Lauren Boebert (CO-04).
Responding to President Donald Trump’s demand that Republican governors redistrict to protect the slim GOP Congressional majority ahead of the 2026 midterms, on Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a redistricting initiative that could potentially create 4 additional Democratic seats. This brings the number of states that have redistricted to 7; three other states have approved plans, Florida is working on one, and four additional states may be subject to court rulings that reverse redistricting. Virginians were not overwhelmingly happy about this, and Democrats threw a lot of money and ad buys into the effort. Nationally, redistricting has more or less been fought to a draw; at the same time, injected instability into all House races. At present, the initiative has been blocked from taking effect by a circuit court judge because it runs counter to a state Constitutional amendment passed in 2019 that established a bipartisan commission process.

Your hosts:

Photo credit: Mehaniq/Shutterstock

News focus:

Here is a short biography of Kashyap “Kash” Pramod Vinod Patel, Director of the Federal Bureau of investigation.
Late last week, The Atlantic published a blockbuster story, based on anonymous internal sources, that FBI Director Kash Patel is plagued by managerial and ethical incompetence, compounded by a serious drinking problem. Patel has filed a defamation suit against the magazine for $250 million. The Atlantic stands by its reporting; experts say that there is a high likelihood that the suit will fail.
Here is a short history of the origins of the FBI, how it has responded to—and shaped—the history of the United States.
Patel was an unusual, and many would say unqualified, choice as Director. Despite that, his appointment passed the Senate on a 51-49 vote on February 20, 2025, with two Republicans—Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski—voting no. Patel replaced Christopher Wray, who had an extensive history in federal law enforcement, two years before Wray’s ten-year term was up.
A former defense attorney and Trump staffer in the Department of Defense, Patel was working as a podcaster prior to his appointment. His show, Kash’s Corner, existed mostly to defend Donald Trump from the myriad charges filed after he left office in January, 2020 and to promote conspiracy theories featuring the Biden family.
As FBI Director, Patel first came under fire for his apparent mishandling of the Charlie Kirk assassination in September, 2025. Numerous sources within the Bureau also report that Patel has severely damaged what was once the top law enforcement agency in the world.
A recent profile of Patel emphasizes how he has put the Bureau at the service of Trump’s retribution campaign.
Patel is a huge hockey fan, and a weekend player. In late February, he took a taxpayer-funded jet to Italy to attend the Olympic men’s hockey final and was filmed partying with the team after they won the gold medal. This was during a period when the search for Savannah Guthrie’s kidnapped mother, Nancy, was intensifying.
Patel lives and is registered to vote in Las Vegas, in a house owned by a GOP megadonor Michael J. Muldoon, who made a fortune from timeshares and has been investigated for shady practices.
Patel has also been criticized for putting government assets at the service of his girlfriend, a minor country music singer and Christian influencer named Alexis Wilkins, and has used an FBI jet to visit her on the weekends. Wilkins has also inserted herself in the MAGA wars, asserting (without evidence) that podcaster Candace Owens and retired General Michael Flynn are Russian assets. In the last 24 hours, the New York Times has reported that the FBI launched an investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, the Times reporter who broke that story, for allegedly stalking Wilkins.
This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee launched an investigation of Patel as a potential security risk. Here’s the letter sent to Patel on Tuesday.
You can read the FBI Ethics guide here; one pertinent passage is in section 2.3: “The FBI expects its employees to behave in such a way that their activities both on and off duty will not discredit either themselves or the Bureau.”

What we want to go viral:

Neil recommends that you read Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book about the influx of foreign money into London and how it tore apart one family, London Falling:

A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (Doubleday, 2026), a real-life murder mystery, it is as good—or maybe better!—than Keefe’s previous books, and features a teenager who created a fantasy life as the son of a Russian oligarch. Coincidentally, Claire is reading it too and thinks it is boss.

Claire wants you to read, or better yet, listen to, Lena Dunham’s Famesick: A Memoir (Random House, 2026): it’s about trauma, turning trauma into art, being famous at an impossibly young age, becoming ill, addiction (and recovery) and learning to navigate a world in which being rich and brilliant doesn’t provide any clear path to being happy.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into the live video! This slightly edited version of show begins with Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, which won a resounding victory in Sunday’s national elections in Hungary, and will become Prime Minister with a more than 2/3 majority—enough to allow him to return that nation to liberal democratic governance.

I brought in my friend and New School for Social Research colleague Julia Sonnevend, who is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications and Co-Director of the Center for the American Experience, to talk to us about the significance of Magyar’s victory in the erosion of what has been a global populist movement. Born, raised and educated in Hungary, Sonnevend is a longstanding observer of Central European politics. She is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton, 2024), named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, and Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event; and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (Oxford, 2016.) Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, BBC Newshour, The Times Literary Supplement, Teen Vogue, Times Higher Education, and Bloomberg News.

You can listen to an earlier conversation about Charmhere. Today’s theme is The News Tonight by Shimmer.

Two peas in a pod: President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, November 7, 2025. Photo credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons.

Learn more about this turning point for Hungary and the future of democracy in the United States:

Luke Johnson, “Too Big to Rig: Hungary’s lessons for the U.S. midterms,” Public Sphere, April 13, 2026.
Michelle Goldberg, “What Orban’s Defeat Means for the Rest of the World,” New York Times, April 13, 2026.
Kellen Browning and Shane Goldmacher “MAGA Absorbs the Loss of Orban, a Kindred Spirit to Trump’s Movement,” New York Times, April 13, 2026.
Michael Birnbaum, “Orban’s defeat offers warning signs for Trump allies,” April 13, 2026.
Julia Sonnevend, “Viktor Orbán’s loss in Hungary shows how a strongman can be defeated,” MS NOW, April 13, 2026.
Editorial Board, “Hungarians Oust Viktor Orbán:The Putin-Trump ally loses in a landslide as statist policies fail,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2026.
Paul Hockenos, “Orbán Is a Loser: Hungary shows how to beat an autocrat at the ballot box,” The Nation, April 13, 2026.
Anne Applebaum, “Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable: If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2026.
Lydia Polgreen, “It’s Not Trump. It’s America,” The New York Times, March 26, 2026.
Jamelle Bouie, “A Minor Strongman, Some Conservative Populists and Tucker Carlson Went to a Conference,” May 24, 2022.

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber—or converting your free subscription to paid!

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We begin with a 2020 clip, in which Paula White-Caine, President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor and current Director of the White House Faith Office, explains how the Holy Spirit works through her.

Today’s theme is Joyful Morning by Cast of Characters.

Pastor Paula White-Cain speaks at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas, June 11, 2021. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

On Monday in a Truth Social post, Donald Trump threatened Iran with annihilation. It was a shocking development and roundly rebuked—not just by Democrats and a few Republicans, but by Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Leo XIV himself. “The threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified,” Cooley said. The Pope had already said in his Palm Sunday homily that the Lord “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” On Easter, he condemned the "great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day," and on the following day, called Trump’s demented Easter post “truly unacceptable.” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby retaliated by summoning Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, and appearing to threaten the Vatican with a military reprisal.
In the category of “even when Democrats lose, they win,” voters in GA-14 went to the polls on Tuesday to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump-backed Republican Clay Fuller won with 54% of the vote—normally not a squeaker, unless you consider the nine-point shift to Democrat Shawn Harris since he last ran in 2024, when it was a Trump +37 district. Republicans spent $1.5 million on a seat that is normally a gimme. Harris spent a similar sum, but has about $750 thousand cash on hand to try again in the fall.
In other election news, Wisconsin Democrats have snagged another State Supreme Court seat in a cakewalk. Chris Taylor’s 17-point victory gives liberals a solid 5-2 majority on the court, but part of the story is that the GOP basically waved the white flag, spending less than $1 million on a race that in the past has sucked down as much as $100 million. Then, there is Waukesha County: 86% white, wealthy and a traditional Republican bastion outside Milwaukee that Trump won by 20 points in 2024. But in a stunning reversal, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben slipped past incumbent Waukesha mayor Scott Allen with 51.2% of the vote.
Pam Bondi was subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 14 to testify about the Epstein case, but since she is no longer Attorney General Barbie, the Department of Justice has notified the Committee that she won’t be coming. That isn’t how Congressional subpoenas work: the House Oversight Committee, including some Republicans, say she still has to show up. Committee chair James Comer (KY-01) says he doesn’t know how to withdraw a subpoena; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says it’s Comer’s problem, not his.

Your hosts:

In what has become an iconic image, faith leaders (including Paula White, far right) pray over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, on March 19, 2025. Photo credit: Molly Riley/The White House/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: What Pastor Paula White’s relationship with Donald Trump teaches us about white Christian nationalism

WE begin by noting the extent to which the illegal war on Iran has been framed by the Trump administration as a Christian Crusade. On Easter Monday, for example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth compared the downed pilot rescued in Iran by special forces on Sunday to Jesus Christ.
The establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits a national religion. However, Project 2025 promoted the strengthening of Christianity and Biblical principles across the federal government and throughout civic life, and that is what we have seen in the Trump administration’s turn to Protestant extremism. Commonly called Christian nationalism, this religious activism is both familiar and unfamiliar.
The first President to have a spiritual advisor was Dwight Eisenhower: that was Billy Graham, who had relationships with 13 presidents, from Harry S Truman to Barack Obama.
However, the dominant theme is Protestantism. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960: voters were concerned about his Catholic faith. On September 12, 1960, Kennedy gave a speech to a group of Protestant pastors in Houston saying that he believed absolutely in the separation of Church and state, and also opposed religious discrimination. He was “not the Catholic candidate for president” but “the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”
Bill Clinton had a number of pastors in Little Rock, but following the Monica Lewinsky scandal, put together a group of ministers to counsel him.
President George W. Bush was the first president to establish an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. It was maintained by Barack Obama, who was forced to sever ties with his own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for Wright’s strong testimony about American racism and his harsh criticisms of the United States government.
The nation first met Paula White in 2017, when she delivered the invocation at the inauguration as the first female clergy member to speak at that ceremony. In 2025, White appeared on PBS’s Frontline to discuss a relationship with Donald Trump that goes back 20 years.
White, who was born again in 1984 and launched her first ministry in the 1990s, preaches the “prosperity gospel.” She is controversial because of that, and because of her gender. Here is a short historical account of her rise in the ministry, her three marriages, and investigations into her ministries. She is currently married to Jonathan Caine, of the rock band Journey, who played the iconic opening bars of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
White has been criticized for her political involvement and what some call a “faith-based ponzi scheme:” she has been investigated for diverting tithed funds and profits from the sale of religious items into her own pockets, and those of family members.
White is also known to practice glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a practice of Pentecostals and charismatic Christianssaid to be a gift of the Holy Spirit. Here is a video of Caine from January 5, 2021, in which she calls upon angels from Africa: she spoke at Trump’s January 6 “Save America” rally the following day, which preceded an attack on the Capitol that highlighted white Christian nationalist support for Trump.
In 2016, White was one of 25 evangelical Protestant pastors, televangelists, and lay Christians assembled as an advisory board to the Trump campaign and charged with outreach to the Christian evangelical community. The Board, which continued into Trump’s first term, was largely White—four members were Black—and male. The initial Board had only two women; in 2017, when A.R. Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn resigned over the Unite the Right rally, Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece and the only member of the family who supports Trump, joined the Board.
In 2019, White joined the Trump administration to run the Faith and Opportunity office in the administration.
When he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump createdthe White House Faith Office and put White in charge of it.
During Holy Week this year, White also appeared on Lara Trump’s Fox News show to vouch for Donald Trump’s faith, and his upbringing in the church, claiming that he attended Sunday and Saturday school “at least three times a week.” This has been questioned by numerous people, who have pointed out that Saturday and Sunday are two days, not three, and that Trump was raised Presbyterian, a faith that does not have Saturday school.

What we want to go viral:

Neil’s viral pick this week is historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (Liveright: September, 2026). You can only pre-order it now, but this recent history of the Instagram-able world of mass culture Christianity is not to be missed. Through blogging, crafting, reading, and consuming, White Christian women created their own gospel of prosperity.
Claire wants you to read public historian John Garrison Marks’s “America’s 250th Is Repeating a Familiar Mistake” (TIME, April 7, 2026), about a history of erasure and struggle over slave-owning by the founders—and George Washington, in particular. Marks has a book coming out this week on the fight over Washington’s memory, but this essay focuses on the efforts of African American historians like W.E.B. DuBois to ensure that the truth about our nation’s founding was not lost.

Short takes:

"We are shocked—shocked, I tell you! “On Wednesday, the right descended into a feeding frenzy over unsubstantiated rumors of a Justice Department investigation into whether certain conservative commentators were being paid by foreign sources to argue for and against the war,” Will Sommer writes at The Bulwark. “It’s worth noting early that, while there is a rich and well-documented history of conservative influencers being on the dole, there’s so far no evidence of that happening in this particular instance.” In fact, the accusations have come from inside the influencer community itself. “But the enthusiasm for a Justice Department probe is notable not just because it suggests influencers believe the MAGA civil war now requires federal intervention,” Sommer continues. “It sticks out because many of these influencers calling for a DOJ probe have taken foreign money themselves.” (April 9, 2026)
The Trump administration is trying to rid itself of federal buildings in downtown Washington D.C., presumably so they can never again be filled with federal workers. But the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, Judith Shulevitz writes at The Atlantic, is also a landmark filled with priceless art, painted directly onto the walls. “Ben Shahn and Philip Guston, who went on to join the ranks of the most-renowned American artists of the 20th century, won plum commissions on the ground floor, as did Seymour Fogel, a respected muralist,” Shulevitz reports. “According to sworn testimony, the Trump administration is already soliciting bids to tear down the Cohen and three other federal buildings, bypassing the usual reviews. Meanwhile, the regulations meant to protect historic buildings are being weakened.” Remember, he did it to Bonwits in New York. (April 9, 2026)
Why did Melania Trump have a surprise press conference yesterday, to disassociate herself from Jeffrey Epstein—and the husband she does not appear to have lived with for ten years? “‘I have never been friends with Jeffrey Epstein,’ she said to reporters gathered at the White House,” Diana Nerozzi and Hailey Fuchs report at POLITICO. “She also denied any friendly relations with Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. She said she had ‘casual’ email correspondence with Maxwell and suggested any association was a result of their inhabiting the same New York social scene.” FLOTUS did not respond to questions from stunned reporters, and there was no new knowledge—including the fact that, after 30 years of living in the United States, her English is still terrible. (April 9, 2026)

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We begin with a clip from November 27, 2025, in which a reporter on Air Force asks President Donald J. Trump who—other than himself—would be a good Republican nominee in 2028.

Vice President JD Vance (left) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, February 28, 2025. Image credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

Last weekend was No Kings Part Three: Minneapolis and St. Paul saw a particularly robust turnout. The crowd was graced by special appearances from Jane Fonda and Joan Baez; Bruce Springsteen also sang his anthem to the city. Nationally, as 8 million citizens took part, with an enhanced number of young people who oppose Trump’s war on Iran. In Manhattan, the procession stretched for over a mile; in Washington D.C., the parade route went past Stephen Miller’s house as the crowd called for his removal. The National Republican Campaign Committee derided the events as “Hate America Rallies;” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson referred to them as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions” created by “leftist funding networks.”
In the department of “We didn’t see this one coming,” Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon was outed by the Daily Mail on Tuesday as a visitor to a cross-dressing fetish website devoted to “bimbofication.” You can read the allegations as printed by the New York Post here; a spokesperson for Noem says that “The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers at the time;” and President Donald Trump expressed sympathy for the family. Bryon Noem is not speaking to the press, but his neighbors in Castlewood, South Dakota have responded with generosity and kindness.
Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court has given the University of Pennsylvania 30 days to comply with the Trump administration’s demand for a list of Jewish faculty, staff and students. Penn is appealing the ruling, arguing that the university has an obligation to the privacy rights of its employees and does not maintain such lists. In fact, until the late 1960s Penn, and other universities did exactly that, and it was tied to antisemitic quotas and discriminatory housing practices on campus.
A Colorado law banning gay conversion therapy has been struck down by the Supreme Court, with all justices but Ketanji Brown Jackson voting in the affirmative. Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist, said the law would prevent her from “consensual conversations” with people who believe that their feelings conflict with their religious values. The majority agreed that the law was not neutral because it did not ban speech that affirmed sexual or gender identity. Jackson’s dissent argued that states have the right to regulate medical treatment; she read her opinion from the bench, a signal about how strongly she felt about it. The ruling vacates existing or pending laws in 27 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media. Her most recent book is Political Junkies:From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Vance (left) and Rubio chat up U.S. athletes at the 2026 Olympics in Milan, Italy. Photo credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons

News focus:

Let’s start with the annual poll of young conservatives at CPAC last month: Vice President JD Vance won, with 53% (down from 61% last year), but Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in single digits last year, rose to 35%. Other candidates—including re-runs Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Tulsi Gabbard—were in the very low single digits. Rubio won “favorite Cabinet member,” while Ken Paxton outscored John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary by 46 points. Except for Trump in 2024, the straw poll has never accurately predicted who will be president: Ron Paul won it in 2010 and 2011, Mitt Romney won it repeatedly, and Ted Cruz won it in 2016.
Created by the American Conservative Union, CPAC is a festival of conservatism, largely attended by young activists. Founded in 1974, it is credited with launching the New Right and setting Ronald Reagan on a path to the 1976 GOP nomination.
In 2010, when Fox News host Glenn Beck gave the keynote, CPAC also became the place where right wing media influencers merged with the GOP.
In 2014, former Bush advisor Matt Schlapp was elected head of the ACU. He and his wife Mercedes are canny entrepreneurs: they have turned CPAC into a franchise, with national and international satellite conferences. CPAC sustains and mirrors the strength of the MAGA right within the GOP. For example, in 2017, after Trump won the election, his political strategist, Steve Bannon, was embraced after having been shunned for years.
CPAC is also famous for the partying and networking. It also has a vexed relationship with queerness: in 2010, evangelicals protested the inclusion of gay Republican groups and lost. In 2015, Log Cabin Republicans was barred from the event, but has since returned; and in 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos was cancelled because of remarks he made about having sex with a priest while underage. That said, as at many GOP gatherings, the rumor mill insists that Grindr is super-busy when CPAC is in town.
As importantly, Schlapp himself seems to be at least bisexual: he has repeatedly been accused of making advances to men. In 2022, a staffer for Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker accused Schlapp of sexual assault; the accuser settled in 2024. Then, in 2025, he was accused of assaulting another man in a Virginia bar.
So, it’s a sign of how powerful Schlapp is in conservatism that he remains in command of CPAC, and how critical the organization is in mobilizing the base.
This leads us back to Vance, who was chosen as Trump’s running mate in part because he was young and had working class origins; in 2024, right wing media also tried to sell him as sexy and handsome. According to Pew Research, however, Vance’s approval rating has gone south. Only 38% of voters view him positively, while 52% view him negatively. Marco Rubio, at 34/44 is polling below RFK Jr. (44/48) in favorability and above him in unfavorability.
That said, if we just look at Republican voters, Vance has a 75% favorability, RFK Jr. 74%, and Rubio 64%. Rubio also has the highest numbers in the cabinet, except for Pete Hegseth, when it comes to being unknown to voters in either party. The window for announcing a presidential campaign is about two years, which means we should look at these numbers again after the midterms.
As Vice President, Vance is positioned well in a bad field: while Trump has not endorsed a successor, he seems to be pushing a Vance-Rubio ticket.
Vance has been a shapeshifter, but may be trapped this time. He went from being a Trump critic to a Trump supporter to become Vice President. If Trump is repudiated in the midterms, will he be forced to decide whether to distance from Trump (which will be difficult, as he has no real record of his own) or embrace a MAGA agenda (which only 27% of voters endorse) that has failed to deliver? That could open the door for Rubio—or someone else.
And, oh yes! Goodbye, Pam Bondi! Here’s the profile of Bondi that Neil references.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Faith Wilson, “The Quiet Rise of Employee Surveillance” (March 31, 2026) because there is no federal law that regulates or controls the collection of employee data.
Claire wants you to take a deep dive into a new report by Sophie Culpepper at Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, “How a Minnesota mom and minister `blew past’ her screen time limits when ICE came to her city” (March 26, 2026). Culpepper asks: if only 16% of Americans pay for news, how are they getting it?

Short takes:

Local and state officials are fighting the expansion of ICE incarceration facilities through warehouse conversion by denying these facilities access to utilities—water, power, and sewage—they need to make a husk of a building into a prison. “CE has claimed it conducted “thorough due diligence” to ensure that surrounding communities were equipped to provide the warehouses with necessary utilities and infrastructure,” Judd Legum writes at Popular Information. “In at least three states, however, officials say that the new ICE facilities will overwhelm local water and sewage infrastructure or damage the local environment.” Pennsylvania, Georgia and Utah have all taken this tack, Utah as recently as this month. “Salt Lake City is facing a water crisis. The region received very little snow over the winter and faced record-breaking high temperatures in March, causing the city to issue a stage 2 drought advisory the week before voting to limit water use by new developments.” (April 2, 2026)
The libertarian conservative tech class claims to be all about helping young (white) men: at the same time, numerous cynical projects are designed to exploit them. “Sports bettors are overwhelmingly male. Compulsive sports betters are almost universally male,” Jill Filipovich reminds us on her Substack, relaunched as Throughline. The shift to phone-based gambling has vitiated live communities organized around fandom and betting, making young men more isolated and more lonely while also picking their pockets. “I see virtually no ads for sports betting platforms on my social media pages. My husband, who like me is not a gambler nor much of a sports-watcher, gets them with regularity. And when you watch ads for sports betting, they’re strongly male-coded. They know the audience they’re trying to bring in, and it’s young men — and particularly less-educated young men, who may not be as savvy or sophisticated, and who may be looking for an easy fix to their financial problems.” (April 2, 2026)
Are there more flimflams under the Trump administration, or is this just the same tune from a different band? Barbie enthusiasts from around the world arrived in Fort Lauderdale, FL for the “ultimate Barbie fan event,” only to find a sad little display of Barbie-themed junk swimming around in the Broward County Convention Center. “Tickets started at $149 for adult admission and went up to $449,” Madison Malone Kircher writes at The New York Times. “Tara Brooks, a data analyst who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., spent about $249 on a ‘pink pass,’ a higher-tier ticket that included a ‘special swag bag.’” It wasn’t so special. “She received a bottle of Barbie-branded hand sanitizer” that Brooks said is available at The Dollar Store. (March 30, 2026)

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Today’s episode begins with a February 6, 2026 press gaggle on Air Force One, in which Donald Trump discusses the lawsuit he filed against the Internal Revenue Service. It is unclear what he means when he says that the United States government gives $40 billion a year to charity: we can’t document that.

Our theme for this episode is LFG by Divisioner--you can find their work, and all the talented artists we feature on these episodes, on Soundstripe.

TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk delivers remarks during the memorial service for her husband Charlie in Glendale, Arizona on September 21, 2025. Recently, Kirk threatened to sue three different people for falsely implicating her in her husband, Charlie Kirk’s, murder. Photo credit: Daniel Torok/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

On Monday, a new front opened in the redistricting and election security wars: Riverside, CA County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, seized more than 650,000 votes cast in California’s Prop 50 special election. Bianco claims that the final vote tally did not match the number of ballots cast. Both Republican and Democratic officials say this charge is baseless; however, it matches the Trump administration’s seizure of 2020 presidential election ballots last February in Fulton County, Georgia.
Florida is the gift that keeps on giving—to Democrats. This week, first-time candidate, Democrat Emily Gregory prevailed in a special election in HD-87. That’s Palm Beach County, and Gregory, a small business owner and military spouse won by 800 votes in a district that the previous Republican won by 19 points. She will now represent President Donald Trump in the Florida legislature. In West Tampa’s SD 14, another first-time candidate—union organizer, electrician and navy vet Brian Nathan—upset Republican State Representative Josie Tomkow by 408 votes; the previous Republican in that seat won by ten points. Meanwhile, former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn is running for Congress again—this time in Cape Coral’s ultra-MAGA Florida-19, formerly Byron Donald’s seat. According to the Cook Political Report, this is an R+14 district.
Last May, South Carolina Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews announced she would run against four-term incumbent Lindsay Graham, who beat his last challenger by 10 points. The last Democrat to represent South Carolina was Fritz Hollings, who was defeated by Jim DeMint in 2004. But Andrews just released a new ad on Instagram that points to how the Democrats are positioning candidates running against Donald Trump’s allies. We feature a controversial ad Andrews dropped on Instagram.

Your hosts:

Image credit: AndriiiKoval/Shutterstock

News focus: MAGA’s lawsuits

Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has had it up to her waterproof mascara with accusations that she arranged the murder of her late husband Charlie Kirk. Her attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist order to Collin Scott Campbell, the Maryland-based figure behind Project Constitution, which has also alleged that Kirk procured underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, and trafficked orphans from Romania. Influencers Candace Owens and Zach de Gregorio have received similar letters: all say that views they have expressed are their opinions, and fall under their right to free speech. The MAGA-sphere seems to be standing with Kirk, and directing most of its opprobrium to Candace Owens.
Lawsuits are a feature, not a bug, of MAGA Republicanism. There are so many lawsuits against, or instigated by, the Trump administration that the Lawfare blog created a litigation tracker. Universities, media outlets, and law firms have been in court almost non-stop, and it seems like when these institutions fight, they win.
Donald Trump has always employed lawsuits as a strategy: USA Today has counted 4,095 over three decades.
Since he was re-elected president, Trump has filed a number of personal lawsuits. He sued the Des Moines Register and its legendary pollster Ann Seltzer (ongoing) for fraud. He is seeking $15 billion from the New York Times and four of its journalists for reporting fraudulent business practices. He is suing the BBC for $10 billion, and the Wall Street Journal for another $10 billion. ABC/Disney settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million; as did Paramount/CBS, which some Democrats believe was basically a payoff for FCC approval of the Skydance merger. In January, Trump and his sons filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in compensation for his tax returns being leaked to the New York Times.
Let’s compare these lawsuits, which seem designed to extract payoffs and concessions from major corporations, to Prince Harry’s three lawsuits against British tabloids. In 2024, he was awarded about $300,000 in a phone-hacking suit against The Mirror Group. In early 2025, the Prince settled a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s English tabs in exchange for a “full apology” but no money; and he is currently suing The Daily Mail for “media intrusion.”
This strategy goes beyond Trump: Peter Thiel destroyed Gawker, a gossip website, in 2014 by financing a successful lawsuit against it.
In the ultimate tabloid event, Melania Trump threatened to sue journalist Michael Wolff, because he has tied her to Jeffrey Epstein, for $1 billion. In retaliation, he hit her with a SLAPP suit which, if it goes to court, would cause both Donald and Melania Trump to be deposed about their relationship with Epstein. Wolff has been chronicling the progress of this lawsuit on his Substack and podcast, and in the Daily Beast.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read and subscribe to LA Material, Los Angeles’s new neighborhood-by-neighborhood local paper. You don’t have to live in the City of Angels to find it interesting: it’s got stories that matter to any community that cares about art, culture and politics, as well as fascinating general interest stories like what actor Mickey Rourke left behind when he was evicted from his home. And I have to tell you: it looks a lot like it was built on a Substack platform, which is really exciting.
Claire wants you to watch Louis Theroux’s documentary, “Inside the Manosphere” (Dir. Adrian Choa: Netflix, 2026), which digs into the gamified world of right-wing male influencers, a number of whom are one or two degrees of separation from Donald Trump. As a film, as Theroux is filming them, their people film him filming them and turn the event into content. While the misogyny and reactionary politics are real, it’s all in service of making money by selling the dream of power, independence, and style to boys and men who are insecure and directionless. You can read more about the movie here.

Short takes:

A new investigative report from Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson at The New York Times explores how much the Trump family and its various imitators have profited from all that MAGA merch: the answer is over $300 million a year. “The vast economy of tchotchkes and trinkets has become a visceral proxy for the energy behind his political movement, with the products acting as billboards for membership in the club,” Hsu and Thompson write. “No other sitting president has tried to make money off of the office the way Mr. Trump has, according to several ethics watchdogs. For members of Congress and many federal employees, using public office for private gain is explicitly forbidden by their codes of conduct. There are no comparable rules for the president.” (March 27, 2026)
“America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective,” Thomas Chatterton Williams writes at The Atlantic. “From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.” Why do these powerful men “whose work is most profoundly shaping our collective reality” lack the desire or ability for introspection? Relying on a crude and reductive reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, they view conscience itself as“a sickness that emerges when repressive social norms cause us to turn our aggressive instincts inward—leading to crippling guilt and obsessive self-reproach—rather than directing them outward,” Williams explains. “In order to justify exerting their will and creating their own values, some readers reduce Nietzsche to a mantra: Act and then forget.” (March 27, 2026)
“In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio,” Rafael Carranza and Arizona Luminaria write at ProPublica. But their new investigative report shows that Maricopa County, Arizona, the poster child for anti-Latino racial profiling in the western United States, has not changed all that much. “When all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.” (March 26, 2026)

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Last week, The New York Times published an investigation into legendary labor organizer Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) and his decades of alleged criminal conduct. Women, including Dolores Huerta, a key ally, have revealed what was rumored, and well-known in the movement’s inner circle: that he was a serial sexual abuser. Chavez, along with Huerta and other allies, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. The NFWA later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez has had celebrations and spaces named for him, and President William Jefferson Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom on 1994.

Chavez’s accomplishments were historic, and like many organizers of the period, he was a charismatic leader. However, that gave him an extraordinary amount of power in the movement, which we now know he used to selfish and cruel ends. While Chavez’s mercurial temperament and marital infidelities were well-known, his sexual abuse of women and young girls was not, in part because those in the movement who knew helped to conceal it by not calling him to account. A second painful revelation is that one of his victims was Dolores Huerta. In support of the other victims, she revealed that Chavez, a friend and comrade, raped her twice.

I asked the University of Pittsburgh’s Eladio Bobadilla, to visit with Political Junkie on a Substack Live. A prize-winning historian, Bobadilla has a terrific new book coming out, Dangerous Migration: Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights (University of Illinois, 2025.)

Eladio and I applaud all of these women for making their stories available to us, and wanted to put it in the context of Chavez and Huerta’s achievements.

Cesar Chavez, guarded by two Chicano Brown Berets, speaks at Los Angeles peace rally, May 3, 1971. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons

Catch me if you can:

Image credit: Juice Flair/Shutterstock

If you are in the vicinity of Boulder, Colorado on 4:00 tomorrow (Wednesday, March 25), stroll on over to Macky Auditorium at the Center for Humanities and Arts. I will be doing a star turn as the Cox Family Process Speaker—and reflecting on the inspiration for this newsletter, my 2020 book Political Junkies. If you come, bring your copy—I’ll sign it.

What I’m watching:

Vladímír, a limited series on Netflix, based on a 2020 fictional sendup of academic life of the same name written by Julia May Jonas (which my friend Laura Kipnis says is better.) It’s a dark comedy starring Rachel Weisz and John Slattery as an aging power couple in the English Department of a liberal arts college that could be Bard. Or not.

It’s based on the novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas This pair has an “arrangement”—one that has, in the further past, landed Slattery (who also played a serial sexual harasser in Mad Men) in the beds of students. Empowered and inspired by #MeToo, those students have filed a mass grievance against him.

The show’s “so what?” attitude towards sex and power imbalances catapults us back in time (or sadly, maybe not), and is amplified by the arrival of a flirty, married tenure-track assistant professor. Vladímír (played by Leo Woodall, who you last saw in the movie Nuremberg) becomes the stuff of Weisz’s fantasies, propelling her towards an affair with a subordinate even as she navigates fallout from the sexual harassment suit. English actor Ellen Robertson (Mickey 17, Black Mirror) has a superb supporting role as an adult queer daughter trying to understand what all this chaos has to do with her own relationship issues.

Read a review here.

Short takes:

Expect Donald Trump’s 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence to portray a bunch Enlightenment atheists as devout Christian nationalists, Ja’han Jones warns at MS NOW. One member of the planning committee is “Eric Metaxas, the far-right media figure and promoter of election conspiracy theories who has touted his belief that Christians should ‘infiltrate’ government,” Jones writes. Celebratory events are expected to include “universal” favorites like a cage match on the White House Lawn, a drag race in the Streets of Washington D.C., and a religious revival on the National Mall. “One of the people apparently helping plan the programming is a self-described Christian nationalist named Sean Feucht, who has portrayed himself as an informal adviser of sorts to Trump officials. He has been a fixture alongside Scott Turner, secretary of Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.” Last year, Feucht was enlisted, and presumably paid, by the Trump administration to provide a “divine perspective” on California wildfire recovery. (March 20, 2026)
Does public pressure on federal immigration detention work? HSA says no, appearances say yes. “This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows,” ProPublica’s Mica Rosenberg and McKenzie Funk write about the Texas facility that became notorious for its poor treatment of children. “One 13-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edison was released from Dilley with his mom this week. During his 92-day detention, Edison had cried in video calls to his father back in Chicago, saying he felt like he was being treated like a criminal,” Rosenberg and Funk write. “Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning,” (ICE Barbie lost her job the previous Friday) “a guard came to their bunk room and told him and his mom to start packing their belongings. By that night, they were on a plane to Chicago to be reunited with Edison’s dad.” (March 20, 2026)
Katha Pollitt read Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir of having been drugged and serially shopped out for rape by her husband, and she wants to know why we care less about sexual assault when it is perpetrated by ordinary people. “In every social class, men tend to have power over the women in that social class and the ones below,” Pollitt writes in The Nation. “It’s not universal—some men are more interested in sexual coercion than others, some women are more vulnerable than others. But men who commit sex crimes mostly get away with it, and society mostly shames the woman.” And had Pelicot not had the courage to not just prosecute, but put her face on the crime, Pollitt points out, the 51 men who subscribed to a web site that facilitates spousal rape, would be free today to continue their crimes. (March 18, 2026)

Thank you Alison Moore, Mary Cuellar, Order is never Peace, Alison Holt-Kalish, and many others for tuning into the live video with Eladio Bobadilla! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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We begin with a deposition from Nathan Cavanaugh, a twenty-something DOGE staffer on a team tasked with reviewing NEH grants awarded by the Biden administration in 2024 and to be paid in 2025. Cavanaugh and others cancelled grants based on whether, in their judgement, they violated Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any initiative that forwarded diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Today’s theme is Billionaires by LNDÖ.

DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh. Image credit: screenshot by author

In the News:

After a machine recount and a manual recount, Boca Raton, Florida has its first Democratic mayor in 30 years. Andy Thomson defeated 70-year-old Republican incumbent Mike Liebelson by only five votes. Liebelson may challenge the results based on his skepticism about what he calls a “last minute dump” of 109 mail-in ballots. A third Republican in the race, Fran Nachlas, split the GOP vote, in a town only 27 miles south of Mar-A-Lago that went for Kamala Harris by less than a point in 2024.
Illinois Democrats are getting their business done, sending Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton on to the general election as the party’s nominee to replace Richard Durbin. Her election—which is likely would be historic, both for Illinois and the Senate: she would join Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) as the first cohort of three Black women Senators to serve concurrently.
Another big winner in Illinois? Governor J.B Pritzker, who was not on the ballot but financed and promoted Stratton. AIPAC was engaged in open and dark money spending in the state, and emerged with mixed results, going three for three. It underlines a recent trend for the pro-Israel lobbying group: while they still do quite well supporting party moderates, in some districts their support can be toxic.
MAGA drama! Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, accusing the administration’s of capitulating to Israel’s desire for war in Iran. Some Capitol Hill watchers describe Kent as groyper adjacent; a far-right conspiracy theorist, he was always a controversial pick for the job. Kent has amplified antisemitic MAGA influencers who blame the war on Israel, some linking Trump’s decision to Prime Minister Netenyahu’s February visit. But conspiracy theories have room to fester: there are no clear goals or exit plan for the conflict, and why the operation was launched remains a mystery.

Your hosts:

Are you always thinking that you would love to read a book we have talked about? Then:

Image credit: DCStockPhotography/Shutterstock

News focus:

Here is a running list of attacks that the Trump administration has made on funding for the humanities, including the cancellation of NEH grants made by the Biden administration.
Several initiatives converged in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to remake the arts and humanities to support a certain kind of patriotic narrative. As one of his first acts as President, Trump signed an Executive order called the “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” That same day, Trump created DOGE, also by Executive Order.
On March 27, Trump issued an EO called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which reflects a longstanding conservative commitment to events, political actors, and historical myths that valorize conquest, whiteness, and masculinity.
In 22 days, existing grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute for Museum and Library services were canceled by DOGE operatives assigned to those agencies. Trump wanted the Republican Congress to eliminate these agencies; in January, 2026, Congress instead reaffirmed this funding.
Trump said he would redirect the funding to a “National Garden of American Heroes,” which would open in Washington D.C. as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Little progress has been made: there appears to be no definite site, while Politico warned early in that there were not enough artists in the country to complete such a mammoth project in a year.
On May 1, 2025, the American Historical Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Modern Language Association sued the Trump administration to restore the grants. You can read an up-to-date summary of the case and the damage done here; here is a list of specific grants cancelled.
Posted depositions of DOGE staffers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox have become the face of MAGA contempt. A judge has ordered these videos taken down, but so far, no good. Neither appeared to know what they were doing: they could not define what DEI was, feed grants into ChatGPT to determine whether they were DEI projects. The DOGEys also admit that their work failed to balance the budget.
On March 6, 2026, the AHA, MLA, and ACLS filed a motion for summary judgement that would restore humanities funding.
How do we account for Cavanaugh and Fox’s contempt and hostility? Right-wing attacks on these fields that characterize them as inherently soft and pointless. Claire and Neil discuss the lack of men in college-level humanities courses, particularly those in STEM.
Cavanaugh and Fox seemed to have little knowledge of the damage they had participated in, conflating all the projects canceled with wasteful and fraudulent government spending. You can see Nate Cavanaugh’s deposition in a second suit against the NEH filed by the Authors’ Guild here.
Online commentary about these depositions has foregrounded the brand of masculinity Cavanaugh and Fox project: arrogant, diffident, and reckless. It points to the number of low-level Trump administration staffers steeped in the manosphere, as well as Elon Musk’s cult of masculinity.
Both men admitted that the terms they fed into ChatGPT were “gay,” “BIPOC,” “indigenous,” “Jewish”—because such work was inherently promoting minority viewpoints. But there are also a crosscutting themes put this incident in a larger culture wars context: the longstanding hostility of tech bros to diversity initiatives in their own industry, and reactionary intellectuals (for example, Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, recently interviewed by journalist Ross Douthat) who see work about national diversity as inherently discriminatory towards white people, men, and Christians.
Attempts to rebrand the Kennedy Center have also failed. After programming was gutted by artist cancellations, Director Ric Grenell (a diplomat—but gay!) has been fired, and it will be closed for two years.

What we want to go viral:

Neil is a great fan of dogs, and wants you to read John Seabrook’s “How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour,” (The New Yorker, March 16, 2026) Poodle crossbreeds are all the rage—and as it turns out, these cuddly floofs have a social history.
Claire’s political imagination was captured by Thomas Friedman’s “How Minnesota Beat Trump,” (New York Times, March 15, 2026) a hopeful set of observations about how the idea of neighborliness knitted a diverse community together to protect vulnerable people against an out-of-control federal policing campaign.

Short takes:

Today’s big political news: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed Graham Platner, who is running neck-and-neck with Governor Janet Mills for the right to knock off incumbent Maine Senator Susan Collins. “The intervention by Ms. Warren is her latest split with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, whose polling numbers have sunk as the Democratic base turns on him for his handling of government shutdown negotiations,” Tim Balk and Reid J. Epstein write at The New York Times, noting that Warren is a formidable fundraiser who is expanding her endorsement across the country. “Ms. Mills’s campaign responded to Ms. Warren’s endorsement by noting that the governor was backed by several other prominent Democratic governors, including Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Maura Healey of Massachusetts.” (March 19, 2026)
Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership is backing Brandon Herrera, who is the proud owner of a copy of Mein Kampf and denies that Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved people, in TX-23. “Even without House leaders’ backing,Herrera emerged two weeks ago as the party’s de facto nominee after Rep. Tony Gonzales exited a Republican primary runoff with him in response to allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide,” Kadia Goba

and Teo Armus report at The Washington Post. “Several of Herrera’s videos show him reenacting historical assassinations, including testing the type of guns that killed John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln or were used in various historical wars.” Herrera has also re-enacted the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 19, 2026)

George Washington, meet the manosphere—AI George, that is, a bot created by conservative media tycoon Glenn Beck. “The founding era’s premier beefcake is uniquely adaptable to an alpha aesthetic. He was famous for his bearing—his height, musculature, and command,” presidential historian Alexis Coe explains at Vanity Fair, although not his teeth, which Beck’s programmers have repaired. They have also repaired Washington’s ideology to match the MAGA present. “AI Washington can be made to bless positions that the real Washington spent years warning against. His early presidency was dominated by the question of how a fragile republic survived infancy, and he made a call: profit, not war,” Coe writes. Yet, in Beck’s hands, Washington is “a non-interventionist turned Iran hawk, a deist recast as an evangelical, a man who dreaded partisanship now a guest on a culture warrior’s podcast.” (March 18, 2026)

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We begin with a clip from the 2016 campaign trail in which presidential candidate Donald Trump discusses a Black supporter and invites rally-goers to “look at my African American.” At this point in MAGA history, influencer Candace Owens still identified as a liberal. By late 2017, she had transitioned to a conservative identity and become a leading voice in the MAGA movement.

And you will want to listen from the beginning for a special announcement from Neil!

Candace Owens speaking with the 2023 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

In the News:

This week, prices on the global crude oil market cracked $120 a barrel, an almost 90% increase since Donald Trump started a war on Iran. This is a shock to the global economy. At United States, gasoline pumps, prices have risen an average of .27 a gallon with states like California, Florida and Pennsylvania seeing much higher prices. Trump’s reassurances that U.S. oil independence will shield American consumers from higher prices are false. Because it is traded on a global market, the price of oil is the same regardless of where it is pumped. Americans should expect to see rising prices, from utility bills to food. And with 61% disapproval on Trump’s handling of the economy, Republicans may see their path to retaining a majority in the 2026 midterms extinguished.
Speaking of the economy: in Maine and Ohio, where Democrats have targeted two Republican incumbents, recent polling suggests MAGA economic policies hurt voters. In Maine, Democratic Governor Janet Mills is polling even with Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Democrat Graham Platner also polls only two points behind Collins—and it is Platner who seems to have momentum. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown polls two points ahead of Jon Husted—Husted, although uncharged, is also enmeshed in a major corruption case.
As Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gear up for their Republican primary runoff, a Democratic poll with a Trump +14 sample shows James Talarico in a statistical dead heat with either opponent. Are conditions ripe for Democrats to snatch a Texas Senate seat too?
It looks like frenemies Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, fixtures in the Democratic House leadership for decades, will fight one last battle. Pelosi has endorsed Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who testified about the January 6 coup against a former Hoyer aide, state delegate Adrian Boafo, in the primary for MD-05 Hoyer will vacate in 2027. Dunn lost a previous congressional bid in 2024, also endorsed by Pelosi; there are currently 22 other candidates vying for the Democratic line on November’s ballot.

Your hosts:

Turning Point USA founder and Director of Communications Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, then Director of Urban Engagement for the organization, during a visit to Texas State University in San Marcos On October 24, 2018. Photo credit: Carrington Tatum/Shutterstock

News focus: Who is Candace Owens, and why is she saying these terrible things about Erika Kirk?

Candace Owens, who is only 37 years old, began life as a Connecticut liberal in Stamford, CT. She became locally famous for filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that, as a senior in high school, she was not protected from racist bullying. The Stamford School Board settled the lawsuit for $37,500.
After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, Owens worked in journalism, finance, and marketing. She founded SocialAutopsy.com, a web site where users could report bullies, in 2016. However, Social Autopsy was identified by internet activists as an asset for doxxing and trolling. Owens then waged an aggressive campaign against two of these critics, feminist gamers targeted in GamerGate. Owens claimed that Zoe Quinn, a GamerGate victim, targeted her with doxxing and racist hate mail and a Quinn ally undermined Social Autopsy’s fundraising efforts. This moment marks Owens’s conversion to conservatism and conspiracism.
In 2017, Owens launched a site called “Red Pill Black,” marketed as a rebuttal to the Democratic party’s record on race. A frequent guest on Fox News, Owens described liberal policies as a long-term strategy to make Black Americans dependent, a perspective she elaborated on in a 2020 book, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.
Also in 2017, after Turning Point USA was exposed as a cauldron of racism. She became a Trump supporter, Owens went to work for Charlie Kirk. Trump noticed her in 2018 after she and Kanye West appeared on TMZ to defend the right of Nazis to hold public demonstrations and assert that remaining in slavery was a choice that African Americans made.
But Owens was also becoming increasingly antisemitic: she was forced to resign from TPUSA in 2019 after praising Adolf Hitler and defending Kanye West’s antisemitic statements.
Nevertheless, Owens joined The Daily Wire in 2021 as editors Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boering defined the issues of the current right-wing culture war politics, most prominently anti-vaccine, anti-trans, and anti-DEI campaigns. But much of this is also nested in Owens’s allegations of longstanding CIA and state-sponsored conspiracies to destroy America. Owens’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, which intensified after October 7, 2023, caused Shapiro to break with her: her podcast is now on YouTube.
Owens’s current campaign against TPUSA and its CEO, Erika Kirk, stems from new conspiracy theories that position Erika Kirk as an ambitious gold-digger who married Charlie to take control of the multi-million dollar nonprofit. Owens maintains that Kirk’s killer was in league with larger forces--the FBI, the Mossad, antifa, Egypt, France, Donald Trump or Kirk enemies within TPUSA itself—or that Charlie Kirk is still alive.
In 2025, Owens broke with Trump over his support for Israel. Currently, she is also currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over her claims that Brigitte Macron is a trans woman.
Owens sat down for a four hour meeting with Erika Kirk in December 2025 to iron out their differences. It didn’t work. Recently, Owens dropped a 6-episode YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie” in which she portrays Erika Kirk and her whole family as fraudulent.

What we want to go viral:

Neil can’t stop thinking about Heath W. Carter, “Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism,” (The Atlantic, March 9, 2026), and book Carter reviews, Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books, 2026). Weaving religious values into the nation’s policies and priorities is too often configured as backward looking and repressive, but the quest for a Christian America has, and still can be, one that attends to humanity and love.
Claire wants you to read Sarah Weinman, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime (Ecco, 2025), about Greta Rideout’s 1978 accusation that her husband had sexually assaulted her. This was a crime that could not even be charged in most states at the time, much less believed by many police and jurists—but because of Rideout’s courage, and the support of a feminist legal establishment, marital rape is now a crime in all fifty states.

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We begin this episode with a clip from a four-hour segment of testimony by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She appeared before the House Oversight Committee on February 26, 2026; former President Bill Clinton testified the following day.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Dec. 3, 2009. Image credit: Chad J. McNeeley/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

The big news this week is the Trump administration, minus Congressional authorization or an explanation, and in partnership with Israel, starting a war with Iran. You can see a timeline of the conflict here. Although the administration continues to insist that this will be a short war, there are no war goals or a timeline. Trump hints at regime change (hence the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in an Israeli air attack within the first 48 hours), as well as the Islamic Republic’s long history of sponsoring terrorism in the region. Trump also announced yesterday that he plans to be personally involved in choosing Khamenei’s replacement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and others are scrambling to get out of the region: there was no evacuation plan.
In related news, cracks in the MAGA coalition widen. On the extremely far right, influencer Laura Loomer has leapt to Trump’s defense, Groyper Nick Fuentes announced he will vote for Democrats in 2026 because Trump has broken all his promises, and antisemite Candace Owens blames the war on Israel. Hawks in the GOP have surfaced for a victory lap, while former Trump champions like Ann Coulter, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, who were high on the deportation supply, have crashed to earth. Trump’s response? MAGA is what he says it is.
War or no war, the midterms approach: on election day we saw incumbents in both parties struggling or knocked off. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper had a big win in North Carolina; incumbents on both sides of that state legislature’s aisle were pummeled. In Texas’s Senate contest, DemocraticState Representative James Talarico defeated Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, while incumbent John Cornyn faces a runoff with Attorney General Ken Paxton. Can Talarico win?
On Thursday, Trump fired ICE Barbie: could it be because Kristi Noem passed the buck to Trump for that $220 million ad campaign—about herself? She has been given a soft landing, a newly created job securing the Western Hemisphere, where she will be Marco Rubio’s problem.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies:From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

In an earlier moment of grace under fire, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary Clinton, now also a defeated presidential candidate, attend Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Photo credit: Cristian L. Ricardo/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Hill and Bill—Still?

After months of negotiating that included threats to jail them, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee last week.
The Clintons were treated by, and responded to, the committee, quite differently. Hillary Clinton seemed annoyed and exasperated as she repeatedly said, in response to a battery of repetitive and stupid questions, that she knew nothing about Jeffrey Epstein, and had never visited any of his homes. Republicans also quizzed Clinton about Pizzagate and UFOs.
Former President Bill Clinton was charming, polite and voluble; he said he saw nothing, and did nothing, wrong when in Epstein’s company. As a point of interest, even the Daily Caller reported Ghislaine Maxwell’s claim, under oath, that Clinton never received “a massage.”
But why is the GOP still obsessed with the Clintons? Conspiracy theories about them first emerged during the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bill—then governor of Arkansas—seemingly came out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination, then ejected a sitting Republican president. That campaign also featured the fracturing of the GOP by a serious populist candidate, Pat Buchanan, as well as rumors of serial infidelities.
In 1993, when White House counsel Vince Foster committed suicide, right-wing outlets promoted the story as a murder, paid for by the Clintons. Later, Bill Clinton was investigated and nearly impeached for real estate dealings and an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; subsequently, former campaign worker Juanita Broadrick accused him of raping her.
Many of these investigations were generated by right-wing actors who Hillary Clinton characterized in 1998 as a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” They were, in fact, targeted by operatives who promoted outlandish tales about them.
Conspiracies were also spread by Fox News, new media actors like Matt Drudge, as well as operatives and ordinary people using free social media platforms.
By 2008, Ron Paul’s libertarian bid for the presidency highlighted the extent to which conspiracy theories powered the right.
These falsehoods gathered new life during the 2016 campaign, when MAGA influencers promoted rumors that she was hiding a terrible illness and a story, spread by Fox News’s Sean Hannity, that DNC staffer Seth Richie had been murdered by his employers (Fox later retracted this story to settle a lawsuit.) As election day approached, and Wikileaks dumped a tranche of Clinton’s emails into the public domain, Clinton conspiracists noted that many of them mentioned “pizza.” This morphed into accusations that the Democratic party was running a pedophilia ring out of Washington’s Ping Pong Cosmic Pizza.
Only last May, Donald Trump—for no apparent reason—dredged up an old video from 1994 called The Clinton Chronicles that falsely alleges the Clintons had numerous political enemies murdered.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants to endorse a walk on a college campus to enjoy the beauty of these places, but also to take in the infectious joy of diverse young people engaged in a common enterprise at an exciting and life-changing moment.
Claire wants you to read Ellen Cushing, “The McDonald’s CEO’s Big Burger-Eating Mistake,” The Atlantic (March 5, 2026), in which fast-food CEO Chris Kempczinski makes an unconvincing stab at eating his own product—and gives us a window into what the world of food influencers expects.

Short takes:

Is Donald Trump about to lose the unreality shield that protects him from the consequences of wreaking havoc on a global economy? “It is unsettling how often Trump affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who in any case has little investment in the outcome,” Lydia Polgreen writes at The New York Times. “But that curious passivity reveals a darker truth. Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.” Not for much longer. (March 6, 2026)
At The Atlantic, Phillips Payson O’Brien argues that Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attitude that war is about relentless aggression may be degrading the United States’ military capacity by neglecting technology and strategy. “On multiple occasions after President Trump launched a massive air campaign against Iran this past weekend, retaliatory attacks by simply constructed Iranian drones have penetrated American defenses with serious results,” O’Brien writes. “In Bahrain, a lone Iranian drone penetrated the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which oversees 2.5 million square miles of the world’s oceans. The incoming weapon destroyed an AN/TPS-59 radar unit intended to provide 360-degree air surveillance for U.S. forces. In a moment, Iranian equipment that cost perhaps $30,000 devastated a piece of U.S. military hardware estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.” (March 5, 2026)
It’s spring break in Florida—which is having a measles outbreak! “Florida measles (rubeola) cases increased five-fold from January to February, making Florida third-highest in the nation for measles this year, behind South Carolina and Utah, according to state and federal health data,” Laura Cassells writes at The Florida Trident. “In this high-stakes setting, state lawmakers voted Tuesday to send the Florida Senate a bill that guts school-age vaccination requirements, including the MMR shots that prevent measles, by granting a “conscience” exemption for any reason. The bill does not suggest that vaccines are unsafe nor recommend against their use, but is part of a conservative, anti-regulation movement in Florida.” (March 5, 2026)

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Thank you Theresa Smalec, John Stoehr, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ryan James Girdusky!

At the end of last week, I had a chance to do a Substack live with Ryan Girdusky, a conservative political junkie who has many balls in the air at any given time. Ryan’s book with Harlan Hill, They’re Not Listening:How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution (Bombardier Books, 2020) was one of the first to explain to a mass audience how and why national populist movements, from MAGA to Orbán, swept North America and Europe. His Substack, the National Populist Newsletter, tracks this phenomenon from a conservative perspective, including important data and sources, whether you are a reader on the left or the right. If you are a podcast fan, try It’s A Numbers Game, where Ryan breaks down politics according to how he understands the data.

From left to right: Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R, GA-14), Tucker Carlson, President Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump on July 31, 2022, at the LIV golf Tournament, Trump National Golf Club, Bedminster,NJ. Photo credit: L.E.MORMILE/Shutterstock

Together, we talked about Jason Zengerle’s new book, Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind (Crooked Media Reads,2026). A biographical study of Carlson, who rose to national fame as a Fox News pundit in parallel to Donald Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate, it’s an excellent survey of the interconnections between radio, television, internet publishing as cable TV pushed Americans to extremes—and conservative journalism profited from their relationships to Donald Trump.

Short takes:

You know by now that Ayatollah Khamenei was killed by an Israeli missile on the first day of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. He was a pivotal figure in the calcification of Iran’s brutal totalitarianism, policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour writes at the New York Times. For almost 40 years, “this seemingly unqualified cleric who rose to the top almost by chance would become one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, confounding every American president since George H.W. Bush,” Sadjadpour writes. “He would at one point become the most powerful man in the Middle East, dominating five failing lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. This ambition and hubris also eventually led to his downfall. He came to govern with the hypervigilance and brutality of a man driven by the idea that much of his own society and the world’s greatest superpower sought to unseat him — which, in the end, it did.” (February 28, 2026)
Did Representative Jasmine Crockett (TX-30), on track to win the Democratic Senate primary in the Lone Star State, have Atlantic reporter Elaine Godfrey removed from her Lubbock rally last week? Crockett says no, Godfrey says yes. “After Crockett finished speaking, I attempted to join a closed-door press scrum with the congresswoman that was open to the other reporters at the rally,” Godfrey writes. “But I was turned away, so I walked over to interview people in the crowd. That’s when I heard my name from the same woman with the badge at the entrance—and hit ‘Record’ on my iPhone. She asked me to leave, and armed security guards escorted me from the property.” You can listen to the audio if you click the link: the Crockett campaign has yet to issue a full statement on what happened. (February 27, 2026)
Mary Walsh, a producer and 46-year veteran at CBS News, has left the building. Saying that the newsroom has been “told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum,” she explained; “I don’t know how to do that.” Jeremy Barr at The Guardian broke the story, reporting that “On a staff-wide editorial call on Friday morning, Walsh received a glowing tribute from the CBS News president, Tom Cibrowski, as did another departing veteran producer, Kate Rydell, according to a staffer who participated. The two producers also received an emotional sendoff at the network’s Washington bureau on Thursday.” The CBS News division is now helmed by conservative Bari Weiss, and numerous unnamed sources claim to fear for their jobs if they do not bend the news to her viewpoint. (February 27, 2026)

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We had a little trouble with the video upload on today’s podcast: it is inconsistent, so if you will find that annoying, please just listen!

We began our episode with a clip from this video, made by NBC journalist Savannah Guthrie, offering $1 million for the return of her mother. Eighty-four-year-old Nancy Guthrie was reported missing from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026, and is believed to have been abducted by persons unknown. The FBI has also offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to her recovery.

Today’s theme music is Mirror by New Alkemi$t.

FBI Director Kash Patel at the head of the table as the task force assigned to Nancy Guthrie’s abduction meets on February 10, 2026. Photo credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

With a hat tip to journalist Erin Reed, we have a report from Kansas that a bill passed over Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto has invalidated the drivers licenses of trans people across the state, and that licenses are to be surrendered by end of business today. Senate Bill 244 requires that all drivers’ licenses reflect “sex at birth:” there is no grace period for updating credentials, and anyone found driving without a license is subject to fines and imprisonment. The legislation also awards a bounty of $1,000 to anyone uncovering a transgender person using a bathroom that the state deems incorrect.
Donald Trump gave the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. It was 108 minutes long, soup to nuts, and the longest SOTU ever, breaking the record held by...Donald Trump last year at 100 minutes. You can read a transcript here, and highlights here. Nearly all of the people honored that night were men, including the gold medal Olympic US Ice Hockey team that partied with Kash Patel and laughed when the President dissed the gold medal women’s team. The exceptions were National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, killed near the White House last year, a little girl who was rescued at the Texas summer camp that suffered a deadly flood last year, and a woman who benefitted from IVF.
On Wednesday, Dr. Casey Means came before a Senate Committee charged with vetting her for the position of Surgeon General of the United States. Means is a wellness influencer and popular author who dropped out of her surgical residency, no longer has a license to practice medicine, and promotes the idea that individuals, not doctors, are the experts on their own bodies. Not surprisingly, she is an influential figure in the MAHA movement; when asked about vaccines, she refused to commit to any position. The United States does not currently have a surgeon general: that role has been temporarily filled by Stephanie Haridopolos, a Florida family practice physician who was appointed as the acting chief of staff and senior advisor to the U.S. Surgeon General. She is married to Representative Mike Haridopolos (R, FL-08). This may be the longest that post—created in 1879 and usually filled by a high-ranking physician in the military--has remained vacant.
Primary voting is underway in Texas for the Senate seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn. On the Democratic side, the polls are all over the place: YouGov sees Representative Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) in firm command of the race; Emerson gives James Talarico (HD-52) a 9-point lead. The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram poll gives Crockett a comfortable 8-point lead. On the Republican side, John Cornyn is clearly struggling, and ahead by only 2 points in a single poll, with Attorney General Ken Paxton leading the pack in most polls. Cornyn warns that if he is not nominated, and if the primary goes to a runoff (as it is likely to, with three strong candidates, none of whom Trump has endorsed) Democrats will win the seat.

Your hosts:

Image credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation

News focus: the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie

Last weekend, video of Kash Patel partying with the US Men’s gold medal ice hockey team in Milan once again pointed attention to his use of federal assets for personal travel and entertainment. But it also underlined what he was not doing: overseeing the search for Nancy Guthrie, now well into its fourth week.
The New York Times has summarized all information that can be known to the public, and a timeline of the investigation here.
It is unusual for Guthrie not to have been found by now. While murder only has a 61% clearance rate, kidnapping has upwards of a 90% clearance rate; for children, it is 92%, because children are usually snatched by relatives. Kidnappings targeting adults are rare; kidnapping elderly adults is even rarer.
The New York Post reports that the investigation is at a dead end; the FBI is currently engaged in genetic genealogy, using DNA in a glove found away from the crime scene that seems to match a glove worn by the person who disabled Guthrie’s Ring camera.
Tip lines are common in a case like this. They can produce useful leads—but they also draw kooks, and require manpower to run down plausible leads. The FBI eliminated 1500 positions in 2025; 18 of 53 Special Agents in Charge were forced out; around 1,000 FBI agents and personnel were reassigned to redacting the Epstein files; and nearly half of the agents across the country (or 23% of the remaining workforce) were reassigned to immigration enforcement.
Then, the search is complicated by misinformation, volunteers, amateur detectives stoked on CSI episodes, and conspiracy theorists. Influencers and content creators are also a problem: one innocent family who had a degree of separation from Nancy Guthrie was targeted by an internet mob.
Like many high-profile kidnappings, the Guthrie case has become a media spectacle.
Are the kidnappers particularly deft—or is the turmoil at the FBI at fault? Donald Trump appointed podcaster Dan Bongino (who recently resigned) as Associate Director and Kash Patel as Director. Neither one had any senior law enforcement or investigative experience; Patel was said last December to be virtually unable to function at an agency paralyzed by chaos and lack of leadership.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s take on the RFK Jr./Kid Rock workout video, “RFK Jr. and Kid Rock’s MAHA manosphere mashup,” MS NOW (February 22, 2026). There are so many questions! By “whole milk,” do they mean “raw milk”—you know, the kind with all kinds of wild bacteria? But most of all—where are the women on MAHA’s agenda, when Trump claimed he was going to forward the interests of women?
Claire wants you to read Charles Duhigg, “What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting,” The New Yorker (January 26, 2026), about the difference between community based activism and top-down political organizations.

13-year-old Gerson Lopéz Garcia wrote: “We are all stuck in rooms that can hold 12 people they won’t let us go out to the playgrounds and park and it’s very boring to do every day God touch the hearts of those at ICE let us out We are not criminals I want to go home.” Image obtained by ProPublica

Short takes:

One of the ways children process trauma is through art, but ICE isn’t having it. During room searches at Dilley Detention Center in Texas, “Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper,” McKenzie Funk and Mica Rosenberg report at ProPublica. “Guards have taken artwork, too, they said — even one child’s drawing of Bratz fashion dolls.” Detainees are also losing access to Gmail and other computer services, making it harder to contact attorneys. “The detainees and others interviewed for this story said these measures increased after the Jan. 22 arrival of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, sparked protests and congressional visits. They said the clampdown intensified as children and parents at Dilley wrote letters to share with the public and reporters and relatives recorded video calls with the detainees, including those published by ProPublica this month. The children’s stories, many told in their own words, fueled an outcry over the scope of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which the president had promised would focus on criminals.” (February 26, 2026)
Perhaps you have seen all the Republican influencers and politicians on X promoting the SAVE act, which would require a photo ID to vote in federal elections. “But upon closer inspection, something very strange is going on,” Mark Novicoff writes at the Atlantic. “For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true.” Well, bring it on! “Republicans’ current voter-ID push seems almost custom-designed to disenfranchise their own voters.” (February 26, 2026)
“Trump believes he is popular, strong and successful,” New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote after Tuesday’s State of the Union address. “The truth says otherwise. Trump is as unpopular as he’s ever been.” Bouie has a lot to say about Trump’s catalogue of missteps and policy pratfalls, but here’s the truth: “What Trump has, a little more than one year into his second term, is a failed presidency: one that has crashed on the rocks of his ambition to supplant constitutional government with that of his own will. Yes, Trump has done a tremendous amount of damage. And yes, he has degraded American democracy to the point where it is on life support. But he’s failed to make himself a dictator, and the public is poised to punish his party for his transgressions.” (February 25, 2026)

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Last week, the federal Health and Human Services Administration website posted a video of HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working out with Trump-aligned musician Kid Rock. Titled “Rock Out Work Out,” it featured head-banging music and two retirement-age men goofing around, getting in hot tubs, saunas and cold plunges, playing paddle ball, eating healthy food (we think—they were promoting raw milk which can also be really unhealthy), and using exercise machines in a home gym.

RFK Jr. was wearing jeans, his standard workout gear, and Kid Rock a pair of baggy black shorts. Both remove their shirts early in the video: the Secretary reveals his trademark testosterone-pumped torso, while the musician—well, looking like he has been living on Pop Tarts and Kool-Aid in one of ICE Barbie’s detention centers.

But before I lean into the body-shaming, let me just say this: there was virtually nothing in the video that would cause an average American to be inspired to re-up at the Y or join the local food co-op. In fact there was no actionable information at all, other than: men, grab a piece of exercise equipment and go!

Fortunately, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023) jumped into the fray almost right away from her perch at MS NOW.

“This stunt is more than just a disgusting distraction; it signals the dark reality of what MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — now unapologetically embraces, rather than what it might have been,” Petrzela writes. “Rather than promising a wholesome, if highly idealized, world in which individual fitness and diet choices offer all Americans who are willing to work for it a path to civic and moral salvation, this video makes clear that to Kid Rock, RFK Jr. and the administration behind them, fitness and food are primarily props for alpha-male preening, entirely disconnected from any policy that will actually make more Americans healthier and happier, in their bodies or their lives.”

We used the opportunity this strange video offered to dig a little deeper: what should an administration that really cares about Americans becoming healthier be doing? How and why has RFK Jr. misfired so badly on the common sense advice and policymaking that past presidents, Republican and Democratic, have promoted with grace and skill?

Short takes:

Trump administration Border flak Greg Bovino deliberately dressed like a Nazi storm trooper in Minneapolis, but he’s not the only one: federal social media seems to be positively dripping with messaging and inside jokes that reference the Third Reich. “So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?” Tom Nichols asks at The Atlantic. Looking back as far as the Reagan administration, Nichols argues that the tipping point was the Tea Party movement that arose in 2010, political organizing that advocated for a big tent on the right. Since then, the GOP “has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.” (February 23, 2026)
While RFK Jr. dithers in the gym and looks for new fringe theories to promote, actual scientists released a study that points in one direction: teenagers should not smoke pot. “As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug,” Rhitu Chatterjee writes at NPR. “Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.” The numbers go down dramatically as the age of first use goes up. “Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.” (February 21, 2026)
If you are conservative administration and you have lost the National Review—well, you have lost. Listing the string of disasters that have followed from Trump administration’s military attack on Minneapolis, NR writer Andrew McCarthy points out that “as any experienced law officer knows, a hostile environment calls for a soft touch. It must stress cultivation of relationships with local police; more numerous than the feds, they are also more sympathetic to immigration enforcement than are Democratic pols. Also required: understanding that what can be accomplished is severely limited by the assets available.” Instead, “Instead, Trump entrusted the Minneapolis mission to [Kristi] Noem, a sycophantic former South Dakota governor with presidential ambitions, whom he appointed to run the huge DHS bureaucracy despite her dearth of relevant experience.” (February 19, 2026)

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Some of you may have read last week’s post about how I ended up in the Epstein Files—and what I learned about the sex offenders world when I took a deeper dive into why I was there. Berlin-based journalist Luke Johnson did the same thing, and he invited me into a Substack Live to talk about what we found when we peeked into this strange and ugly world.

Our topics? Why universities held a special interest for him, and vice versa; how Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were similarly marginal in the world of elite academic credentials; and what keeps pushing Epstein back into the news.

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Everybody is talking about the Quad God, Ilia Malinen. But the figure skating performance I found most inspiring yesterday was the top pair, Ellie Kim and Danny O’Shea. This is their first Olympics: Ellie is 21, Danny is 35 (which is pushing the edge of the envelope for a figure skater) and they had to come in at least fourth for the United States to be positioned for the team gold medal. They absolutely nailed it, turning in the best performance of their lives, and their joy is inspiring.

In all its wisdom, YouTube has disabled playback on other platforms, but you can watch it here.

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The show begins with a clip from right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s November interview with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem after the NFL announced that Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny would perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. Our theme this week is Ride It Like You Mean It by Kristian Leo.

Image credit: AtlasStudio/Shutterstock

In the News:

“Melania” opened last weekend to mostly terrible reviews but a decent box office of $7 million, although in Australia 33 theaters reported sales of just over $32,000. But some are questioning how those tickets were sold. One report points to bulk sales and private screenings; other reports show blocks of seats supposedly sold that were not then filled with patrons. Moviegoers who did show up were overwhelmingly white, female and over 55.
Over the weekend, ProPublica reported that the two men who murdered Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and Minneapolis ICE observer, are Border Patrol Agent Jesus “Jesse” Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Both men are veteran agents normally based in South Texas. Ochoa is a gun enthusiast who owns over 25 weapons, and Gutierrez as a specialist in rapid-response high risk operations.
On Monday, following the raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office, President Donald Trump told reporters that Republicans should move to “nationalize” elections in at least 15 states. The presser is part of Trump’s attempt to revive 2020 election conspiracy theories prior to this year’s midterms.
It looks like former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify before Representative Jim Comer’s (R, KY-01) Oversight Committee after all: nine Democrats crossed the aisle to hold them in contempt, and the motion was on its way to the full House when the Clinton’s reversed their decision. Comer halted all investigations into Trump that were underway in the last Congress, and has completely dedicated himself to pursuing prominent Democrats.

Your hosts:

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News focus: The Super Bowl

The Super Bowl shows the trajectory of football as a popular sport. The first one was played on January 15, 1967: 61,000 people attended a game between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs, at the Los Angeles Coliseum which the Packers won 35-10.It was not sold out, but it was broadcast on two networks, CBS and NBC, with an audience of 50 million. It also marks the maturity of the AFL, which had been founded in 1960; the two leagues had just merged in 1966.
Traditions have grown up around the event: the Super Bowl party, wagering on the game, the halftime show, and the broadcast as a showcase for advertising agencies to display their talents and top clients. This Sunday, we will see an advertisement for Trump Accounts.
Another tradition, since the George W. Bush presidency, is the Super Bowl Sunday Presidential interview: it is so entrenched that Joe Biden’s decision not to do it in 2023 and 2024 was controversial. Donald Trump will do the interview although he will not attend the game as he did last year.
It’s the biggest television audience of the year, and predominantly North American: last year a record 127.7 million viewers tuned in. Here are the demographics of that audience.
It’s also a big day for domestic violence, and the most dangerous day of the year to be at home with an abusive partner.
At least one study by Brianna McNary, a former sociology major at Ohio State and now a sports reporter and news producer in Nashville, argues that because of the sport’s hyper-masculinity, the NFL is also more homophobic than any other men’s professional league. There have been only 16 players who have come out as gay or bi in NFL history, and all but one, Carl Nassib, were retired at the time. The NHL has none, there have been two in the NBA and three in MLB.
Football began as a segregated sport. Approximately 70% of players are Black, but only 20% of the broadcasters and 30% of the coaches are Black. Only three head coaches are Black. This year, out of 10 open head coaching jobs, only one new hire was not White: Robert Saleh, of the Tennessee Titans, who is of Lebanese descent.
So, let’s talk about Bad Bunny: born Benito Ocasio, he just won three Grammys (including album of the year for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, the first time a Spanish-language album to win that award, will performat halftime. It’s the first time that concert will be entirely in Spanish; the show also calls attention to how few Puerto Rican players there are in the NFL.
This is really getting under MAGA’s skin: there has been a lot of chatter about Bad Bunny not really being “American,” revealing a great deal about what it means to “belong” in Donald Trump’s America.
But it isn’t just that Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, or opposes the form immigration enforcement has taken in the past year, it’s that football is a hyoer-masculine sport and —although he identifies as a straight man—Bad Bunny is an LGBTQ+ ally and presents as gender-fluid.
Yet, almost 60% of NFL players approve of the league choosing Bad Bunny: two Seahawks players, QB Sam Darnold and defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence, have stated openly that they are fans.
Nevertheless, Turning Point USA has created counter-programming: a so-called “All American” halftime show headlined by Kid Rock will stream on YouTube and a handful of right-wing platforms.
The controversy is perhaps unsurprising, as some observe that the Super Bowl is a snapshot of the nation at a particular moment.

What we want to go viral:

A blackmailer threatens to release confidences intended to remain in the treatment room unless the ransom is paid. Neil is binging “Ransom Man,” a 2026 BBC podcast about a hack at a Finnish virtual psychotherapy network that combines a real-life thriller with the question: is Finlad really the happiest nation in the world?
What’s in that spandex? Claire wants you to read “Are ski jumpers enhancing their penises to fly further?” Philip Buckingham’s reporting about the skin-tight aerodynamic were that allow people to fly like birds at the Olympics. (The Athletic, February 6, 2026)

Short takes:

As The Washington Post implodes, its multi-billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has eliminated parts of the paper he believes perform poorly: one section that has bitten the dust is the Post’s legendary Book World. “But quality had nothing to do with the decision to cut book reviews, just as it had nothing to do with cuts in the paper’s sports and international coverage,” Adam Kirsch writes at The Atlantic. “Rather, the Post was making the same business decision that most other publications have made. People don’t want to read book reviews—at least, not enough people to make publishing them worthwhile. It’s a vicious circle. As people feel less of a need to keep up with new books, they stop reading reviews; publications respond by cutting books coverage, so readers don’t hear about new books; as a result, they buy fewer books, which makes publications think they’re not worth covering.” (February 6, 2026)
Analysts are starting to unpack the 14-point trouncing Republican Leigh Wambsganss took from Taylor Rehmet in Texas’s SD-09, a district the Democrats have not won since 1990. According to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, Wambsganss’s Moms for Liberty censorship agenda is a big part of why she lost. “Wambsganss, though, is a type of woman who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in the Bible Belt,” Marcotte writes: “the crazy church lady who wants total control over the lives of her neighbors, dictating what they read, who they socialize with, how they spend their free time and who they have sex with. While most Republicans in the MAGA era either support or at least tolerate giving miserable theocrats that much power, there are still some holdouts who believe in personal liberty and separation of church and state.” (February 6, 2026)
John McWhorter leads out Black History Month with a complex portrait of Lillian and Amanda Randolph, talented and highly-trained sisters who performed in film, radio, and television during decades when few parts for Black women did not put them in a maid’s uniform. In other words, most of the 20th century. “The early stages of both sisters’ careers — especially Amanda’s — are lost to us because of how expensive and cumbersome cameras and recording equipment were,” McWhorter writes in The New York Times. “In part as a result of that scarcity, we see the Randolph sisters’ work as occurring in a distant and perhaps peculiar past. But they didn’t feel it that way, and when we can get a peek at what they were doing, it can be fascinating to imagine ourselves in the lives they led.” (February 5, 2026)

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Our show begins with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, as he disputes the Trump administration’s account of Renée Good and Alex Petti’s murders in the Twin Cities and promises a thorough investigation.

ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue following the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, MN on January 24, 2026. Photo credit: Chad Davis/Wikimedia Commons

In the news:

There’s nothing that says investor jitters like the skyrocketing cost of gold—except perhaps the spike in silver prices. The New York Times reported this week that rising precious metal prices are partly due to Trump’s tariff policies and the uncertain effects of Europe’s pivot away from trade with the United States and towards India. But they are also an effect of China choking off silver exports: because of its capacity to conduct electricity, the metal is important to a number of technologies, and crucial to AI infrastructure.
On Wednesday, FBI agents searched an Atlanta election office and seized ballots at the center of Donald Trump’s false claim that he won Fulton County, Georgia—and the presidential election—in 2020. Trump is supported by allies on Georgia’s State Election Board, and claims to be acting at their request. Coincidentally, the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Atlanta was relieved of his duties just last week.
The war on trans people continues. This week, Utah moved to enacting a complete ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and the Trump administration has found San Jose State in violation of Title IX for allowing a trans woman to play on the women’s volleyball team between 2022 and 2024.
Amazon’s Melania documentary debuts in theaters across the nation on Friday, but all is not well. Most of the New York crew “requested that their names not be added to the film’s credits,” Eboni Boykin-Patterson reports at The Daily Beast. Director Brett Ratner, who has not made a film since he was accused of sexual assault in 2017, did it as a rush job, and was described by crew members as personally unclean, rude and generally a d*ck. Melania Trump, while boring, was nice, and revealed nothing about herself. Surprise. In other news: South Africa has canceled the film’s release and did not specify a reason; and Trump issued a proclamation on Truth Social that Melania is the greatest film ever made and will be required viewing in all history classes.

Your hosts:

Our news focus: The Trump administration’s Second Amendment problem

Jamelle Bouie speculated that Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s murders could be the Trump administration’s Gettysburg moment.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimed that Alex Pretti was shot after having “brandished” a gun at Border Patrol agents. There is consensus that is not true. Here is one analysis by Bellingcat, and another by the New York Times.
Here’s a full timeline of what led up to Pretti’s murder, and a historical account of the 100 year-old Border Patrol, and its routinely violent enforcement tactics. Since 2010, 364 people have been killed by Border Patrol officers, some across the border with Mexico.
The two agents who murdered Pretti have been placed on administrative leave.
Donald Trump has uncharacteristically distanced himself from the Pretti coverup, although ss of Wednesday, he continued to insist that Pretti should not have been carrying a weapon. Trump has relieved Greg Bovino of his role and sent Tom Homan, the so-called White House Border Czar to the Twin Cities to negotiate with local authorities. Homan is tasked with extracting concessions from Governor Tim Walz, including turning over Minnesota voter data to the Trump administration. Bovino has also lost access to his social media, and his future as a government employee is unclear.
Some Republicans have joined Democrats in criticizing Petti’s murder, and warned Trump that the extreme violence of immigration enforcement calls for an investigation. Democrats have responded to the outrages in the Twin Cities by threatening to shut down the government if Congress does not act to constrain ICE and the Border Patrol.
Vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse has also re-emerged as a lightning rod; the absent player? The Department of Justice.
Gun rights groups have split with the Trump administration over assertions that Pretti, a licensed gun owner, broke the law by bringing a gun and an extra magazine to last weekend’s demonstration. One of these organizations is the NRA, which did not defend cafeteria worker Philando Castile when he was shot by a police officer in the suburbs of St. Paul in 2016.
Here is a summary of Minnesota’s gun laws.
We also have statistics from Pew Research on gun ownership in the United States: about 40% of Americans live in a household with a gun, and 32% personally own one. Around 45% of Republicans and GOP leaning Republicans personally own a gun, as opposed to 20% of Democrats and Democratic Party-leaners. About 38% of White Americans own one and 24% of Black Americans; 40% of men, 25% of women; and 72% say they own a gun for personal protection. Only 20% of adults who live in cities own a gun, as opposed to 47% who live in rural areas and 30% in the suburbs. Whereas 71% of gun owners say they like having one in the home, only 30% of people who live with gun owners do; furthermore 40% of Democrats who do not own a gun can see themselves owning one in the future, compared to 52% of Republicans.
Another report says that as many as 30% of Democrats own guns, in part because of the volatile political climate.
Claire mentioned Bruce Springsteen’s new protest song, “The Streets of Minneapolis.”

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Devon Provo’s “L.A. is ripping up 1,600 acres of pavement — but is it too little, too late?” (Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2026), about the Southern California city planners who hope to mitigate climate change by replacing pavement with plants and reorienting citizens to investing in living infrastructure.
Claire is immersed in Katie Benner and Erica L. Green’s new book about TM Landry College Prep in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises (Metropolitan Books, 2026), and the story it tells about racism in education.

Short takes:

FBI Director “Keystone” Kash Patel announced the capture of former Olympic snowboarder-turned-alleged-cocaine-trafficker Ryan Wedding in Mexico by a special Hostage Rescue team on social media. Only problem? It was supposed to be a secret. “Mexican law prohibits foreign law enforcement officers from being physically present in operations on Mexican soil, let alone take part in raids and arrests,” Hafiz Rashid explains at The New Republic. “Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum scrambled to perform damage control, as foreign intervention in Mexico is politically toxic. She said that there was no U.S. involvement in the operation and that U.S. agents in Mexico are limited by law.” (January 29, 2026)
Remember how MAGA influencers freaked out about being “shadow banned” on social media? Well, unsurprisingly, according to Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic, TikTok might now be shilling for the Trump administration. “Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so,” Tiffany writes. “Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them. Still others noticed that they were unable to send the word Epstein in a direct message, a quirk so bizarre that it incited California Governor Gavin Newsom to repost a screenshot shared by an anonymous X account using the handle @intelligentpawg.” TikTok denies that any of this was intentional, and blames “the issues on a power outage at one of its data centers, which it said caused a “cascading” systems failure affecting all types of content (not just posts about Minnesota).” (January 28, 2026)
How’s this for an intriguing data set? As the numbers of women forced to bring pregnancies to term grows, the total number of abortions is also rising. “The increase in abortion numbers has been due not only to the herculean efforts of the provider community but also to the money that poured into clinics and support organizations immediately after Dobbs by Americans incensed by the loss of legal abortion,” David S. Cohen and Carol Joffe write at Ms. “‘Rage spending,’ as these donations became known, brought in millions of dollars needed for the huge costs associated with transporting thousands of people across state lines and paying for the abortion itself along with other costs.” But it is also true that forcing women to travel long distances simply makes the procedure less available to poor and working women. (January 21, 2026)

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In this emergency episode of the Political Junkie podcast, I am joined by Michael Kazin, a prize-winning scholar and Professor of History at Georgetown University. Michael is an expert in American social movements and politics; his most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), but he has also written extensively about the American peace movement, the Progressive and populist movements, and the New Left. You can see all of his work here.

The episode begins with a clip from a press conference on Sunday, January 25, 2026, in which Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar demands that ICE leave the state.

A protest on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, immediately following the murder of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. Photo credit: Alejandro Diaz Manrique/Shutterstock

Your host:

The topics Michael and I touched on in today’s podcast included:

The murders of two Twin Cities residents: Alex Pretti, a 38 year-old White man, and an ICU nurse, and Renee Good, a 37 year-old White woman and mother of three. Good was shot in the face, and then twice more, as she attempted to leave the scene of a protest, while Pretti was shot in the back multiple times as he was being held on the ground by officers.
The roots of the Minnesota’s resistance in its long progressive past, and the networks established during the George Floyd protests in 2020. The organizations involved in the anti-ICE protests were clearly prepared--and some of the violence we are seeing from federal officers may be evidence that the activists are effective.
A recent poll shows that almost 20% of registered Republicans now want to abolish ICE: will this brutal crackdown will be a decisive factor in moving the electorate away from MAGA policies?
We mention the “credibility gap,” an old phrase from the Vietnam War years, a phrase that speaks to the out of control falsehoods coming out of Washington and the MAGA media. The Trump administration has responded to the crisis by flipping the narrative--claiming that ICE officers are really the victims, stating that they will not investigate the officers involved--and their media allies are pushing the same story. Is this fundamentally different from other Trump lies on some level, or should we expect many Americans to accept this as the “new normal?”
What Democrats should do right now, and what should those of us who are bracing for ICE in our own communities be doing.

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Short takes:

Meredith Lee Hill reports at POLITICO that the White House may be pivoting: ICE chief Tom Homan is headed to the Twin Cities in what may be a move to displace the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. “A growing number of Hill Republicans have been pushing publicly and privately for a lowering of the temperature, including from the federal government, after DHS agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday,” Hill writes. “GOP lawmakers largely view Homan as a more practical enforcer of Trump’s mass deportation plans as some grow increasingly wary of how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino are handling the campaign, according to six GOP lawmakers granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.” (January 26, 2026)
“It’s not clear why the Trump regime chose to invade Minneapolis,” Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, speculating that the Trump administration could be having its Gettysburg moment. “But when the regime’s forces occupied the city they were surprised by the resistance they encountered. Not from Democratic politicians, or institutions, or the legal establishment. From ordinary people. The people of Minneapolis organized to protect their neighbors and provide oversight of the regime’s forces that the local government either could not, or would not, perform.” (January 26, 2026)
“Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution,” Robert F. Worth writes in The Atlantic about what he observed in the Twin Cities. “As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, school teachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb. Some of the quarrels that divided Minneapolis city leaders only a few weeks ago, over policing or Gaza or the budget, have faded as people have come together to oppose ICE.” (January 25, 2026)

Items left at the site where Alex Pretti was murdered on Sunday. Photo credit: Darth Stabro/Wikimedia Commons

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We begin with this clip: Bari Weiss, newly named chief of the CBS News Division and founder of The Free Press Substack, reintroduces herself and the network prior to a Town Hall with Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk on December 14, 2025. Today’s theme music is Never Say Never, by Afternoonz.

In the news:

The Department of Justice made it official on Sunday: despite the fact that a federal agent on the ground recommended a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, it is Good herself who is being investigated for allegedly assaulting a federal officer. Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor James Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and three other elected officials are also being investigated for interfering with ICE’s operation. In addition, five federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned after being tasked with an investigation of Good’s partner; so have several DOJ prosecutors in Washington who have been excluded from the investigation. Because the FBI has taken over the case, and the evidence, the state of Minnesota has also been barred from investigating Good’s death. Radley Balko writes about how many conventions are the Trump administration is violating.
At Davos, President Donald Trump continued to insist on the United States taking possession of Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Trump appears to have ruled out military action, threatened tariffs instead, and now claims to have a deal. This roller-coaster ride sparked a sell-off of Treasury bonds by European investors. Although some Republicans have gotten on board with the United States annexing the territory, a bipartisan Congressional delegation traveled to Greenland to reassure its government, and meet with EU President Ursula von der Leyen.
Representative James Comer (R, TN-01), chair of the House Oversight Committee, pushed for a vote to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in contempt of Congress and got one. Democrats on the committee crossed the aisle to rebuke the former first couple for refusing to appear to testify in the Epstein investigation. The Clintons argue that the subpoenas are invalid, even as their attorneys try to negotiate backstage for an off-ramp to the legal standoff.

Your hosts:

Image credit: OpturaDesign/Shutterstock

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News Focus: Bari Weiss—Free Speech Activist? Journalist? Media Disruptor?

We start with a profile of Bari Weiss that sketches her biography, education, and professional accomplishments.
A staunch Zionist, Weiss graduated from Columbia University in 2007, having founded The Current, a campus magazine of politics and culture focused on Jewish affairs. She also waged a highly publicized campaign against Middle Pastern Studies Professor Joseph Massad, which spurred the creation of a special committee, Columbians for Academic Freedom, to examine the state of free speech on campus.
Weiss cut her teeth as a journalist at Haaretz, The Forward, and Tablet. From 2013-2017, she worked for Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, with whom she was also having an affair. She followed him to the New York Times: it was part of an effort to diversify the editorial page following the departure of James Bennet, a resignation forced by staff outrage over the publication of an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
When Weiss resigned from the New York Times editorial page in July 2020, she sent publisher A.G. Sulzberger a stinging letter of resignation, saying that the atmosphere at the paper was illiberal, that the editorial policy was determined by what left media critics on Twitter found acceptable, and that she had been bullied for her views.
Shortly after leaving the Times, Weiss married tech reporter Nellie Bowles, which she announced on Megyn Kelly’s podcast over a year later. Bowles now writes a column for The Free Press and is the biological mother of their two children.
In 2021, Weiss and Bowles co-created a Substack called Common Sense, which became The Free Press, a home for contrarian writing and an engine behind what became the pandemic-driven anti-woke politics that ultimately found a home in the MAGA movement.
In 2021, she also became one of the co-founders of the University of Austin, which accepted its first class in 2024. Since the institution has begun to stumble, she has distanced herself from the institution.
In 2022, Weiss was one of five pundits and four reporters (all from The Free Press) invited by Elon Musk to review internal Twitter archives relating to content moderation.
In late 2025, after David Ellison bought Paramount Skydance, he purchased The Free Press for $150 million, and installed Weiss as chief of the news division at CBS, believed by many to be a sop to the Trump administration.
Weiss’s tenure has been marked by early stumbles. In December, she pulled a 60 minutes segment on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, recently aired in full.
On January 6, Tony Dokoupil, former CBS Mornings co-host, made a disastrous debut in the anchor chair, replacing John Dickerson. The “Five Principles” Dokoupil articulated as the News Divisions guiding principles included “We Love America,” a sentiment that many though had little to do with reporting the news.

What we want to go viral:

Neil had a lot to say about a series that has already gone viral, HBO Max’s “Heated Rivalry,” a show about two closeted, gay hockey players—one Russian, one Canadian—competing to be the best at the game, and having a secret affair.
Claire wants you to read Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat(Biblioasis, 2025), a novel about two alienated, teenage, White teenagers who light out for the Territory and find themselves sucked into a dark and violent scenario of their own making.

Short takes:

Political scientists call it the “ratchet effect:" that political power acquired is rarely relinquished, and becomes a permanent feature of any state institution. “There’s been no nation-halting constitutional crisis. No rupture dramatic enough to force a reset,” Theodore R. Johnson writes at The Washington Post. “It’s mostly business as usual for today’s branches: the executive flexing its authority, the legislature shrinking from its own and the judiciary shielding the presidency and loosening federal protections for the people. But the resulting imbalance makes it increasingly difficult to check an emboldened executive, especially when partisan loyalties trump most everything else. The greatest risk isn’t that the system will fail, it’s that its institutions — and the public — will grow accustomed to presidential excess.” (January 21, 2026)

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At the beginning of this episode, we hear a clip from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about strategic uncertainty on February 12, 2002, as the Bush administration falsely argued that the United States was compelled to go to war in Iraq to seize weapons of mass destruction.

Protesters march to the Pentagon on March 21, 2009 as part of an anti-war march and rally in Washington, D.C. Photo credit: Rena Schild/Shutterstock

Show notes:

Jeremy discusses the movement against the War on Terror as a moral obligation, one that he participated in, but which he could not fully understand the dimensions of at the time.
Claire mentions the role that the War Resisters League, founded in 1923, played in the antiwar movement.
Jeremy and Claire discuss the significant participation of women, many of whom had extensive social movement experience, in the resistance to the war on terror.
Code Pink was a particularly effective and energetic feminist anti-war group that devoted itself to international civil society activism and highlighting the ways women’s experience in war provides a broader lens into the harms of state violence.
Jeremy points to Hillary Clinton’s support for the war, which was dismaying to many feminist organizations. You can read more about women’s participation in the War on Terror here.
The extreme violence of the War on Terror was, in some ways, epitomized by the sexualized torture and brutality inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by American men and women at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Claire and Jeremy discuss the violence of President Trump’s deportation agenda, and the administration’s assertions that ICE agent have absolute immunity, as a domestic extension of the War on Terror.
Jeremy outlines how the movement to stop the first Gulf War set the stage for strategies and groups that would oppose the War on Terror.
In a conversation about the moral injuries of war, Jeremy discusses the many ways in which soldiers suffer for their participation in war.
In a conversation about the forms of fellowship, friendship, and community in peace movements, Jeremy mentions Benjamin Heim Shepard’s book, On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies and Conflicts (Common Notions Press, 2025).

Your host:

Short takes:

It’s called “Blaxit”(short for Black Exit): Black Americans leaving the United States in higher than usual numbers. Historically, African Americans have often felt safer and freer abroad, but the trend of Black professionals seeking out relocation experts is growing. “This modern migration is seeing Black expatriates settle in countries like Thailand, Dubai, Ghana, Portugal, South Africa, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, and more,” Karen Juanita Carillo writes. Predictably, MAGA hates dual citizenship. “In December 2025, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno,” an immigrant from Colombia, “introduced the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, which aims to prohibit dual citizenship. It requires Americans with multiple nationalities to renounce their foreign citizenship(s) within one year or face automatic revocation of their U.S. citizenship.” (January 15, 2026)
Can prediction markets change history—or allow insiders to profit from political decisions? Democrat Ritchie Torres (NY-15) says yes. “Hours before U.S. Army Delta Force commandos captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife during a nighttime raid in Caracas, an anonymous trader, using a newly created account on the prediction market Polymarket, wagered more than $30,000 that Maduro would be out of office by Jan. 31, 2026. The trader walked away with more than $400,000 in profit,” Torres writes in The Washington Post about government insiders finding yet another way to profit from the Trump presidency. “On Jan. 7, traders wagered on whether the White House press briefing would last longer than 65 minutes. The market assigned a 98 percent probability that it would. Then, with seconds to spare, the briefing was abruptly ended — delivering massive, near-instant payouts to those betting against the odds.” (January 15, 2026)
Former Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has been named as a correspondent in a divorce proceeding. “In a complaint filed in North Carolina, the ex-wife of Matthew Ammel, who worked on Ms. Sinema’s staff for two years, accused the former senator of seducing him and breaking up their marriage,” Anni Karni reports at The New York Times. Heather Ammel asserts that Sinema sent her husband Matthew, her bodyguard, “suggestive photographs on Signal, the encrypted messaging app; chose him to accompany her on trips to Napa Valley and to the Sphere, an events venue, in Las Vegas; paid for him to enter psychedelic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and other issues; encouraged him to bring drugs on work trips so she could guide him through a psychedelic trip; showered him with gifts and concert tickets; and eventually entered into a sexual relationship with him that caused him to leave his family.” Sinema has been divorced since 1999, left the Senate in 2024 about a year after the affair with Ammel allegedly began, and is openly bisexual. (January 15, 2026)

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News Summary:

Yesterday, 37 year-old Renee Nicole Good, a poet, mother of three, and a United States citizen was murdered by an ICE officer identified as Jonathan Ross, a ten-year veteran of the service. Good was confronted by ICE vehicles, and for unknown reasons, Ross ordered Good to get out of the car, where she was accompanied by her wife and dog. As Good she attempted to leave the scene, Ross shot her three times. Trump and other administration officials have repeatedly lied about the events surrounding Good’s death. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled the victim a “domestic terrorist” and falsely claimed that the ICE officer had been endangered; as of today, Democrat-sponsored articles of impeachment are circulating in the House to remove her from office.
In the wake of an alleged multi-billion dollar scheme to divert federal dollars intended for Minnesota’s subsidized child care, Governor Tim Walz has dropped his bid for a third term. The state’s popular Democratic Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is said to be almost certain to run in 2026; if she wins, she or Walz will pick someone to fill her seat who could run in the special election to replace her. Will that person be from the Congressional delegation? Perhaps it will be the popular mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey? Or Keith Ellison, the former Representative from 05 and currently attorney general?
Donald Trump added his own name to the Kennedy Center, not only outraging the ginormous Kennedy family, but causing numerous artists scheduled to perform there to cancel.
In a 4-1 ruling, Wyoming’s Supreme Court has struck down two laws banning abortion in the state as unconstitutional, including the first law in the nation to ban chemical abortions. The court, all appointed by Republicans, cited a 2012 amendment approved by voters in the wake of the ACA empowering adults to make their own health decisions.

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House in Washington DC, April 7, 2025. Photo credit: noamgalai/Shutterstock

News focus: Marco Rubio, Venezuela, and the “Donroe” Doctrine

On the evening of Saturday, January 3, a special forces team from the United States supported from the air penetrated the compound in Caracas where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores lived. After killing 31 members of a Cuban bodyguard, the team kidnapped Maduro and Flores. They were charged this week in New York with narco-terrorism.
While the official justification for Maduro’s kidnapping is unclear, as is Trump’s plan for “running the country,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as president—but is she on the same page as Trump? Yesterday, the New York Times obtained a 90-day emergency order issued by the government commanding the police to take into custody anyone who supports the “armed attack” by the United States.
Trump threatened attacks on two other sovereign nations in the hemisphere, Colombia and Cuba; and revived plans to annex Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Marco Rubio has amended Trump’s statements to say that the plan, for now, would be to purchase Greenland.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a bill invoking the War Powers Act with five Republicans voting aye: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Who is Marco Rubio? The son of Cuban exiles, he is only 54: he rose swiftly in Florida politics, becoming speaker of the Florida House of Representatives at 35. He was elected to the Senate in 2010, replacing Republican Mel Martinez, the first Cuban American in the Senate, and became well-known on the Foreign Policy Committee as a centrist.
But Rubio has always been a Cuba hard-liner. A challenger to Trump for the presidential nomination in 2015, he was once seen as the future of the GOP. But after Trump became president, as Secretary of State, Rubio has had to toggle between conservative principles and gaining influence in a now-populist and ideologically rudderless party.
President Trump and Secretary Rubio are now directly threatening Cuba’s sovereignty. Trump has suggested that cutting off Venezuelan oil will cause a fragile regime to collapse on its own, whereas Rubio represents a return of an exile opposition community that has remained organized in the last 60 years in Miami and Madrid.
Some see the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy as a make-or-break moment for Rubio: insiders say he was responsible for pushing Trump to act aggressively on removing Maduro. There are implcations for the 2028 nomination: the heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, has become almost invisible at a key moment; whereas Rubio, who was not very visible in Year 1, is everywhere, and seemingly in charge of Trump’s expansionism in the Western hemisphere.

Your hosts:

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Ruth Graham’s “Philip Yancey, Prominent Christian Author, Admits to Extramarital Affair” (New York Times, January 7, 2026) about a best-selling Christian author whose books in the 1990s compelled a general audience to think about grace and who has now fallen from grace.
Claire wants you to think about Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Social Media is a Trap for Politicians,” in which Ramaswamy cautions about the fast and inaccurate information that is reflected back to politicians from a platform populated by extremes. (The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2026.)

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Short takes:

The Heritage Foundation has produced new proposals to incentivize marriage and childbearing, including state-funded marriage boot camps. This “represents a sharp pivot for the organization away from its tradition of small government and free-market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation,” Brianna Tucker and Jacob Bogage report at The Washington Post. “Some of the proposals in the family report are part of the upheaval that’s shaken Heritage, an august institution with offices on both sides of the U.S. Capitol. Policy experts clashed over ideas that some staffers felt eschewed traditional conservatism or ventured so far into new territory that they made others uncomfortable, according to three people familiar with the paper.” (January 8, 2025)
MAGA’s latest obsession is that the United States can acquire Greenland through an arranged marriage between 19-year-old Barron Trump (who has taken to looking like a porcelain doll) and Denmark’s Princess Isabella, just turned 18. “While her post-graduation plans are unknown, it is unlikely the Nordic country is willing to barter its first princess in 60 years,” Laura Esposito writes at The Daily Beast. “For Barron’s part, this is hardly the first time MAGA has thirsted over his teenage love life. Last year, the New York University student made headlines for shutting down an entire floor of Trump Tower for a date.” (January 8, 2026)
The Pentagon has begun a review of women in combat roles, framed as an effectiveness study, but probably a prelude to excluding them from front-line jobs that convey the highest prestige, pay, and possibility for promotion. “Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposed women in ground combat units while he was a Fox News host and author,” Tom Bowman writes at NPR. Hegseth withdrew these comments during his confirmation hearings. “Kris Fuhr, a West Point graduate who worked on gender integration for the Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., said an Army study between 2018 to 2023 found that women performed well in ground combat units and, in some cases, had higher scores than male soldiers,” Bowman reports. “She called the upcoming Pentagon study ‘a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.’” (January 7, 2026)

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Promotional photo of Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar from “Your Show of Shows,” August 30, 1952. Photo credit: NBC/Wikimedia Commons

For this final podcast of 2025, we begin with a clip from “The Vitality Health Food Restaurant,” featuring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as the recurring characters Charlie and Doris Hickenlooper; Howard Morris and Carl Reiner play bit parts. It was broadcast during the 1955 season of Caesar’s Hour on NBC: you can see the whole sketch here.

Show notes:

Claire mentions Dick Cavett’s afternoon talk show: Cavett’s unique style was inspired by his admiration for, and study of, Sid Caesar.
The Catskills comedy scene, also known as the “Borscht Belt,” nurtured a generation of Jewish comedians who Caesar relied on, even though he himself spent little time in it.
David Margolick discusses how Sid Caesar navigated the heightened consciousness of antisemitism in the 1950s by downplaying the Jewish roots of his art.
Claire mentions the historical maleness of the comedy writers’ room, a phenomenon that—according to Tina Fey—lasted well into the late twentieth century.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was created by a Caesar writer, Carl Reiner, the father of the late Rob Reiner: the plot revolved around the antics of creatives in a fictionalized—and very cleaned up—version of the Sid Caesar Show writers’ room.
Caesar sustained the emotionally and physically crushing schedule of putting out a weekly show with alcohol and pharmaceuticals, something that was not all that uncommon for adult creatives and professionals in the 1950s.
David discusses the rivalry between Caesar and bandleader Lawrence Welk, who produced a more anodyne variety show aimed at middle America.

Your host:

Short takes:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is getting ready to hand over the reins of government to Zorhan Mamdani, but will be in the news for some time to come. Numerous Adams staffers “are still facing criminal prosecution, lawsuits in state court, federal and local investigations, or some combination of all of the above,” Noah Schachtman writes at New York Magazine. “And while Adams is all grips and ‘What, me worry?’ grins in public, he continues to have some legal exposure of his own.” (December 26, 2025)
At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait argues that no one should defend Bari Weiss for spiking the “60 Minutes” story on CECOT. Her reasoning is incoherent, Chait argues; worse, “Weiss is following a long-standing instinct to turn every Trump abuse into a debate, a generosity she does not afford targets on the left,” Chait writes. “The Free Press, which she continues to edit while running CBS News, publishes obsessively and unremittingly negative coverage of New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, but holds symposia on Donald Trump. In defending the administration’s actions as debatable, she has misrepresented just how heedless it has been with the Constitution.” He has other reasons too: read on. (December 24, 2025)
The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang has been following the debate about kids and social media since before Australia imposed a ban on the apps for youth under 16. Such a a ban is unlikely in the United States—but aren’t there other, more thoughtful approaches? The First Amendment argues that “we shouldn’t place arbitrary age limits on who gets to express themselves in the digital town square,” Kang writes, “and we shouldn’t require everyone who wants to express their opinions online to submit to an I.D. check.” In fact, the revolution has already begun by simply taking smartphones out of the hands of school-age kids without federal legislation. “The nascent anti-smartphones movement in America is decidedly nonpartisan, for the most part,” Kang writes. “It also has taken place almost entirely at the local and state level.” (December 23, 2025)

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As we slide into the holidays, our politics podcast is on a three-week hiatus. But I have some terrific book chats lined up, each one accompanied by a short news summary. Neil and I will be back and ready to rock on January 9 to evaluate the fresh hell breaking loose in 2026!

Country music star Dolly Parton arriving at a Hollywood premiere in January, 2012. Photo credit: DFree/Shutterstock

We begin this episode with a clip from a 1977 Barbara Walters interview, in which Parton skillfully parries a stereotype about White people who grew up poor in the American South.

News summary:

The man who right wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos has called “The most ostentatiously useless and embarrassing government employee in the history of the nation”—that’s right, Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino—has resigned as of January. “Bongino expressed deep satisfaction earlier this month after the FBI arrested a suspect in the Jan. 6 pipe bombing case. He said he pressed the bureau to solve the case and got regular updates from the lead investigator,” Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian write at MS NOW. But as a podcaster, Bongino had stoked conspiracy theories that the pipe bombs were a false-flag operation. When asked by Fox’s Sean Hannity about the discrepancy, he said “that as a podcaster, he was paid to give his opinions, but now at the FBI, he was ‘paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.’” Rumor has it Bongino is returning to podcasting. (December 18, 2025)
This week saw a furor about a two-part profile of Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles by Chris Whipple of Vanity Fair. Wiles, a political consultant who is normally very backstage, let drop a number of frank comments about the President and the clown car that surrounds him. The outrage has been predictable—except for White House attacks on photographer Christopher Anderson, whose closeup of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose lip gloss did not conceal injection marks, presumably the residue of a cosmetic procedure.
The suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University, a Portuguese man who may also be responsible for the murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, has been found in. New Hampshire storage unit, an apparent suicide.

Today’s guest: Martha Ackman, the author of Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton (MacMillan, 2025)

Claire notes some of the similarities between Dolly Parton and an earlier female artist Martha Ackman explored, Emily Dickinson. You can read about the famous reclusive poet in These Fevered Days:Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton, 2020).
Dolly Parton’s big break was on The Porter Wagoner Show. It was where she learned her craft, but also became aware of how fiercely she would have to fight to make a career in the male-dominated country music industry.
Dolly has described her childhood in her autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (HarperCollins, 1994).
Claire and Martha also discuss Dolly making books available to children through her Imagination Library.
Rumors about Dolly’s private life include speculation about whether she has been sexually involved with a close woman friend: she denies them. We discuss how Dolly’s support for the LGBTQ community, her unusually supportive husband who preferred the backstage, and the difficulty in describing love and loyalty between women, have fed such rumors.
You can learn more about Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband for almost 60 years before his death this year, here.
Claire notes that her favorite song is White Limozeen, from the 1989 album of hte same name, because it reflects her commitment to her family and community.

Short takes:

Changes to Medicaid under H.R. 1 will affect Black and Brown communities disproportionately, but also whole institutions designed to serve low-income people. “Community health centers like Harlem United serve as the few sources of dental care for low-income populations in New York City,” Neela Jain reports in The Amsterdam News. “Across the city, many neighborhoods lack enough dental providers to meet the needs of populations eligible for Medicaid, according to the federal government,” Jain writes. “The majority of shortage provider areas are located in the city’s predominantly low-income communities of color.” (December 18, 2025)
Does Donald Trump want us all to get cancer? Liza Featherstone, citing numerous policies and regulations that have been abandoned across federal departments, says yes! “How can the Make America Healthy Again crowd put up with all this? They can’t,” Featherstone concludes at The New Republic. Some MAHA Moms “are now circulating a petition to fire EPA chief Lee Zeldin, who has allowed chemical industry insiders to relax restrictions on harmful chemicals. One of the groups circulating it, Moms Across America, is calling EPA the ‘Everyone Poisoned Agency.’ MAHA also takes issue—rightly—with Zeldin’s approval of new pesticides, including two that contain PFAS, a.k.a. ‘forever chemicals,’ which have been a major target of the MAHA movement.” (December 18, 2025)
In his shouty, untethered televised speech this week, President Donald Trump announced something he called “warrior dividends,” checks for $1,776 dollars that would go out to members of the military. In fact, according to Thomas Novelly at Defense One, Congress appropriated an extra $2.9 billion in reconciliation funds to supplement troop housing allowances, and Trump is just rebranding it as a holiday gift. “The $2.9 billion meant to subsidize the basic allowance for housing, the monthly payment to cover troops’ off-base expenses such as rent, mortgage, and utilities known as BAH, comes as some service members have struggled to make the most of the benefit,” Novelly writes. And it isn’t the only funding gone astray. “Senator Elizabeth Warren,D-Mass., and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., issued a report last week highlighting $2 billion diverted away from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department for border enforcement—including redirecting funds for barracks, maintenance hangers, and elementary schools.” (December 18, 2025)

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We begin with influencer Milo Yiannopoulos on December 6, 2025, in conversation with ex-Congressman and pardoned felon George Santos on Tim Poole’s podcast.

Sporting a sequined “Make America Straight Again” cap, self-described journalist and “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos served as the Parade Grand Marshall for the Boston Straight Pride Parade and Rally on August 31, 2019. Photo credit: Maverick Pictures/Shutterstock

News Summary:

On Monday, Colin Allred dropped his Senate bid to run for Congress in the new, redrawn TX-33; this cleared the way for two-term Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) to compete with State Representative James Tallarico for the Democratic nomination: new polling shows her with an 8-point advantage. But there’s an interesting race shaping up on the Republican side: three-term incumbent John Cornyn is facing a challenge from a MAGA normie, two-term Congressman Wesley Hunt (TX-38) and whack-job Attorney General Ken Paxton, who survived impeachment for bribery and corruption in 2023 and settled federal securities fraud charges in 2024. Paxton leads Cornyn by 8 points, Hunt by 9: the nominee must win 50%, or face a run-off
Democratic candidates had another great election day on Tuesday, holding two state house seats in Florida, and flipping one in a Georgia district that Trump won in double-digits and the same candidate lost by 22 points a year ago: some analysts are blaming the gerrymander. A Democrat, Eileen Higgins, will be Mayor of Miami for the first time in 30 years. Around 20% of Little Havana voters who supported Trump shifting to the Democrats: Higgins won by 19 points.
In 2025, Democrats flipped 21% of GOP-held seats up for grabs in regular and special elections, won the largest majority they have had in the Virginia House since the 1980s, expanded control of the New Jersey Assembly, and torpedoed supermajorities in Iowa and Missouri. The GOP has not flipped any seats. In FL-11 on Tuesday, Ralph Massulo, Jr. held a Republican seat—but by a margin that is 18 points lower than Trump’s tally a year ago.
Democrats are now imagining districts Trump won in the single or low two digits in North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California as potential flips, the total of targeted districts for 2026 is 39. And for the first time in modern history, Texas Democrats—a state party recently said to be dead in the water—are contesting every congressional seat in the redrawn map. In an odd twist, Trump’s pardon of Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar has moved TX-28 from tossup to Lean D (as per the Cook Political Report.)
In the face of the Senate’s failure to pass healthcare legislation, Mike Johnson is losing control of a GOP caucus running for the exits. On Wednesday, 16 Republicans cosponsored a discharge petition to extend ACA subsidies, demonstrating that the legislation can pass the House—also, that Leader Mike Johnson is losing control of his caucus. In addition, 13 Republicans joined Democrats to nullify a Trump executive order that eliminated Federal workers’ labor rights. Finally, just yesterday, after multiple visits by top Trump administration officials, including JD Vance, the Indiana legislature turned down the gerrymandering bill 31-19. Twenty-one Republicans voted against it.

Your hosts:

Right-wing influencer Candace Owens at a TPUSA event at Texas State University-San Marcos, 2018. Owens has since broken with the organization, and promotes conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination that have splintered the MAGA-verse. Photo credit: Carrington Tatum/Shutterstock

News Focus: Is MAGA Cracking Apart?

The Daily Beast is reporting a full-blown social media war featuring deeply personal attacks, often from the fringe, on Trump and his allies.
Podcaster Candace Owens is spreading rumors online that Turning Point USA committed financial fraud, and that Charlie Kirk’s assassination is related to that. This week, the Treasury Department sent Erika Kirk a letter confirming that none of the four organizations under the TPUSA umbrella are being investigated or audited. The organization appears to have pulled in $85 million in the fiscal year ending in June, 2025.
Podcaster Tim Poole has gone after Owens, who also claims that Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson did not act alone: she has implicated the American military, Israel, financier Bill Ackman, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Her fans see efforts to stop or debunk her as further proof there is a conspiracy to cover up the “facts” surrounding Kirk’s death.
We have also seen Tucker Carlson going after Laura Loomer; Carlson taking fire from Texas Senator Ted Cruz for platforming white supremacist, misogynist, and self-declared incel Nick Fuentes; and Milo Yiannopoulos maintaining that Fuentes is gay.
Some of the rifts, while predictable, are self-inflicted wounds about sex, sexuality, and violence that go well beyond allegations of a Trump administrative coverup in the Epstein case. In the past year, numerous right-wing influencers have collaborated in propping up brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, pornographers who have been charged with rape and sex trafficking in Romania and England. Members of Trump’s circle including, it seems, the President and two of his sons, have colluded to free them and put the brothers—whose penchant for sadistic sexual violence against women is well documented—back in business.
Another little corner of the right-wing world where everyone has their panties in a twist is what Michelangelo Signorile has dubbed “Gay MAGA.” Milo Yiannopoulos, who was canceled back in 2017 for talking enthusiastically about performing fellatio on a priest when he was a boy, characterizes himself as an “ex-gay,” and now operates a crisis management form, is currently waging an outing campaign against influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson is married with four children, and recently on Tim Poole’s podcast, he and pardoned fraudster George Santos tossed it out there that the late TPUSA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk was also a closeted gay man.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to listen to “Blood Relatives,” a new season of In The Dark, a podcast produced by The New Yorker and hosted by Heidi Blake, who reported the original 2024 story about then murder of a prominent English farming couple and the son convicted of the crime. But did he do it?
Claire wants you to read Jack B. Reardon and Abigail S. Gerstein, “‘For the Reinvention of Man’: How a Conservative Debating Society at Harvard Pushed Women From Its Ranks,” The Harvard Crimson (December 7, 2025), about how Trumpism is helping elite conservative manhood reclaim single-sex spaces at America’s most prominent university.

Short takes:

As Joe Gruters, the chair of the Republican National Committee, makes his media rounds, he is setting expectations for 2026 way low—which tells you something about the upheaval and finger-pointing up on Capitol Hill. “This week, I spoke to a number of swing-state GOP operatives about Trump and the midterm environment,” Andrew Eggers writes at The Bulwark. “And they were pretty blunt. To them, the biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability.” As one anonymous source on the Hill said to Eggers, Trump’s economic message is “landing like doo-doo.” (December 12, 2025)
President Trump is now trying to get the massively unqualified Lindsey Halligan properly appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Burgess Everett reports at Semafor, but neither of Virginia’s Democratic Senators seems likely to return the blue slip to support the nomination. Neither Tim Kaine or Mark Warner “explicitly confirmed they’ll block Halligan as they seek a nominee they could support; Warner said he’d meet with her but that it would be ‘very hard’ to support her,” Everett writes. “And Senate Republicans aren’t eliminating blue slips, despite Trump’s request, because they want input when a Democrat is president, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.” (December 12, 2025)
At her Substack, Abortion, Every Day, Jessica Valenti reports that the Wisconsin legislation that sought to compel women to bag the residue of their medication abortions, then turn it over to the authorities as “medical waste,” is DOA in the legislature. “Students for Life has been drafting “clean water” bills for lawmakers across the country—legislation that claims abortion pills and pregnancy tissue are poisoning groundwater,” Valenti explains. “Republicans are furious and embarrassed: instead of looking like environmental protectors, they seem like creeps who want to sift through women’s bloody miscarriages.” As Bette Davis memorably said to a terror-stricken Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?— “But you are.” (December 11, 2025)

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We begin with this clip from a cabinet meeting earlier this week, in which Pete Hegseth described to a journalist his participation in a deadly September 2 strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat, and a second missile fired that killed first-strike survivors.

Secretary of Defense fakes screwing in a sign misidentifying the Department of Defense of the Department of War, a name he likes because it sounds more lethal. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech/Wikimedia Commons

News Summary:

In a closely watched special election, MAGA Republican Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn by 9 points in a race to fill a seat vacated by Republican Mark Green, in TN-07. Van Epps was endorsed by Trump; Behn, a former community organizer, was endorsed by DSA. Good news for Mike Johnson’s tiny majority; not such good news for MAGA 2026, since Trump won this district only a year ago by 22 points, and Democrats clawed back a bigger percentage of the vote in every county.
For the first time since 1988, the Trump administration declined to commemorate World AIDS day. The State Department issued a statement this week saying that “an awareness day is not a strategy,” but it is also the case that the Trump administration has no strategy beyond pretending that AIDS does not exist. Funding cuts to fight AIDS globally have declined by almost 40%. Almost all funding for domestic AIDS prevention has been eliminated for 2026, and programs aimed at developing a vaccine for the HIV virus have been eliminated.
In a story we have been following in one way or another for several weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson is holding on by a thread in the face of criticism from his caucus—criticism led out by very high profile women. Johnson’s foes include Elise Stefanik (NY-21) who has accused him of lying and “getting rolled” by Democrats. Stefanik has also launched her campaign for governor, which means she can’t run for her House seat in 2026.
As Democrats circulate a discharge petition to renew existing health insurance subsidies under the ACA for three years, Republicans can’t agree on how to respond to the hole they have dug for themselves. A new poll by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research shop, reveals that a quarter of those who are now insured through the ACA would drop their insurance completely, and about half say it would affect how, or even whether, they vote in the midterm elections. Although those polled had little faith in politicians of either party to solve the problem, the majority were critical of Republicans.

Your hosts:

Like other members of the Trump administration, Hegseth enjoys sporting uniforms he is not entitled to wear. Here, he cosplays as a fighter pilot at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, on October 19, 2025. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Lyin’ Pete Hegseth

Hegseth was a controversial nominee for SecDef in the first place: reports of financial mismanagement, sexual assault, and an unresolved alcohol addiction dogged the nomination process. He barely squeezed through with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote in a Republican-majority Senate.
A military veteran with two Bronze stars, Hegseth was one of a number of high-level Trump appointments plucked out of the Fox News pool: here is a short bio. At 45, he is on his third wife. Hegseth’s second wife was said to have requested aid for spousal abuse on more than one occasion. He was said to habitually drink to the point of passing out, and family members said they feared him when he was drunk.
Hegseth has also been characterized as a Christian nationalist, and is a self-admitted Islamophobe who believes that Western Civilization is under attack. He has at least two tattoos that suggest he is a white supremacist, and he is a member of the arch-conservative Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Hegseth has initiated and presided over the expulsion of transgender people from the military, has women in combat roles as inherently unqualified, and has reduced the visibility of lesbian and gay people in the military service. He has characterized LGBTQ troops serving openly as part of a “Marxist agenda,” although Marx had little or nothing to say about homosexuals.
Hegseth’s command decisions have demoted a disproportionate number of Black and female officers, or forced them into retirement. A policy that bans beards is projected to prompt the resignation of significant numbers of Black men, who can develop a painful skin condition from shaving, as well as soldiers who wear beards for religious reasons. Last week, Hegseth barred all soldiers who currently have beard waivers from one of his speaking events in South Korea.
In a September meeting for which general and flag officers from around the globe were brought to Quantico, VA, Hegseth promoted the return of hazing, bullying and harassment as part of an effective training process. The U.S. military has worked to eliminate hazing since 1874.
More recently, Hegseth has announced that his department will sever all ties with Scouting America (formerly Boy Scouts of America) which, he claims, promotes DEI and is not a “boy-friendly” space.
Calls for an investigation into Hegseth’s running of the department have escalated in the past week after yet another deadly attack on a Venezuelan vessel, one followed up by a second strike to kill two survivors adrift in the water.
One important question is who authorized the second strike, which may violate the laws of war. But legal scholars have also questioned the legality of any strikes on people who, regardless of the Trump administration’s designation of them as terrorists, are still legally civilians.
But there are bigger issues: Signalgate is back! On Thursday, a Pentagon watchdog report concluded that in March, Hegseth violated his own department’s policies by discussing a military operation against the Houthis on a Signal app installed on his personal device. You can read the report here. In a bizarre twist, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell issued a statement that report exonerated Hegseth from charges that he breached security protocols, and in a xeet, Hegseth claimed “Total exoneration.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice President JD Vance may also be involved in the cover-up.
Also on Thursday, the New York Times filed a lawsuit that named numerous administration officials, including Hegseth and Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. Prompted by new Department of Defense rules that require journalists to take an oath they will not report anything not been approved for release, the suit charges that this requirement violates provisions of the First and Fifth Amendments. The new requirement caused dozens of experienced reporters to walk off the job in October, only to be replaced by influencers and luminaries from right-wing propaganda outlets like Gateway Pundit, One America News, Turning Point USA’s Frontlines, The Federalist and LindellTV.

What we want to go viral:

Neil is excited about Bobby Smith II’s essay, “History Shows How Cooking Can be a Pivotal Tool for Activism,” (Made By History, TIME, November 8, 2025). Smith tells the story of Georgia Gilmore, a Black female chef fired for her civil rights activism, turned her cooking skills to fund—and feed—the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Claire is excited about James Reginato’s, “Oscar Wilde’s Only Grandchild Investigates the ‘Atom Bomb’ of the Oscar Wilde Scandal,” (Vanity Fair, November 28, 2025), which follows the Wilde family’s disintegration after the scandal of their patriarch’s arrest and imprisonment for homosexuality.

Short takes:

Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, one of the most consequential constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War to eliminate barriers to full Black citizenship. The Trump administration argues that the amendment was intended to apply to Black Americans and no one else, but that would repudiate a century of legal precedent. “In a landmark 1898 case, the Supreme Court ruled Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment,” Justin Jouvenal writes at The Washington Post. “Roughly 250,000 babies were born to mothers who are in the country illegally or on a temporary basis in 2023, the latest year figures were available, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which aims to curb immigration.” (December 5, 2025)
A big driver behind MAGA back in 2015 was the populist revulsion for opportunistic wars, mostly driven by the toll the 20-year War on Terror took on working-class America. But how does Trump’s apparent eagerness for regime change in Venezuela jive with an “America First” agenda? “So far, Trump’s base supports his pivot to hawkish interventionism in Venezuela: 66 percent of MAGA Republicans would favor the United States taking military action in the country, according to a recent poll by CBS News and YouGov,” Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic. However, “Among Americans as a whole, fully 70 percent oppose a war with Venezuela. But assuming Trump does not usurp the constitutional order by trying for a third term, he will never again face voters, so if there are political consequences for a failed war in Venezuela, as there were for the war in Iraq, other politicians––perhaps Rubio or Vance––will suffer them.” (December 5, 2025)
Donald Trump is exactly the kind of venal self-dealer our founders worried might ascend to the presidency, Jamelle Bouie writes at The New York Times, and his abuse of the pardon power is a prime example. “But if there’s an issue that demands constitutional amendment, it’s this one. Americans should give serious consideration to whether they want to amend the Constitution to restructure the president’s pardon power—to limit its scope and make it more subject to the checks and balances that are supposed to structure the American system,” Bouie proposes. “Even without an amendment on the table, a future Congress could use its power and authority to speak about the Constitution to condemn the Trump pardons as an unconstitutional abuse of power. That Congress could say, through legislation, that the pardons are invalid. It could investigate the pardons and force the White House to explain itself. And in the almost certain event that this would then reach the Supreme Court, congressional action could push the court to state its view, so that the American people know where they stand if they decide to rein in the president’s authority.” (December 3, 2025)

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Here are a few books you might be interested in after listening:

Kevin M. Schultz, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Leah Wright Rigueur,The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: 2016).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
James E. Clyburn, Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black (University of South Carolina Press, 2014).

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Hello listeners! This is a Substack live I did earlier in the day: in the future, I will be doing more features that take a deep dive into an important story that illuminates the functioning of our democracy.

Trump allies are demanding Pam Bondi’s resignation over the botched indictments—but no that they happened in the first place. See Edith Olmsted, “MAGA Demands Bondi’s Head After Failed Comey Indictment,” (The New Republic, November 25, 2025)
The article I refer to in this video is Alan Feuer and Devlin Barrett, “Judge Dismisses Cases Against Comey and James, Finding Trump Prosecutor Was Unlawfully Appointed,” New York Times, November 24, 2025.
The book I wrote about the FBI is War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998.)
Listeners who want to learn even more about J. Edgar Hoover, the long history of the FBI, and why this is such an aberrant moment in the history of hte federal justice system should check out Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Penguin Books, 2022, which won the Pulitzer Prize it is so good!
Want to know why everyone thinks the current FBI director, Kash Patel, is out of his league? Try Marc Fisher, “Kash Patel’s Acts of Service,” The New Yorker (November 17, 2025.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video, and just to say: I have rescheduled historian Kevin Schultz, and the conversation about whether everyone really hates liberals. I filmed this before Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress late last night.

Join me for my next live video: download the app, if you have not done so already, and I will see you on Wednesday, if not before.

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We begin with a clip from a gaggle on Air Force One this week, in which a female reporter asked a follow up question about the Epstein files, and President Donald Trump responded by wagging his finger at her and saying: “Quiet, piggy.”

Image credit: miss.cabul/Shutterstock

This week, we had trouble with our internet connection, which resulted in the loss of much of what Neil’s valuable contributions to the second half of the show.

News Summary:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 38%, the lowest it has been since he began his second term. He is five points underwater from November alone, but here are the numbers broken out: Only 41% of Americans approve of his handling of immigration; only 34% approve of his handling of the economy (Biden’s number at the end of his presidency), but down 39 points from January 2025. Marist shows Democrats with a 14-point lead on a generic ballot going into the 2026 midterms.
The vote counting in Seattle has ended, and socialist Katie Wilson, cofounder of the Transit Riders Union and a politics newbie, has unseated incumbent Democratic mayor Bruce Harrell. She’s 43, and lives with her husband and toddler daughter in a 600 square foot rental: sadly, Seattle has no official mayor’s residence. Virginia Heffernan has made the argument that millions poured into fighting progressive and socialist candidates motivates young voters to move left.
“He is a democratic socialist who once called for defunding the police. She is a data-centric billionaire heiress who has sharply criticized laws to relax bail.” That’s a quote from Wednesday’s New York Times about New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s decision to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on, and her decision to do it.
David Maltinsky, in training as a special agent at the FBI, was pulled from his class in October, three weeks before graduation. Why? Because he hung a Pride flag when he was a civilian tech employee at the agency’s Los Angeles office after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. Maltinsky, who is gay, is now suing the FBI and its director Kash Patel.

Your hosts:

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Representative Thomas Massie (R, KY-04) has been crucial to mustering GOP votes for the bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock

News focus: The accelerating Jeffrey Epstein scandal

On November 12, the House Oversight Committee released a tranche of materials, among which were some 20,000 pages of emails that journalists and lookie-loos have been combing through. Committee Chair James Comer (R, TN-01) has accused Democrats of cherry-picking the documents to smear Donald Trump.
This week, a bill demanding that the Epstein files be released in full, after languishing for weeks, headed to Donald Trump’s desk. It passed the House with only 1 no vote, Clay Higgins (R, LA-03), and the Senate passed it officially on Wednesday. Trump freed Republicans to vote for it after months of stalling, and said he would sign the bill because he has nothing to hide: he did. But in fact, the bill contains loopholes to protect “ongoing investigations,” which means evidence will continue to be concealed from the public.
Some observers argue that Trump’s capitulation to the inevitable signals that he is losing his grip on his own party; journalist Michael Cohen believes that the vote to release the files is an inflection point for Trump and MAGA.
One stress point to watch is Kentucky GOP Congressman Thomas Massie’s 2026 re-election campaign. President Trump is backing a challenger, but Kentucky’s soon-to-be senior Republican Senator, Rand Paul, has vowed to help Massie—who is taking a victory lap today—win re-election.
Among the emails is a 2019 exchange between Epstein and Lawrence Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, former President of Harvard, and now a distinguished University Professor in Harvard’s Economics Department. In the exchanges, Summers, who had been married since 2004, sought advice about his pursuit of a young female economist, Keyu Jin. Jin took her B.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, and was teaching at London School of Economics at the time (she is now with the China Finance 40 Forum, a think tank.) Jin is also Chinese, which is neither here nor there, except that Epstein and Summers nicknamed her “Peril.” Summers “stepped back” from a number of his commitments, as well as teaching and administrative roles at Harvard, and says he is “deeply ashamed.”
Nina Burleigh has identified a close relationship between Epstein and Trump whisperer Steve Bannon in the released documents. The emails also reveal that after their falling out, Epstein displayed open contempt for Trump, and at the same time, used his knowledge of the man to help other friends.
Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, who pushed Epstein back into the news in 2017, xeeted out a list of documents that have not (and may not) been released, investigative files held by multiple federal agencies, including the CIA, DOJ, FBI and Homeland Security.
Jennifer Weiner wrote a great column at The New York Times this week in which she argues that the Epstein scandal, in becoming a political wedge issue, has pushed the victims to the margins.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Ruth Graham’s terrific piece about young, White men flocking to one of the most conservative branches of the Catholic Church, “Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts,” (New York Times, November 19, 2025).
Claire wants you to pre-order Martha Ackmann’s new biography of an iconic country singer and a great American, Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

Short takes:

Who’s got the money, honey? At The Bulwark, Andrew Egger unpacks Donald Trump’s newest phony international investment scheme. Trump’s murderous White House guest, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, supposedly agreed on camera to invest $1 billion in the United States. But guess what? MBS (the “BS” also stands for “bone saw”) made “monopoly-money promises,” Egger explains. “Saudi Arabia is a staggeringly wealthy country, but its entire GDP is something like $1.2 trillion. The country’s sovereign wealth fund contains an estimated $925 billion. The idea that MBS plans to sink the entirety of his nation’s accumulated petro-lucre into building factories in the United States is laughable on its face.” (November 20, 2025)
AI may be changing the political landscape—not only with deepfakes, but also by the way data farms drive up consumer energy bills. In Georgia, “An AI data center construction boom across the state has caused consumers’ electricity costs to surge, leading voters to elect Democrats to state-level office for the first time in two decades,” Theodore Johnson writes at The Washington Post. “Political research finds that voters generally support their preferred party’s policy choices on issues with little public attention,” Johnson notes, “but their partisan loyalty frays on issues that command lots of public attention when representatives take unpopular positions. In one study, two political scientists studied ratemaking in Arizona, which has elected members to its public utilities commission for more than a century.” (November 19, 2025)
When alleged sex trafficker and misogynist influencer Andrew Tate was arrested with his brother Tristan in Ft. Lauderdale earlier this year, it should have launched an investigation into the crimes they were accused of. Instead, when “the White House intervened on their behalf,” they were released, Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro report at ProPublica. According to Faturechi and Asher-Schapiro, “a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.” The Tates have also been charged in Romania, and in the U.K, where they are currently residing and hold dual citizenship. (November 18, 2025)

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We begin with an Oval Office presser on Tuesday, when a White House reporter asked Trump to respond to criticism from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14) for spending time on foreign policy during the government shutdown.

One correction: you will hear Claire misstate the beginning of the Watergate affair as the summer of 1971: it was the summer of 1972.

Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking with attendees at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

News Summary:

A federal judge’s ruling that created a majority Democratic district in Utah highlights the successful fight against Trump’s arm-twisting to get the Congress he wants in 2026.
As the House returns after an almost two-month vacation to vote on new Senate legislation to reopen the government, Democrats debate whether the shutdown was worth it, whether eight of their number crossing the aisle to end the suffering was a capitulation or strategic, and whether Republicans can be trusted to open debate on restoring the ACA subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans.
The reopening of the House also means that Republican Leader Mike Johnson will finally swore in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, allowing her to begin working a mere seven weeks after having been elected. She is the daughter of Raúl Grijalva, who represented Arizona’s 7th until his death earlier this year. Johnson insisted he was powerless to administer the oath until the House was back in session.
Coincidentally, Grijalva was the final signature on a bipartisan petition demanding the full release of the Epstein files, and Speaker Mike Johnson has scheduled a vote on that petition for next Wednesday. In advance of that, as of Wednesday, we have the release of about 20,000 pages of emails between Epstein that implicate a variety of people in his affairs, including Donald Trump and former Harvard President Larry Summers.
Speaking of the Epstein files: journalist Michael Wolff has slapped Melania Trump with a lawsuit, claiming that her threat to sue him for $1 billion is an attempt to stop his reporting on her own involvement with Epstein.

Your hosts:

On September 3, 2025, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14) speaks to the media after a press conference with Epstein survivors. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock

Our focus: What happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia businesswoman, was elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia’s 14th district in 2020: here’s a biographical essay from 2021.
Greene took office in 2021 amid a slew of accurate charges that she spread conspiracy theories (some antisemitic), threatened Democratic colleagues, and was a conduit for Russian propaganda. In 2021, she was suspended from Twitter for spreading COVID misinformation, and was fined almost $50K for not wearing a mask on the House Floor. When she finally capitulated, she wore face coverings with messages on them. A self-identified Christian nationalist, Greene left the Catholic church because of the sexual abuse scandals, and she joined the evangelical Protestant Northpoint Community Church in Alpharetta, GA.
In her first term, Greene was disciplined by both a Democratic-led House and by fellow Republicans. In 2022, she and Lauren Boebert (R, CO-04) heckled Joe Biden and called him a liar at the State of the Union address.
Originally Lauren Boebert’s Bobbsey Twin, the two MAGA women had a nasty break-up. Greene’s tight relationship with then-Congressman Matt Gaetz (R, FL-01) did better: as his nomination for Attorney General was failing in 2024, Greene accused the GOP of overlooking other members with equally grave transgressions.
Some argue that MTG’s current attacks on fellow Republicans are a savvy money-raising technique that prey on MAGA conspiracists who are suspicious of all entrenched power.
After last week’s Blue Wave, Greene warned fellow MAGAs that their losses could be chalked up to a failure to make life affordable. “Business 101,” she said. “If you don’t deliver what you promise, then don’t expect return customers.”
Greene’s criticism of the GOP preceded the Blue Wave on election day 2025. On September 3, Greene was one of several Republicans to speak at a September press conference on the steps of the Capitol, surrounded by alleged victims of financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, to demand the release of materials still withheld by the DOJ. She also promised that she would read “every damn name” into the Congressional record.
Greene also spoke out against the expiration of the ACA tax credits in early October, and in an appearance on The View this week, disavowed her long-term support for QAnon.
Greene says she has consistently been America First, but that increasingly Trump is not. “Restoring American’s ability to raise a family on one income, to me, should be a top priority,” Greene posted on X Tuesday. “It was once the norm in America.” This was a position originally promoted by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Tyagi two decades ago in a book called The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Still Going Broke (2004).
The tech and design platform Fast Company is calling Greene’s evolution “the brand pivot of the year.” Some are speculating about a presidential run in 2028.

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What we want to go viral:

Neil urges you to read an unfolding story about thrill-seeking in a war zone, Sarah Rainsford and Guy Delauney’s “Italy investigates claims of tourists paying to shoot civilians in Bosnia in 1990s,” (BBC, November 12. While the evidence is still hazy, the Italian government is looking into charges that “Italian citizens travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina on ‘sniper safaris’ during the war in the early 1990s.” The problem is based on an investigation by Milan journalist Ezio Gavazzeni that wealthy people bought access from Serbian authorities to such trips: participants reportedly paid different rates for the “privilege” of shooting men, women, and children.
Claire is behind on her television watching as usual, but is currently in love with Hacks (2021- ), the Max series starring Hannah Einbinder as Ava Daniels, a struggling young comedy writer, and Jean Smart as a veteran stand-up comedienne at the end of her career. The series is beautifully plotted and written and has a lot to say about not just women and creativity, but about all of us making a commitment to learning from our generational differences.

Short takes:

The Trump administration has begun to refer to the nation’s premier food assistance program, SNAP, as “broken” and in need of reform—a sure sign that benefits suspended during the shutdown may be threatened permanently,” Melody Schreiber writes at The New Republic. “During previous shutdowns, including the 2019 shutdown under the first Trump administration, SNAP continued operating as normal. The fact that the second administration refused to tap into the emergency fund this time—and brought the issue all the way up to the Supreme Court—is itself worrying to those who follow food assistance. (November 14, 2025)
Former FTC Chair Lina Kahn is bringing the trust-busting savvy she exercised in the Biden administration to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda, Liz Hoffman reports at Semaphore. “People familiar with the transition, and her thinking, have an answer: Khan has been scouring city and state laws—some overlooked by past mayors and some too new to have been tested yet—for legal footing for Mamdani’s priorities,” Hoffman writes. “It’s a skill set the Yale-trained lawyer wielded while running the FTC, where she dusted off laws, some dating from the early 20th century, and sued companies under novel theories of harm.” (November 12, 2025)
As we have discussed on the podcast, gadfly Laura Loomer is no ordinary MAGA: in fact, she believes she may be Donald Trump’s spiritual twin, and she has periodically purged White House personnel by pillorying them to her 1 million followers on social media “Loomer’s influence extends beyond the realm of personnel,” Antonia Hitchens writes in a profile at The New Yorker. “In August, a group of Palestinian children who had been severely injured in the war in Gaza arrived in San Francisco after the State Department issued around two hundred temporary visas for medical treatment. Loomer posted a video of the children being received with flowers at the airport.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called her that night, and suspended the program the following day. (November 10, 2025)

Jean Smart shines as diva comedienne Deborah Vance in Hacks. Photograph courtesy of Max.

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We begin with a clip from New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech in Brooklyn, New York, on November 4, 2025, one of five critical victories for Democrats that day.

Representative Mikie Sherrill campaigning in Morristown, NJ, October 14, 2025. Photo credit: Ben Von Klemperer/Shutterstock

News Summary:

On Election Day, former Vice President Dick Cheney died in Northern Virginia at 84 from pneumonia, cardiac and vascular disease. The ultimate Washington insider, CNN characterized him as a “polarizing Washington power player” and The New York Times as “a singular figure: more powerful and less ambitious for higher office than any vice president in modern times.” The architect of the Bush Administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which may have laid the ground for the MAGA movement, he died a Republican in exile, having cast his last presidential vote for Kamala Harris.
On Wednesday, the government shutdown became the longest in history: the previous record was set in Donald Trump’s first term. On Election Day, Trump—now under court order to restore SNAP benefits that were suspended this week—said he would partially restore them but that didn’t seem to reassure voters. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has declined to suspend the filibuster to reopen the government. Twelve Senate Democrats have signaled they are ready to talk in exchange for a vote on restoring healthcare subsidies, but the Trump administration has decided to apply more pressure by reducing flights to 40 major airports. A poll released on Monday shows that 52% of voters hold the Republicans responsible for the shutdown; only 42% blame Democrats.
Also on Wednesday, SCOTUS heard arguments in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, a case filed by small businesses and states that challenges President Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The case is broadly understood as a test for the conservative majority as to whether they will support the authority of Congress, as well as the power of the judiciary over constitutional interpretation. Both conservative and liberal judges were skeptical about the Trump administration’s case, both in its specifics and in its potentially precedent setting power to allow presidents to veto legislation retroactively. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claims that if the tariffs are overturned, the government may have to return as much as $750 billion in revenue.

Your hosts:

On May 5, 2025, supporters of Representative Abigail Spanberger link their vote for governor to Donald Trump’s corruption. Photo credit: The Old Major/Shutterstock

Our focus: Democrats ran the table on Tuesday night. Why? And what does it mean looking forward to 2026?

Democrats won four major contests last night, as well as a slew of minor races. While Republicans are making excuses, many Democrats saw the outcome as a combination of great campaigning, great candidates and buyer’s remorse. Trump blamed the shutdown; Fox News’s Brett Baier thinks that Trump’s policies are alienating voters. In other words, Trump wasn’t on the ballot—but he was on the ballot.
Turnout in some places was historic, and appears to have won back some Trump voters—particularly Latinos. In New York City, over 2 million people voted by mail or in-person, the most since Republican John Lindsey defeated Abe Beame in 1965.
New York City: it took less than 30 minutes to declare 34-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York: he will be the first Muslim mayor of the city, and defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo; Republican Curtis Sliwa’s voters left him in the dust. Here are the numbers; here is the road ahead. And breaking: former FTC Chair Lina Kahn is co-chairing the all-woman Mamdani transition team.
As expected, Abigail Spanberger will be the next governor of Virginia, and the first woman governor. Less predictably, Democrats ran the table, expanding representation in the House of Delegates, winning the Lieutenant Governor’s position (Ghazala Hashimi will be the first Muslim and first Indian American to win statewide office in Virginia); and Jay Jones, pilloried for sending texts that were at worst violent and at best in execrable taste, will be the next Attorney General.
Again, less predictably, Mikie Sherrill will be the next governor of New Jersey. In a race that was supposed to come down to the wire, she beat Jack Ciaterrelli by a blistering 13 points. Former Governor Jim McGreevey goes to a December 2 runoff with City Councilman James Solomon.
Pennsylvania voted by 23 points to retain three Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court, ensuring that the court will stay out of Republican hands through the 2028 general election.
Californians turned out in droves to approve the temporary Congressional redistricting proposed by Gavin Newsome to counter redistricting in Texas. In a surprise move, Kansas Republicans just turned back an effort to redistrict their state.
In Maine, voters rejected a shorter early voting period and a photo i.d. requirement, and approved a red-flag gun control law.
Colorado voters approved a tax on high earners to fund free meals for all public school students.
In Mississippi, Democrats have secured two more seats in the State Senate, ending a decade-long Republican supermajority.
Some of the factors that went into Democrats’ big night—and why we should be hopeful going into 2026.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to go to your phone and follow The Alabama Murders (Pushkin Studios, 2025), a riveting podcast hosted by Malcom Gladwell about the ripple effects of a murder and how it illuminates our national debate about the death penalty.
Claire wants you to think about David Gauvey Herbert, “She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges,” (New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2025) about Mary Beth Lewis’ determination for more babies—into her 60s.

Short takes:

You might want to watch what you eat: according to ProPublica’s Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts, because of Trump cuts, safety inspections of food imported from abroad are at historic lows. “The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit,” Waldman and Roberts report. “The gutting of the workforce coincides with other actions the administration has taken that are poking holes in the nation’s food safety net. In March, the FDA announced it was delaying compliance with a rule to speed up the identification and removal of harmful products in the food system, to give more time for companies to follow the rules. The next month, it suspended a quality control program that ensured consistency and accuracy across its 170 pathogen and contaminant labs as a result of staffing cuts.” (November 6, 2025)
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—a government plane, to be exact, taking FBI Director Kash Patel to visit his girlfriend! “Facing criticism for taking a government jet to see his country-singer girlfriend perform at a wrestling match in Pennsylvania—then taking the jet to her home city of Nashville,” Will Sommer writes at The Bulwark, Patel “chose to fire a veteran FBI official in charge of the bureau’s planes,” presumably for not hiding the trips efficiently. “What’s fairly clear is that Patel has been using the jet for events that have no real overlap with the actual responsibilities of the FBI. It’s an issue that came up in a September Senate hearing. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) showed blown-up pictures of Patel hobnobbing ringside with celebrities at UFC matches in Las Vegas and Miami, and chatting with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky at a New York hockey game—all trips Patel took on the government jet.” (November 6, 2025)
Here it is: Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) “has confided to colleagues that she wants to run for president, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including one who has spoken with her directly about it,” Reese Gorman reports at NOTUS. “One source says her conversations have centered around her belief she is ‘real MAGA and that the others have strayed,”’ adding that she believes she has ‘the national donor network to win the primary.’” Greene has contested NOTUS’s reporting—but not denied it. (November 5, 2025)

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Neil is off this week doing super-secret stuff: all will be revealed eventually. But today, I am delighted to offer an episode featuring former New York Times journalist Sam Tanenhaus. The author of two previous books on conservatism in the United States, including a biography of anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers, Sam joined me to talk about his new volume about a man who did more than almost anyone else to move the Republican Party to the right. So, join Sam and me in a conversation about Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025).

President Ronald Reagan (right) with William F Buckley in The White House Residence during his private 75th birthday party, February 7, 1986. Image courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons

Show notes:

We begin with a famous, televised quarrel between William F. Buckley and novelist Gore Vidal at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami, in which Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley responded by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to hit him.
Sam mentions another podcast, Know Your Enemy, a show about the American right produced by Dissent.
Buckley’s archive at Yale, as Sam points out, is enormous: you can take a look at the finding aid here.
Oilman William F. Buckley, Sr.’s plan to raise his family in Mexico was thwarted by the success of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and ended in 1920.
Sam refers to Louis Menand’s review of Buckley (May 26, 2025).
Claire and Sam discuss The National Review, the conservative magazine of ideas that Buckley founded and ran for nearly 50 years, and which still exists in magazine and online formats.
Discussing the large number of gay men in Bill and Pat Buckley’s social and professional circles, Sam references Christopher Buckley’s memoir, Losing Mum and Pup(Twelve, 2009).
Claire and Sam discuss the 1965 debate between Buckley and Black writer James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union—Baldwin won the debate.
Listeners who want to learn more about extremism and the rise of the New Right may wish to read David Austin Walsh, Taking America Back:The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (Yale University Press, 2024).
Pat Buckley, a major figure in her own right, died in 2007: you can learn more about her here.
Sam brings up Midge Decter, a neoconservative intellectual and writer.

Short takes:

Fifty years ago this week, William J. Brink of the New York Daily News wrote a headline for the ages. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” was an epic Bronx cheer in response to President Gerald Ford’s dithery response to the New York City budget crisis. The headline “had the benefit of truth-telling, at a time when truth was easier to discern and less open to argument,” Bill Brink, the headline writer’s son and a senior editor at The New York Times, writes. But it is also emblematic of a certain moment in journalism that Brink, Sr. was eminently suited to. “For Nixon’s famous visit to China, he decided to have a calligrapher draw Chinese characters for a front-page message to Nixon. But as deadline approached, my father panicked over the accuracy of the characters. He went around to Chinese restaurants to show the page to workers, and he wasn’t satisfied until three of them verified that the message was correct.” (October 30, 2025)
They had to find that $150 million for Bari Weiss somewhere, right? No, seriously, Paramount need $2 billion, which means cutting 1,000 jobs—at least. “As part of the cuts, the network has closed its Johannesburg bureau and is cancelling its CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus streaming shows,” Jeremy Barr reports at The Guardian. “The network’s Saturday-morning program will undergo a format change, according to a source with knowledge of the changes who was not authorized to comment.” And of course: “The network’s race and culture unit was gutted.” (October 29, 2025)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, on the specious grounds (recently publicized by President Donald Trump and contradicted by his own FDA) that the pain reliever causes autism. “Paxton, a candidate for US Senate and a major supporter of Donald Trump, has spent much of his time as attorney general focused on pregnancy—more specifically, forcing women to stay pregnant against their will,” Bess Levin writes at Vanity Fair. “He has supported extreme abortion bans, made June 24 (the day Roe v. Wade was overturned) an annual holiday for the attorney general’s office, and sued the Biden administration after it said hospitals must perform life-saving abortions even in states that ban the practice.” At the same time, Paxton’s wife is divorcing him on, as she put it, “Biblical grounds,” which we presume means that he violated one of the Ten Commandments—maybe the one about the ox and the ass? (October 29, 2025)

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We begin with this clip of Vice President Vance excusing the Young Republicans who sent racist, homophobic, and violent messages and misidentifying them as “boys” and “kids.” The organization he seems to be referring to is College Republicans. Young Republicans, founded in 1856, is an organization designed for “young professionals” as old as 40, and jumpstarts political careers.

Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance (right) confer with U.S. Space Force Col. Susan Meyers, 821st Space Base Group commander, left, in Pituffik, Greenland. Meyers was removed from her post almost immediately after the visit for repudiating Vance’s derogatory remarks about the governance of a Danish territory that President Donald J. Trump covets. Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Jaime Sanchez/Wikimedia Commons

News Summary:

Amazon Web Services went down early in the week due to a system flaw at a data center in Northern Virginia, taking a range of services offline, from educational software to Wordle. Critics point to this moment as a warning about how vulnerable the cloud services we rely on really are.
Donald Trump is literally destroying Washington D.C. In what appears to be an impulsive project, the president launched a demolition of the East Wing on Monday. The project has already expanded beyond its original scope. Trump says the ballroom he intends to build on the site will cost $250 million—or more! Originally built in 1902 by Theodore Roosevelt, and expanded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, Trump’s project is only the most recent renovation done to the White House’s structure over two centuries. This is only the most recent episode in Trump’s history of destroying historic sites.
Taxpayers have footed the bill for numerous Trump vanity projects over the last 10 months. The President has suggested he might pay for this one with $230 million he expects to receive from the federal government in so-called “damages” from having been investigated and prosecuted for crimes he committed in the first term. As a not-irrelevant aside, Trump has a long history of promising charitable donations that never arrive.
GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) is still “carving her own lane” on issues like healthcare, Gaza, Ukraine, and the Epstein files. But why? A former Republican strategist has told The Daily Beast that Greene is angry because the White House refused to back her potential 2026 bid for governor. On Wednesday, Greene told Tucker Carlson that she sometimes “hate(s) my own party” and blames Republicans for government dysfunction. She has also publicly complained about how women are treated in the GOP.

Your hosts:

Our focus: JD Vance is normalizing the Republican sprint to extremism. But will it carry him to the presidency?

Who is Vice President JD Vance? We begin with a profile of him as a candidate, and then discuss his role in the Trump administration: you can read about it here and here. During the campaign, Robert Reich dubbed Vance a political chameleon who will do, or say, anything to succeed.
During the 2024 campaign, Vance went viral for misogynistic comments about “childless cat ladies.” This crude characterization of women who work aligned him with the Christian nationalist wing of the GOP, and a pro-family politics that relies on women staying home to raise children. Despite this, in 2024, Vance polled significantly better among young women than young men.
Vance’s favorability rating is currently hovering at about 43%, slightly lower than Donald Trump’s. He was also the least well-liked of any recent Vice Presidential candidate; Vance was even less popular than Sarah Palin. Two months ago, The Washington Monthly speculated that Vance was also the least popular new VP in history, in part because of his “obnoxious” style.
Vance has consistently driven the GOP culture wars, although in a less aggressive and crude way than many MAGA politicians. A convert to Catholicism, he prevaricated when Pope Francis criticized the cruelty of the Trump deportation agenda, and Vance appears to see no conflict between the administration’s policies and his own marriage to attorney Usha Vance, a daughter of immigrants.
Vance’s role seems to be to soften the edges of Donald Trump’s erratic behavior and decision-making, sometimes by doing belated walk-backs of extreme positions. For example, Vance was one of several administration normies to urge pregnant women to speak to their doctors about Tylenol after Trump and RFK Jr. linked its use to autism.
Vance is also part of the administration outreach to young men. He grew a beard during the campaign, reportedly to enhance his masculinity; Ms. Magazine devoted an essay to Vance’s manspreading body language. But these efforts have only been partly successful. He has been widely mocked for an awkward running style some call the “Vance Prance,” and photos have circulated of Vance, as a young man, cross-dressing at a Yale Law School party.
Vance downplayed the seriousness of the Young Republicans group chat by diverting attention to ugly texts sent by a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia, and by arguing that they were “just kids” and that “young boys” specialize in “edgy, stupid jokes.” Some of the participants are only a little younger than Vance, while making claims to humor do not mean a statement is “just a joke.”
CNN pointed to this incident as representative of the GOP’s shift from moralism to “whataboutism.”
Notably, the second Trump administration no longer distances itself from the so-called mistakes, infelicities and jokes that animate MAGA political culture. The GOP seems divided on this question. The party has shut down Young Republicans chapters in the aftermath of the texting scandal, and Attorney Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to the Office of Special Counsel this week was withdrawn when Senate Republicans agreed that his text messages and social media posts were too extreme for them. Yet, in response to the “poop video” Trump posted to Truth Social on No Kings Day, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said the President was “using satire to make a point.” He did not explain what the point was.
Can Vance lead the GOP and MAGA into the permanent majority that it craves? Some say yes, while others say he will have trouble fending off fringier primary candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump. Jr. on one side, and a more mainstream, seasoned candidate like Marco Rubio on the other. Betting markets show a 55% likelihood Vance will be the nominee.

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What we want to go viral:

Neil points us to the Netflix series, “Love Is Blind,” a reality show now in its ninth season, in which competitors develop a romance, separated into pods and without seeing each other. If that isn’t creepy enough for you, this season has turned very dark: you can read about it in Stephanie Sengwe’s story, “I Thought the Ed Gein Story Would Give Me the Creeps, but Love Is Blind 9 Is the Scariest Thing on Netflix Right Now,” (People, October 11, 2025)
Claire wants you to revisit what it meant to become a woman artist in the 1960s and 1970s by reading Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz(Scribner, 2024). Fans of both Joan Didion and Eve Babitz (who, as it turns out, were friends) will find new material; new perspectives on both women’s sexuality; and a new story about their sense of themselves as potentially iconic figures—and how they used men to further their own careers.

Short takes:

“Given the scale of the crisis facing New Yorkers, voters deserve significantly more ambition,” New York Times journalist Mara Gay writes about the big talk about housing the city’s mayoral candidates engage in. But where is the big thinking? “Mr. Mamdani, whose campaign was built around the rallying cry `freeze the rent,’ is the only candidate in the race who has shown significant urgency around housing over the course of the year,” Gay writes. “But the most pressing question is what he would do to make housing more affordable for the millions of residents who don’t live in rent-stabilized homes. Mr. Mamdani has said he would build 200,000 affordable new units over 10 years. That’s a fraction of what the city will need when 85,000 people are already in shelters and the market is pricing longtime residents and young families out of the city.” (October 23, 2025)
Why are college students drawn to conservatism? “Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else,” recent campus right-winger Julia Steinberg writes in The Atlantic: students pretended to agree with each other even when they were actively disagreeing (as a former college teacher, I can vouch that this is true.) “ But when she joined the conservative Stanford Review, Steinberg found a milieu where people argued honestly. “Preachy, judgmental authority has never sat well with young people. The young people of today see that authority in the establishment left, not the right,” she writes. “At Stanford, this translated to a vibrant conservative scene and a lackluster liberal one.” (October 23, 2025)
At Abortion, Every Day, feminist Jessica Valenti reports that Wyoming Republicans are advancing a bill that “would effectively outlaw the regulation of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, even allowing the groups to sue state leaders who try to stop them.” CPC’s are fake clinics that exist to steer women towards carrying unwanted pregnancies to term: some coerce clients into exploitative adoption networks. “The goal is simple: to make crisis pregnancy centers unregulated and untouchable, freeing them up to spread conservatives’ extremist agenda nationwide. And a tremendous part of that agenda is quietly and informally banning birth control.” (October 22, 2025)

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We begin with this clip from a March 28, 2025 press conference, in which President Donald Trump answers the timeless question: “What is a woman?”

Photo credit: NeydtStock/Shutterstock.com

In the news:

Election day is on November 4, less than a month away, and a race everyone is watching is in New Jersey: Democrat Mikie Sherrill leads Jack Ciattarelli by between 3 and 8 points if you knock out a few outlier polls. It’s a litmus test for 2026, since by party registration, New Jersey is starting to look a little swingy, since new GOP voter registrations are rising faster than new Democratic registrations. It’s an ugly campaign. Ciatterelli accused Sherrill of being part of a cheating scandal during her time at the United States Naval Academy, based on documents leaked by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. The Sherrill campaign counterattacked by linking a medical publisher Ciattarelli owned to the opioid epidemic. But what could push Sherrill over the top is Donald Trump’s toxic approval rating in the Garden State: 37%.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that leaders of Young Republicans chapters across the country routinely use racial, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs on their Telegram channel. In these exchanges, these young men spoke of torturing, bombing, gassing, and burning their opponents; joked about rape; and chatted about their admiration for Nazis (mostly the old-school German ones.) Despite widespread disgust at the chat’s content, Vice President JD Vance has downplayed criticism of these men, some of whom are employed by elected politicians, as “pearl-clutching.”
As we expected, Maine Governor Janet Mills has jumped into that state’s Democratic primary for the honor of facing 73-year-old Republican Senator Susan Collins in 2026. Mills will face oysterman and former marine Graham Platner and progressive Jordan Wood. Platner has positioned himself as the populist candidate, Platner the businessman, and Mills will be the proven winner with statewide name recognition who has already distinguished herself by standing up to the Trump administration. But Mills is 77, and would be almost 80 when sworn in. Political scientist Amy Fried, who believes a contested primary will benefit a Democratic candidacy, breaks down the primary here.
In yet another bizarre piece of medical advice, Secretary of Heath and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has linked male circumcision to autism. Asserting that babies are given Tylenol after the procedure, he claims that circumcised boys have twice the rate of autism as uncircumcised boys (about 80% of American people with penises are circumcised.) Kennedy is relying on two, small outlier studies: larger studies have revealed no link between circumcision and autism. But the announcement has elevated another fringe group, so-called “intactivists,” who believe that the procedure, usually done shortly after birth, is a form of psychological and physical abuse that is detrimental to a full male sexual experience.

Your hosts:

Neil J. Young,is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, a mentor at the OpEd Project, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Our Focus: the women of MAGA

President Donald Trump has appointed women to a third of his Cabinet positions: that is more than any other president. These appointments include Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the Small Business Administration; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins; Secretary of Education Linda McMahon; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem; Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
One of Trump’s most trusted personal attorneys was Alina Habba; he recently installed her as U.S Attorney for New Jersey—something that has turned out to be a problem, as at least one judge asserts she was appointed illegally.
But there are many more women in key positions in the Trump administration. They include 26-year-old Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person to fill that role, and Trump can’t seem to stop talking about how pretty she is. In a recent gaggle on Air Force One, he commented: “That face... and those lips, they move like a machine gun.”
It’s probably no accident that the highest-ranking Black official in the Trump administration is also a woman, and that she is also Director of Minority Outreach. Lynn Patton, who grew up in New Haven, CT, was unable to begin her job until May because of sanctions imposed for violating the Hatch Act (twice) when she worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump Presidency.
In his first term, Trump had a lot to say about how he liked women to look, which may account for the remarkably uniform appearance of many of the women in his administration.
First Lady Melania Trump is almost exclusively discussed in relation to her fashion choices and physical appearance.
Trump has a long association with beauty pageants.From 1996 to 2015, he owned the Miss Universe Organization (which includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA), which is said to be racier, and does not offer a path to education, which the Miss America brand does.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there are a large number of successful beauty pageant contestants in Trump’s circle. But what else about pageant contestants makes them good candidates for a Trump White House?
One Trump woman who is not a glamour puss is White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, a veteran of Florida state politics and the director of Trump’s 2024 campaign. She is also the first woman to serve in that role.
Another c0ontrasting look is Laura Loomer. Trump is said to value women who fight, hence his allegiance to the 32-year-old social media influencer. Journalist Nina Burleigh recently dubbed Loomer “the Madame DeFarge of the right.” But some around Trump see the forms of intimidation Loomer engages in, and her claims to intimacy with him, as vulnerabilities, and aides actively work to keep her away from the President.
The women surrounding Trump represent a larger emphasis for conservatives: a rejection of feminism’s gains in favor of returning women to home and family. And yet, there is a contradiction, since obviously the women around Trump work and have careers.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Annie K. Lamar’s “Inadequate recordkeeping is not just a bureaucratic failure” (Capitol Weekly, October 16, 2025), which details ICE’s destruction of documentation, what seems to be a calculated process that allows the federal government to simply make immigrants disappear. Somewhere around 400 human beings vanished from a facility built in the Florida Everglades before it was shut down by the courts. The destruction of records also makes it impossible for detainees to appeal their incarceration and deportation or show that they have been wrongly arrested.
Claire pushes back against the mainstream TV critics and urges you to watch “Boots,” a Netflix series based on Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine (Aboutface Books, 2015.) Although the show is set in the 1990s, Cope’s original book is about a gay teen who joins the Marines in 1979, when it was still illegal to be homosexual in the armed services. “Boots” (slang for freshly-minted Marines) was Norman Lear’s last creative project before he died in 2023. While it has received mixed reviews, particularly criticisms that it glorifies the military, it is wildly entertaining—and an excellent preview of the antediluvian military to which Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want to return us.

Short takes:

At The Nation, Elie Mystal predicts that SCOTUS will undo Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which “prevents white people from overrepresenting themselves in Congress.” Black voting will not cease to exist, as it did all over the South after between 1877 and 1965, but the capacity of Black voters to act together will be diluted in many places. “Oral arguments can sometimes sound like the justices are deliberating great and technical points of law, but the outcome in this case was decided long before the lawyers arrived at the courthouse,” Mystal writes about Louisiana v. Callais, which was heard on Thursday. “Oral arguments were largely an exercise of the Republicans justifying their racist positions.” (October 16, 2025)
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has distributed a video to be shown in airports, explaining to passengers that if their flights are delayed or canceled, it is the Democrats’ fault. But more than a dozen “airports said that the video was overly partisan,” Christine Chung reports at The New York Times. “While some airports cited internal or municipal policies that barred politically partisan messaging for preventing them from showing the video, others pointed to state and federal law. Kara Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Port of Portland in Oregon, said in a statement that the video violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law intended to maintain a nonpartisan federal work force and to limit the political activities of federal employees.” (October 14, 2025)
In The Prospect, Jo-Ann Mort tells you everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about White House Deputy Chief of Staff and hate monger Stephen Miller. “Miller is one of a handful of hardcore ideologues who have served in both Trump White Houses. He will likely be remembered in history for his current project, turning the streets of America into war zones so that he can meet his professed goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day,” Mort writes. And yet, “There is probably nothing more central to the liberal and mainstream American Jewish experience than the history of being immigrants and of having the opportunity to thrive and prosper in a US that welcomed them.” (October 14, 2025)

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Due to a corrupted video file, our original file cut out after the 56 minute mark, and I couldn’t fix it. I have taken it down and you can now listen to the episode as an audio file.

Our episode begins with White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller’s Christian nationalist eulogy for Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk on September 21, 2025, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale Arizona. Our title is taken from Buffalo Springfield’s iconic 1967 song about political conflict, “For What It’s Worth.”

LAPD officers reloading tear gas launchers during a demonstration in downtown Los Angeles against expanded ICE operations on June 8, 2025.

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In the news:

On Tuesday, Pam Bondi testified for almost five hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But instead of answering questions, she met every inquiry from Democrats with a petulant attack, refusal or conspiracy theory. With a few exceptions, Republicans acted like everything was normal. Here is the full hearing.
In a break with her party, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14) is demanding an extension of Obamacare subsidies—even as she insists that she dislikes the program. Why? Insurance premiums will double for her kids and constituents. Although MTG voted to cut the subsidies, unlike other Republicans, she is now telling the truth about what a disaster the cuts will be for all Americans. Is Trump may be listening to her?
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard a case challenging Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. The plaintiff is a Christian therapist who argues that her free speech is impinged on by not being able to help young people change their sexual or gender orientation. A summary of the research on conversion therapy by Cornell University’s Public Policy Portal found that out of 47 studies, 1 showed positive results—and those were examples of faith healing. The Trevor Project characterizes CT is “dangerous and discredited,” and that damage to clients costs the U.S. economy $9.3 billion a year in related medical bills. UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that LGBQ people (trans people were not part of the study) who have undergone CT are twice as likely to try to end their lives as people who have not.
Rutgers history professor Mark Bray and his family were boarding when airline officials stopped them at the gate, saying their ticket had been canceled. Bray, an expert on antifascist movements, has been targeted by Turning Point USA as a violent extremist, defamation amplified by influencers like Jack Posobiec, Andy Ngo, and Milo Yiannopoulos. As a result, Bray has faced a barrage of death threats. Bray was also targeted at Dartmouth in 2017 when he spoke out against the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville; as of last night, has successfully departed for Spain.

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Your hosts:

Our focus: Donald Trump’s war on American cities.

Here’s a timeline of the troops deployments that began in June with Washington D.C.
The United States has a bad history of deploying the National Guard against peaceful protesters. On May 4, 1970, four White students were killed during an anti-war protest at Ohio’s Kent State University. Less than two weeks later, two students were killed and eight wounded when White police officers fired into a crowd of students at Mississippi’s historically Black Jackson State University.
Trump is claiming his authority for these deployments under the 1807 Insurrection Act, modified in 1861 and 1871 to allow a President to deploy state troops against the will of the governors who command them.
But there are obvious Constitutional restraints on the President too. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress broad powers over the military and militias. Another is the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act: Neil and Claire explain why that is a significant landmark.
In the District of Columbia, Mayor Muriel Bowser—whose city is legally governed by Congress—has tried to work with Trump, even as citizen protesters monitored, and in some cases resisted, troops whose arrests are 40% immigration related. Meanwhile, many of the 2300 troops put on the streets found themselves doing landscaping tasks, while homeless people rousted by soldiers are mostly living hours outside the city, still in tents.
In early June, 2,000 National Guard were federalized and sent to Los Angeles.
The Trump administration has not yet deployed National Guard in Memphis, but has deputized over 200 local officers there.
The reason to militarize cities seems to go beyond immigration. In a recent harangue of top military officers, Trump referred to American cities as a “training ground” for troops; in fact, the military is prohibited from enforcing local laws, and is not trained in policing or immigration enforcement.
California Governor Gavin Newsome filed suit, and just this week received a temporary restraining order, upheld by the appeals court It will also apply to Oregon, where Trump is trying to deploy troops to Portland, scene of some of the most spectacular Black Lives Matter protests. The author of the original ruling is Judge Karen Immergut, who was appointed to the District of Oregon by Trump in 2019.
On September 8, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, a targeted surge of agents to a city that is about 30% Latino; of those residents, about 74% are of Mexican heritage, or 1 in 5 residents of Chicagoland. President Trump has called for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed for opposing his deployment of troops to Chicago. Pritzker to Trump? “Come and get me.” Pritzker has also twice said that the President is in the grip of dementia.
Two pastors peacefully protesting outside a Chicago ICE facility have filed a First Amendment case against the Trump administration: one, Presbyterian minister David Black was shot in the head with a pepper ball while praying.

What we want to go viral:

Neil is excited about Rebekah Peeples, Unchanged Trebles: What Boy Choirs Teach Us About Motherhood and Masculinity (Rutgers University Press, 2025), about the community culture of boys’ choirs, and what one mom learned about her son’s transition to manhood.
Claire wants you to think about Sam Terblanche, a Columbia University student who twice sought treatment in an Upper West Side Mt. Sinai Hospital ER, was sent home, and then died in his dorm room. Lisa Miller’s deeply reported story, “Just a Virus, the ER Told Him. Days Later, He Was Dead,” is a story about a fraying urban medical system, and the use of emergency rooms for routine care.

Short takes:

In a blast from the past, the authors of the Declaration of Independence ended their list of grievances by charging the King of England with inciting Native American violence against them. “In this so-called Age of Reason, Native Americans were charged with having none at all,” historian Ned Blackhawk writes in The Atlantic. “They were not only lawless but also irrational, incapable of self-governance, and lacking moral capacity.” The so-called Founders knew differently, but it was a legalistic move to establish “unchallenged dominion” over North America. “To achieve this, they needed to erase the legitimacy of Native governance and justify violent dispossession. It was precisely because Native societies mirrored some of the colonists’ own ideals (autonomy, law, liberty) that they had to be cast as savages.”(October 9, 2025)
Surprise! A class action lawsuit contends that Amazon Prime Day is fraudulent. Judd Legum at Popular Information contends the “deals” are fake. “For example, on July 8, the Ninja Air Fryer Pro XL was on sale for $119.99, which Amazon said is a 33% discount off the list price of $179.99,” Legum writes. “But the online tool Camel Camel Camel revealed that the air fryer had never been listed at $179.99 until just before Prime Day, and had been available for $119.99 or less every month since last November. The air fryer was available for $119.99 at Macy’s, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Wayfair.” Oops. “Although the actual savings to consumers may be minimal, Prime Days have proven extremely successful in generating billions of additional sales for Amazon. This creates pressure on Amazon’s labor force, which already works at a breakneck pace, to push even faster.” (October 9, 2025)
The Bulwark’s Will Owen asks: Why does Megyn Kelly seem afraid of Candace Owen, who has been pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination? “Many Kirk friends and confidants have pushed back hard on Owens, calling much of what she’s saying batshit crazy,” Sommer writes. His answer? “Kelly, a right-wing media survivor of the first order, recognizes that all the energy these days is flowing toward younger, more antisemitic and conspiratorial influencers—people like Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Ian Carroll. And while she might not join them, she is at least not going to allow herself to be run over by them.” (October 9, 2025)

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We begin with words from Jeffrey Schaub, the Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Grand Blanc Ward.

The Angel Moroni atop the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints temple in Monticello, Utah. Photo credit: Kara Laws/Shutterstock

News roundup:

We begin with the government shutdown that began on Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. Although the House majority was able to pass the continuing resolution without Democratic votes, but Senate Republicans are four votes short of a super-majority. They picked up three centrist Democrats but lost Republican, budget-hawk Rand Paul of Kentucky. In a sign that the government is battered and leaderless, the shutdown plan was radically incomplete. Some workers did not know whether they were furloughed, fired, or should report to work. It is unclear what Trump will do next: he met on Director of OMB Russell Vought met Thursday to discuss firing thousands of federal workers. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) told Fox News that Vought has been “waiting for this moment since puberty,” but some government officials are warning the White House to back off.
On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald J. Trump summoned hundreds of top military officers to Marine Base Quantico in Virginia to lecture them about their appearance. In a particularly disturbing Trump announced expanded plans to station federal troops in American cities, a training exercise to fight the “war from within.” Hegseth leaned in on abandoning legal and moral restraints to the “warrior ethos,” and is particularly concerning, given a recent report about the lawlessness of special forces troops.
Primate scientist Jane Goodall has died at 91. In her twenties, Goodall began working among chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, a project run by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and became a leading advocate for land conservation and the ethical treatment of wildlife.

Your hosts:

Our news focus:

On Sunday, 40-year-old former Marine Thomas Jacob Sanford rammed his truck into the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc, MI, set it on fire, and began shooting at the congregants as they tried to escape. Four are dead, and eight still critically injured, and Sanford was killed in a shootout with police. Investigators have not discerned a motive, but Sanford appears to have been a Trump supporter. Some friends say that he believed that Mormons were the `Antichrist,’” others say that he had struggled with drug abuse and financial problems, and had been behaving erratically.
This came the day after Russell M. Nelson, a physician and reform-minded President of the Church died at the age of 101.
Sanford was the second former Marine to be charged with a mass shooting this week. The day before, Nigel Edge fired into a waterfront bar in Southport, North Carolina,, killing three and wounding eight.
As neighbors moved to comfort each other and collect money for the injured, one LDS member based in Utah has set up a GoFundMe for Sanford’s family that has collected over $200,000.
Although homicides at houses of worship are rare, so far this year there have been six targeted religious attacks, three attacks on places of worship or religious schools. There have been 16 such attacks since Donald Trump first became President in 2017. By comparison, there were only 25 between 2000 and 2017, only 5 in the 1990s, and 2 in the 1980s. In two-thirds of these cases, the perpetrator appeared to have no connection to the church.
Only three targeted attacks have been against LDS Churches. However, there is a long history of violence against the Church since its founding in upstate New York in 1830. A recent poll showed that 39% of Americans hold unfavorable views of the LDS Church, and much of that animus comes from other Christians.
How is such violence linked to our political divisions, if at all? A New York Times/Siena Poll this week reveals that only 33% of the American public believes that the nation can overcome its political divisions; 52% of Democrats and 40% of independents said they no longer lived in a Democratic country. And in a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, 30% of Americans now believe that violence may be necessary to get the country “back on track,” up 11 points since April 2024, and an increase largely driven by Democrats.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read historian Nicole Hemmer’s long history of the “woke Right.” Today’s conservative speech warriors “did not learn cancel culture from the left,” Hemmer argues; “the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.” (New York Times, September 30, 2025)
Speaking of the woke Right—Claire is immersed in Sam Tannenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025), a biography that reveals Donald Trump’s America as McCarthyism’s vengeful return.

Short takes:

Secretary of HSS Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claim that pediatricians profit from childhood vaccines covers up an ugly reality for this ill-paid subspecialty. “Health-care providers purchase roughly half of the vaccines given to children in the United States directly from manufacturers, sometimes paying hundreds of dollars per dose,” Katherine J. Wu writes at The Atlantic. “They don’t recoup any costs until they administer those vaccines to privately insured patients, and bill the companies.” Doctor’s offices “must then shoulder the costs of storage and administration: specialized refrigerators, alarms to monitor for temperature issues, highly trained staff,” Wu writes. “Insurers generally reimburse for some of those costs, but not for unexpected problems—a refrigerator failure, a dropped vial, a dose drawn into a syringe and then declined by a patient’s family. Lose just one vaccine, and providers may have to administer dozens more to break even.” (October 3, 2025)
At The Amsterdam News, Carl E. Douglas reflects on the 30th anniversary of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal in the criminal case brought against him in the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown. “Back then, as contentious and polarizing as the Simpson case was, our nation’s leadership set a tone of restraint and respect,” Douglas recalls. “President Bill Clinton, who almost certainly disagreed with the jury’s decision, did not attack the jurors, question their intelligence, or undermine their legitimacy. He did not label the verdict a miscarriage of justice. He respected the process, and in doing so, set an example for the country.” Three decades later, it’s hard to imagine that same scenario. “The Simpson verdict tested America’s nerves and America passed that test,” Douglas writes. “Today, I’m not sure we would.” (October 2, 2025)
Katha Pollitt isn’t surprised that the Trump administration is blaming women who take Tylenol while pregnant for autism, a link that is wholly and completely unproven. “There is virtually no aspect of women’s lives that the culture does not manage to infuse with doubt and fear and guilt,” Pollitt writes at The Nation. “And that goes double for motherhood. Just ask any middle-class woman who doesn’t breastfeed her baby. It doesn’t matter if she knows intellectually that the baby will be fine, the way boomer babies like me were fine on formula; she’ll still feel selfish if she chooses not to breastfeed, and like a failure if she can’t. As a mom she is supposed to do everything humanly possible and then some to produce a perfect child.” (September 30, 2025)

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We begin with this clip, in which Donald Trump defends FCC chair Brendan Carr’s warning to Disney about ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about the right’s reaction to Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Image credit: chayanuphol/Shutterstock

News roundup:

On Monday, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” There is no structure or organization called Antifa, and domestic terrorism does not exist as a category in the United States federal legal code.
House and Senate Democrats want a probe into Attorney General Pam Bondi’s decision to drop an investigation into bribery allegations against Border Czar Tom Homan. In 2024, Homan, who has close ties to private prison contracting, was recorded accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents in exchange for a promise to steer contracts once Trump was in office.
New York Magazine alleges that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem may be ICE Barbie—but that Ken, otherwise known as unpaid government contractor Corey Lewandowski, really runs the show. The pair are said to have been in a long-term intimate relationship, although still married to other people. As importantly, DHS is an administrative mess.
This week’s biggest news is the HSS recommendation linking autism to the use of the pain killer acetaminophen during pregnancy. Teased by Donald Trump at Charlie Kirk’s memorial on Sunday, the “finding” was announced by him and HSS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at a White House Press conference. There is little scientific evidence for this claim. Major medical associations are pushing back strongly on it, as well as the administration’s continued misinformation about the childhood vaccination schedule. Republicans Mehmet Oz, in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, and Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy have pushed back strongly, as have world health organizations, numerous autism foundations, and Kenvue, the company that makes Tylenol. The March of Dimes also reminds us that high fever can be the cause of facial and heart deformity, miscarriage and perhaps autism.

Your hosts:

Our focus: Free speech for me—but not for thee?

The First Amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Here is what speech, and forms of speech, are or are not covered by the Constitution. Satire is protected speech.
Jimmy Kimmel returned to late night TV on Tuesday, following a major backlash that even crossed into the MAGA ranks. You can listen to Kimmel’s original statement about the political furor surrounding Charlie Kirk’s death; his Tuesday opening monologue about free speech is here. ABC stations in the Sinclair and Nexstar systems have declined to broadcast the show (Sinclair is conservative, while Nexstar has a merger pending with the FCC.) Fox hosts are scrambling to support the Trump administration’s assertion that Kimmel’s suspension was unrelated to federal pressure.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr is unrepentant for having threatened Disney, raising larger questions about how the government agency now exercises its power to regulate. Some Republicans have opposed Kimmel’s brief suspension
As Brian Stelter noted in his CNN newsletter, one battle for free speech has been won but the war is not over. MAGA Republicans demand free speech for themselves, even as they seek to limit the speech of liberals and leftists, while government officials suppress journalists’s efforts to report the news.
Speech can be deemed constitutionally protected; at the same time, suffering consequences from that speech can be legal, depending on the nature of the institution, its policies, and how that speech is received. However, late night TV is traditionally edgy and provocative.
Censorship is not the only issue. Courts has also held (for example in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, 1985) that creating an atmosphere to chill speech can also be unconstitutional.
Private entities are permitted to regulate speech, while publicly-funded institutions must meet a higher bar. Right-wing figures claim that social media platforms have, in the past, suppressed their speech. One of the first policy changes Elon Musk made on X (formerly Twitter) was to unban suspended users, something all internet platforms can elect to do because they are privately held. But they must also operate in accordance with their own rules: here are the regulations each platform claims to abide by.
Eight free speech cases will come before the Supreme Court in the next term.

What we want to go viral:

Neil highlights the work of Marian Burros, a New York Times food journalist and cookbook author who died last weekend at the age of 92. Pete Wells’s “Her Torte Will Outlast Us All” (New York Times, September 23, 2025) tells the story of Burros’s classic dessert, the plum torte, originally published in 1983. It is the all-time most requested recipe from The New York Times food section.
Catching up on unread magazines, Claire was mesmerized by Ezra Marcus and Jen Wieczner’s hair-raising tale about the crypto world, “The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse,” (New York Magazine, August 11, 2025) The article describes a criminal atmosphere that a lack of regulation, or institutional checks-and-balances, cultivates.

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Short takes:

Are calls for civility a distraction from understanding the stakes of political disagreement? “The people who call for civility harbor the belief that we can contend with challenging ideas, and we can be open to changing our minds and we can be well mannered even in the face of significant differences,” New York Times opinion writer Roxane Gay argues. “For such an atmosphere to exist, we would have to forget everything that makes us who we are. We would have to believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the world is a fair and just place. And we would have to have nothing at stake.” (September 24, 2025)
At The Deviant Dispatch, DJ Gay Panic reports on the anger in Fire Island New York’s historically queer towns when officials lowered flags to half-mast in honor of Charlie Kirk (as per President Trump’s orders.) “Since apparently pride flags have to fly at the same height as American flags, the people of Cherry Grove lowered the Pride flags as well,” Panic writes, despite the fact that New York State elected not to change its flag status to honor Kirk. “Clearly the President doesn’t care about federal protocol, so why should gay people?” Panic continues. “Charlie Kirk called trans people ‘a middle finger to God,’ so why would we lower the trans flag in honor of his death?” (September 20, 2025)

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We begin with a clip from the House Oversight Committee’s March 26 2025 hearing, chaired by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), in which Greene begins by accusing the now-former CPB President and CEO Katherine Maher of partisanship.

Image credit: beast01/Shutterstock

News of the week:

On Monday, we learned that a New York Times team has done a forensic examination of the Epstein files, teasing out the relationship between the JP Morgan bank and Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking.. CEO Jamie Dimon claims to have known nothing about one of his more lucrative clients. However, Dimon’s closest assistant was the conduit between Epstein and the bank, and employees flagged Epstein’s large cash withdrawals, something that should trigger a sex trafficking or criminal activity investigation. These warnings were never followed up.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04) has lost yet another seat from his historically teenie-weenie majority. In a special election in Virginia’s Eleventh, a deep blue district, voters did their duty and elected Democrat James Walkinshaw to replace Gerald Connolly, who died earlier this year.
On Wednesday, a Manhattan judge threw out federal terrorism charges filed in the Luigi Mangione case. This decision not only has ramifications for Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, but for Donald Trump’s announced determination to use terrorism designations against a range of nonprofits that have historically funded liberal causes.
On a lighter note, news surfaced last week that there has been a happy ending for the recently widowed 81-year-old right-wing pundit Oliver North. A former Marine and national security aide in the Reagan administration, North’s testimony about the illegal Iran-Contra arms for hostages deal—or cocaine for arms for hostages—electrified the nation in 1987. His bride? Former Secretary and part-time model Fawn Hall, who admitted to Congress that she had destroyed evidence in the case: she is now 65.

Our focus: How Republicans are trying to reshape the media landscape to privilege conservative ideas and voices.

This week, the Walt Disney Company, under FCC pressure, suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on ABC for these words in his opening monologue: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
CBS News reports a “wave of firings” across industries intended to punish people for First Amendment protected wrongspeak about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Neil noted the firing of Washington Post columnist Karen Attia, the last Black journalist working for that section of the paper. (In this section, Claire dropped the ball on remembering Lydia Polgreen’s name as she was discussing hte large number of Black writers who have left top media organizations.)
The succession drama at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire—which includes valuable conservative outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, as well as properties in England and Australia—is over. Lachlan Murdoch finally did what his father told him to do in the first place—buy out his three siblings for over $1 billion apiece—securing the company’s right-wing political influence in the English-speaking world.
President Donald J. Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, four reporters, and Penguin Random House of having tried to influence the 2024 election by “spreading false and defamatory content” about him—and for endorsing Kamala Harris. In July, Trump also filed suit against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on the Epstein birthday book.
During the 2024 campaign, we saw Donald Trump attack Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists Conference: more broadly his attacks on diversity undermine the vitality of the news environment.
In February, we began to see news organizations bending the knee to Trump: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a new editorial policy that would prioritize content “defend[ing] personal liberties and free markets,” accelerating departures from the Post that had begun as downsizing through layoffs and buyouts in 2024.
Republican attacks on fact-based reporting position major media as cynical and readers as the true fact-finders. Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy emphasized this in the Senate hearings on state-funded public media. In his remarks on the recision bill that defunded the CPB, he insisted that public media was no longer necessary because Americans can choose from an array of options available on the internet.
The Trump administration is using federal agencies to force changes in corporate policy that they would otherwise have no control over. One example was the $8.4 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance, which has been hanging fire for over two years before approval from the Trump administration allowed the deal to go through. Coincidentally, this also followed settlement of a 2024 election interference lawsuit between candidate Donald Trump and Paramount’s CBS News division in July. The network committed $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library and made changes in its editorial policy.
Skydance also promised, prior to the merger’s approval, to install an ombudsman to evaluate charges of bias at the network. That person is Kenneth Weinstein, a Trump donor and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute.

Since the merger, CBS has cancelled Late Night with Stephen Colbert. Paramount has also announced a planned acquisition of Bari Weiss’s Free Press Substack for $200 million, and that Weiss may then be installed in an editorial position at CBS.

Your hosts:

What we want to go viral:

Neil’s big read is Gil Duran’s “What’s Up With Peter Thiel’s Obsession With the Antichrist?” (The Nation, September 16, 2025) which tells the story of MAGA’s best friends intensifying his focus on Satan’s Little Helper. Thiel has a hunch who it is too—you’ll never guess.
Claire urges you to click on Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” (Vanity Fair, September 16, 2025). Countering the narrative that Kirk “did politics the right way” (Ezra Klein) by engaging in reasonable debates, Coates shows how Kirk wove bigotry and hatred into an existing conservative narrative about faith, family, and White supremacy. Kirk called for hte death penalty to be administered publicly, and even suggested that Joe Biden should die. “What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself?” Coates asks.

Your hosts:

Short takes:

Tyler Robinsin’s mother “mother told investigators that his political views had recently moved to the left,” Jia Lynn Yang writes in the New York Times Magazine. “That doesn’t mean, though, that his act can be mapped cleanly onto the familiar left-right axis of 20th-century politics. He was not registered with any party. He did not bother voting in the 2024 election. He rarely seemed to surface from the deep end of the internet, where he learned a language that included antifascist slogans divorced from coherent ideology. Politics, it seems, existed alongside video games as a source for a strange swirl of signifiers.” (September 19, 2025)
Reviewing the right-wing media frenzy that attempted to pin assassin Tyler Robinson to so-called “gender ideology,” Lydia Polgreen argues in the New York Times that fact-based journalists were right. “There is no evidence that the markings on the shell casings had any connection to transgender people at all,” Polgreen writes, part of MAGA’s ongoing narrative that blames all unhappiness on stigmatized outsiders. “If you can’t find a job or a house, it is because immigrants took them all and filled your community with crime to boot. If your business is failing, it is because foreign countries are ripping off America by selling us their goods and not buying enough of ours. If your child has health problems, it is because greedy pharmaceutical companies and scheming scientists gave toxic chemicals to your baby in the form of vaccines. And if your child is murdered while cowering in a chapel or at school, the problem is not the surfeit of easily accessible guns in America; it is transgender people.” (September 19, 2025)

Charlie Kirk’s “eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics,” Jamelle Bouie reminds us at the New York Times. “The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.” (September 13, 2025)

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This week, we skip our In the News feature to focus on what has dominated the national narrative since last Wednesday afternoon: the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. We want to emphasize our sorrow at this event, our exhaustion at an epidemic of gun violence in the United States that most frequently harms people who are not politicians or celebrities, and our heartfelt sympathy for Kirk’s parents, his wife Erika, his two children, and friends.

Listeners can follow a chronology of the shooting and the manhunt that resulted in the arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson here. Robinson was identified to authorities as the shooter by his father. Here is an account of the arrest.

The episode begins with a clip of Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, speaking to the media a few hours after Kirk was murdered on stage at Utah Valley University in Logan, Utah on September 10, 2025.

Mourners at a Los Angeles vigil for conservative influencer, youth organizer, and Turning Point USA executive director Charlie Kirk on September 11, 2025. Photo credit: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock

Let’s start with who Charlie Kirk was, why he was disliked by some Americans, and why others honor him as a martyr and thought-leader on the right.

Some of Kirk’s admirers are portraying him as a sacred figure. Christian nationalist influencer Jack Posobiec wrote on September 11 that Kirk “died as he lived, bold, steadfast and unashamed of the Gospel and the truth.”

Yet, among other aspects of his MAGA agenda, it is the fact that Kirk put faith to work for extremist policies that also made him a lightning rod: here is a sketch of a few of the culture war issues Kirk promoted. Here are some of the other things Kirk believed, in his own words. At the same time as we deplore Kirk’s violent death, it is also necessary to take full account of his life, and his repeated utterances that denigrated Black people, immigrants, women, and LGBT people.

Your hosts:

Here are some topics we discuss in the show:

Kirk was 31; he founded TPUSA in 2012 as an 18-year-old college dropout before turning to campus organizing as a career. He appears to have been well-liked in MAGA Republican circles, and Kirk played a role in mobilizing the youth vote for Donald Trump in 2024. One source pegged his net worth at $12 million.
Kirk has been credited by some with remaking modern conservative media for the digital era, something that bought him enemies on the left and on the right. One of his major contributions to the new conservatism may have been making MAGA Republicanism tangible and coherent for a Gen Z audience longing for coherence and meaning.
Was Kirk destroyed by a world he helped to make? Or was he, as Ezra Klein argued, “doing it right” by emphasizing the importance of ideas and debate?
In a discussion about generating empathy for political opponents, Claire mentioned Geraldine Brooks’s book about mourning her husband, Memorial Days: A Memoir (Viking, 2025), and how it helped her connect to the Kirk family’s grief.
Here is Erika Kirk’s eulogy for her husband, broadcast live on Fox News on Friday, September 12, 2025.
Kirk’s podcast was very popular. It often featured him debating students, although the debates were often one-sided, Kirk set the rules, and his chosen opponents seemed chosen for self-presentations that seemed to almost parody leftist students. Such encounters also created edited viral internet content for Kirk’s social media platforms, headlined with phrases like “Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies Once and For All” a technique pioneered by right wing activist Ben Shapiro. But sometimes Kirk debated popular podcasters from the Left as well.
Touted as someone who believed in the free exchange of ideas, Kirk also maintained a website that targeted college professors for harassment by his followers. Jamelle Bouie writes about how Kirk’s brand of intolerance became a framework for right-wing attacks on education.
At the time of the shooting, Kirk was doing one of his “Prove Me Wrong” events, where he invited students to challenge him about his political ideas. Some students at UVU had organized to prevent Kirk from coming to campus. Claire found this striking, since the university has been ranked as the 21st most conservative campus in the United States.
Here is an account of the events leading up to, and after, the shooting: the assassin was spotted jumping from the roof of a campus building.
Immediately after Kirk was murdered, right wing social media exploded with accusations that he had been killed by someone on the Left, or by the Democrats, or by Israel, long before a suspect was captured or evidence released. President Donald J. Trump, who seems to have been genuinely fond of Kirk, echoed these conspiratorial accusations from the Oval Office.
In the aftermath of the shooting, some of his admirers compared him to scared figures like Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. (a contradiction when we take into account that Kirk reviled Dr. King.) Others referred to him as a martyr and a messiah. On Facebook, Christian singer Pat Boone called him an Apostle.
Kirk’s death crowded other acts of violence out of the news: the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks went almost unnoticed by news organizations, as did yet another mass shooting at a Colorado school.
During our conversation about faith, Claire mentioned Peggy Noonan’s September 11 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal discussing prayer as a form of action.
What’s going on at the FBI? In the aftermath of purging experienced investigators, and putting two podcasters in charge of the agency, the legendary federal agency appeared to be in disarray.
This summer, the Utah legislature updated its constitutional carry laws to permit students 18 or older to bear arms on a college campus, concealed or openly. Under Utah law, a gun owner does not need a permit for open carry.
What other political assassinations seem like parallels? September 8, 2025, marked the 90th anniversary of Louisiana Democratic Governor Huey P. Long’s assassination: he was also a young and rising populist figure. A second figure that he calls to mind is right wing media conspiracist Andrew Breitbart, who died in March 2012 at 43.

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What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read Elaine Godfrey’s profile of Texas Democrat James Tallerico, “Texas’s Pete” (The Atlantic, September 9, 2025). Tallarico has joined the Democratic primary for a United States Senate Seat in that race, and “has cemented himself as his party’s newest, shiniest 2026 contender.” Neil raises some doubts about that, and whether Tallarico’s combination of moral seriousness and internet savvy can budge a race in which Colin Allred seems to hold all the cards.
Claire has returned to a classic text about social cohesion, sociologist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community(Simon and Schuster, 2000). A pre-internet account of how community eroded in the United States, she wonders whether Putnam’s thoughtful study helps us imagine a road back from vilifying and dehumanizing those who disagree with us.

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This image of President Donald Trump leaving the White House prior to the Labor Day weekend raced around the internet and fed rumors that he was either already dead or had suffered a catastrophic health episode. Photo credit: posted on r/thebulwark, September 1, 2025; retrieved on September 6, 2025.

We begin with this clip, in which Trump responds to internet rumors about his health.

News of the week:

Best buzz for political junkies this week? The shellacking that Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took from the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, not just from Democrats but from members of his own party. A major point of contention was whether the Department, under Kennedy’s direction had or had not limited access to the Covid vaccine, and whether he had lied in his confirmation hearings about imposing his anti-vaxx views on the nation. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has now issued her own executive order requiring all insurance companies doing business in the state to pay for vaccines approved prior to Kennedy’s action.
The dice are rolling. We expected, and received late Friday, an announcement by Iowa Senator Joni “We’re all Going to Die” Ernst that she is stepping aside, signaling the possibility of a Democratic pickup in an agricultural state hammered by Trump trade policies. This makes six Republicans and four Democrats who are vacating the premises. Then there is Maine Governor Janet Mills who may challenge Republican Senator Susan Collins. Democrats need to hold what they have and flip four additional seats for a majority.
Takes one to know one? Virginia’s Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was scheduled to visit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at its headquarters. The event was cancelled when right-wing influencer Laura Loomer accused Warner repeatedly, and without foundation, of being a Russian asset, and asserting that the Senator be tried for treason. The visit was classified, and Loomer has no security clearance: pardon me—who is a Russian asset?
The New York Post scooped the media world on Thursday when the Murdoch-owned tabloid announced that Paramount is in talks to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press for a possible $200 million, and put Weiss in a senior editorial role at CBS. In three years, Weiss has gone from self-styled “ideological diversity hire” (her words, not mine) at the New York Times Slack channel to being a wealthy and powerful media figure in her own right.

Your hosts:

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Our focus: The national obsession with Donald Trump’s health

Over Labor Day weekend, social media was suddenly abuzz with rumors that Donald Trump was either ill or dead, and that the White House was covering it up.
According to Rolling Stone, although he claimed otherwise, Trump was aware of the rumors.
Reporters and conspiracists alike have been tracking Trump’s health since the 2016 campaign. During and after the 2024 campaign, observers believed that the President was dragging his foot, called attention bruises on his hands, and swelling in his legs and ankles. All of these things are symptoms of various ailments associated with old age; Trump has been diagnosed with venous insufficiency, also associated with aging.
In July, 2024, following an assassination attempt in Butler, PA, there was also speculation about how trauma might affect Trump’s mental health.
Then, there have been accusations of drug use. In 2024, there were reports that speed, Xanax, and other narcotics were easily available in the White House during first Trump administration; these rumors were fueled at various points by ongoing scrutiny of Trump sniffing during debates and other public appearances.
Right wing conspiracists often have difficulty knowing whether political celebrities are dead or alive, sick or well. For example, there is a longstanding rumor, stoked by QAnon, that JFK, Jr. is alive, while the 2016 Trump campaign stoked longstanding conspiracies that Hillary Clinton was ill.
Contemporary conspiracies, whether QAnon or BlueAnon, are also fed by the fact that presidents and their staffs have hidden ill health. But there is an important exception: in 1955, right before he agreed to run for a second term, President Dwight Eisenhower made the unusual decision to go public with the fact he had had a heart attack.
By contrast, John F. Kennedy went to great lengths to keep his many health problems, which included Addison’s disease and debilitating back problems for which he took opiates, a secret.
In 2011, Ronald Reagan, Jr. said that he believed his father had Alzheimer’s while he was still president, although it was not diagnosed until 6 years later. We still have no satisfactory explanation for Joe Biden’s erratic public performances and seeming memory lapses, except that his staff was aware of and strategized around them. President Trump is known to lie about things as neutral as his height and weight.
Does the public need to know about the President’s health—and has concealing that knowledge been a problem for past administrations?
The age of our political class continues to be a problem.Some Democrats are paying attention to concerns that politicians are simply too old. After endorsing New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, 78-year-old Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler announced that he would not run in 2026 and explicitly cited his age.

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What we want to go viral:

Neil recommends The Los Altos Story, a 1990 documentary available on YouTube. It’s about how AIDS came to “a family oriented community with quiet, tree-shaded streets…located in the heart of Silicon Valley,” and the town’s Rotary Club, which stepped up to not just fight the disease, but also change minds about the people who had it.
Claire wants you to read Daniel Currel, “Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class,” (The New York Times, August 28, 2025), a deeply reported piece about the lengths to which Americans of average income go for a Disney World vacation—and how Big Mouse picks their pockets.

Short takes:

Donald Trump “has already started fund-raising off the social-media frenzy surrounding his supposed death over Labor Day weekend,” Susan Glasser writes at The New Yorker. But what does he not want you to know about? Last week’s epic string of failed lawsuits, low approval ratings, and a stalled agenda. “I am well aware that this is not currently the dominant narrative about Trump 2.0, which, whether you like it or hate it, has generally been covered as a sweeping and surprisingly successful attack on pillars of the American establishment in and out of government,” Glasser continues. “But, depending on how the next few months play out, it could be. And that’s the point: What’s clear from Trump’s first seven months back in power is that he has embarked on a breathtaking effort to reshape the American Presidency. What’s far from apparent yet is whether and to what extent he will succeed.” (September 6, 2025)
The Department of Defense is supposedly now the Department of War, a rebranding done by executive order that reverts to World War II. “How far the rebranding might go is unclear, but any comprehensive effort would saddle taxpayers with costs in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars,” Dell Cameron explains at Wired, “as every sign, logo, uniform, computer system, and piece of official paperwork tied to the Pentagon’s identity across the globe would need to be replaced.” An initiative in the Biden administration “to recommend changes at military installations commemorating the Confederacy carried a projected cost of $39 million and covered only nine bases. The Defense Department’s real property portfolio spans hundreds of thousands of facilities, from major bases to small outposts worldwide.” (September 5, 2025)
Sorority rush “is bigger and more competitive than ever, driven by a boom in TikTok content detailing the process,” and if life isn’t difficult or more expensive enough, according to Annie Joy Williams at The Atlantic, moms are now hiring coaches ti help their daughters maximize bids. “Parents invest in lots of kids’ activities; private coaching is now a common feature of competitive athletics. And getting their kids into the right sorority, parents believe, might help them make the kinds of connections that can get them job interviews someday. At my college, a rumor went around that one mother injured herself by falling out of a tree outside a sorority house—people said she’d been trying to get a peek at her daughter’s performance during the final round of rush.” (September 5, 2025)

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Hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, the first out gay man to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, at his January 2025 Senate confirmation hearing. Photo credit: Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock

We begin with this clip from Donald Trump, speaking immediately after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, and before the New Hampshire primary, in 2016.

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In the news:

For the past week, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsome has trolled President Donald J. Trump with tweets, memes, and AI-generated videos that mimic MAGA-world’s worship of him as a sacred figure, pop culture icon, and superhero. He’s been getting attention for this, but also getting out information—for example that red state murder rates are higher than those in Blue states. He is also spoofing MAGA with a so-called “Patriot shop” that has made $300,000 since Monday selling merch that says things like Make America Gavin Again. Is it a coincidence that he has also surged 8 points in the polls, and is currently the leading Democratic candidate for 2028?
MAGA world went into a tailspin this week when the iconic right-wing Cracker Barrel restaurant chain unveiled its corporate redesign: a new logo and decorating scheme, and menu items like—margaritas. The “old timer,” also known as “Old Uncle Herschel” was disappeared from a newly-minimalist sign, and the company—founded with one Tennessee store in 1969 that became a national chain has abandoned its “old-fashioned” charm. Donald Trump weighed in to say that Cracker Barrel should put everything back the way it was: as of late yesterday, it appears that they have. In fact, the company was trying to broaden its appeal: it has been in trouble for some time.
On the flip side, Hooters—which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy status last spring, and closed 30 locations in Florida and California—may be in for a renaissance. Attorney Neil Keifer, who owns two dozen franchises and sees the second Trump administration as a great opportunity to market a tacky aesthetic, says he wants to “re-hooterize” the chain. This apparently means butter on everything and slightly longer shorts for the all-female waitstaff, who will no longer be instructed to do everything short of a pole dance to get a tip. The new business plan still emphasizes a wholesome nostalgia for scantily clad—but covered—women that doesn’t cross the line into sexual behavior.
Today we learned that bright red Iowa no longer has a Republican supermajority in its state legislature: Democrat Caitlin Drey appears to have defeated Republican Christopher Prosch by 11 points in a lean-red northwest district near Sioux City.

Your hosts:

Image created by ChatGPT on August 27, 2025

This week’s focus is on the large number of gay men working for Donald Trump, in an administration determined to stamp out the individual rights that the LGBT community has achieved over the last half century. But we also want to know: where are the lesbians?

This week we return to a conversation about who advises Donald Trump, with a focus on the large number of out gay men in his administration. It’s a network that the New York Times described this week as “a new power tribe” in Washington. Charles Moran, the former head of Log Cabin Republicans and now in charge of national nuclear security at the Department of Energy, explains that gay networks have always existed in government, but were not visible.
The Republican party has been the party of homophobia, and in many respects, still is, although that role was shared with Democrats until quite recently. Here’s a short account of the Lavender Scare, still up on the National Archives website: in the 1940s and 1950s, both parties identified queers in government as mentally ill, vulnerable to blackmail, and a national security risk.
Gender transition has been an issue that has made it possible to identify and mobilize MAGA-leaning queers, particularly lesbians. Currently, the Trump administration also has some deniability because most of the attacks on LGBT rights have happened at the state level (there are currently 604 bills pending and the Department of Justice will not be stepping in to enforce civil rights precedents) and/or affect transgender people, with whom Republican queers misidentify.
Yet, here is the record: although Trump endorsed gay marriage in the 2017 campaign, his first administration saw a steady erosion of LGBT rights: here’s the ACLU’s report. GLAAD is maintaining an “accountability tracker” for the second term, which demonstrates not just the loss of funding, but the erosion of visibility. A series of Day One executive orders target the LGBT community. Trump has also taken numerous actions that will impact the health of LGBT people.
By the 1970s, lesbian and gay people became part of the reform movement within the Democratic party that also included feminists, Black and Latino voters. In the 1960s and 1970s, coalitions between queer voters and communities of color resulted in progressive victories in cities like San Francisco and Chicago. In 1980, over 70 out delegates were elected to the Democratic National Convention.
Here’s the Log Cabin Republican Club’s official history of how their politics and power in the party have developed over time, and why they see the Trump administration as a defender of their rights.
But where are all the Republican lesbians? There’s only one out lesbian in the Trump administration; that is former Fox News host Tammy Bruce, nominated this month as deputy UN ambassador.
Will we see more lesbians in the MAHA and wellness space, like lesbian podcaster wellness influencer Jillian Michaels? Another former reality television star, she recently leaped to Donald Trump’s defense in a conversation on The View where the panel discussed the Trump administration’s attack on The Smithsonian.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read about the trend in lux college dorm decorating. In “How Parents Hijacked the College Dorm” (The Atlantic, August 26, 2025), Meaghan Francis invites readers into the world of “well-curated rooms coming together with lots of parental assistance.”
Claire can’t stop talking about Dana A. Williams’s recent book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Amistad, 2025). It illuminates Morrison’s time at Random House, as she was also establishing herself as a leading novelist. But as an editor, Morrison leveraged her growing power in mainstream publishing to elevate Black authors. It’s biography, literary, and intellectual history, all wrapped into one package.

Short takes:

Get your jab now, if you haven’t had one recently. The Daily Beast’s Tom Latchem reports that, based on a discredited study, the HSS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may move to pull the Covid-19 vaccine from the market in the next calendar year. “Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by `influential’ members of President Donald Trump’s family,” Latchem writes, noting that Malhotra has th administration’s ear. “Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.” (August 25, 2025)
“It’s easy, maybe even tempting, to think” that RFK, Jr'.’s “hostility to vaccines has nothing to do with his enthusiasm for fitness,” Jonathan Cohn explains at The Bulwark. But the two have a crucial connection.” It’s the theory that “healthy living” confers” confers "natural immunity” to disease. A backbone of the MAHA world that imagines all humans have the power to heal themselves without medical or pharmaceutical intervention, and that conquering a disease confers for lasting benefits than vaccine-induced protections. (August 24, 2025)
The high focus on fake conspiracies in the Trump Department of Justice has overshadowed news in the department of actual conspiracies. As the nation approaches the 70th anniversary of Emmett Till’s lynching, the federal government has released 6,500 documents in a “cold case” whose White perpetrators were and are well known, but who were shielded for decades. “Davis Houck, the founder of the Emmett Till Archives, said for decades historians have longed to see these records, many of them files of the FBI, which balked at a federal investigation in 1955,” Jerry Mitchell reported last week at Mississippi Today. “The records can be seen at the Civil Rights Cold Case Records portal, maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration.” (August 21, 2025)

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Delaware Representative Sarah McBride at the Delmarva Central Railroad headquarters in Harrington, DE, August, 2025. Behind her is Senator Chris Coons. Photo credit: Office of Congresswoman Sarah McBride/Facebook.

We begin with a clip from a March 13, 2025 press conference, in which Representative Sarah McBride (DE-01) rebukes her Republican colleagues for focusing on culture wars rather than issues of critical importance to the American people.

In the news:

Tuesday saw documents released in the defamation suit Smartmatic Voting machines has brought against Fox News. Text messages that emerged during discovery show that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, prominent hosts like Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfield, and Jeannine Piro (now a United States Attorney for the District of Columbia) sought to promote the network’s financial interests by supporting Donald Trump’s charges of election fraud, despite their knowledge that he had lost.
On Wednesday, Judge Fred Biery in Texas’s Western District temporarily blocked implementation of a law passed last year by the legislature that mandates a large, visible display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Texas. The reasons for the order may be unexpected for some listeners.
This week, President Donald J. Trump has intensified his attacks on The Smithsonian Institution and its director, historian Lonnie Bunch. This week, Trump ordered an investigation of all the museums attached to the Smithsonian and posted this to Truth Social: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” I’ll bite: How bad was slavery, Donald?
James Dobson, founder of the Christian ministry, Focus on the Family, and a major figure in White evangelical Christian politics, has died at 89. Neil discusses his significance—and his advice that beating children was good for them.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020). She is currently writing a biography of radical feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, an independent journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Today’s focus: Congresswoman Sarah McBride (DE-01)

Sarah McBride is young—only 35—progressive, and has an extensive political biography. While still in college, she worked on numerous campaigns, including Governor Jack Markell’s 2008 run, and Beau Biden’s 2010campaign for Delaware Attorney General. She interned in the Obama White house in 2012, the first openly transgender person to do that, and she has worked extensively on LGBTQ issues.
McBride, who came out in 2012, right before she graduated from college, is not the first transwoman to hold elected office. In 2022, voters put Zooey Zephyr in the Montana Legislature to represent House District 100—which includes Missoula and is solidly Democratic—with 79% of the vote. She was re-elected in 2024 by a 60-point margin.
McBride has written a memoir about her journey in life and politics, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality (Crown, 2019). The same year the book came out, she ran for Delaware State Senate, and became the first transgender state senator in United States history.

Congresswoman McBride at a fundraiser last week in Provincetown, MA, with strategist and change maker Jessica Halem (left) and Amherst College historian Jen Manion, the author of Female Husbands (r.) Photograph reprinted with permission of Jessica Halem and Jen Manion.

Almost as soon as McBride was elected to Congress in 2024 as the first out transperson to hold a seat in that body, Republican Representative Nancy Mace (SC-01), supported by Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04), took steps to demean and insult her by authoring a bill limiting all transpeople’s use of restrooms at the Capitol to their gender at birth.
In June, McBride appeared on Ezra Klein’s podcast, where she discussed her work in Congress, the setbacks to trans rights, and how the GOP was able to mobilize suspicion of, and anger about, transpeople so effectively in the 2024 campaign.
McBride, while remaining an important voice for LGBT rights, has mostly worked hard on a variety of issues important to Delaware: In July, she passed her first bill—co-sponsored by one Democrats and two Republicans. H.R. 3339, The Equal Opportunity for All Investors Actopened the field of capital investment to people who have the professional credentials to do it. Previously, only people worth $1 million or more were eligible.

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What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read about how the right came to distract the experts, in Daniel Immerwahr’s “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise,” (The New Yorker, May 19, 2025)
Claire wants you to watch “Apple Cider Vinegar,” a Netflix limited series made for our MAHA moment. It’s about Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson, who launched on Instagram in 2012 and then on her Whole Pantry app in 2013. She was also a fraud, claiming for more than two years to be successfully treating multiple cancers, including the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with organic fruits and vegetables, juices, coffee enemas and apple cider vinegar.

Short Takes:

Tressie McMillan Cottom looks at the Trump administration’s attacks on voting and asks: how do we know what matters and what doesn’t? We don’t. However, Cottom writes at The New York Times, “Patterns matter,” and when we look at them, Donald Trump’s strategy to win the midterms is becoming clearer—make voting harder. New federal and state rules do not rely on old methods such as “poll taxes or literacy tests. Instead, the most telling of them aim to make voting harder by making it more onerous for election offices to meet new rules, overwhelming them with expensive, laborious technical requirements,” Cottom explains. “This is how they catch both the bird in your hand and the one in the bush. Onerous oversight for a nonexistent problem makes voting harder. It also seeds a nasty undergrowth of doubt should an election tally not go their way.” (August 23, 2025)
Donald Trump “has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with `good genes’ and cleanliness,” Julie Métraux writes at Mother Jones, “and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place.” But as Métraux points out in a fascinating history of anti-homelessness campaigns, Trump is in good company. For generations, Americans have tried to wish poverty away by declaring it unsightly and criminalizing the act of being poor in public. (August 22, 2025)
Does Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. simply not know that his stated goal to make food and drugs healthier and safer is being contradicted by massive deregulation that undermines food safety and puts harmful chemicals back in our bodies? MAHA leaders were recently dismayed to see “a draft of a forthcoming White House report on children’s health,” Jessice Winter writes at The New Yorker. “The paper—a follow-up to a MAHA `assessment,’ released in May, that was later found to have numerous made-up or garbled citations—mentions the scourge of ultra-processed foods only once, specifies virtually no concrete action on improving food safety and nutrition, and calls the E.P.A.’s existing regulatory process “robust.” And that research RFK, Jr. kept touting about the links between autism and environmental toxins? Ain’t gonna happen. The Trump administration cut that grant. (August 21, 2025)

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Representative Cory Mills (FL-07) firing up the base in August, 2022. Photo credit: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

We begin with a clip from the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, in which presidential candidate Donald J. Trump describes sexually assaulting women; it surfaced weeks before the 2016 election, but remains relevant to today’s conversation. You can listen to the whole thing here.

In the news:

This week President Donald J. Trump put Washington D.C. under the control of federal troops and police after former DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Corastine was assaulted by teens during a carjacking. Declaring that “crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control," Trump put the D.C. police under federal jurisdiction, redeployed Secret Service and FBI agents to street patrol, and called in the National Guard. He also announced plans to round up homeless people, although it is unclear where he plans to take them. As of Thursday night, local authorities were making an effort to move the homeless out of harm’s way before raids began.
On Monday, CNN reported that AOL is ending dial-up service after thirty years of connecting people: according to the 2023 census, 160,000 Americans still access internet via modem and landline. More troubling? Between 20 and 40 million Americans have no access to broadband, an affordability and infrastructure problem—but one also driven by the absence of competing carriers in rural areas and on tribal lands. Access increased dramatically under the Biden administration, but one 2023 study shows that 8% of Americans had either no internet or used mobile phones.
Thursday, Trump announced plans to celebrate July 4, 2026 by hosting a UFC cage match fight on the front lawn of the White House. This promotional event benefits at least two campaign donors: UFC CEO Dana White, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, whose WWE franchise owns $50 million worth of stock in the holding company that owns UFC.
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska yesterday to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, a summit planned for only four days. Trump said Putin was ready to make a deal, but it seems not. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his European allies insist they need to be at the table for a just and sustainable peace. Meanwhile, experts say that the fact this summit was in Alaska is a victory for Russian nationalists who view the state as lost territory.

Your hosts:

Our focus today begins with Florida Republican, security entrepreneur, and Congressman Cory Mills, then explores why Trump’s GOP is filled with nasty men.

Cory Lee Mills is a member of the House of Representatives representing Florida-07, a district just north of Orlando. Mills was born in Winter Haven and served with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. Following his service, Mills worked for a series of military contractors before starting his own private security company, which appears to have done millions of dollars of government-approved business with the government of Iraq.
In 2022, Mills flipped a Democratic seat and, upon arriving in Washington, distinguished himself by handing out souvenir grenades with a GOP logo to his new colleagues. He also co-sponsored a House resolution to impeach President Biden with Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), over what they claimed was Biden’s mishandling of immigration at the US-Mexico border. Mills also seems to have separated from his wife around this time, but is not yet divorced.
Mills is a staunch Trump ally. But he is now in the news because of allegations by an ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Langston (who is both a Florida state Republican committee member and the reigning Miss United States) that he stalked and threatened her, and anyone she might date in the future. A staunch anti-pornography advocate in the House and voted for the Take It Down Act, Mills said he would release nude images and videos of her. Langston is being represented by Anthony Sabatini, who Mills defeated in the 2022 primary.
These revelations follow on an incident in February, in which D.C. political consultant Sarah Raviani called the police, alleging that Mills had assaulted her. Raviani later recanted, and Mills has denied the accusation.
Mills says all allegations against him are false, and that they are political attacks: Republicans are said to be “fretting” behind the scenes, but have done nothing: Democrats have declared that they plan to go after his seat.
Since 2017, 8 high profile Republicans have been accused of physically or sexually assaulting someone: Greg Gianforte, Curtis Hill, Aaron Von Ehlinger, Tom Reed, Matt Schlapp, Rob Porter, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Then, there’s Corey Lewandowski, who works for Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem—both of them are married, and Lewandowski has been credibly accused of physically assaulting a woman at least twice.
How about porn and trafficking teenagers? There’s Matt Gaetz, obviously, Donald Trump possibly, but also Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey, Pennsylvania State Senator Mike Folmer, and Arizona State Representative David Stringer.
Most recently, South Carolina Republican R.J. May, a member of the state legislature representing Lexington County, has resigned after accusations that he shared child pornography videos on the social messaging app Kik under the username "joebidennnn69." He’s also in jail: the judge has denied bond in the case.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants everyone to listen to “Liberty Lost,” a podcast hosted by journalist T.J. Raphael, about Liberty Godparent Home, a facility on the campus of Liberty University, where pregnant teens go to deliver unexpected babies—to a thriving network of parents eager to adopt.
Claire wants everyone to read “This Ohio Community Is A Mecca for the MAHA Mom,” a piece by Caroline Kitchener of the New York Times.

Short takes:

Trump’s cuts to the EPA’s solar energy programs are hitting tribal nations hard, Miacel Spotted Elk writes at Mother Jones. “The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, for instance, has planned solar projects reliant on federal tax cuts. The projects were designed to power a community health clinic, schools, and a radio station that broadcasts emergency notices during winter storms,” Spotted Elk explains. “However, with the passage of the OBBB, the tribe must now begin construction by July of next year or lose credits, a feat that doesn’t account for the time it takes to secure capital in various stages, seek a complete environmental review, and navigate long permitting timelines through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” (August 15, 2025)
At The Nation, Osita Nwanevu argues that focusing on elites’ power to limit democracy for the many is a tough job, in part because hte wealthy exercise their power in indirect and secretive ways. Instead, he argues for strategies that will“democratically restructure the economy—granting the American worker more agency and ensuring that economic power and resources accrue to more than a wealthy few in the first place. In doing so,” Nwanevu writes, “we’d not only reduce inequality to the benefit of our political institutions, but also, of course, to the material benefit of everyday Americans—demonstrating that democracy is worth fighting for not just as a political abstraction but a means of improving our working lives.” (August 14, 2025)
PBS has notified its staff and affiliates that it must reduce its budget by 21% to manage the impact of Congress defunding hte Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “It is not clear what the budget cuts mean for the day-to-day operations of PBS,” Benjamin Mullin writes at The New York Times. “The most beloved public TV shows, such as Sesame Street,’Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’ and `PBS NewsHour,’ are distributed by PBS but produced by third-party organizations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting contributed funding for some shows, meaning that there are likely to be many funding gaps.(August 14, 2025)

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We begin our show with a clip from a June 3, 2025 White House Press briefing in which Karoline Leavitt is asked about Laura Loomer’s influence on White House decision making.

In the news:

Peeved by revised job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, President Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics late last week. Trump I had a record turnover of 92%, and Trump II seems to be on track for that, but this decapitation in a boring little backwater of the federal government puts a new spotlight on the administration’s war on facts.
On Monday, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed New York City Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. A new poll this week has Mamdani currently polling higher than all the other candidates combined. August is usually a somewhat fallow month for the mayor’s race, but Mamdani is collecting endorsements while his chief rival, Andrew Cuomo collects—billionaire donors?—many of whom are Donald Trump allies. As this turns into a national race, let’s talk national money. Politicians like Warren ($3.9 million cash on hand), Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders ($20.1 million), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ($9.8 million) also have money they can legally throw into this race.
It’s Groundhog Day in the Texas legislature! This week, most of the Democratic minority in the legislature have run away to Blue states to block a vote on a gerrymander delivering five more Congressional seats to Donald Trump. The last “quorum break” was in 2021, when Governor Greg Abbott called a special session to restrict voting rights. Unlike last time, where they all went to Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., they are camping out in Blue states where governors like California’s Gavin Newsome, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker, and New York’s Kathy Hochul are threatening to re-gerrymander their own states if Texas continues down this road.

Influencer and MAGA gadfly Laura Loomer at a "No Eminent Domain! No Carbon Pipelines!" rally at the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa in January, 2024, only weeks before the caucuses. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Your hosts:

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Photo courtesy of Loomer for Congress/Wikimedia Commons

Today’s focus: right-wing Influencer Laura Loomer’s impact on the Trump administration.

Loomer is a 32-year-old far right media activist, influencer, and conspiracy theorist from Tucson, Arizona. Proudly Jewish, she also identifies as a white nationalist, an Islamophobe, and is fiercely anti-immigrant. Loomer attended Mount Holyoke for one semester but quickly left, completing a degree in broadcast journalism at Barry University in South Florida.
Before 2020, Loomer mostly specialized in theatrical confrontations, many framed as “journalism.”In 2015, still a college student at Barry University, she went undercover for Project Veritas to “expose” administrators at the school as supporters of Isis.
In 2017, Loomer and Jack Posobiec disrupted a Public Theater performance of Julius Caesar that depicted Donald Trump as Caesar, saying that the play “normalized violence against the right.”
In 2018, Loomer was an architect of conspiracy theories surrounding the Parkland School shootings. Broadcasting on behalf of Alex Jones’s InfoWars, she created videos asserting that the shooting was a false flag operation sponsored by the “deep state.” You name a hoax, Loomer has promoted it, including the 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that a blizzard that occurred on the day of the 2024 Iowa Caucuses was caused by deep state actors using a secret weather technology.
In 2020, Loomer ran for Congress in Fl-21 (West Palm Beach south to Delray Beach.) She won the nomination decisively, then lost to incumbent Democrat Lois Frankel by 20 points. In 2022, Loomer primaried Republican incumbent Daniel Webster in FL-11, losing by 7 points. Claiming voter fraud and weeping copiously, refused to concede.
In 2023, Loomer launched a show on Rumble called Loomer Unleashed (which you can also get as a podcast.)
In 2024, Loomer campaigned for Donald Trump vigorously. Although campaign staff tried to distance him, and at one point kicked her off the campaign plane, Trump embraced her. Loomer accompanied Trump to official events only weeks before the election; when Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsay Graham pushed back on her racist comments about Kamala Harris, she taunted Graham about his sexuality on social media.
Despite continuing efforts to create air between Loomer and President Trump, she has significant influence on him and he appears to like her. Loomer has succeeded in getting at least 15 people fired, most recently Jen Easterly, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), to serve as a distinguished chair of the US Military Academy at West Point’s social sciences department.
Who’s lying? On CNN, Loomer claimed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has enlisted her to ferret out leakers; a DOD spokesperson characterized her work as “outside advocacy.”

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What we want to go viral:

·This week is the 80th anniversary of the day the United States used nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing thousands and decimating both towns. Claire’s pick is a book about that event that went viral almost eighty years ago: John Hersey’s Hiroshima (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). Harold Ross, the managing editor, devoted the entire August 31 issue of The New Yorker to the book, keeping the 31,000-word piece a complete secret until the issue hit the stands, and it was published as a book later in the fall. The Book-of-the Month Club sent it out as a free pick, while ABC and other radio stations, including the BBC, sponsored complete readings.
Neil’s viral pick is Caroline Fraser’s new epic history of the late 20th century northwestern United States, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (Penguin Press, 2025): like Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the book ties human history to the land—and this time, the land is poisoned.

Short takes:

If you did not already think that Donald Trump and all the people around him responsible for sending 250 migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison are a bag of dicks, you will after you read a stomach-churning story about what happened to those men. “One detainee was beaten unconscious,” a Washington Post team reports. “Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted.” In fact, sexual assault—from other prisoners and from guards—is a feature, not a bug of what was quickly characterized as a “torture prison.” El Salvador is being investigated for crimes against humanity, and the Trump administration—which paid $6 million to brutalize these men—may well be implicated. In addition, “The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.” (August 6, 2025)
Confession: I had no idea who Sydney Sweeney was before she and American Eagle, a company recovering from a crummy second quarter earnings report, were boosted into the news because of an ad campaign—one that features the white, blonde, blue-eyed actress and a tagline advertising “good jeans”—that was supposedly eugenicist. In a surprising twist, blonde, blue-eyed, MAGA chicks have decided to own that.“While at first some mocked progressive outrage as `hysteria,’ now they are proud to embrace the ad campaign’s celebration of whiteness, throwing off the yoke of woke,” Joan Walsh writes at The Nation. “Right-wingers Megyn Kelly and Fox’s Laura Ingraham are declaring the ad part of a long-overdue backlash against definitions of beauty that don’t center whiteness.” (August 6, 2025)
Have presidential libraries become a racket? As usual, the Trump administration raises the stakes of a question we should have asked decades ago, as anyone who has visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (and compared it with the far shabbier Jimmy Carter Center) is aware. “When Trump announced that his Administration would accept a luxury jet from the government of Qatar—an act widely decried as brazenly corrupt—it was reported that, after a period in service as Air Force One, it would end up in the library,” Jon Allsop reminds us at The New Yorker. “Also going to the library: the proceeds of settlements that Trump has wrung out of media and tech companies following lawsuits that many critics have characterized as blatant shakedowns.” (August 1, 2025)

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Photo credit: Jim Vallee/Shutterstock

Today’s theme music is Ni Aarin, by Cast of Characters; the show begins with State Senator Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention in Boston, MA on July 27, 2004.

In the news:

Journalist Jonathan Capehart has left the Washington Post, and showed up on Substack. For those of you who, like me, look forward to seeing Jonathan on the PBS NewsHour each week, it’s no surprise that this principled liberal journalist has departed a once glorious institution that seems to aspire to become Pravda Trump. But what’s next?
Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer has gotten more people holding government appointments scuttled: April Falcon Doss, the general counsel of the National Security Agency, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, and most recently, cybersecurity expert and Army veteran Jen Easterly has had a teaching position at West Point, due to begin this fall, withdrawn.
The latest YouGov numbers show that President Donald Trump’s popularity has dipped to 37%, and he is disliked by 49% of the population. None of this is astonishing, except for one thing: Vice President JD Vance is marginally more popular, at 38%, and less disliked (44%). Trump is also less popular than Barack and Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and wild chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall.

Today’s guest is Kevin Schultz, professor of history at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Kevin is a historian of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States, and he specializes in religion, intellectual and cultural history. But he also has a lot to say about politics, and he is here today to talk about his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), out a few weeks ago from the University of Chicago Press. Earlier this summer, I had a chance to sit down with Kevin, and talk about why the left and the right both excoriate liberals—and why that hatred has been so effective, even as liberalism has created social change that most of its haters accept, and often value.

Become an annual paid subscriber to Political Junkie, and get a free copy of Kevin’s book—or mine—as a welcome gift!

Show notes:

Kevin begins by discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s adoption of the term “liberal” to describe the future of the Democratic Party: for example, in his 1932 acceptance speech he declared that “Ours must be a party of liberal thought,” an alternative to Republican disarray and the radicalism on the other.
“Liberal” has a long and important history in the European intellectual past as well. Listeners may wish to follow up with Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism:

The Life of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018).

In response to Claire’s question about how whiteness becomes associated with liberalism, Kevin points out the embrace of a Black civil rights movement by anti-racist whites who consider themselves to be mainstream Democrats, such as John F. Kennedy. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. explored the larger agenda at stake for the Democratic Party in The Politics of Hope (1963).
But Kevin also notes that liberalism also frustrated activists who wanted to accelerate economic justice and political change: Anthony J. Badger addresses this as a specific, structural flaw in liberalism: see Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Claire asks whether modern American liberalism was constrained at birth because liberal Democrats had to negotiate with conservatives in their own party, and seek alliances with Republican liberals. Listeners can learn more about this in Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win:A History of the Democratic Party (Picador, 2022).
Hubert Humphrey was one white liberal who sought to tie the Democratic Party more firmly to racial justice: his 1948 convention speech promoting a civil rights plank in the platform caused racist Southern whites to walk out of the convention and form the States Rights Party.
Claire mentions the “Four Freedoms” speech (1941), in which FDR imagines a liberal world order, as well as Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (Houghton, Mifflin, 1962), which imagines liberalism as the politics of moderation—not necessarily social justice. Kevin points out that the contradictions of this philosophy blossom in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency: see Robert Dallek,Flawed Giant:Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973 (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Kevin notes a critique of white liberals from the Black Left, citing the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks: listeners who want to delve into Brooks’s social commentary may wish to begin with Elizabeth Alexander, Ed., The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005).
Fast forward fifty years, and hatred of white liberals is simultaneously one of the few things that that simultaneously unifies the MAGA right and defines the 21st century left.
Claire gives a nod to Tom Wolfe’s classic takedown of liberals, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970).
To make things more complicated, Claire and Kevin dig into the rise of neoliberalism after the late 1970s: listeners who want to learn more may wish to read Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order:America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Claire mentions David Dinkins, mayor of New York in the 1990s, and the morphing of liberalism into a form of Democratic Party politics called “progressivism,” a term that has hung on to describe the left wing of the party.
Kevin and Claire discuss whether liberalism can be recuperated: for one perspective, see Adam Gopnick’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2019).

Short takes:

The deal Columbia cut with the Trump administration, which included adopting commitment to act as an administration surrogate in policing hiring, admissions, and teaching, as well as special scrutiny of Middle East Studies, has caused emeritus Professor of History Rashid Khalidi to cancel a course he was scheduled to teach in the fall. Noting that simply teaching discussion sections put his teaching assistants in jeopardy, instead, Khalidi will “offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing,” he wrote in an open letter published today in The Guardian. “Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.” (August 1, 2025)
At Mother Jones, Samantha Michaels reports on the Trump administration’s push to build more “soft-sided” concentration camps migrant detention facilities, a hasty and “startlingly low-tech” solution for a problem it has created be demanding thousands of arrests every day. “Tent cities may seem cheap—they’re certainly less expensive to build than brick-and-mortar jails—but they’re very pricy to operate, largely because more staff are needed to deal with the logistical challenges,” Michaels writes. “In 2018, Vox found that it cost $775 per day to house an immigrant in a tent city vs. $133 to $319 to house them in a traditional detention center—and just $4.50 per day to let them stay in the community with an ankle monitor. Alligator Alcatraz will cost taxpayers a whopping $450 million annually.” Tents are also an inhumane way to house people long-term—but as Michaels points out, Donald Trump loves to threaten people. (August 1, 2025)
Trump apologists love to say that things that are being outlawed are on the fringe of what Americans approve of, and will leave more mainstream rights intact: in fact, we have seen the outrage about abortion bans dim in the past two years. But what happens when conservatives ban contraception, Jessica Valenti asks at Abortion, Every Day. How? By labeling contraception as an abortifacient. “Republicans don’t need to pass a law that says contraception is illegal, they just need to make it impossible to get—whether it’s keeping some kinds of contraception out of family planning programs, allowing pharmacists to deny patients their prescriptions, exempting employers from requirements to cover contraception, or stripping minors of their ability to access birth control. Is contraception really legal if you can’t get your hands on any?” (July 31, 2025)

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As the 2020 campaign revved up, MAGA conspiracy theorists once again attempted to portray the Democratic Party as covering up elite crimes: note the triple parentheses around “Epstein” in this 2019 photo, symbols that identify Jeffrey Epstein as Jewish. Photo credit: Marc Nozell/Wikimedia Commons

We begin with a clip of Fox News host Laura Ingraham demanding answers from the Trump administration about the Epstein case at last weekend’s Turning Point USA summit.

In the News:

Polling shows President Donald J. Trump underwater in every category, including immigration, and the stink has spread to the rest of the GOP. Fabrizio Ward, a Trump-leaning polling firm, warns that the generic Republican in a swing district is down 7 points among motivated voters. A central issue is the threats to Obamacare in the recent budget bill. Nearly 2/3 of Trump voters and ¾ of swing voters favor health care tax credits set to expire at the end of this year: extending the tax credit would give Republicans a 6-point edge in the 2026 midterms.
On Tuesday, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he will run for Mayor of New York City as an independent following a stunning primary loss to State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Along with incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, that makes four major candidates on the ballot. Cuomo has promised a more energetic campaign than he delivered the first time around: we’ll see.
Congress passed a budget rescission request from the President yesterday that, in addition to further foreign aid cuts, defunds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a non-profit media institution Republican presidents have long tried to kill. On Wednesday, Ann Philbin, former Director of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, was awarded the prestigious Getty Prize: she has given the entire $500,000 award to NPR and Los Angeles Public Media.

Today’s focus: former financier and accused predator Jeffrey Epstein lives on in the conspiracy theories that flourish among GOP extremists

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter argued that conservatives are more prone to believe conspiracy theories. But research suggests that the partisan embrace of such beliefs depends on the conspiracy. A 2020 Pew Research study about election fraud conspiracies showed that while Republicans were more likely to believe in election fraud, the subset of Republicans that did not watch Fox or listen to talk radio were dramatically less likely to believe in those false narratives.
Following her Turning Point USA, Laura Ingraham then went on air to parrot the Fox News line that there was no there-there.
On Monday, House Democrats introduced legislation that would force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files; only one Republican voted for it. Republicans are now toying with a similar, but non-binding, resolution.
Following last night’s Wall Street Journal scoop about the Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book,” Trump put out an order on Truth Social to release the Grand Jury testimony in the case.
Steve Bannon warned that Trump could lose 10% of his base if he does not release the Epstein files, and translated that to 40 midterm House seats.
Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, also a podcaster, threatened to resign, saying that he could no longer work with Attorney General Pam Bondi. He didn’t.
Trump has made a public statement supporting Bondi, but insiders say she is on the hot seat.
Former Fox star Megyn Kelly admitted the possibility of a Trump coverup on her streaming show.
Trump has a talent for altering his base’s reality: why is it not working this time? Is the Epstein case different from other things he has lied to them about?

What We Want to Go Viral:

Neil’s fave rave speaks to a number of issues we have discussed here, and whether all unjust laws ought to be decided by a Supreme Court that will always deliver a conservative opinion; see Duncan Hosie, “Liberals Are Going to Keep Losing at the Supreme Court,” The Atlantic (June 30, 2025)
Claire is excited about ”My Mom Jayne” (HBO, 2025), a documentary by actress and filmmaker Mariska Hargitay about her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield.

Outro photograph of Donald Trump is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

Your hosts:

Short takes:

One demographic especially hard hit by the ICE raids in Los Angeles, according the Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark, are street vendors, who are now scrambling to support each other. The effects of these attacks are reverberating outward. An “attack on working immigrants is also an attack on the local economy,” Carrasquillo writes, “and while the economic effects of such actions might be less photo-ready than the scenes of violence, ICE’s abduction of street vendors (and intimidation of others) threatened their livelihoods. The consequences are now cascading outward into a community scrambling to help them.” (July 18, 2025)
“What’s striking about Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson’s turns of phrase is that they employ what we typically regard as oral language—spontaneous, spoken words—in an extremely serious written text,” New York Times house linguist John McWhorter writes in an excellent essay about how the newest Associate Justice is dragging the law into the 21st century. “That choice and the blowback it encountered are a chance to consider the arbitrariness and narrowness of the conventions dictating how legal opinions should be written. The expectation that their language be timeless, faceless and Latinate is a matter of custom, not necessity.” (July 17, 2025)
At Vanity Fair, a Tufts doctoral student, abducted by ICE and sent to a for-profit women’s detention center in Louisiana earlier this year, offers a first-hand view of her journey through Trump’s deportation machine. “All we wanted was to be seen as human again,” Rümeysa Öztürk writes. “We felt invisible, stripped of our identity as breathing and living human beings. One morning, we were head-counted seven times in the span of a few hours and woken up from our sleep to be lined up. Another time, we were forced to wait for nearly three hours in bed to be counted. During head counts, we communicated with our eyes, rejecting the dehumanization and silently agreeing that this is brutal. We longed to be recognized as more than just numbers, no longer reduced to figures in orange uniforms.” (July 17, 2025)

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President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson answer questions about the budget bill from the media at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 20, 2025.

Welcome back to the weekly politics chat with Neil and Claire! Remember that if you prefer to read, you can activate a transcript by clicking the “transcript” button above.

We begin this week’s episode with a clip from President Donald Trump’s speech on July 4, 2025, as he prepared to sign H.R.1, otherwise known in the Republican Party as as the One, Big, Beautiful, Budget Bill.

In the news:

The search and rescue in Kerr County Texas following the July 4 flooding continues as a recovery operation. As of this morning, 120 people are confirmed dead, and 160 still missing. There seem to be several big questions coming out of this tragedy What did officials know and when did they know it? Were the Trump Administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service partly to blame for late and incomplete warnings? Another question is whether the fate of FEMA, which the Trump administration wanted to dismantle to shift costs and coordination of disaster recovery onto states, will proceed as planned. We also highlight the sad story of Camp Mystic, a Christian camp for girls decimated by the rising waters, despite a disaster plan implemented two days earlier: 27 campers are among the dead.
Since the Kerr County disaster, there has been deadly flooding in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, where 9 to 12 inches of rain fell in 24 hours; and in southeastern New Mexico.
After feeding conspiracy theories about financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and vowing to reveal the “truth” about liberal elites’ coverup, the Trump administration has officially reversed course. Laura Loomer, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGA influencers are crying foul, and demanding resignations from Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. Even Fox News’s Peter Doocy, whose day job appears to be teeing up softball questions that give Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt opportunities to spread lies and propaganda, is demanding answers for why Bondi promised to reveal an “Epstein client list” she now says does not exist. Critics now point to a new conspiracy—one hatched by the Trump administration.
Late last week, Elon Musk’s X released a new version of Grok; on Tuesday, the AI chatbot started kicking out antisemitic posts and praising Hitler. Although many of the posts are still up, Grok seems to be back on track as of today. On Wednesday, in what was said to be an unrelated development, X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, resigned after two years of working in the most highly-paid thankless job in the United States.

Today’s focus: Trump’s Budget Bill, otherwise known as H.R.1:

What gets cut in this bill to make room for the tax breaks it writes into federal law? Among other things, Medicaid and SNAP, some created by the difficulties recipients have in navigating new work requirements. Billions of dollars will be shifted to federal deportation and incarceration of immigrants, and there is a $150 billion bump in military spending, even as the United States withdraws its soft power around the globe.
Why was this bill was so huge to begin with? Here, we discuss the way it was passed: reconciliation. Does the use of reconciliation have ramifications for our democracy? The National Immigration Law Center argues that it does. However, President Joe Biden also used reconciliation in 2021 for pandemic recovery; and againin 2022, to pass a sweeping agenda that included expansions of clean energy, the Affordable Care Act, and Medicare-subsidized prices for commonly used drugs.
Intriguingly, Trump’s bill is extremely unpopular. According to a recent YouGov/Economist poll, only 35% of the public supports it, as opposed to 53% who strongly or somewhat oppose it. In fact, it seems that the more Americans know about it, the less they like it: the bill’s approval has fallen by ten points in the past month, and according to a Quinnipiac poll, only 67% of Republican voters support the bill—about 12 points lower than Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced Republican cuts to public assistance as “an offense to human life.” Evangelical Christians are sharply divided, with the Southern Baptist Convention praising cuts to Planned Parenthood, and those involved in relief work condemning cuts to social welfare.
A few budget hawks on the Republican side voted no, pointing to the $3 trillion the bill will add to the federal deficit over 10 years. Because of this, the bill passed very narrowly in the Senate: Republicans Rand Paul (KY), Susan Collins (ME), and Thom Tillis (NC) voted against it; Lisa Murkowski (AK) cut big deals with the White House and voted for it, but Alaskans will still lose benefits.

What we want to go viral:

Neil recommends a podcast he was on this week, “This Guy Sucked: A Podcast by Professional Historians for Amateur Haters.” Hosted by historian Claire Aubin, the show delivers a historical figure to hate on with each episode: Neil’s is on Reagan White House aide Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man who pursued a homophobic agenda as thousands sickened and died from AIDS in the 1980s.
Claire recently binged “Lost Boys and Fairies,” a three-episode drama from the BBC, released in 2024 and available on Britbox. It’s about two gay men, a drag community in Cardiff, Wales, and the couple’s journey to adopting a child. But really, it is about the trauma of growing up with homophobia, and how those who have been hurt and abandoned helping each other heal and grow.

Your hosts:

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Short takes:

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be some of the most hated people in the United States? When The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff “spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office,” he found that the face of Trump’s police state demoralized, burned out, and distressed about what they are being forced to do. “The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests,” Miroff writes, “but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.” Furthermore, “ICE’s physical infrastructure is buckling. The agency is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, but it has been funded for only 41,000 detention beds, so processing centers are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells with nowhere to shower.” (July 10, 2025)
Democrats are hoping that once the practical realities of the Trump budget sink in that working and middle-class voters will come home. Not so fast, Lauren Egan explains at The Bulwark. True, “The bill’s polling is toxic,” but “The most politically toxic policy changes, like the cuts to Medicaid, won’t be fully implemented until after the midterm elections, while the more popular elements—such as $1,000 investment accounts for newborn children—will go into effect immediately. Some Democrats are concerned that their posture could alienate those parents aided by the new accounts.” Furthermore, the Democrats are still just the Party of No. The party must support “efforts have begun to help the party fill out the ‘What we will do’ part of the pitch to voters.” (July 9, 2025)
At Axios, Mike Deehan reports that legislation moving through the Massachusetts legislature could ban mobile phones in public schools beginning with the 2026-2027 school year. Although the bill “allows local schools some flexibility in implementing the ban,” such as for students with disabilities and multilingual learners, “School districts must create `bell-to-bell’ prohibition policies during school hours, meaning phones would be off limits during the school day.” You know what would be even better? Legislation that prohibited smart phones for everyone under 16, and that required all major carriers to support a good, affordable flip phone. (July 9, 2025)

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We begin with a response to last Saturday’s attacks on Minnesota State legislators and their families from Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, as well as her comment about Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee’s ugly social media posts.

Our title is a nod to Richard Slotkin’s classic text on America’s historical embrace of violence, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum, 1992).

News roundup:

On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court delivered an unsurprising, distressing, decision in United States v. Skrmetti. In a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS ruled that a Tennessee state law banning pharmaceutical treatments or surgery for trans minors does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Key point: it does not ban the treatments or procedures, only using them for transition for minors. Here’s the response from Samantha Williams, the parent who brought the case.
On Tuesday, New York City Comptroller and mayoral primary candidate Brad Lander became the second Democratic politician to be detained by ICE as he sought to escort an immigrant who had showed up for a hearing out of the building. Numerous Democrats, including Governor Kathy Hochul, defended him: Hochul went down to retrieve Lander and, in an unusual display of anger, tell the press Lander’s arrest was “b**t.” Right-wing media went berserk, with many misleadingly characterizing the arrest as a “campaign stunt.”
Right after last week’s broadcast, Israel launched air attacks on Iran that decapitated its military leadership, damaged nuclear facililties, and killed at least two leading nuclear scientists. Those attacks, and Iranian retaliation (which one friend of mine on the spot characterized as “terrifying,” continue as we speak. The possibility of US involvement in this war has split the MAGA coalition, with many Trump allies urging their President not to betray his America First pledge. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) has opposed intervention; on his X podcast, Tucker Carlson pilloried Ted Cruz, a traditional GOP Israel hawk on his X podcast; and there is bipartisan legislation invoking the War Powers Act floating around Capitol Hill.

Your hosts:

While the right-wing American militia movement began outside the two-party political system, since 2017, it has visibly supported President Donald Trump. Above, members of the Proud Boys mustered in Raleigh, NC, as part of a “Stop the Steal” protest on November 28, 2020. Photo credit: Anthony Crider/Wikimedia Commons

Today’s focus: escalating political violence

On Friday, the New York Times delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump for having fomented political violence against politicians in both parties.
On Saturday, Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old evangelical Christian and registered Republican executed Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark; afterwards, he severely wounded Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. He apparently planned the attacks for months, left behind a long list of other targets, and disguised himself as a policeman.
Although President Donald Trump posted a long, rambling repudiation of the violence on Truth Social, when asked whether he would call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Trump said no, that it was “a waste of time.” He then went on to insult Walz. Other Republicans, and Republican influencers, also spread disinformation and mockery about the attacks. Most egregiously, Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a series of now-deleted remarks on X, now deleted, including: “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” Lee was personally confronted by Senators Klobuchar and Smith; he removed the post, but has not publicly apologized.
The Minnesota shootings have restarted the conversation about American political violence, which has escalated in the years that Donald Trump has been in political life. Trump has twice been a target himself, as have other members of Congress. Are Democrats targeted disproportionately? It’s hard to know: in February, Axios published a list of how much members of Congress and Senators spend for security: Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz topped the list at over $350,000 a year. Last year, at least one Republican, Mike Gallagher, may have left his Wisconsin House seat because he feared for the safety of his family. but research from the Brennan Center shows that female politicians and politicians of color are most frequently targeted with online hate and threats of violence.
On Wednesday, the Democratic Mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, who is Black, confronted found a 25-year-old White man in his yard. Trenton Abston, who had climbed over a wall to, as he explained, have a conversation, was armed with a stun gun, rope, and duct tape.

What we want to go viral:

Neil wants you to read historian Nicole Hemmer’s review of Sam Tannenhaus’s towering biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025). As it turns out, “Buckley was no stranger to ethical vacuums,” Hemmer writes in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. “Throughout his life, Buckley was guided by ideology and personal gain far more than truth and virtue. Yet his charm, generosity, and loyalty ensured that he never paid much of a price for his transgressions.”
Claire wants you to listen, if you have 90 minutes to spare, to Ezra Klein’s interview with Democratic Congresswoman Sarah McBride (DE-01), the first transperson to serve in the House of Representatives. In “Sarah McBride On Why the Left Lost Trans Rights” (New York Times, June 17, 2025), McBride reveals herself as a savvy politician, a pragmatic gradualist, and one of the party’s up-and-coming leaders.

You can also get all video and audio content by subscribing to my podcast, Why Now? available for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, or Soundcloud.

Short takes:

ICE raids are not just a danger to Latinos, Sherdell Baker warns at Ebony: Black immigrant workers are vulnerable too. “As these raids have persisted, Afro Latinas have been left out of the conversation and media representation as Black immigrants can also be impacted,”Baker writes. “This can impact African Americans based on appearance generalizations, and commonalities between the two cultures.” Racialized policing makes it likely that African Americans will suffer the same assaults from police that legal Latino citizens have. “To help combat this growing issue, those who are African American should share resources from organizations that are helping to aid immigrants, and heighten their awareness when traveling,” Baker writes. “It is also helpful to keep up with ICE raid announcements in their area via news outlets or social media to stay up to speed with locations on where they’re taking place. Carrying identification with you at all times can also be helpful when it comes to stay alert.” (June 20, 2025)
A lawyer in Cambridge, MA told me last week that the Trump administration was likely to lose every case that Harvard University has brought, and you could probably extend that prediction to individual academics who have been swept up by the government. The release of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil “is the latest setback for the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport foreign academics who have been involved in pro-Palestinian campus activism,” Erica Orden and Kyle Cheney write at Politico. “Judges have ordered the release of Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, who were similarly detained after Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked the same law used against Khalil.” (June 20, 2025)
We know that the right has embraced pronatalism, but are falling g birthrates only a conservative issue? As Amanda Taub argues in The New York Times, there is also a feminist case to be made for policies that encourage child-bearing, and we child-free folks should support them. Why? Because the next generations support all of us. “As the problem of falling birthrates attracts more concern — and previous efforts to reverse it have proved insufficient — a growing body of research indicates that a genuine solution will require a paradigm shift in society’s understanding about what is worth paying for and who ought to pay it,” Taub writes. “As the ratio of working-aged adults to dependent children and retirees falls, there are fewer workers to support the social safety net. The result is that taxes rise, the quality of public services deteriorates, and the economy eventually shrinks.” (June 20, 2025)

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s live video! This morning, Natalia and I had fun talking about Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) making the transition from SoCal sorority president to class valedictorian at Harvard Law School!

If you have not yet watched “Legally Blonde,” go here.

Stay tuned for the next film in my series about the cultural obsession with Harvard University. Historian Neil J. Young will join us for a Substack Live about that classic Harvard romance, “Love Story” (1970), adapted from the 1970 best-selling novel of the same name by classics professor Erich Segal. A faculty member at Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities, Segal is rumored to have based the lead male character Oliver Barrett IV (O’Neal) on two Crimson athletes: future Vice President Al Gore and his roommate, future actor Tommy Lee Jones.

The film stars Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw in breakout performances as cross-class undergraduate lovers.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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Hi friends: You may have seen changes in this neighborhood lately. Starting this summer, there’s going to be more multi-media content that you can consume the way you choose: you will be able to read, or watch, or listen on the Why Now? podcast platform. You can also elect to have podcast episodes download directly to your device from Apple iTunes or Spotify.) In addition to my weekly date with historian Neil J. Young, where we dive deeply into one political story, I am tapping my list of friends to bring more expert opinion on current events to you.

This means altering the subscriber model. Most of the content will be free, except for live chats, which you can watch as they are happening (I will give you ample warning), or at your convenience. In other words, I am asking you to become a paying subscriber because you believe in this platform and its mission.

This week’s subscriber-only live chat will be with historian of gender, culture, and fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: it’s the first episode in a summer series where I am going to explore the American cultural obsession with Harvard University. On Thursday June 19, at 11:00 a.m., Natalia and I will kick off this special feature with a deep dive into Reese Witherspoon’s 2001 girl power flick, Legally Blonde: paying subscribers will get an email with a link so they can listen and ask questions in real time.

Today’s interview is with Ilyse Hogue, an American activist with a long history on the progressive left. Ilyse is perhaps best known as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, now Reproductive Freedom for All, a position she held from 2013-2021. There, she emphasized integrating the reproductive rights struggle into the larger progressive movement, linking feminism to other, related projects: the environment, our changing media, and the health of the Democratic Party itself.

During a stint at New America, Ilyse was part of a team (with former Congressman Colin Allred and pollster John Della Volpe) that incubated a new project to persuade young men that the Democratic Party cares about what they care about: prosperity, economic justice, and the resources everyone needs to build a future. Speaking with American Men is a $20 million initiative to re-engage men between the ages of 18 and 29 in the project of rebuilding our democracy.

Why? Because, across racial groups, Democrats narrowly lost this demographic to Donald Trump in 2024, after winning it by 12 points in 2020. Like many feminists, Ilyse isn’t the kind of person who walks away from a fight like that—and friends, she’s got plan. Let’s listen to what she had to say.

Photo credit: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock

Claire Potter: Ilyse, welcome to the show.

Ilyse Hogue: Hi, Claire, it's so great to be here.

I'm excited about this because I was reading SAM—the Speaking with American Men document—and you're one of the co-authors. I wonder if we could just start by you telling our listeners: Where did the concept for Sam emerge, who backed the initial phases of the project, and who is moving it forward now?

Sure. Honestly, we certainly weren't calling it SAM at the time, but the challenge that we were trying to address came to my attention while I was leading NARAL Pro-Choice America, which is now called Reproductive Freedom for All, one of the country's preeminent abortion rights organizations.

As part of my tenure there (I was there for the better part of a decade), we decided we really had to understand the information ecosystem. We realized we were in an information war, one driving anti-abortion narratives and mobilizing adherence on the other side. So, we set up an opposition research operation. It was the most robust in the sector and, sort of by accident, honestly, Claire, we started to see all this activity of young men who were not presenting the way traditional anti-choice people were.

They were not even overtly anti-choice but animated by a lot of information ecosystems that were just kind of swimming in misogynistic content. They emerged as a huge force and came out of online spaces that organized around Gamergate. I don't know if your listeners know Gamergate, but it was online bullying of female game designers who were creating games with female protagonists.

And this loosely organized group emerged as a huge force for Trump in his first run. Arguably, it did a tremendous amount of work to help him emerge out of the initial primary in 2016 and then continued to back him through his first presidency. I kept monitoring these online spaces, trying to understand what young men were being fed as they were driven more and more online, but I couldn’t do anything about it while I was at NARAL.

So, after I left NARAL, I spent a couple years at New America, which is a fantastic D.C. organization that supports research about what we called our “gender extremism and engagement program.” In real time, we were looking at what was happening online with these young men who are going online to look for things like fitness or gaming strategy or things like that and see what was getting served up to them in their online algorithms.

What we learned was startling: that the right had put an enormous number of resources and energy into establishing a presence in these online spaces and cracking the algorithms. So, if you are on TikTok or in Twitch, it's not that far a journey for you to go on to saying: I want to learn how to bench press better. Pretty soon you're getting an Andrew Tate video that's telling you that you can't have nice things because women are advancing too far in the world.

But the other thing that happened through this research was an understanding that temperamentally, a lot of these young men are not what we would call progressive but that they had progressive priorities. They want affordable housing. They want universal healthcare. And we were ceding to the right a space that formulates, first their identity, and then their politics.

A handful of us were writing papers and articles and screaming into the void in the lead up to 2024 saying: “Houston, we have a problem. There's an entire online ecosystem you all aren't even aware of that is pursuing grievance politics on behalf of Trump. And we can't win if we don't play. We don't have anyone in these spaces. We're not resourcing leaders.”

And that like I said, fell into a vacuum. But after the election, the results were too stark to ignore. We lost men of every race, class, and ethnicity. And by lost, I don't mean absolute numbers, but I mean there was rightward slide in those demographics: 28 points for Latino men. It depends on how you slice and dice the data, but it's double digits, no matter how you look at it.

Eleven points, wasn't it? I mean, that's a lot.

I came together with a couple of other folks who were saying: Unless we're willing to invest in engagement, be in the spaces where these young men are getting their information, equipping folks to fight the fights, then we're losing this generation, not just for the next election, but for the next 50 years of their voting lives.

And not only does that mean Democrats can't win, but it means democracy honestly cannot survive.

So, I'm thinking about a couple of things. One is that for about 20 years, feminist sociologists have been talking about how lonely boys are, how difficult it is for them to make and keep friends. A friend of mine named C.J. Pascoe wrote a book called Dude, You're a Fag (University of California, 2011), in which she talked about homophobia as the way men express their frustration with each other and fend off the idea that to be a friend means to be gay in some way.

We've also got a fair amount of literature that shows how much the right has invested in campus activism. Liberals give students unpaid internships to do diversity work in the dorms and conservatives pay people to go around campus turning in their professors and write blogs.

We know a lot about what the right has invested in youth. What makes boys and young men so vulnerable to that siren call?

Sam has a mantra: we can't win if we don't play. So, part of what makes them vulnerable is, as you say, a lack of dedicated resources to listening to them, vying for their attention and offering an alternative vision of how they can be included in a pluralistic coalition that fights for progress for everyone.

There's a lot more technical elements to it than that, to your point. Turning Point USA, for example: Charlie Kirk got runs an $80 million a year campus organization. He made a big bet (that he openly says his benefactors laughed at), which was that he could move young men, a typically Democratic constituency, 10 points in 10 years.

Well, he beat that. He beat it by four years, and he moved them by more than 10 points. To some degree, that is because of the total absence of alternative voices in the spaces where young men are.

Loneliness is something that came up in our 60 hours of listening. I think everyone is lonely; I don't totally think that that's restricted to young men. But there's no question that young men who encountered the triple-whammy of online culture, breakdown of civic institutions, and then the pandemic, which pushed them even more online—they tell us they don't really know how to form community relationships and we’re not helping them do that.

But another thing that I think is possibly even more potent when we look at the collective impact of what's happening with young men is a broad expression of shame; shame that is coupled with economic and social anxiety. They don't know how to get ahead. They don't know how to provide, which is what their culture and all their role models told them is a core masculine trait. They don't know how to protect, and that has created a sense of internal shame.

You may be familiar with an academic literature that shows shame is one of the most salient emotions, and most easily translated into radicalism. So, thinking about shame as a driver, one of the things that we are working on are messages like: The shame is not theirs to own. Shame is produced by a manipulation of social and market forces that are designed to exclude them. If they can, and are willing, to participate in work to diminish the power of those forces—and that's concentration of wealth and power and all the things you know about, and I know about—t here is a different pathway forward.

Yes. I want to be clear with our audience that SAM is not associated with the Democratic Party. But are there policy proposals that you hope will come out of this project? Because one of the things I think about, is that I don’t want the draft to come back, but military service was one thing that many young men had in common. And then there was a certain point at which it was either the anti-war movement or the draft.

There were also organizing projects, either state-sponsored or grassroots, that pulled young men into alliances with each other. One was ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project), a Students for Democratic Society initiative during the Great Society, in which mostly White kids went into Black and Brown neighborhoods to organize and so on.

Are there policy proposals that go beyond living in these virtual communities, initiatives that seek to pull young men into physical and social community with each other?

There are, but SAM is not a policy shop, and I really want to be clear about that. We work with great people who do that hard work. Richard Reeves is among the best known, Gary Barker at Equimundo, Ross Morales Rocketto: The role that I think we play is saying we've mapped these information ecosystems. We see leaders within them who, to your point, are not resourced, are not actually networked together to make a bigger impact on how young men are interpreting what is happening in the world around them—far upstream from politics, then politics as well.

Our listening inevitably allows us to communicate to our partners in the field and to any candidate willing to listen. Our audience tends to be more Democratic leaning about how these guys are seeing their interests. I intentionally differentiate interests from policies, because the idea that most Americans are sitting there reading and looking at policies and understanding the nuances are, is sort of fundamentally flawed.

But, like I said, interests are something that we can effectively reflect for people who are writing policy and running campaigns. Then, the question of when policies are moving and when they are in the news, how we can make sure that men are getting the progressive perspective in the Discord servers that they're in, in the subreddits and in the Twitch streams, is crucially important.

Right now, you could have the best policy in the world but their interpretation of what that policy is, what it means, and who benefits from it is entirely mediated by right-wing forces. I think there would be a tremendous amount of openness to an idea of national service. Really, we're talking about what's popping being much more sort of survival based. How do I get a better paying job? How do I afford stable housing? Those kinds of things.

What we've learned from being in these spaces is that men want more information about how to make their lives better. They're getting it from one side and not from the other.

One of the things I've noticed, is that my generation saw the Peace Corps as that kind of opportunity. I knew a lot of people in my senior class at college who did the Peace Corps, and they came back with very strong ideas, not only about what they wanted to do, but how they were going to get there.

But now, getting into and paying for college itself is really sort of under question. It's very difficult for people to do. It appears that young men look at the whole thing and go, “No, I can't deal with this.” Whereas young women will sort of pull themselves together and figure it out.

Why is there such a difference between young women feeling a sense of purpose and young men feeling a sense of purpose?

That is a very big question that I can take a stab at, but I'm not sure I can answer. I think we have rightly and reasonably—and both you and I have participated in this—resourced and moved social and political agenda that young women see their interests reflected in. Right? There's a lot of rhetoric, but also actual policies, and ambassadors for those policies, saying, “Hey, look what's in this for you. If you work with us, if you put the time in, you're going to reap the benefits of it.”

So, young women have bought into a component of a social contract that is coded Democratic that young men have not. Why? Because we haven't put in the commensurate interest. We sort of sweep them in, and we tend to lead with race or ethnicity.

Democrats have a program for Black men, and they assume that means that young men see themselves as Black before male. We're trying to challenge those assumptions. One of the things we learned in our research is that Generation Z has bought into that they are the most multiracial generation. They're mostly totally fine with that. So, misogyny has become the gateway drug for the right to pull them in much more than white supremacy, which we saw is more effective for the older generations. The Proud Boys say they're one of the most diverse groups in America and they're not wrong.

There's a piece of this that we need to think about in terms of how people are self-identifying, the multiple identities that, we, the left would call it intersectionality. That is not language that these young men are using, but it happens to be true. There are people who do this well--Governor Wes Moore, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senator Cory Booker— they have started to say, “We want you to see yourself as part of this coalition. We're going to call you out explicitly, and sometimes we're going to have policy that is for you.”

The pushback on SAM has been informative, But one of the things that I feel viscerally coming from critics on the Democratic and left sides is that we have cemented ourselves in this zero-sum game way of doing politics. To me, that is very anti-progressive and anti-democratic, right? We should and can have a vision that is not about moving pieces on a board where one person gets ahead and then the other person must take a step back. In fact, the winning vision is going to be the one that can really inhabit pluralism as people have more and more intersecting identities.

Let's talk about masculinity, because there's a lot of stuff out there about what's wrong with men, and what's wrong with young men. The right picks up on that and says, yes, all these things are wrong with you, but it's not your fault. It's the fault of women. It's the fault of Black people and immigrants taking your jobs and so on.

How might one turn that around in an online space and say, “Hey guys, here's what's right about you, and this is how to activate it?”

The way that I see doing that is lifting up the young men who are doing that all the time. And I have been in these spaces long enough to say, “My God, that guy, Luke—" I sometimes only know them by their handles because they're online—"is really trying to fight for a different vision of masculinity, but he's being drowned by the surround sound of the right.”

So, how do we find a hundred Lukes and network them together so they're not doing a hand-to-hand combat one by one, but they become much more of an organized force? Quite honestly, it's basic organizing. Then, how do we resource them with what they need to fight for this vision better.

There are positive visions of masculinity out there. There are also people who are pointing out that the negative vision doesn't work, right? And every time that we see a clip of Trump bullying someone, there needs to be a service that is clipping that, putting it into all these spaces, giving it to these young men who are organizing and saying, “Hey, I don't know that we know what a new version of masculinity totally looks like, but it doesn't look like that. I was raised by my father, my grandfather, my coaches to say that bullying is not what a man does.”

And I think we're not doing any of the above right now.

I think that's important. I am sort of a sideways fan of Taylor Lorenz. I read her newsletter, and one of the things she's been talking about a lot lately, is that the left has abandoned online spaces to the right, and the right has a powerful online infrastructure.

If we point to what's going on in Los Angeles now, the right had influencers on the ground immediately. There were these networks of professionals who were just pumping out content. How do we go about doing that but doing it in an ethical way where we're being upfront about who we are, being authentic and connecting with people without bending the facts or trying to manipulate them?

The good news is that we don't have to bend the facts to win our arguments, which they do have to do. We saw that over and over in our town halls with young men. What we need to do is break the monopolistic grip that the right has on these channels, right? I keep saying that it's not rocket science, it's doing what we've done in other sectors. The innovation is recognizing that we need to do it in this sector. There are great leaders and great organizers and people who are producing content. They need resources to get out in the streets of LA and show a different version of what's going on.

Then, what I would call a back office which is a little bit what SAM is, to make sure it's getting distributed as widely as possible. That's much more than half the battle, right?

Because if you look at the media asymmetry, just a map of how much real estate the right owns in online space, Taylor is totally right about this. We should have lost that election by a lot more than we did, which says to me that some modest investments will go a long way in regaining ground. SAM put out a funding proposal for $20 million—the media imagined that that we had all the money, and we don't; that it was all for research; it's not. It's a two-year engagement program.

Here’s an apples-to-apples comparison: Trump's campaign spent $20 million on engagement of young men between Labor Day and Election Day in 2024. Sam is suggesting we spend the same amount over two years. I’ve got to say the pushback that these young men were not worth that level of investment was dispiriting, but it’s also kind of terrifying, because the alternative is not great.

Part of what you're making me think about, and tell me whether this is right or not, is that SAM has a goal, and then there need to be ancillary efforts to say to young women: “This is not about boxing you out. What can a feminist do to support young men? What can a feminist do to think about policies that allow young men to achieve their dreams.”

Is that right?

I think that's right. And I also think, again, that we don't see much divergence on the policies. We had young men say to us in our listening tour: “I love that my wife makes more money than me. I just want to be able to contribute as well.”

I think some of this is in our own flawed frames. I come from the feminist world; I am a proud feminist. I would never promote any kind of policy that is at the expense of those hard-fought gains. What we do need to quell are people in our own ranks who seem to authentically believe that any young man who is not already with us is a hair away from becoming a knife-wielding incel. That is the furthest thing from the truth of what we have experienced.

So, you know, just extending a hand, recognizing that these, grievances that are being weaponized politically are grounded in real problems, human problems. That's where you start, just saying: “My God, I see you, it's hard for me to afford rent too. What do we do together to make that a reality?”

I don't want to connect too many different things because I don't know whether the research leads you there, but we're also seeing a lot of research that says that young women are frustrated in the ability to find a man who will really be a partner to them. I think it's upwards of 40 % of young women are saying: “I probably won't get married and if I have a baby, it'll be by myself.

That's a huge shift in the culture. And without saying whether it's a good shift or a bad shift, I don't think young women are finding that there are men who feel that they can support a family or support a partner or whatever. So, doing this for men is doing this for women too. I say that as a lesbian, but you know what I mean.

You're getting to one of my favorite points. There's both this sort of capital P “political” point, which is that there is a portion of young women who are sort of in the feminist tank with us, and are, stridently, rightfully wary of anything that would ask them to subsume their own goals and dreams to create more space for men. I don't want to do that. Nobody should want to do that. T

here are also, just to be real, increasing numbers of young women who are like, “I want a boyfriend, and I want to get married, and I want to have a baby.” And if they don't see that perspective, reflected in Democratic policies, then we start to lose them too. The other thing I've been warning about is I'm starting to see among a lot of liberal and independent Moms a concern that Democrats don't care about their sons. So, we're going to start to see that impact voting patterns.

But on the larger scale, I live for the world where everybody gets married because they want to, and nobody gets married because they must. It's much more about an emphasis on mutually supportive partnerships. I think that that is the vision that we want to put out there.

And I also think that what young men are perceiving right now is that unless they are parroting progressive lines, then they are treated as predators, dangerous, and that is not a pathway forward for anyone.

Before we go, I'm wondering if you could tell our listeners where they can read more of your writing?

I write for The Bulwark and Democracy Journal of Ideas, but we also have a SAM Substack, and you should check it out. It is, we just launched it a couple weeks ago and we look for subscribers.

Fantastic. Ilyse, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Claire. Nice to see you.

What I’m doing when you’re not looking:

When I am down in New York City during Pride week, I will head over to the center for Architecture to see “Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture.” Curated by historians Stephan Vider and M.C. Overholt, the exhibit explores the life and work of a pathbreaking designer who asked the question: what would spaces look like if they weren’t designed and built by men?

Short takes:

At The Liberal Patriot, Michael Baharaeen argues that if the Democrats are going to push Trumpism aside, they need to address Americans’ ongoing anxiety about the state of the nation. Many respondents in a recent survey “fondly recall” the Reagan era “as a time when the country succeeded under the leadership of a strong and confident president—especially coming out of the Vietnam War and economic stagnation of the 1970s,” a finding that does not suggest voters will automatically respond to the chaos of the Trump era by rushing back to the Democratic Party.” Democrats “would be wise to reckon with the disquieting feelings many people possess right now, including speaking directly to the issues that informing those feelings” with policy proposals that project decisiveness and strength. (June 17, 2025)
Donald Trump’s Bunker-Busting Budget Bill has drawn a lot of attention for what it takes away, and less for where that money is going. As Felipe De La Hoz points out at The New Republic, “the Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps the bill’s most ominous characteristic: an orgy of resources for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller’s shock troops to carry out President Trump’s indiscriminate crackdown on immigration and protest.” The bill “is effectively a blank check,” De La Hoz continues, and “ would take everything we’ve seen so far—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.” (June 17, 2025)
Calls for Barack Obama to take charge of the Democratic Party are revealing—but not about Obama. This plea "speaks to an accepted truth: The Democratic Party lacks leadership,” media sociologist Tressie MacMillan Cottom writes at The New York Times. But it also speaks to an inability to grasp that political communication has changed drastically since 2016: the Obama that generates such nostalgia governed in a different country and a different media environment. “Yes, he was a historic president and a gifted speechmaker. But he was also speechifying in a media environment that could easily deliver 50 million viewers for political theater,” Cottom explains. “It is also symptomatic of a deeper problem among both the political center and the political left: They don’t want the discipline of a political faith, but they still clamor for a charismatic preacher.” (June 13, 2025)

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Today’s video cast is available to all subscribers and will also be issued as a Why Now? podcast: this means that you can listen here, on the Substack app. If you want to enjoy this episode as you walk, garden, or work out, you can either download the file to your device or subscribe on Apple iTunes or Spotify.

Los Angeles has been organized to defend migrants all year: in a February protests, marchers wave Mexican flags and pronounce Donald Trump “El Criminal.” Photo credit: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock

Our episode begins with a clip from Gavin Newsom’s June 10, 2025, speech to the people of California—and perhaps to 2028 Democratic primary voters as well?

In the News:

Democratic Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled out of the room, thrown to the ground, and briefly handcuffed for trying to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a question at her Los Angeles press conference on Thursday.
David Hogg, the 25-year-old anti-gun activist, influencer, and Vice Chair of the Democratic Party is making good on his promise to shake things up. Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve PAC puts money behind primary challengers to older Democratic officeholders. This put him is conflict with DNC Chair Ken Martin and as of late Wednesday, Hogg is out. We also learned on Wednesday that 89-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, a civil rights warrior and the Representative from the District of Columbia, plans to run again despite visible decline.
Sexual harasser and former governor Andrew Cuomo seems set to hammer progressive Zohran Mamdani in the June 24 New York City mayoral primary. On Wednesday, Cuomo scored an endorsement from former mayor Michael Bloomberg. Whether he wins or not, Cuomo says he plans to run on the “Fight and Deliver” party line—a party he created for himself.
On June 14, as Donald Trump assembles a $45 million military parade in Washington to celebrate himself the Army, activists will celebrate No Kings Day with nonviolent protests around the country. You can find the nearest one here; the Craig’s list ad asking for “seat fillers” is here. In response,Trump has said that protesters will be greeted with “very big force.” It would also be terrible if the people who signed up for free tickets just didn’t show up.
This week we lost Brian Wilson, the musical heart of The Beach Boys and a pathbreaking composer, at 82.

Your hosts:

News focus:

Thursday, Congress seemed to want to dress the anti-immigrant raids up in the cloak of legality by bringing in Governors Kathy Hochul (New York), Tim Walz (Minnesota), and J. B. Pritzker (Illinois) in for a turn in the GOP’s barrel. You can see “Sanctuary State City Governors” (Minnesota is not a sanctuary state.)
Jonathan Van Last asks: Are anti-immigration protests a good thing? Hint: it’s hard to know. (June 9, 2025)
Journalist Michael Tomasky speculated that, unlike advisors in the first administration, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would not dissuade Trump from giving an order to fire on Americans with live ammo or calling up citizen militias. (The New Republic, June 9, 2025)
The troop deployment to LA will cost $134 million. (The Hill, June 10, 2025)
The battle between citizens and police in Los Angeles immediately became the object of fake news and conspiracy theories. (June 10, 2025)
Taylor Lorenz explains why protesters in LA are burning their beloved Waymos. (June 9, 2025)
Seth Masket interviews a political science professor arrested in Los Angeles,despite asking repeatedly to leave. (June 12, 2025)
Molly Jong-Fast argues that the show of military might in Los Angeles, and in Washington on Saturday, are accumulating evidence that the Trump administration is failing. (Vanity Fair, June 10, 2025)
Jill Filipovic asks: are the protests are a turning point, and if so, for whom? (June 11.2025)
Let’s go back to Gavin Newsom: what are the opportunities and risks for him going up against Trump?

What we want to go viral:

Neil is excited about Sierra Crane Murdoch,Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country ( Random House, 2021), a true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it.
Claire wants you to read Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir about her mother, Erica Jong, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir (Viking, 2025)

Short takes:

President Donald Trump has been very public that he and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador are partners in the United States deportation project. But, as T. Christian Miller and Sebastian Rotella report at ProPublica, if the United States has an MS-13 problem, Bukele is implicated. “A long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter,” Miller and Rotella write. “The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.” It gets worse. “Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.” There are also allegations that U.S. humanitarian aid to El Salvador ended up in the gang’s coffers. (June 12, 2025)
Trumpist attacks on universities and cultural institutions seem to be driving an escalation in state-level culture wars too. “In a chilling meeting of the Florida State Board of Education last week, a school district superintendent was publicly browbeaten and repeatedly threatened with criminal prosecution,” Judd Legum writes at Popular Information. The crime? Not removing 55 books designated as pornography from Hillsborough County Schools, despite the fact that none are pornographic, and they are classic YA literature no parent has complained about. “Kelly Garcia, who was appointed to the State Board by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in 2023, suggested that librarians in Hillsborough County were illiterate and told [Hillsborough School Superintendent Van] Ayres they lacked a single shred of decency,’” Legum reports. “She described the librarians aschild abusers’ and asked if Ayres had considered firing all of them.” (June 12, 2025)
A deep dive into his family tree gives new meaning to the joke: Is the Pope catholic—and please note I am using the small c. “Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reminds us in a New York Times story about Pope Leo XIV’s genealogy, which includes Black people and minor Spanish nobility, colonizers and freedom fighters. “The initial finding about the pope’s Black ancestry looked back three generations,” Gates continues. “In collaboration with the genealogists at American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, we were able to identify more than 100 people going back 15 generations and discovered a wealth of fascinating stories. We all agreed that, after more than a decade of doing this kind of genealogical work, the pope’s roots make for one of the most diverse family trees we have ever created.” (June 11, 2025)

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Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, on August 23, 1953. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons

In 1938, in the face of rising fascism in Europe, the United States Congress created the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Preceded by at least two internal security committees meant to expose Communist activity in the United States, the Dies Committee, named after its chair, Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr., lasted until the end of the war. It was almost immediately followed by a new body, the House Un-American Activities Committee, later known as HUAC, that set out to investigate Russian spy networks, the Communist Party of the United States, and so-called “fellow travelers”—progressives who were, with or without their knowledge, Communist-adjacent.

The Red Scare that followed World War II is largely identified with Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. But the hunt for Communists—in Washington, Hollywood, the journalism establishment, and classrooms—was well underway by the time McCarthy gave his famous Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950. There, McCarthy waved a white paper, which he claimed was a list of 205 known Communists working in the State Department.

Later, McCarthy said it was 57 Communists on the list, while others claimed that what Tail Gunner Joe really pulled out of his vest pocket was a grocery list.

Whatever. McCarthy’s grand gesture was what President Donald Trump, in his incarnation as an unsuccessful real estate developer and casino owner, calls “creative hyperbole.” The list may have been fake, but it helped Americans get the point.

Politicians really got the point. 1950 was a midterm election year, after all. The political uproar over McCarthy’s accusations put Democrats, who had been investigating subversion for over a decade, on their back foot. Washington Postcartoonist Herb Block stitched the whole phenomenon together with a neologism: “McCarthyism.”

In the 1950 Congressional midterm campaign, Joe McCarthy took the fight straight to the heart of the Democratic party. That summer, he spoke at a rally for fellow Senator Forrest C. Donnell, a Missouri Republican, and coined the word “Commiecrats” for his opposition.

Sound familiar? A powerful political figure making up numbers, conjuring faceless foreign enemies, inventing disparaging names for his political opponents, and insisting that some Democrats were actual Communists? In any case, it worked. The Republicans took 28 House seats from the Democrats and five Senate seats, setting the GOP up to seize the Senate majority and the presidency in 1952.

As it turns out, culture wars pay. And, as many people have pointed out before me, there’s another connection between McCarthy and Trump. That was Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who cut his teeth on hunting Communists by McCarthy’s side, scoured government libraries abroad for subversive books, and perfected the art of filing aggressive, specious lawsuits to get his way.

But as journalist and historian Clay Risen points out in his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthy and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025), if the Communist witch hunts promoted by McCarthy and dozens of other public figures were a grave threat to democracy, they also distract us from why communism was so attractive to Americans of all races, and what it promised as a route to a more perfect democracy.

Yes, communism was politics. But it was also a romance about what the United States could be if it embraced socialism. The witch hunt narrative also draws a veil across why professional anti-Communist witnesses Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, came to regret the choices they had made so deeply that they dedicated themselves to destroying others.

Show notes:

Clay Risen appeared in Episode 11, You Are Dead To Me, where he talked to us about obituaries as popular history.
Clay points out that there really was Soviet espionage in the United States: listeners who want to know more may wish to read Herbert Romerstein and

Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets:The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America (Regency, 2014).

More than one person has equated the McCarthy period with the Salem Witch Trials and other moral panics in the United States. Listeners may wish to revisit Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible.
Claire raises a theme of Clay’s book, Americans’ genuine fear of nuclear weapons. That fear of World War persisted well past McCarthy’s dominance in American politics, and is expressed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Clay discusses the sharp break between American political institutions and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA): James Traub discusses Hubert Humphrey’s role in purging communists from Minnesota progressive politics in episode 48, “The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights.”
Listeners who want to learn more about Whittaker Chambers may wish to read his best-selling 1952 memoir, Witness (Regency, 2014).
Claire’s favorite professional witness is Elizabeth Bentley; you can read more about her in Kathryn Olmstead, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Clay talks about how unusual William Wyler’s post-war movie, The Best Years of Our Lives(1946), was—and how rare a film as critical of the United States as that would be until the 1960s.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 68, Arise, Ye Workers From Your Slumbers: A conversation with Maurice Isserman about American radicalism, past and present, and his new book, "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism."
Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s."
Episode 20, Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice:A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right."

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Ruby Bridges leaving William Frantz Elementary School, in New Orleans in on or about November 14, 1960. Bridges became one of the first four Black children to integrate a White school in that city after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Federal marshals are protecting her from the violent White mob outside the frame.

On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Tessie Prevost woke up and put on one of her prettiest dresses.

Like Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Ruby Bridges, Tessie was a very special little girl. Along with hundreds of other Black children, the New Orleans Four, as they would forever be known, had taken a test. The test was devised by the Louisiana Pupil Placement Board after Brown v. Board of Education had declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional. A federal court was now insisting, eight years later, that Orleans Parish integrate its schools, and testing Black children’s academic skills was part of that process.

I don’t think we know how many children passed that test, one that White children never had to take just to enroll in their neighborhood public school. But we do know how few of these Black children were seen as worthy. We know that Black boys were generally not seen as desirable candidates for what school boards, parents, and politicians in Jim Crow states viewed as an unwelcome social experiment.

Ruby Bridges, the best known of these children, faced a screaming white mob at William Frantz Elementary all by herself, while Tessie, Leona, and Gail were assigned to William McDonogh 19. All were escorted by federal marshals, since New Orleans law enforcement would not guarantee their safety.

This is how Tessie remembered that morning for an oral history project, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. “I’m going to take care of your baby,” a federal marshal promised Tessie’s mother. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? The child was going to school. She should have been safe in her school.

But dramatic scenes about brave Black children and violent White mobs conceal a great deal of American history. They conceal the fact that, once she agreed to become a symbol of racial justice, no one could truly take care of Mrs. Prevost’s baby. It conceals the fact that Tessie and the other three went to class in largely empty buildings, taught by a single teacher, at schools White parents abandoned. Those White parents remained committed to segregation, transferring their children to religious and private schools that many states supported with tax credits, initiating the school voucher systems legal in many states today.

Stories about these truly heroic Black girls also obscure a history in which segregation didn’t only happen in the South, and didn’t end. As historian Noliwe Rooks points out in her new book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, 2025), school integration was not always a traumatic experience—but that doesn’t mean it was a success either. In several states, politicians responded to desegregation orders by closing the public schools: some Black students didn’t go to school for years.

Desegregation also often dismantled well-functioning, sometimes prestigious, Black schools, run by Black teachers and administrators who took care of everybody’s babies, and were ambitious for their students. These institutions were embedded in thriving Black communities where taking care of a mother’s baby was not a job entrusted to adult, armed men, but to skilled professionals committed to high quality academics, athletics, and co-curricular activities.

Here’s another dirty truth: the trickle of Black children permitted to attend formerly all-White schools reinforced the racist notion that most of their peers were inferior and incapable. Integrated tells that story: why our schools are more segregated than they ever have been, even though segregation is not the law, and why the phenomenon of Black “only-lonelies” persists in majority White schools.

Show notes:

For a full account of what legal school desegregation did not accomplish, see Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford, 2005).
Civil rights actions related to school segregation in the north included a boycott on February 3, 1964, in which 464,000 New York City students—about half of the young people enrolled—boycotted classes.
Melba Patillo Beals has written a personal account of the Little Rock Nine, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of Battle to Integrate Little Rock (Atria Books, 1995).
Claire and Noliwe discuss historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s experience of integrating an elementary school in Texas. That, and the story of her parents’ marginalization when Black schools were closed, is in Gordon-Reed’s memoir, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021).
In discussing the phenomenon of Black strategies for self-protection in White society, Noliwe cites Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” (1895).
Claire and Noliwe discuss the methods and ethic of pathbreaking educator Marva Collins, winner of the 2004 National Humanities Medal.
Noliwe also cites the contributions of Black Panther Ericka Huggins, who ran the organization’s education project. You can read more about Huggins in Mary Francis Phillips,Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (New York University Press, 2025).

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 3, Black and White Together: historian Victoria Wolcott discusses prefigurative politics and her book, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement."

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A 1903 illustration in London’s Daily Graphic of actor Ivan Berlyn as Fagin, one of the “weird and eccentric parts” he was said to specialize in. Descended from German Jewish immigrants, Berlyn (born Isaac Berlin) played Fagin on stage and in silent films. He seems to have made some effort to obscure his ethnicity and religion, but the artist did not: in this drawing, Berlyn has a pronounced, hooked nose and a threatening expression, in contrast to the depiction of the other actors’ more delicate and Anglicized features. Image credit: S A H Robinson/Wikimedia Commons.

That was the trailer for the award-winning 1947 movie, “Gentleman’s Agreement.” If you watch the whole thing, you will find out that it starred Gregory Peck. You will also learn that in 1948, it was nominated for eight Oscars, and won three, including Best Picture. But what you will never learn is what the “taboo topic” that forms the basis of the plot is. That story is so taboo that movie audiences would not know what Gentleman’s Agreement was about unless they went to see it.

It's about antisemitism. That’s right—a topic that was apparently unspeakable in the United States, even two years after American and Soviet soldiers liberated the first Nazi death camps.

But antisemitism was unspeakable—although not as much so as homosexuality. Crossfire, another 1947 movie, was originally about a homophobic murder and rewritten as a story about antisemitism. It seems significant, for example, that Hobson’s novel, which is not about women, was first published in a women’s magazine. Did publishers of serious literary fare not want to touch the manuscript initially? It seems so.

And yet, there is a reason that a movie about antisemitism could be both taboo and rewarded in 1948. The previous year, the Truman administration launched the Voice of America (now shuttered by Donald Trump) to broadcast the virtues of democracy into Soviet-controlled eastern Europe. In April, Jackie Robinson would become the first Black player since the 19th century to take the field for a major league baseball team. In May, President Truman signed an Act of Congress that promised aid to Turkey, Greece, and any other nation under siege from communism—and launched almost four decades of what we now call the Cold War. In October, the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation into communism in Hollywood.

We know that by 1947 the United States was grappling with an enormous contradiction: that it sought to be a beacon of democracy around the globe—and that it was a cesspool of racial inequality at home. U.S. federal courts heard a series of cases—Mendez v. Westminster, Delgado v. Bastrop, and Shelley v. Kraemer—that began the process of breaking the back of Jim Crow. The separation of white and Black was public, well-known, and defended robustly by white Southern politicians.

But the nation’s dirty little secret was antisemitism. The Roosevelt administration knew what was happening to Europe’s Jews under Nazi rule and did nothing. American colleges and universities had, for decades, worked to ensure that their campuses did not become—too Jewish. While Black home buyers were steered away from all white neighborhoods, Jews were steered by agents away from some of them, a fact that became even more uncomfortably clear when home ownership was supported by new banking policies and federal subsidies after World War II. Parallel spaces grew up to serve Jews—hotels, resorts, country clubs, and golf courses—because they were barred from others.

That’s the America I grew up in, and it didn’t start to change until the 1970s. This is why I have been astonished and angry about how so many non-Jewish Americans today want to dismiss the history, and contemporary pervasiveness, of antisemitism in this country. If it is possible, I have been even angrier at how Donald Trump and the Republican party have deployed cynical, fake concern about the eruptions of antisemitism since October 7—when their own movement springs out of antisemitic conservatives like Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, and Ron Paul; and they continue to embrace antisemitic, proto-Nazi groups today.

But it’s also important to remember that antisemitism, its tropes and stereotypes, are something we all need to grapple with. Hatred and contempt for Jews is baked into Western culture and our literary canon; we cannot simply wall off the past when it is convenient. This is why I asked historical novelist Allison Epstein to come on the show to talk about her rewriting of the Oliver Twist story, in which the hero is not a darling blonde English child, but Jacob Fagin—a tutor in crime, and a Charles Dickens character cobbled out of every 19th century antisemitic stereotype available to him.

Listeners will remember Allison from Episode 38 and some of you will know her from her Substack, Dirtbags through the Ages, where she profiles saints who were sinners, and sinners who are…just dirtbags. Fagin is a legendary dirtbag, but in Epstein’s hands, he is something else: a man who survives not by exploiting people, but by holding them close and teaching them; an orphan who yearns for connection but knows it can never last. Freed from Dickens’ antisemitism, Epstein’s Fagin also gives us a gift: insight into how antisemitism works, how it burns the soul, and how it drips into our present.

Join Allison and me for this episode of “Why Now?” where history and politics meet the challenge of today. And I’m your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of the Political Junkie Substack.

This is Episode 70, “Fagin!”

Show notes:

Claire mentions Christine Stansell’s history of early national New York, and the need for working-class children to earn their own keep on the street,City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1987).
In our conversation about the importance of voluminous Victorian women’s fashions to female shoplifting, Claire reminds listeners about Elaine Abelson’s When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1992.).
Allison learned the ins and outs of how to pick pockets from Henry Mayhew, The London Underworld in the Victorian Period:Authentic First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes (Dover, 2005. Orig. 1852).
Claire and Allison declare their mutual dislike for “As Long As He Needs Me,” the most covered song from the movie, Oliver! as an example that rewritings of the Dickens novel failed to grapple with its misogyny as well as its antisemitism.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 31, Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, "The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts."
Episode 23, Creative Fictions:A conversation with historian Sam Franklin about "The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History."
Episode 4, Bringing the War Home: A conversation with writer Zayd Ayres Dohrn about the Weather Underground, a generation raised in its shadow, and the search for answers in his podcast, "Mother Country Radicals."

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Image credit: Cookie Studio/Shutterstock

On October 12, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was sworn in for her testimony before the Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee. If you were a Democrat and a feminist, it was a galling moment for so many reasons. First, the United States was on the brink of an election, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who had denied Merrick Garland a hearing in the final year of the Obama administration—had contradicted himself, handing President Donald Trump his third Supreme Court nomination, one that would bend the Court to the right for decades.

But it was also galling because it was our seat—one occupied by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a pioneer of feminist jurisprudence, and a woman who had carved a narrow path of rights for women in the 1970s by building case law around the idea of gender discrimination. So many women like me had careers and economic security because of Ginsberg and others like her—in fact, Ginsberg became a law professor and then a civil rights litigator at the ACLU because, despite her stellar credentials from Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia, she couldn’t get a job at a law firm.

Amy Coney Barrett was where she was because of Ginsberg—but also because, like Ginsberg, she had a husband, Jesse, who supported her career.

Barrett then went on to say a few sentences about each of her seven children. It established her credentials as a mother. But she failed to mention that she, as part of a power couple clearly had lots of household help. Instead, she attributed her success to her strong belief, inculcated by her father, that girls and boys were intellectual equals.

Confirmed to the Court, Amy Coney Barrett then voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping the right to reproductive freedom from millions of working-class women—many of whom are doing care work for the children and parents of other white women, conservative and liberal.

Because let’s get real: the vast majority of women who are held up as exemplars of the feminist meritocracy, from the executive who works down the hall from you to Sheryl Sandberg, have squads of well-paid, moderately paid, and poorly paid people caring for their homes, children, and elderly parents. Door Dashers shop for them. Amazon warehouse workers stuff clothes, toys, and nutritional supplements into boxes to be shipped to them. Grub Hubbers deliver dinner made by line cooks.

What does girl boss feminism has to say about this? Not much. And now that Donald Trump is back in power, we’ve got more White conservative women telling us that women are full members of the meritocracy—and Republicans have Barrett, Ivanka Trump, and Pam Bondi to prove it. That’s why I wanted to talk to feminist philosopher Serene Khader, the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press: 2024.) Khader wants us to revisit the question of which women succeed, and which ones are forever invisible, what feminism is—and what it could be, if weren’t so very white.

Show notes:

Serene mentions an earlier publication Claire wrote, a blog called Tenured Radical. The archive lives on at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Claire mentions her upcoming biography of Susan Brownmiller, a radical feminist who was a radical feminist journalist, anti-rape activist, and anti-pornography activist. Until the book comes out, you can read about her here.
Black feminists began to theorize their own position early on: listeners may wish to read Toni Cade Bambara ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology(New American Library, 1970.)
Claire mentions Joan Wallach Scott’s important book about Muslim women in France, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2010.)
For conservative feminism, Claire points to Faye Ginsburg’s book about women who oppose abortion, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (University of California, 1998.)
The clip where Donald Trump vows to protect women is from an October, 2024 campaign stop in Wisconsin.
A critical text for Serene’s work is Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review (1991.)

Would you prefer to read this interview? Become a paid subscriber! Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication, and interview transcripts are a paid subscriber benefit. Transcripts go out a few days after the episode drops.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy:A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."
Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."
Episode 22: Hit Them in The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty."

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In 1938, philosophy professor Edward I. Fenlon testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that that professors and students at Brooklyn College were "deluged" daily with communist propaganda. Photo credit: Harris & Ewing/United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division (Wikimedia Commons)

For years now, those of us who are paying attention have heard a range of political positions, from those held by moderate Democrats to socialism, described by MAGA Republicans as something called “the Left.” Sometimes “the Left” is simply invoked by the shorthand “they,” as in: “They tried to assassinate Donald Trump;” or more commonly, “They want you to believe,” followed by some caricature of an idea about women, race, gender, or sexuality.

But I’ve noticed something else: warnings from Republican politicians and pundits about a growing cadre of Marxists and Communists who are hostile to the United States and seek to destabilize the nation with things like “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” and “DEI.”

To the MAGA partisan, the term “Marxist” can describe anyone, from former Vice President Kamala Harris, to an anti-Israel activist, to the local librarian who steers readers to Judy Blume, to a Girl Scout troop leader who doesn’t discriminate against trans children. For example, on Saturday, June 28, 2023, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made a pledge to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” event in Washington D.C. that he would secure the nation’s borders against Communists and Marxists clamoring to destabilize our society.

In 1947, Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan described to the House Un-American Activities Committee his success in purging massive numbers Communists from the organization. However, there had never been more than 100,000 CPUSA members, and in 1947, as Maurice Isserman’s Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism (Basic Books, 2024) explains, the party was already in trouble, a fracturing that would intensify over the next decade, aided by government harassment and industry blacklists. When news of Stalin’s crimes erupted at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February, 25 1956, disillusioned Americans fled communism, and networks of activists that had sustained them for decades.

Today, Trump almost seems to be invoking Communism and Marxism as part of that fictional Cold War world where America was supposedly great. So, what better time to point out that Communists, although their movement failed, also did a lot of good?

Despite their flaws, blind spots, and sometimes harsh internal discipline, the CPUSA fought for a just society in America. Members organized powerful industrial unions, protested racism, and moved the nation towards reforms and small revolutions: the New Deal, Black civil rights, the Great Society, the movement to stop the war in Vietnam, and even feminism and gay liberation.

Show notes:

Claire begins by mentioning that radical feminists often came out of Communist Party, or CP-adjacent, backgrounds: she name checks Susan Brownmiller, who she is writing about now, and Maurice mentions Betty Friedan. You can read about Friedan now in Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
Two books Claire mentions that dovetail with Maurice’s critique of the CP are Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (Verso, 1977) and Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics:How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006). Listeners might also be interested in Jane Lazarre, The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir (Duke University Press, 2017).
Claire and Maurice discuss the importance of Communism to Black workers and intellectuals; you can learn more about this in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Maurice mentions his experience in SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing student movement that emerged in the 1960s from the wreckage of the CP and later spawned the more revolutionary group, Weatherman. Listeners who wish to learn more may wish to read Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2010).
Communism has, over time, been attractive to Black American intellectuals; there are a lot of good books on this, but listeners may wish to start with Harry Haywood’s memoir, Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle(University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Claire asked Maurice who his favorite character in the book was: he picked Dorothy Healey. The two collaborated on an earlier book, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party ()Ford University Press, 1990).
Readers interested in learning more about Mary Heaton Vorse can consult Dee Garrison,Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent (Temple University Press, 1989).

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy:A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."
Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s"
Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."

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Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who transformed the use of television to drive partisanship, speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C. after a 1995 appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” Photo credit: Mark Reinstein/Shutterstock

Back in 2016, like about a million other fans, I was listening obsessively to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show, “Hamilton: The Musical.” Unlike a lot of stage door Johnnies, I am a historian of the United States. So, when my friend and colleague Renee Romano called to suggest we edit a collection of articles that would help teachers, students, and Hamilton fanatics think critically about the show, I jumped at the chance.

The result of Renee’s brainstorm was Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University press, 2018). The Hamilton story was compelling, at least in part because it spoke to the optimism of Barack Obama’s presidency. For example, Hamilton and his pal, the Marquis de Lafayette, were portrayed as ambitious immigrants—even though neither really was an immigrant.

Never mind. After an openly racist Republican, Donald Trump, was elected president in November 2016, the line “Immigrants—we get things done!” would incite a cheerfully partisan New York audience to leap to its feet in show-stopping applause.

But that moment was also a symptom of a deeply divided country. Trump and his allies excoriated liberals, women, foreign nationals, people of color, and even Republicans who balked at extremism. We see the distant origins of that partisanship in “Cabinet Battle #1,” when Hamilton, now President George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, has to learn to make deals rather than force others to his will. At the end of the song, Hamilton explodes, while Thomas Jefferson and James Madison taunt him with his inability to move legislation without their help.

“Figure it out, Alexander,” Washington snaps.

Miranda portrays, however imperfectly in some historians’ minds, an important transition. The Founding Fathers, having originally seen political parties as a source of dangerous factionalism, changed their minds. Governing required that partisanship be disciplined and contained in political parties willing to negotiate with each other.

This isn’t a progress narrative, listeners. Those negotiations bargained away the rights of many Americans for centuries, and they have also worked to restore those rights. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. One party, the GOP, began to toy with breaking the norms that had emerged over two centuries. In 1964, Arizona Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater openly mused about using nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon was found to have used the tools of government to cover up his own crimes and punish his political opponents.

And in 1995, Newton Leroy Gingrich, a Congressman from Georgia, steered House Republicans to a majority and seized the Speaker’s gavel. For three hair-raising years, Gingrich spoke about liberal policies in extreme, and often inaccurate, terms; used government shutdowns to force spending and tax cuts; and presided over an impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

In one exchange between Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and Republican committee chair Henry Hyde, Frank accused Hyde of masking a partisan attack on Clinton by pretending the committee’s work was merely procedural. Hyde responded that, because only a bipartisan Senate could convict, an impeachment could never be partisan.

After reading Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new book, In Defense of Partisanship (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), I would say: both men were right. Yes, the attack on Clinton was partisan, and the impeachment was one chapter in the GOP’s strategy to accelerate and harness hyper-partisanship. But also, yes to Hyde’s insistence that effective partisanship ultimately required bipartisanship to succeed.

It is, perhaps, that last truth that explains the MAGA-fied Republican party’s determination to govern from the White House in Trump’s second term. After the 1990s, a partisanship that no longer brooks compromise, and narrow margins regardless of which party is in the majority produced an increasingly frozen, not to mention uncivil, Congress. Does it have to be this way? No, Julian argues; not if Americans understand that partisanship—responsible partisanship—is integral to democratic governance, not a path to domination.

Show notes:

Claire and Julian discuss hyperpartisanship in the early national period: interested listeners should consult Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor:

National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2002.)

Claire mentions Lyndon Johnson’s rise in the Democratic Party, partly through his distribution of campaign funds: Robert Caro writes about this inThe Path to Power (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.)
Claire mentions Phyllis Schlafly’s iconic conservative crie de coeur, A Choice, Not an Echo (Pére Marquette Press, 1964.)
Claire mentions Julian’s earlier book about Newt Gingrich, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Books, 2020.)
Listeners interested in the transformed media environment, and how it benefitted the late 20th century conservative project, may wish to read Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books, 2022.)

Paid subscribers will receive a transcribed version of this post tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 65, Baby Trump:Political scientist Dan Drezner talks about his 2020 book, "The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency."
Episode 60, When We Lose, We Win: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial and her new book, "Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation."
Episode 55, The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Chatting with historian William Hogeland about Alexander Hamilton, debt, taxes, visionaries, and his new book, "The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.”

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

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Gift Shop in Trump Tower, New York City, September, 2022. Photo credit: Suiren2022/Wikimedia Commons

In the 1939 movie, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” W.C. Fields played a role familiar to Depression-era audiences: the grifter. Rotund, alcoholic—but nevertheless, quick witted—Fields’s character, Larsen E. Whipsnade (Get it? Larceny?) is the owner of a virtually bankrupt circus staying afloat by cheating his employees and the public. In one scene, he shorts a customer on his change, and then mocks the cheated man relentlessly. Whipsnade’s daughter tries to save the circus with her own grift (marrying the son of a millionaire), but her father’s inability to contain his fraudulence undermines the plan almost immediately.

Sound familiar? The Con Man, or “confidence man,” is an American character born out of early nineteenth-century urban life, when middle-class Americans became uncomfortably aware that appearances could be deceiving. As historian Karen Halttunnen wrote in 1982, before the Civil War, advice manuals warned that confidence men and so-called painted ladies “prowled the streets of American cities in search of innocent victims to deceive, dupe, and destroy.” In 1859, Herman Melville wrote a novel, The Confidence Man, about just such a mysterious character.

In the decades after the war, average Americans became aware that there was a bigger problem: from banks, speculators and the federal government to patent medicine salespeople and card cheats, scam artists saw every American pocketbook as an opportunity.

In other words, separating chumps from their money is an American tradition, and by the mid-twentieth century, political campaigns became another way to do that. A system that began in the 1950s with mailing lists and newsletters wheedling money out of registered voters evolved into what we have today: endless text messages asking us for $5.00, sweepstakes that promise a meeting with the candidate for one lucky donor, and hysterical emails scolding us about failing to protect democracy—or, alternatively, keep men out of women’s bathrooms.

As my guest, political reporter Joe Conason, points out in his recent book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), while the political style of these campaigns are similar, it is the American right that has persistently used politics to fleece their followers. If a sucker is born every minute, it seems like a conservative sucker is born every 30 seconds.

So, who was surprised that, having run every grift imaginable—cheating investors by declaring bankruptcy, failing to pay workers and vendors, creating a fake university, slapping a label on items as mundane as steaks and water, and reinventing himself as a success on reality TV—Donald Trump would jump into politics? You can read this story in New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book about Trump titled—you guessed it—Confidence Man.

But as Conason explains in this episode, the con is so much wider and deeper than one man. It’s a way of life on the right. And when things go sideways?

Well, you can always blame the victim.

As I promised in my New Year’s message, paying subscribers will receive a full transcript of my conversation with Joe no later than tomorrow. For access to that transcript, consider:

It’s only five dollars—and you can cancel whenever you like. Annual subscribers ($50) can choose to receive a book mentioned in this podcast (mine or anyone else’s) as a welcome bonus.

Show notes:

Joe mentions the 2019 documentary about fixer Roy Cohn directed by Matt Tyrmauer, Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Claire discusses the emergence, and political impact, of organizations like the John Birch Society as modern pioneers of the conspiracist grift. You can read more about this group in Mattthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (Basic Books, 2023.)
You can read more about Richard Viguerie and Paul Wyrich in chapter 2 of my own book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)
Joe explains the importance of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in elevating the far right. You can read more about Falwell’s connections to the present in Keri L. Ladner, End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to Qanon (Fortress Press, 2024.)
Joe notes that Trump’s Stop the Steal movement was merely a vehicle for raising money for Donald Trump’s discretionary use. You can read more about that here.
Claire and Joe discuss the rise of the Tea Party: for an in-depth dive on this populist movement, try Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford, 2012.)
Claire quotes Jamelle Bouie’s assertion that Donald Trump’s first debate performance was a “firehose of lies. Bouie actually said “stream of lies.”

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 65, Baby Trump:Political scientist Dan Drezner talks about his 2020 book, "The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency."
Episode 61, How the GOP Killed Dissent:A conversation with historian Marsha Barrett about her new book, "Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism."
Episode 51, MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, "A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America."

And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

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The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

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A Trump baby balloon at the third Womens March, Los Angeles, January 19, 2019. Photo credit: betto rodrigues/Shutterstock

Near the end of Donald J. Trump’s first year in office, the New York Times ran a story about his typical day. It began at around 5:30 am with a frenzy of television watching and channel switching. After a few hours of this, Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker wrote, Trump would start Tweeting. “Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow,” the reporters wrote, citing anonymous aides. “Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.”

Trump had very little interest in policy, couldn’t focus, and wandered off the teleprompter for minutes at a time when giving speeches. For the first time in history, anonymous aides began referring to the President as a child who had to be humored and cajoled. The people around him—at least, the ones who were not delusional or crooked—were referred to in the press as “the adults in the room,” who maintained “guardrails.”

What frustrated the President—now, we are talking about the same man who went to his office in his pajamas—was his belief that he wasn’t being taken seriously. And yet, if that was true, even family and close friends had reasons for that. There were abundant rumors that Trump flew into petulant rages when he was thwarted, and that there were favorites, like 20-something aide Hope Hicks, whose main job seemed to be to soothe him.

Then there was Trump’s narcissism. He didn’t read anything but complimentary stories about himself, stories provided by a staff anxious that he stay in a good mood. White House sources explained that the President liked to think of himself, not as the leader of the free world, but as a character in a television show. Who knows—maybe he thought that the 1998 Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show, was really about President Harry S Truman?

I’m just kidding. I’m sure Trump was speaking metaphorically--a word I have never heard him use and that has lots of syllables. But there were other things about Trump that the fishbowl of the White House revealed: that he guzzled dozens of Diet Cokes a day, was a picky eater when he couldn’t have his favorite foods from McDonalds and found it impossible to focus for more than a minute at a time. He flushed documents he didn’t like down the toilet, causing epic clogs—and, incidentally, violating the 1978 Presidential Records Act.

Then, things got crazier. In December 2020, Trump was having an epic meltdown from having lost the election--the one that resulted in an armed mob storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021-- Comedy Central produced a sketch that put a Trump impersonator in a room with a dozen toddlers, an aide, and a bunch of bouncy balls.

Well, he’s back, more incoherent and impulsive than ever; and this time, we are told, there are no more adults in the room. It’s going to be just a big White House full of impulsive, grandiose, lying children breaking s**t. I’m not taking this lightly, listeners, but I do need to take a minute and be straight with you: our best-case scenario for the next four years is that our government is so labyrinthine and complex that these folks won’t be able to find a paperclip, much less make what might, under other circumstances and in other hands, be welcome reforms.

That’s why I invited international relations scholar Dan Drezner on the show. In 2017, Dan started to notice the large numbers of people—journalists, anonymous aides, other politicians—who openly compared Donald Trump, a man in his seventies, to a toddler. He started threading tweets on the platform now called X and started reading up on toddler psychology. The result was his 2020 book The Toddler-In-Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency (University of Chicago Press.)

Dan is the first in a series of guests I will have in the coming months who published books about Trump’s first term I want to revisit or, in some cases, read for the first time.

We know what’s coming, and we need help thinking about it.

Show notes:

CNN commenter Van Jones argued that Donald Trump had grown into the Presidency on March 1, 2017, when he honored the widow of a Navy SEAL; Washington Post journalist Fareed Zakaria got on board a month later, when Trump launched missiles into Syria.
Dan mentions a September 5, 2028 opinion piece in The New York Times alerting the public to Trump’s bizarre executive style, and how aides across government were attempting to thwart him.
Dan reminds Claire about some of Trump’s odder, first-term ideas. On August 25, 2019, Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev reported that “President Trump has suggested multiple timesto senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States.” A year later, he suggested swapping Puerto Rico for Greenland.
Dan’s research included the American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5, now in its eighth edition.
Claire notes that, ten years after his emergence as a politician, journalists still seem unsure how to cover him.
Women who have complained of being sexually assaulted by Trump often report that he grabs at and paws them like child might; here is a collated list of those charges by Mariel Padilla at The 19th. (October 26, 2023)
Claire floated the idea that Trump can’t read, while Dan says he probably can—but can’t focus long enough to read seriously. David A. Graham wrote about Trump’s “indifference to the printed word” in The Atlantic (January 5, 2018.).
Dan recommends · Elizabeth Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision Making,” International Organization (April, 2017).
Claire mentions Mary Trump’s psychological portrait of her Uncle Donald, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
Claire notes that, in retrospect, the White House media knew President Joe Biden was failing and did not report the story: then-New York magazine political reporter Olivia Nuzzi called it a “conspiracy of silence.” Dan notes that owners of major publications have an even greater incentive to not cover any age-related decline that Donald Trump may suffer..
Asked to recommend more readings for our listeners, Dan suggests his own The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (Oxford, 2017), Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy In America (1835, 1840), and Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2018).

You can follow Dan on his podcast with Ana Marie Cox, The Churn, or at his Substack, Drezner’s World.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 55, The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Chatting with historian William Hogeland about Alexander Hamilton, debt, taxes, visionaries, and his new book, "The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.”
Episode 51, MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, "A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America."
Episode 41, Heather Cox Richardson Believes In You:A conversation about Richardson's book, "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America,” Substack, and the importance of popular history.

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Competing reproductive rights protesters outside the Supreme Court on March 26, 2024. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock

On October 28, 2023, the morning of her baby shower, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain was nauseous, running a fever, and in pain. Soon, the Texas teenager began to bleed and she started to vomit. Nevaeh’s mother, Candice Fails, took her to the hospital, where Nevaeh was diagnosed with strep throat and sent home. A second visit also resulted in no care. Both times, ER staff ascertained that the fetus she was carrying had a heartbeat.

That was a problem—for Nevaeh. Texas operates under the strictures of a fetal heartbeat law, passed in 2021 and in full effect since the summer of 2022, when the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Dobbs has since activated abortion restrictions in 41 states; 13 states make no exceptions for rape, incest, non-viable pregnancies, or sparing the life of the mother.

But a few states, like Texas, also rushed to criminalize anyone who participates in terminating the life of a fetus, no matter how non-viable, and no matter how close a woman is to death. Let me be clear: no one in an emergency room wants a woman to bleed to death or die of septic shock. They are just too afraid, and in some cases, too ignorant, to touch her until that fetus’s heart stops. In the podcast, Candice remembers their third, and last visit to the hospital, as Navaeh died from miscarrying a baby she wanted.

Those of us who grew up in the pre-Roe v. Wade era tend to think about abortion as being about choice: that a woman has a right to decide whether to be a mother, and an equal right to a safe, professional termination. Roe, decided in 1973, was always a compromise in that regard. Under that decision, women could not be denied an abortion until the third trimester, when a fetus is technically viable. That made 99% of all abortions legal. Fewer than 1% of abortions were done in the third trimester, usually when fetuses died in the womb or could not survive outside it; or other medical needs were overriding.

Since Dobbs, there has been a rolling reproductive care crisis in the United States. Sometimes it looks like the pre-Roe world—women and girls who are pregnant, don’t want to be, and will do what they can not to have that baby, whether it is legal or not, and no matter how far they must travel.

Yet, it also looks like Nevaeh Crain. Or Amber Nicole Thurman, who obtained a legal abortion in North Carolina, and got sepsis back in Georgia because no doctor would touch her until it was too late. It looks like women who are forced to carry dead fetuses until they get sick, and their bodies expel them. It looks like women in all the Dobbs states who just want pregnancy care—and can’t get it, because the local OBGYN specialists have closed their practices. It looks like women who ask to be sterilized because they don’t trust medical professionals to let them live.

As women die and become infertile for lack of care, president-elect Donald Trump continues to brag about appointing the Supreme Court Justices who are responsible for this catastrophe.

For this, and many other reasons, it’s going to be a long four years, and the harm from treating women separately and unequally will be lasting. There will be more Nevaeh Crains, more Amber Thurmans, and millions more women who will enter what should be a joyful time—getting ready to have a child—with all the protections and safety their great-great-grandmothers had in the 19th century.

So, it’s time to fight, my friends, and fortunately there are feminist activists, community organizers, lawyers and health care providers all over the country who are showing us what that looks like. That’s why I invited sociologist Krystale Littlejohn and historian Ricki Solinger on the show to talk about their edited collection, Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2024).

The authors of these essays are angry, but hopeful. They point out that Roe was never enough, and that we don’t want that world back—we want a better one. One where women aren’t just allowed to live, but also given the resources and care they need to thrive.

Show notes:

Ricki says that she knew that right to abortion rights would be reversed when Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020. Eight days later, President Donald J. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a judge with known anti-abortion views, to replace Ginsburg on the Court.
Krystale points to her earlier work, Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California, 2021).
You can see other titles in Ricki’s series, Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century, co-edited with Krystale and three other feminist scholars, here.
Claire refers to “the leak:” a draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked by persons unknown on May 2, 2022.
Claire mentions Ricki’s foundational history of the debate over women’s sexual autonomy, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 1992).
Ricki mentions the escalating birth rate in Texas since Dobbs: according to the Texas Tribune, 16,000 more babies (or 2% more) were born in 2022, after that state passed its own restrictive law. Births rose again in 2023.
Claire and Krystale discuss the role of, and impact on, men when the law reduces reproductive rights and degrades institutions devoted to women’s healthcare. For example, Planned Parenthood is a leading provider of men’s healthcare, including vasectomies, STD testing, and gender-affirming care.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 49, Without Mothers, There Is No War:A conversation with political scientist Cynthia Enloe about her book "Twelve Feminist Lessons of War."
Episode 45, Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free: Historian Felicia Kornbluh and I mark Roe v. Wade with a conversation about "A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Freedom."
Episode 17, Abortion On Demand: Feminist journalist Katha Pollitt explains why we should treat ending a pregnancy as normal.

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As a freshman representative from Texas, Barbara Jordan sat on the House Judiciary Committee hearing the Watergate case in 1974. Photo credit: United States House of Representatives/Wikipedia Commons

In the summer of 1974, I was glued to the television for most of the day. For the first time in my life, my parents didn’t insist that I shut it off, go outside—do something useful. That was Watergate Summer, the weeks that a national drama played out all day on public television, with coverage hosted by Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer, and interspersed with experts who explained the ramifications of testimony by White House staff for President Richard M. Nixon’s possible impeachment.

Then, on July 25th, a first-term Representative from Texas’s 11th Congressional District, a large African American woman with a commanding voice and demeanor, used her introductory fifteen minutes to express her love for a Constitution that had also permitted and protected American slavery.

That woman was Barbara Jordan. I cried as I listened to her speech, not just because it was so beautifully written and delivered, but because it expressed the love I also felt for my country—for its history, and its laws—at a time when Nixon was being held to account for his crimes. Presidents weren’t above the law, Jordan argued. It was not just the right, but also the duty of the legislative and judicial branches to apply the checks and balances that the Founders intended—those same Founders who ensured that slavery endured for almost another century after the Constitution was adopted, and a legal, racial caste system for almost another century after that.

This is, of course, also the same Constitution and nation of laws that President Donald J. Trump, just elected to a second term, as well as the entire Republican Party, plans to wipe their collective asses with in the next four years.

And it is up to us to stop them.

This is why I wanted to bring Mary Ellen Curtin, Associate Professor of Critical race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University on the show. Curtin is the author of She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan’s Life and Legacy in Black Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), a book I have been looking forward to reading since I heard that it was in the pipeline. As you can probably tell, Jordan is one of my heroes. Her service in Congress was short by any standards: only six years. But it was the penultimate stage of a career in which Jordan used every public platform she had, from childhood on, to make the promise of the Constitution real.

A slightly informal note: listeners may recall that the last episode featured David Greenberg’s biography of Congressman John R. Lewis. I had hoped that the Lewis episode and this one would bookend the election of our first woman president. As a precaution, Mary Ellen and I taped two endings. We had to use the wrong one.

But, although it is going to be a hard fight, as Barbara Jordan famously said on July 25, 1974, my faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I still believe in freedom.

And I believe in you.

Show notes:

Mary Ellen cites a previous biography, Mary Beth Rogers’ Barbara Jordan: American Hero (Penguin/Random House, 1998.)
Mary Ellen mentions Leon Higgenbotham’s early impressions of Jordan: for those who do not know him, Higgenbotham (1928-1998) was a prominent jurist: you can read more about him here.
Claire and Mary Ellen discuss the importance of excellent, if segregated, Black schools for boosting Black men and women into professional and leadership roles: for a case study on this topic, see Vanessa Siddle Walker, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
One of the court decisions that paved the way for Jordan’s career was Smith v. Allright(1944), a Texas case organized by Jordan’s pastor and decided by the United States Supreme Court that abolished the white primary.
Claire mentions Bella Abzug’s published diary of her first year in Congress, Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (Saturday Review Press, 1972.)
If you want to read more about the famous “Class of 1974” that bolstered the progressives elected to the House of Representatives in 1972, check out Claire Potter and John Lawrence, “The Watergate Babies: What the Congressional Class of 1974 can teach us about political change,” Public Seminar, August 15, 2018.
You can read more about the life that Barbara Jordan and Nancy Earl made together in Lisa Moore, “Looking Back at Barbara Jordan,” QT Voices (LGBT Studies, UT-Austin, July 7, 1972)

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 62, We Shall Not Be Moved: A conversation with historian David Greenberg about nonviolent resistance, the legacy of an iconic civil rights organizer, and his new book, "John Lewis: A Life."
Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy:A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."
Episode 34, We Demand Equality--NOW!A conversation with historian Katherine Turk about her book, "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America."

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Georgia Congressman John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, August 24, 2013. Photo credit: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock

There is no question that Donald Trump, a former President who is on the ballot next Tuesday, November 5, is not only a man in love with violence, but one who also understands violence as a way to get what he wants. On May 1, 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News demanding that New York State execute five Black teenagers who were (as it turns out, falsely) accused of beating and raping a woman in Central Park. In fact, Trump has, himself, repeatedly been accused of sexually assaulting women. Although she later retracted it, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, accused him of raping her and pulling her hair out; and on January 26, 2024, a civil jury convicted Trump of raping journalist E. Jean Carroll.

Trump has, over time, seen extremist militias as allies, and on January 6, 2021, those militias attempted—at his urging—to overthrow a legally constituted election which he lost. He has incited violence against those he perceives as political enemies, particularly immigrants and protesters. He has promised—if he is elected President again—to violently deport 11 million undocumented people living and working peacefully in the United States. He has promised to use the United States military against peaceful protesters.

As Vice President Kamala Harris pointed out last week, as she prepared to face voters in a CNN Town Hall, Trump promises to rule violently, something his rally goers and right-wing media supporters have repeatedly cheered.

But the use of violence against political enemies is, unfortunately, not unprecedented in the United States. Although it is illegal to deploy the military against American citizens as Trump has promised to do, police, hired security, and Ku Klux Klan mobs have assaulted strikers, protesters, and civil rights activists since the 19thcentury. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard troops murdered four peaceful antiwar protesters at Kent State University.

Perhaps the most sustained use of political violence against American citizens has been the deployment of police and deputized mobs against Black Americans. This violence intensified in the 1950s and 1960s as a Black-led, interracial coalition of students and activists across the Jim Crow South organized and demonstrated nonviolently for the right to vote, and to desegregate public accommodations, transportation, and public schools. Politicians unhesitatingly deployed armed men against these brave souls, and refused to intervene when vigilantes beat, murdered, and raped activists.

One of those activists was John Robert Lewis, born in Pike County Alabama in 1940, and the first in his family to attend college. While attending a Nashville seminary, Lewis became involved in sit-ins organized to desegregate restaurants and other public places, and he quickly rose to a leadership position. Lewis eventually became the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, an organization committed to nonviolent protest that organized the Freedom Rides in 1961 and helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963. At the March, Lewis—like many young people today who protest Israel’s War on Gaza—expressed his disillusionment with politics, and the failure of either party to deliver racial justice.

Yet, Lewis’s social revolution bore fruit as politics, and he himself—like many movement activists--eventually became a politician. After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson used his political capital to pass federal civil rights bills in 1964 and 1965. Lewis then took his activism into government itself and was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1986, where he became part of the Democratic Party leadership and served the people of the United States until his death in July 2020.

It's hard not to think of Lewis, his fight for justice and against violence, as voters in the United States face their most consequential election in 150 years. I think Lewis’s spirit is watching over Vice President Kamala Harris in this last week of the campaign, and that’s why I invited David Greenberg, the author of John Lewis: A Life(Simon and Schuster, 2024) to come and talk to us about a civil rights icon who helped to transform the Democratic Party that Harris now leads.

Show notes:

There are many secondary sources on Lewis’s branch of the movement, but the best contemporary account of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is Howard Zinn, SNCC, The New Abolitionists (Beacon Press, 1964.)
David and Claire discuss why the Nashville student movement was both part of, and distinct from, the larger civil rights movement. To get a sense of the dynamism of that local activism, take a look at Kathryn E. Delmez, ed. We Shall Overcome: Press Photographs of Nashville during the Civil Rights Era (Vanderbilt University Press, 2018).
Claire asks David why Lewis became so committed to Israel. David believes it was partly because he was aware of antisemitism from an early age, and partly because Jewish activists were so deeply committed to the movement. Listeners who want to pursue this may wish to read Deborah Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York University Press, 2001).
Claire and David talk a lot about Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin. Listeners who want to follow up may wish to read Jonathan Eig, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus, % Giroux, 2023) and John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, 2003.)
Claire raises the question of how John Lewis came to understand LGBT Atlantans as part of his coalition. Listeners interested in how LGBT voters became part of the Democratic coalition may wish to read Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (St. Martin’s Press, 1982) and Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on X, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 58, Picturing Asian America: A conversation with historian Mae Ngai about "Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice.
Episode 48, “The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights: A conversation with journalist and historian James Traub about liberalism and his book, "True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for A More Just America."
Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her new biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk

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Republican Nelson Rockefeller (left) with Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on June 10, 1968. Photo credit: Yoichi Okomoto/Lyndon Baines Johnson Library/Wikimedia Commons

Ana Navarro is probably best known for her work on the popular daytime talk show, The View. But she also has serious chops as a Republican political strategist. She served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s staff—you may recall that Bush was leveled by Donald J. Trump early in the 2016 Republican primary season—and, as co-chair of the GOP’s National Hispanic Advisory Council Navarro worked with establishment conservatives in her party like Arizona Senator John McCain and Utah Governor Jon Huntsman.

In other words, Navarro was the kind of Republican that no longer exists, a Reagan conservative in a party where extremists had been on the offensive for at least two decades. By 2016, people like Navarro were, depending on where you stood in the GOP, thought of moderates, squishes, or not Republicans at all.

After the Billy Bush tape, in which Trump unknowingly joked over an open mic about sexually assaulting women, Navarro became what we now call a “Never Trump” Republican. She declared that she would vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton, and when Trump won the election, she spoke out against his harsh anti-immigrant policies.

On August 27, 2017, a little over seven months into after Trump took office, Dana Bash, a co-host of CNN’s Sunday talk show, SOTU, invited Navarro to join the Democratic party. Another guest, Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo, jeered that Navarro was already just a Democrat in disguise.

That’s right: those who oppose Donald Trump’s domination of the GOP are shown the door. Today, dozens of prominent Republicans have, at least temporarily, crossed party lines to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, even as they cling to their identities as conservatives.

But when did this polarization begin? Was it in 2016, when Trump obliterated his primary opponents and then defeated Clinton in one of the most divisive elections the United States had seen in 150 years? Was it earlier—1992, when populist Patrick J. Buchanan endorsed incumbent president George H.W. Bush at the Republican convention by urging the party to fight a culture war against immigrants, gays, and liberals? Or was it 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected with the backing of the so-called New Right, an insurgent movement that that laid the tracks for Trump and pushed liberal Republicans—especially women—into the Democratic Party?

Yet there was a time when both parties had liberal and conservative factions. We probably shouldn’t call it a “golden age,” because although liberals reached across party lines to pass important civil rights legislation, especially in the 1960s, conservatives in both parties also fought those changes, eventually clustering in the GOP, where they remain today.

At least one politician argued against polarization, proposing that Republicans ought to simply ask whether a policy idea was good or bad, without characterizing its partisan quality. Here’s New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the United States at the time, being interviewed in 1961 by television newsman Max Goldberg about whether he thought of himself as liberal or conservative.

One way to think about Rockefeller’s politics is that he was a liberal Republican. Another way to characterize him is as moderate: a conservative, but one who was open to liberal ideas that, after 1980, were systematically stamped out in the GOP. Rockefeller remains hard to classify today, as historian Marsha Barrett points out in Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism (Cornell University Press, 2024). For example, his draconian anti-drug policies in New York State became a template for similarly harsh laws around the country. These so-called “Rockefeller laws” devastated poor Black communities through incarceration and brutal policing, even as the international drug trade boomed.

At the same time, as Governor of New York, Rockefeller promoted the public good, pumping money into public higher education, medical care, and the arts. And significantly, as the Republican Party spun ever rightward after 1964, Rockefeller learned that the office he craved, President of the United States, would forever be out of reach.

Show notes:

Rockefeller’s disapproval of Governor Orville Faubus referenced the Arkansas segregationist’s 1958 decision to shut down the Little Rock public schools rather than bow to the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate.
Listeners who are interested in the Rockefeller family may wish to read Peter J. Johnson and John Ensor Harr, The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family (Scribners, 1988).
To understand moderate Republicanism in the long history of the party, listeners may wish to read Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2021).
Marsha addresses the shift of Black voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party, beginning in the New Deal: Nancy Weiss Malkiel delves into this shift in Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton University Press, 1983).
Claire and Marsha discuss 1964 as a turning point where Black conservatives are increasingly fighting a rearguard action to protect a civil rights agenda in the GOP. Listeners may be interested in Leah Wright Rigueur’s deep dive into this transformative moment, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Marsha and Claire also discuss how the Democratic Party was changing, as Rockefeller’s moderation became more marginal in the GOP: feminism and racial equality were changing the party, but so were suburban voters, a key constituency for moderate Republicanism: see Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Listeners interested in the Rockefeller Laws and the turn to incarceration as a critical phase in the 20th century war on drugs may wish to read my review essay, “The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image,” The New Republic, February 27, 2024.
Claire and Marsha discuss the Attica prison uprising as a turn away from moderation for Rockefeller: for a terrific history of this moment, see Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016).

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on X, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 55: The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Chatting with historian William Hogeland about Alexander Hamilton, debt, taxes, visionaries, and his new book, "The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.”
Episode 48, “The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights: A conversation with journalist and historian James Traub about liberalism and his book, "True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for A More Just America."
Episode 20, Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice:A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive all new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for as little as $5/month. Annual subscribers receive a free copy of my book, Political Junkies or any book mentioned in this episode or its show notes.

Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Politics and Society in Modern America)

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

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On July 20, 1925 the Washington Times published three front page stories about Tennessee v. Scopes—along with Prohibition, crime, and a woman who was arrested for drinking and driving, the Scopes Trial raised sensational questions about modern American life.

In 2016, white evangelical Christians showed up at the polls in force for Donald J. Trump, part of a diverse movement that defied expectations to sweep him into the White House. In the past decade, scholars and journalists have spilled a lot of ink on what seemed initially like a strange affinity of highly religious people for a base, immoral and violent man.

But Trump’s opportunism and libertarianism offered opportunities for policies on which establishment Republicans—even Ronald Reagan—had failed to deliver. One of those has been to fuel public morality by returning prayer and Biblical teachings to public school systems across the country. As recently as May 30, 2014, South Carolinian Sheri Few, already a failed three-time candidate for state office, campaigned to become superintendent of education on a platform of parents rights that included the teaching of “intelligent design” in science classes.

In case you have never heard that phrase, intelligent design is the theory that the world must have been created by an intelligent being—in other words, God. Sheri was promoting creationism, rebranded as intelligent design, to make it appear to be a science. In fact, evolution is a science—intelligent design is a religious philosophy that has no basis in science.

Other Republican candidates easily portrayed Sheri as a crank. She lost her primary and set out to change politics instead. She devoted herself to parental control of education, a cause that traces its history in southern states to white politicians and their constituents opposing, often violently, the integration of public schools after Supreme Court-ordered desegregation in 1954.

Sheri had been the president of South Carolina Parents Involved in Education since 2000; in 2014, it became United States Parents Involved in Education, or USPIE—as in apple pie. Today, PIE has chapters in 14 states, and—like its more successful counterpart, Moms for Liberty—is engaged in a grassroots fight to end the teaching of race and sexuality, and refuse federal dollars that mandate education standards and nondiscrimination. PIE also wants to create “Education Sanctuaries” where, by refusing federal dollars, state systems can reorient school curricula to the “traditional values of Faith, Family, and Country.”

The movement to put Christian teachings back in public schools, which ended when the Supreme Court determined in the 1962 decision Engel v. Vitale that Christian prayer violated the establishment clause, has been a consistent goal of right-wing conservatism for the last 60 years. It has spurred the massive growth of home schooling, Christian private schools, and the school voucher movement.

But the MAGA movement has pushed Christian extremism into state and federal government too. Using a strategy of directly confronting federal law, these politicians and officials now see Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices as a route to religious control of the public sphere. On June 27, 2024, Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that all classrooms in his state would be supplied with a Bible and teachers of all subjects would be expected it use it in their lessons.

It is already legal in Oklahoma to teach the Bible as part of a humanities curriculum, but not as “religious doctrine.” However, a Bible lesson in a biology, physics, or chemistry class would be just that: a religious explanation for the creation of the earth and every living thing on it.

This is why I asked my New School colleague, historian Brenda Wineapple, to come talk to me about her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation (Random House, 2024), a fresh take on the 1925 trial in which biology teacher John Thomas Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee’s law that only evolution was to be taught in the state’s public schools. A nationwide media spectacle, the so-called “Monkey Trial” was not just a showdown between science and religion, civil rights and censorship. It was also an epic battle between two of the leading public figures of the day: Christian politician William Jennings Bryan and trial attorney Clarence Darrow.

You can watch silent footage of the Scopes trial; the audio track seems to be from a contemporary radio broadcast. (Courtesy of The History Channel)

Show notes:

You can read The Butler Act, the Tennessee law that Scopes violated, here.
Ellis Cose has written a history of the American Civil Liberties Union’s first century, Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America (The New Press, 2020.)
Claire references Brenda’s last book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (Random House, 2019.)
Claire and Brenda discuss the cultural importance of Inherit the Wind, a 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that dramatized the Scopes trial.
If you want to read more about William Jennings Bryan, try Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Knopf, 2006.)
Clarence Darrow fans may wish to try John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011.)
Brenda mentions Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the trial, and Mencken’s disdain for rural America. You can read some of his columns from the Scopes trial in S. T. Joshi, Ed., H.L. Mencken on Religion (Prometheus Books, 2002.)
Like Claire, journalist Daniel Klinghard compared Bryan to Trump: see “Forget Hitler: Trump Is the New William Jennings Bryan,” U.S. News and World Report, March 4, 2016.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on X, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 51, MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, "A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America."
Episode 32, The Court Room of History:A conversation with historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall about her book "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America.”
Episode 28, Terrorism Begins At Home: A conversation with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin about his new book, "Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

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Delegates holding a pro-choice banner at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas. Photo credit: National Archives/Wikimedia Commons

Before Vice President Kamala Devi Harris, there was Hillary Clinton—also, Jeannette Rankin, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Geraldine Ferraro, Patsy Mink, Margaret Chase Smith, Nikki Haley, Carol Mosely Braun, and dozens of other women “firsts” in politics. Most importantly, there was a woman who never ran for office, who most of us knew little about until recently, and who was also lifted up by feminism: Shyamala Gopalan. We’ll get back to her.

Some of you probably noticed that I left someone out. I call it leaving the best for last. Because the first that Harris, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, is most compared to is Congresswoman Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm, the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, and who represented New York’s 12th district in Brooklyn from 1969 to 1983.

There are obvious similarities. Like Chisholm, Harris is a Black woman, a Democrat, and the daughter of immigrants. And as Chisholm did, Harris is running for President. If she succeeds, Harris will become the first woman, as well as the first Black and South Asian woman, to become President of the United States.

There’s another similarity: both Chisholm and Harris promised that, as President, they would represent the people.

In 1972, the United States, in the throes of a civil rights--and a newer, feminist--revolution, was not yet ready for Shirley Chisholm. At the convention, Chisholm was ultimately abandoned by feminists, civil rights leaders, and her own Congressional Black Caucus, all of whom rushed to support a white man, North Dakota Senator George McGovern—who then lost the election to Richard M. Nixon.

Yet, when Harris took the stage at the Democratic National Convention on August 23, 2024 to accept her party’s nomination, she placed herself squarely in the Black feminist social justice tradition that Chisholm had pioneered a half century earlier. In her acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention, Harris described her lifetime commitment as an attorney to extend power to the powerless, and voice to the voiceless.

Could the United States be at a moment when feminist politics are just—politics? Harris presents herself as a feminist, supports traditionally feminist causes, talks about women, but rarely says the word “feminist.” She shows; she doesn’t tell. Harris disclosed in her speech, for example, that her best friend being sexually abused by a family member, and her mother’s admonition not to complain, but to “do something,” propelled her into her role as a prosecutor.

In the years since Dobbs triggered a wave of restrictions to reproductive freedom and attacks on LGBT people, Harris has been President Joe Biden’s main link to feminist politicians and organizations across the nation. But she never labels her portfolio as the feminist causes that they have, historically, been. Rather, Harris presents the health and well-being of women and children as things a just society requires.

Perhaps we no longer need to say the word “feminist” because there is no Kamala Harris, and there is no Democratic party as we know it in 2024, without feminism. In today’s episode, I’ll let journalist Clara Bingham tell you why. In her new book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 (Simon & Schuster, 2024), Bingham tells the story of feminism’s rebirth in the 1960s as a movement that empowered women—politically, institutionally, socially, and culturally. It’s the story of a social revolution, made by and for women.

Weaving radical feminist history into a story about liberal and institutional organizing, it’s easy to see why the multi-faceted women’s movement that exploding in 1972 made a Chisholm candidacy possible, and ultimately failed her; how radicals and liberals traded ideas; how organizations flourished, fell apart, and were reborn; and how ordinary, anonymous women like Kamala Harris’s mother—that’s right, Shyamala Gopalan Harris-- climbed the ladders that feminism built to open doors for themselves and their daughters.

Show notes:

Clara begins by explaining that her storytelling style in The Movement, using only oral histories and primary sources, to tell a story, evolved from the method used by George Plimpton and Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl (Grove Press, 1982).
Clara references her book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul (Random House, 2016), an account of activism during the 1969-1970 school year, which left her wanting to know more about the women’s movement.
Clara praised Susan Brownmiller’s memoir of the radical feminist movement, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (The Dial Press, 1999).
Claire and Clara discuss disagreements over fact in histories of the movement: Claire believes that the first women’s liberation group was formed in Seattle.
Clara argues that the Title IX legislation advanced equality for women on college campuses, partly through athletic scholarships. You can read more about Title IX in Susan Ware, Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
Claire and Clara discuss the “No More Miss America” protest in Atlantic City on September 7, 1968. You can read a press release about the event from the women’s liberation group Redstockings here.
Jo Freeman’s study of why women became radical feminists, The Politics of Women's Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (David McKay Company, 1975).
Claire references Ms. Magazine, which is still available as an online, nonprofit, publication.
Clara pinpoints the rise of popular interest in feminist books with the publication of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics(Doubleday, 1970)
Claire talks about the Jane Collective, a group of Chicago feminists who facilitated safe, affordable abortions. You can learn more about these courageous women from watching the documentary The Janes (Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes: HBO Max, 2022).

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on X, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 45, Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free: Historian Felicia Kornbluh and I mark Roe v. Wade with a conversation about "A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Freedom."
Episode 34, We Demand Equality--NOW!A conversation with historian Katherine Turk about her new book, "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America."
Episode 33, Seattle, the Feminist Soviet of Washington:A conversation with historian Barbara Winslow about her book "Revolutionary Feminists: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid ubscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

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Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

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Photographer Corky Lee on 42nd Street. Photo credit: Jennifer Takaki/Wikimedia Commons

On July 23, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris reached the threshold of Democratic National Convention delegates that she needed to become the party’s de facto presidential nominee. In the two days since President Joe Biden had ceded the nomination, a diverse party had become re-energized around the 2024 race and its second, historic, multiracial nominee. While Harris would not be the first woman, or the first African American, at the top of the Democratic ticket, she would be the first Black woman and the first Asian-American woman. The daughter of immigrants, a Jamaican father and a South Asian mother, Kamala Harris will make history in her own right.

It's a sweet moment. Harris’s political achievement is a signal that Asian Americans have arrived in United States politics. Significantly, if she is elected, Harris will take office in January 2025, exactly sixty years since Hawaii’s Patsy Takemato Mink became the first woman of color and the first Asian-American woman to be sworn in to Congress.

Yet, Harris’s elevation coincides with another surge in anti-Asian hate. While the United States has a long history of vilifying immigrants from Asian nations and their American descendants, that xenophobia was purposefully revived by former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, who have targeted China and its people as an economic and physical danger to the United States.

By 2020, as Covid-19 ravaged communities, Trump and his allies labeled it a “Chinese virus” and the “Kung Flu,” reviving old tropes about immigrants, and specifically Asian immigrants, as carriers of disease. Chinese scholars and scientists have been targeted. In 2023, when he was competing with Trump for the Republican nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed discriminatory legislation that, among other things, prohibited Chinese nationals from purchasing real estate, a painful reminder of pre-World War II discrimination that rendered all Asian immigrants as perpetual second-class citizens.

Not coincidentally, random, violent attacks on Asian-Americans have surged in the United States. One of the first things the new Biden-Harris administration did in 2021 was to strengthen federal hate crimes laws, with special attention to Asian-American victims of violence.

But you can’t tell this political story without also talking about over a century of Asian American activism. Immigrants and their descendants made themselves visible by building vibrant, physical communities that welcomed generation after generation of newcomers from multiple nations. From these communities, they fought back against racism and discrimination in the courts, formed unions, volunteered for military service, raised families, claimed the right to education, made art, mounted demonstrations, and formed businesses.

One activist who documented this Asian American history in pictures until his death from COVID in 2021 was New York City photographer Corky Lee. A college history major and graduate of the city’s public education system, Lee began life as a conscientious objector and housing organizer. For almost fifty years, Lee documented New York City’s Chinatown, mostly in black and white. Hundreds of Lee’s photographs—Asian Americans living, working, striking, celebrating, protesting, and taking part in every activity that occurs in a now-shrinking part of the city—are now available, along with accompanying essays, in Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (Penguin/Random House, 2024). It’s edited by the artist Chee Wang Ng and my friend, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai.

Reprinted with permission from “Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice.” Copyright © 2024 by the Estate of Corky Lee, Mae Ngai, and Chee Wang Ng. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Show notes:

Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, where Corky Lee began his activist career, still exists and provides services in Lower Manhattan.
Mae mentions the Basement Workshop, where Lee began to work with other politicized Asian American artists: you can learn more about it here.
Claire brings up the fact that Lee modeled himself on the photographer Weegee, who chronicled New York’s demimonde from the 1930s to the 1960s. Listeners who want to learn more may want to read Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Picador, 2019).
Listeners who want to dig more deeply into the history of Asians in America may wish to consult Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America(Princeton University Press, 2014).
Claire and Mae discuss Lee’s restating of the famous “Golden Spike” photograph, a moment of national reunification in 1869 when the two coasts were united by rail. That site is now part of the National Parks System.
Claire references the effort to keep Philadelphia from building a new basketball arena in that city’s Chinatown.
Listeners who want to know more about the emergence and evolution of Chinatowns across the country may wish to consult Bonnie Tsui, American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods(Free Press, 2010).
Claire and Mae discuss the controversy over a new municipal jail that New York City is trying to build in Chinatown.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 53, Nobody Else Has My Eyes: A conversation with historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter about her new book, "I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays."
Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her new biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition (Politics and Society in Modern America, 105)

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Cover art from Susan Stryker, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader. Photo credit: Loren Rex Cameron.

In the early 1980s, Christine Jorgensen, a performer, celebrity, and the most famous transgender woman in the United States, appeared on Hour Magazine, a television talk show. The host, Gary Collins, asked Christine if she felt more socially accepted since 1952, when she was publicly outed by the New York Daily News following her gender confirmation surgery.

Jorgensen answered with a conditional yes: intellectuals and artists were welcoming to her, but in general, Americans still believed that there were two genders. The exception to that was young people, who were not just accepting, but interested by and engaged with her. Why?

I found Jorgensen’s observations about who she was in the world fascinating for several reasons. First, she was fully engaged with history, correcting Collins when he referred to her as a pioneer, or unique. Jorgensen explained that people had been transitioning, and doctors had been developing techniques to help them do that, for decades before she made her own decision. In addition, Collins kept cajoling Jorgensen into a progress narrative, presuming that Christine—and others like her—must have become gradually more accepted by the public over time as other social minorities had been. But Jorgensen resisted that story as well, pointing to the conservative backlash that had produced Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and linking the new momentum of the anti-abortion movement to potentially more prejudice against women like her.

But the other thing that interested me about Christine Jorgensen’s thinking was that she linked broader understanding of her humanity among the young to a new generation’s curiosity about themselves, and who they might be, and their belief that there were many identities, selves, and bodies available to them, some not yet imagined. If children had toys that could be taken apart and put together in creative new ways, Jorgensen implies, perhaps they could imagine reassembling their own bodies one day.

Christine Jorgensen was no scholar, but she picked up on some themes that would, in ensuing decades, become critical to the history and theory of transgender people. Jack Halberstam, for example, talks about cartoons and children’s play as arenas for grappling with gender, and gender crossing, while historian Jules Gill-Peterson has identified twentieth century pediatrics as a laboratory for changing, and stabilizing, embodied sex.

And notably, for a woman who in many ways sought to naturalize her femininity, Jorgensen briefly runs towards the idea of bodies as constructed things, available for assembly, disassembly, and reassembly, an insight that would be fully developed by historian Susan Stryker in 1994. “The transsexual body is an unnatural body,” Stryker writes in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” a classic essay in the field. “It is the product of medical science,” Stryker continues; “It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”

With that essay, even though she had no academic job and no prospect of getting one, Stryker may have inaugurated the field of transgender history. Born and educated in Oklahoma, she had just earned a Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley. As Susan made one transition—from graduate student to unemployed historian—she made her second, from one gender to the next. The job market was terrible, and the possibility of being employed as a transwoman was vanishingly small in the early 1990s. So, San Francisco became Stryker’s laboratory. She wrote, she researched, she became a filmmaker, she helped to build an archive, and she learned from other queers on the margins of academia—Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin. In other words, created a space where transgender history could happen—a door that opened and that younger scholars, artists, and activists now walk through.

And one day, the academy caught up, and came calling. Today, Stryker is Professor Emerita in the Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of Arizona. She has held multiple distinguished fellowships and is the executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

I’ll let Susan tell you the rest, a story in which she becomes one of the most distinguished historians of our generation, and a founding mother in her field. A new collection of Stryker’s essays. edited by McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak (Duke, 2024) is evidence of her life’s journey, her intellectual trajectory, and more.

Show notes:

Do you want to learn more about Christine Jorgensen? You can read Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, with an introduction by Susan Stryker (Cleis Press, 2000).
In my introduction, I namecheck Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011) and Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
You can subscribe to TSQ: A Transgender Studies Quarterly here.
MacKenzie Wark, the editor of Susan’s book and my colleague, is Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. You can take a look at some of her work here.
Susan mentions early work in the history of sexuality by John D’Emilio, Making Trouble (Routledge, 1993); and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 2008).
Susan mentions her time as executive director of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society—where you can go to do your own research.
We discuss anthropologist Gayle Rubin: you can read a selection of her work in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2011). She also mentions the importance of Patrick Califia, a journalist who wrote for the local queer press and has published multiple books.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on iTunes, Spotify, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on X, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 36, The Reality of Desire: A conversation with feminist sex educator, filmmaker and podcast host Tristan Taormino about her new memoir, "A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten"
Episode 29, To Sexual Outlaws, With Love:A conversation with the legendary lesbian writer, activist, and community herstorian Joan Nestle about her new collection of essays, "A Sturdy Yes Of A People"
Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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Amazon is a top recruiter of retired workers who need extra income to survive. Photo credit: Tada Images/Shutterstock.com

We are all thinking about the aging process this week. Unless the standard bearers of our two major political parties change, as a nation we may be doomed to talk about aging—and who is too old to work-- for the next five months. If—heaven forfend—Republican Donald J. Trump wins the November election, he would be 78 upon taking the oath of office. Democratic incumbent Joseph R. Biden, currently 81, would be 82 if he were to be sworn in for a second term.

The first presidential debate struck terror into Democratic hearts. Biden seemed fatigued, hoarse, and early in the debate, incoherent at times. Donald Trump, who is always incoherent, vigorously spewed lie after lie. But since he left the presidency in a cloud of tear gas and violence in January 2021, Trump’s appearances have also been marked by what appear to be neurological issues: memory lapses, physical hesitation, what some have identified as a tremor, and nodding off to sleep during his recent Manhattan trial.

South Carolina Governor and 2024 Republican primary candidate Nikki Haley sounded the alarm about both candidates on Bloomberg TV shortly before she dropped out of contention. This year’s presidential race, in addition to sparking a debate about bringing back mandatory retirement, something that has been illegal in all but a few industries since 1986, has also unleashed ugly, unexamined ageism. But here’s the paradox. As a society, we also celebrate elderly Americans when they have qualities that we associate with aging well: in other words, when they are spry and not disabled; witty and not showing signs of verbal and intellectual decline.

And above all we love it when they are productive. As one example, in 2022an ABC News reporter in 2022 celebrated the world’s oldest working flight attendant, American Airlines’ Bette Nash earns praise for her love of flight, her devotion to service, her bright spirits, and what is clearly excellent physical fitness at 86. What we never learn, however, is whether Nash wanted to keep working until her death from breast cancer this year. Was she saddled with debt from caring for a disabled child, or paying her own medical bills? Or was she—like 80% of Americans—not paid enough to be able to save for a retirement? In 1989, when Nash’s career was about half over, the average salary for a college-educated flight attendant was between $20,000 to $30,000 a year.

In fact, as economist Teresa Ghilarducci explains in her new book, Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2024), the hidden story behind feel-good news features is that the vast majority of Americans of retirement age can’t afford to stop working. And that retirement isn’t always voluntary. Over half of United States workers are pushed out, fired, and laid off as young as 62. Many lose higher salary jobs in their fifties. Many have no savings, not because they are undisciplined, but because they were never paid enough to live or had to raid 401(k) accounts to address family catastrophes. We can expect that for several generations of educated workers, money that could have gone to retirement has instead gone to banks profiting from student loan repayment.

Fact: only 20% of us can afford to retire at an age when we can expect a decade or more of good health to enjoy the fruits of our labors.

As Ghilarducci explains in this episode, most Americans don’t retire, they just get older and more disabled, many working at minimum, or sub-minimum, wage jobs. A staggering 78% of the home health care workforce, mostly women of color, are over 40. Older Americans waitress, clean houses, and baby sit. They work at big box stores, like Walmart and Target, at Amazon warehouses, fast-food franchises, and grocery stores. At my local Stop and Shop, mostly self-checkout, every time the machine makes an error, a woman in her seventies who stands eight hours a day rushes over to reset it. “As long as she screws up”—she being the machine—“I’ll have a job!” this woman says to me every time.

It's not that our debates about an aging political class aren’t relevant: they are. The average age of our presidential candidates is 79.5 years, Senators 64.3 years, and members of Congress 58.4 years. But these folks are largely millionaires who choose to work. Instead, this presidential campaign should be about is the millions of older Americans who have worked hard all their lives, and will work until they die, unless we commit as a nation to fair retirement policies.

Show notes:

“Hail to the Chief” at the beginning of the podcast is played by the United States Marine Band.
Most Americans do not decide to leave their jobs voluntarily. They are pushed out in downsizing; see Peter Gosselin, “If You’re Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won’t be Yours,” ProPublica (December 28, 2018).
Teresa name checks Susan Jacobi, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Pantheon, 2011).
You can read more about the connection between new technologies and unemployment among older workers here.
Working beyond traditional retirement age is correlated with better health outcomes—but only among those who are already rich. See Chris Farrell, “Working past the traditional retirement age could be good for your health, but only if you’re rich,” Fortune, April 6, 2023.
Teresa discusses the growing problem of home health care worker abuse. See Priyanka Dayal McCluskey, “Growing violence against health care workers prompts Mass. hospitals to adopt new codes of conduct,” WBUR, January 31, 2023.
Claire and Teresa also discuss why college professors (like them!) are reluctant to retire: Claire has written extensively about this. You can take a look at a sample of her thoughts here and here.
Teresa gives a nod to economist Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago, 2006).
Financial journalist Helaine Olen has written about why GoFundMe thinly conceals how little the American government does for its citizens. See “GoFundMe is a poor substitute for America’s tattered social safety net,” MSNBC, February 9, 2024.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 47, It's Good Work--If You Can Get It:A conversation with sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle about her pandemic book, "Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times."
Episode 22, Hit Them In The Pocketbook:A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty."
Episode 21, A World To Win:Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And here’s a bonus: all new annual subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) Or you can choose today’s featured book, Teresa Ghilarducci’s Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

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The south and east facade of St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., where historian Regina Kunzel’s archive of writing by incarcerated queer patients originated. Photo credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Wikimedia Commons

In the mid-twentieth century, United States homosexuality and gender crossing was punishable in the law, and was understood by psychiatrists as a mental disorder, albeit one that could be treated and cured. Treatments ranged from intensive psychoanalysis to physical assaults, medication, and surgeries; patients both volunteered for treatment and were involuntarily confined for a condition that, as Yale historian Regina Kunzel argues in this episode, was understood a social and medical disability. In 1973, activists succeeded in removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, although Gender Dysphoria (previously gender identity disorder, or GID) is still classified as a mental illness.

Drawing on a collection of writings produced by queer and gender-variant people confined for treatment at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington, D.C., Kunzel’s In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (University of Chicago, 2024) explores one psychiatrists’ work with queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States.

In the Shadow of Diagnosis tells the story of queer people in their own words; it is also a compelling account of the historian’s encounter with an unexpected, rich archive about the queer past, and how history is made. But as Kunzel points out, this past also helps us think about the repathologizing of, as well as attempts to discipline and cure, queer and trans lives today.

This bonus episode comes to us courtesy of History Workshop, founded in the United Kingdom in 1967 to promote the practice of social history, or “history from below.” Now a digital magazine of radical history, History Workshop “seeks to deepen understandings of the past, cast fresh light on the present and agitate for change in the world we live in now.” You can subscribe to more episodes of this wonderful podcast here, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free (or better yet, a paid!) subscriber.

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Photo credit: Janusz Pienkowski/Shutterstock

It was May 12, 2009. A crowd had assembled at the White House for a program billed as “An Evening of Poetry & Music & The Spoken Word.” Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States, and his wife Michelle, had been in residence for less than five months.

I doubt that anyone remembers who else performed that night. But the next day, the historians’ network was chattering about a skinny kid with a buzzcut, a graduate of Wesleyan University, who had recently had a more than modest success with the musical he wrote for his senior project. And that evening, to the delighted laugh of the new President, Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that he was going to present a hip-hop song about the first Secretary of the Treasury.

“Alexander Hamilton,” he deadpanned, as the dignitaries in front of him laughed. As an aside, you must wonder what the actual Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, felt about the hilarity. And then Miranda’s accompanist and long-time musical director hit the opening chords:

Almost six years later, in February 2015, Miranda’s full show, “Hamilton: The Musical,” debuted at The Public Theater, an Off-Broadway venue in Lower Manhattan with a reputation for incubating hits. “Hamilton” moved to Broadway in late summer, where it became a cultural and sociological phenomenon, spawning YouTube imitators by the hundreds, multiple traveling companies and a London production. Hamilton has remained at the Richard Rodgers Theater ever since. It re-energized a popular fascination with Early American history, and with the Founding Fathers, inspiring tourists to roam New York to visit sites associated with Hamilton, a man who, previously, had been best known perhaps for being shot and killed in his prime by Vice President Aaron Burr.

Although Founding Fathers come in and out of fashion, “Hamilton: The Musical” was special in many ways. It flipped everything, using hip-hop to tell the story of the nation’s founding, and an ensemble cast of Black and Brown actors who challenged audiences to re-interpret national heroism through bodies of color. You can read more about this phenomenon in a book of essays I edited with Renee C. Romano, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018.)

But in the end—and in the beginning, actually, since the musical was based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Hamilton—Miranda’s musical was great man history and told a great man story. Yes, there were terrific female characters, but “Hamilton“ repeated familiar tropes: an empty continent waiting to be filled up by white people, a band of brothers risking everything to bring a country into being, a nation that was extraordinary because the Founders were extraordinary.

The founding as portrayed in “Hamilton” was nostalgic for a lost world of ideas, ambitions, and growth. That wasn’t the real world of those turbulent years. More significantly, perhaps, it was not the real world of 2015, when the United States was veering ever more sharply into talk of borders, limits, partisanship, and lies.

Here’s another problem with great man history: it deadens the true excitement of the Early American nation, oversimplifying a world that was just as full of schemers, dreamers, alternative futures, and fascinating bit players as our political world is today.

And that means we have more myth-busting to do, listeners. Today’s guest is William Hogeland, author of a new book on the period, The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding(Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2024). As Bill tweeted recently “People really like the Jefferson-vs.-Hamilton binary as an explanation of American history, and The Hamilton Scheme is out to smash it. Not just triangulate it by reviving the 18th c. labor activists (that too),” he promised. “Jeffersonianism turns out to be only Hamilton-lite.”

Tempting, isn’t it? And there is so much more in this wonderful book, whether you are a Hamilton fan, love the complexity of Early America, or (and I know some of you are out there) whether you are just a finance nerd and think nonstop about the national debt.

So, join Bill and me for this episode of “Why Now?” where history and politics meet the challenge of today.

And I’m your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of the Political Junkie Substack.

This is Episode 55, “The Ten-Dollar Founding Father.”

Show notes:

Bill mentions Hamilton’s friend and ally Robert Morris, a Pennsylvania Merchant. You can read more about Morris in an earlier book, Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation (University of Texas Press, 2012).
Claire mentions the question of why slavery was preserved at the founding, a topic that has been explored by David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill & Wang, 2009).
Bill talks about Hamilton and others understanding that the economic world was becoming transformed through early industrialization. You can understand what they saw in Eric Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (The New Press, 1999).
The deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, and the move to a federal Constitution, is the subject of Joseph Ellis’s The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 (Knopf, 2015).
Claire mentions the classic account of the Constitutional Convention, Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May-September 1787 (Little, Brown & Company, 1966).
Bill discusses the valuable ideas in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: The Organization and Design of Government (1776).
Bill mentions the radicalism of the Whiskey Rebellion; he has written about it in The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty (Scribner, 2006).

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 51, MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, "A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America"
Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."
Episode 14, The Past Is Never Dead: A conversation with historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer about their new, best-selling essay collection, "Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past."

You can subscribe for free. But for this week only, annual subscribers (that’s $50, or five Hamiltons) can choose a free copy of Historians on Hamilton or Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. Sustainers ($150) receive a free copy of Hogeland’s The Hamilton Scheme.

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Hannah Arendt (left) and Mary McCarthy in the early 1970s: close friends, they were two of the very few women identified as “New York Intellectuals.” Photo credit: Unknown/Wikimedia Commons

Picture this: it’s 1936, the depths of the Great Depression in New York City, and you are a bright, Jewish, first-generation American man. You are a teenager, maybe even as young as fifteen or sixteen, from the Lower East Side, Brownsville, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. You’re smart, you’ve finished high school, and what your parents want more than anything else is for you to get a college degree and be a professional, not a garment worker or shopkeeper like they are. If your family has a little money, you’ll commute to Columbia; if your parents have done better, they might be able to scrape together tuition and board for Yale, Harvard, or some other elite school that takes its quota of Jews every year.

But for ambitious men without money, there’s a college a subway ride away, on the north end of Manhattan. And it’s free. It’s a college that’s so good, and so famous for its radical politics that its nickname is “The Harvard of the Proletariat.” It’s City College, and there are so many smart people there that going to lunch is like a whole other class.

Conservative William Kristol’s, father, Irving, graduated with the class of 1940. He was a history major, a Trotskyist, and a devoted member of the Young People’s Socialist League, and he held down one of the alcoves in that lunchroom where students argued hotly about politics.

These verbal battles represent what became famous in twentieth century American political thought as “left sectarianism:” reading Karl Marx, not just against the evidence of what had been done in Marx’s name, but in relation to the American democratic ideal and everyone who had written after Marx. Their arguments were more than abstract. Adolf Hitler was on the march in Europe. The Communist Party was becoming increasingly prominent among intellectuals and artists in the United States. Kristol’s intellectual lodestar, Leon Trotsky, one of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries, was both writing furiously and struggling to stay one step ahead of Josef Stalin’s assassins—who killed him with an ice pick a few months after Kristol’s class graduated.

Their politics were all deadly serious: it’s even possible that a young electrical engineering student named Julius Rosenberg occasionally joined one of the alcoves at City College. But these men—Kristol, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Seymour Lipset—all students of philosophy professor Morris Cohen also had another project. They were inventing a virile intellectual style and agenda that was distinctively Jewish and secular, and imagining how they would get their ideas to the public. Like one of Cohen’s associates, Lionel Trilling, the first Jewish literature professor to be hired at Columbia University, they believed that the looming battle against totalitarianism would be fought with words, pens, and ideas.

And after World War II, and through the 1980s, they did exactly that, in publications like Menorah Journal, Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent. They, and new recruits like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Bell, as well as a select group of women—Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Midge Decter, and Lionel Trilling’s wife Diana—became known as “The New York Intellectuals,” a generation of thinkers who redefined the art of political argument in the United States and elevated it to a contact sport.

That’s the story historian Ronnie Grinberg tells in her new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press, 2024.)

Show notes:

Bill Kristol’s description of the City College lunchroom is from an interview he did with journalist David Brooks on CSPAN-2’s Book TV, February 11, 2011.
Ronnie mentions another study of the New York Intellectuals’ intimate lives, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Claire and Ronnie discuss the effects of antisemitism on the development of Jewish masculinity in the 20th century. You can read more about this in Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America(Oxford University Press, 1994).
Claire mentions Ann Roiphe’s memoir about the literary parties of the 1950s and 1960s, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason (Nan A. Talese, 2011).
Claire and Ronnie discuss the marriages of New York Intellectuals: one first person account of a marriage is Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (Harcourt & Brace, 1993).
Ronnie gives a shout-out to Natalie Robins’s biography of Diana Trilling, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017). You can find Daphne Merkin’s review, which Ronnie mentions, here.
Listeners interested in learning more about antisemitism in universities may want to listen to Tablet Magazine’s podcast Gatecrashers (2022).
In a discussion about the wives editing their famous husbands’ work, Ronnie mentions Ben Moser’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco, 2019).
Ronnie notes the unsung work of wives in their husbands’ writing and scholarship: see Tim Lacy, ““Mrs. Hofstadter” and the Myth of the Heroic Lone Scholar,” S-USIH blog, January 18, 2018.
Claire gives a shout out to Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick (W.W. Norton, 2021).
Ronnie references Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It (Random House, 1967)), and now available from the New York Review of Books Classics series.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."
Episode 23, Creative Fictions:A conversation with historian Sam Franklin about "The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History."
Episode 12, All The News That's Fit To Print:A conversation with historian Kathryn McGarr about American journalism, foreign policy, and "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber. To receive all posts, and subscriber-only content, you can sign up at $5/month. all new annual subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

And here’s a bonus:

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Sojourner Truth, copyright by Nell Irvin Painter, 2022: reprinted with permission of the artist.

On July 21, 2023, amid a culture war manufactured by Republican party activists, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Jacksonville, FL. The occasion? A set of standards for teaching African American history just issued by the Florida Board of Education that evaded or denied much of what we know about the history of Black people in the Americas. These dishonest guidelines brought the state’s social studies curriculum in compliance with H.B. 7, passed in April 2022, a law that characterized current scholarship in Black history as socially divisive propaganda and harmful to the young.

Like similar laws passed in seventeen other states, H.B. 7 misclassifies most knowledge about Black history, literature, and culture as “critical race theory.” It makes false claims that true history shames white students by forcing them to bear responsibility for racism.

White activists, under the mantle of “parents’ rights,” have pushed this narrative since the 2020 election. One white mother from Fairfax County, Virginia worked to have Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved, removed from the curriculum. She claimed that the book gave her teenage son nightmares. “It was disgusting and gross,” the young man, now a college student, affirmed.

Most of us would characterize Beloved as a tough read, but also one that accurately reflects the scholarship about violence directed against enslaved people. So, this creates a problem for educators under laws like H.B. 7: removing the violent realities of white supremacy from the curriculum creates a void that is difficult to fill.

And yet, Florida educators, hand-picked by Governor and presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis, tried, looking for stories of uplift and progress. The standards offered younger students stories about African American inventors and explorers. They encouraged high school teachers to introduce “the contributions of Africans to society, science, poetry, politics, oratory, literature, music, dance, Christianity and exploration in the United States from 1776-1865.”

Sometimes the realities of African American history had to be massaged into a positive story. One lesson plan included instruction in the “opportunities” Black Americans had to learn “skills” as enslaved people, as if plantations were vocational schools.

The history being dismantled, and books being banned, in states like Florida took decades to research, write, and weave into lesson plans. Historians don’t just fight for this knowledge because it helps us understand the past, but because our violent present is descended from the world that slavery made. In 2007, celebrated African American historian John Hope Franklin, the grandchild of enslaved people, discussed this legacy. He urged us to not just understand Black history as a field with its own lessons, but as a living thing: an intervention in United States, North American, and world history, and a mirror for the present.

Few contemporary scholars have invested more in that project than Nell Irvin Painter, who returns to the show with a new collection of her work, I Just Keep Talking:A Life in Essays (Doubleday, 2024). The author of eight previous books, Painter also pursues her historical vocation as a visual artist, professional training she completed after retiring from the Princeton University history department. This curated collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the questions, visual observations, and imaginative renderings that scholarship alone cannot properly address.

The book is autobiographical, it is scholarly, and it is beautiful: Painter has truly taken the practice of history to a new level.

Show notes:

Claire notes Nell’s last book, a personal story about training as a visual artist after retiring from Princeton, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint Books: 2019.)
Nell mentions her biography, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), and the impossibility of dislodging Francis Dana Gage’s incorrect depiction of this leading abolitionist intellectual. Nell also sites biographies by Carleton Maybee and Margaret Washington.
Nell emphasizes the importance of 19th century intellectual Martin Delany. After you read her essay in the book, you can follow up with a book of his essays edited by Robert S. Levine, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (University of North Carolina Press, 2003.)
You can listen to Nell discuss her book The History of White People (W.W. Norton, 2010) in “Why Now? Episode 30, Inventing A White Race.”
Since Claire heard Nell muse about the possibility that slave owners sexually assaulted male slaves, there has been a book on the topic: Thomas A. Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (University of Georgia Press, 2019.)
In discussing Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, Nell name checks bell hooks’s Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982.)
Claire references the late Jan Lewis’s article about the Jefferson family, “The White Jeffersons.” Nell and Claire also mention the new Susan Lori Parks play at The Public Theater in New York, “Sally and Tom.”
Claire and Nell discuss the ways in which art can allow us to tell speculative histories, and Claire mentions an earlier episode, “Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, "The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts."

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her new biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."
Episode 41, Heather Cox Richardson Believes In You:A conversation about Richardson's book, "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America,” Substack, and the importance of popular history.
Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy:A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."

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The situation comedy Leave it to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963, was one of many half-hour comedies that idealized the American post-war suburbs, always portraying them as uniformly white and a refuge where children got into “scrapes”—but not real trouble. From left: Hugh Beaumont (Ward), Tony Dow (Wally), Barbara Billingsley (June), Jerry Mathers (Theodore AKA "Beaver"). Photo credit: ABC/Wikimedia Commons

I grew up in a place called the Main Line, a string of suburbs outside Philadelphia. The area got its nickname from a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad first laid in the early 19th century as part of a Federalist public works program. In the next several decades, the railroad also became a passenger line, ferrying upper-class Philadelphians, eager to escape the summer’s heat and epidemic diseases, out to the healthful Haverford and Bryn Mawr hotels.

But by the late 19th century, that Main Line train was ferrying businessmen, who now lived in suburbs built around the railroad, in and out of the city every day. Today, men and women can still walk to the train from their homes. Children who attend private schools that are also situated near the tracks (Baldwin, the one I attended, is in the old Bryn Mawr Hotel) can also be seen trudging off to the train like the little professional workers they will become.

But one thing has changed. Those suburbs, which were almost uniformly white for decades, are now integrated—if not by class, then by race. As prices for one-bedroom apartments in places like New York top a million dollars, a three-bedroom house with a broad expanse of lawn may even seem—affordable?

Something else changed too. Those suburbs used to be solidly Republican, but now Main Line voters are far more likely to vote with Democratic Philadelphia.

Oh sure, there are still some Republicans in those fancy houses. That’s why Donald J. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, was in my hometown on November 6, 2016, two days before the election, telling her audience that it was an honor to speak to the white suburban women who had volunteered for the campaign.

When I saw this on the evening news, I was shocked, but not nearly as shocked as I was on November 9 when I learned that my home state—my hometown—had been among the metropolitan regions producing the razor-thin margins of votes that elevated Ivanka Trump’s pussy-grabbing father to the Presidency of the United States.

But the good news is: it didn’t last. When the GOP embraced extremism, the Pennsylvania suburbs east of the Appalachian mountains roared back. Suburban voters provided the margin of victory for Joe Biden in 2020, and have consistently handed the GOP loss after loss, turning red states purple, and purple states blue. And it’s not just Pennsylvania. Republican suburbanites in bright red states are also voting to preserve the right to choose abortion in the post-Dobbs era.

Why? Well, we can point to that diversity I mentioned at the top of the show. Dr. Jasmine Clark, a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives, described the pockets of support for African American minister and sitting Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in the 2022 by-election. Her prediction was that the suburbs were changing, and that Warnock would win.

Dr. Clark was right, and today Georgia has not one, but two, Democratic Senators.

The suburbs have never been more important to our political life than they will be in 2024. They are also important in every other respect: 69% of Americans now live in an area defined as suburban, and every policy has its greatest impact on suburban citizens.

But it’s also true, as my guest historian Becky Nicolaides underscores in her book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945(Oxford University Press, 2024), that suburban America has always been less white and more complex—in its class structure, its built environment, its relationship to the city, and its attractiveness to new immigrants from around the globe—than post-World War II popular culture imagined.

Show notes:

If you want to watch a few episodes of Leave It to Beaver, you can see them on Amazon Prime.
You can find Becky’s first book, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (University of Chicago Press, 2022),here.
Becky and Claire discuss the New Deal as a pivot point for implementing racial segregation in housing at the federal level. You can learn more about this in Edward Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013.)
You can also learn more about suburbanization, white home buying, and the post-World War II economy in Barbara Miller Lane, Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965 (Princeton University Press, 2015.)
Becky describes the “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959: watch their classic Cold War confrontation here.
Restrictive covenants were part of the architecture of residential segregation, and they were made illegal in Shelly v. Kraemer (1948). You can read more about the devastating effects of “redlining” on Black wealth in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press, 2019.)
But Black Americans are not new to the suburbs. Becky references Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2005.)
A classic text that puts transportation and urban development at the center of the history of suburbanization is Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985.)
Becky mentions Proposition 13 (1978), a libertarian initiative that artificially suppressed property tax rates in California; it was a pretext one community used to try to close their parks to outsiders.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 20, Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice:A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 8, First, Pick the Right Wife: A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP.

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It’s the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose. On this day, Baez is giving a live, outdoor concert in Norway. Bantering with an audience of young Norwegians, she smiles to a happy, shirtless youth and segues into her next number: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Canadian Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of The Band, wrote that song for his drummer, Southerner Levon Helm, in 1968. The original, backed by a Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel blues harmony, describes the pain and despair of Virgil Kane, a Southern railroad worker who watches the Confederacy crumble before his eyes in 1865.

Although this powerful ballad can be seen as an anti-war song, it also sentimentalizes the “Lost Cause” myth —a cherished dream of the independent Southern nation, based on white supremacy, that might have been had the Confederacy not lost the Civil War. As in other cultural renditions of this alternative South, in which all white men are equal and have dignity, the song conceals the causes of the war: a violent, illegal rebellion that sought to preserve racial slavery. Talking to one interviewer who raised this issue, Robertson again returned to mythmaking. The song, he recalled, had its origins in a conversation with Levon Helms’s father, a poor, white Delta farmer, about what his family lost in 1865.

In the interview, Robertson says he felt like he was writing a movie: in fact, he was transcribing, and embellishing on, a myth, one that figured rebellious Southerners as the victims of violence, not the cause of it, much as those being held in jail for the failed coup of January 6, 2021, are perceived by Donald Trump’s supporters as martyrs.

Nevertheless, it’s a powerful song, and it became an instant folk-rock hit when it was released in 1969. It climbed even higher in 1971 when Baez recorded it for her double album Blessed Are. But why was Baez, a longstanding supporter of the Black Civil Rights movement, singing such a song in the first place? And why was she still singing it on August 1, 2017, this time accompanied by the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, even as Donald Trump’s MAGA crowds declared themselves descendants of that same Confederacy?

A better question might be: how do myths provoke feelings so powerful that even people with progressive politics like Baez stop paying attention to the dangerous, false histories they promote? And who better to turn to for answers, at a time when the Donald Trump MAGA myth machine promotes the worst aspects of American history as virtues, than American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin? A former colleague, friend, and mentor from my Wesleyan University days, Slotkin has spent a career exploring the violence at the center of the American past, and how it is both concealed and elevated by national mythmaking.

Just to reassure you: not all myths are bad. After all, if the Confederacy represented one myth about the American founding, the Union government represented another. As Lincoln put it in the 1864 Gettysburg address, that myth was that the nation’s founders “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That was a myth too—but it’s one that we who love democracy are willing to fight for still, and one that those who do not love democracy—Donald Trump and his allies—are determined to defeat.In his new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (Belknap Press, 2024), Slotkin examines the history of the two Americas that exist side-by-side today, with their clashing and common myths, two American cultures that will meet at the ballot box in November 2024 to decide the fate of American democracy.

Show notes:

Richie refers to the American “myth of the frontier.” There are many worthwhile things to read on this topic, but one of the primary sources that most influenced intellectuals, as well as politicians, in the twentieth century was Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893).
Claire and Richie occasionally refer back to the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2917.
“The Lost Cause” is another big theme in our discussion. A book that helps us think about how this myth structured our political and built environments to promote white supremacy is Karen L. Cox, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University of Florida Press, 2019). Listeners may also wish to return to my conversation with Jacqueline Dowd Hall in Episode 32 about the Lumpkin sisters, one of whom traveled the South promoting the Lost Cause.
Richie discusses aspects of the frontier myth, particularly race, that inflect the long-running Star Wars franchise. To learn more, see Case R. Sunstein, The World According to Star Wars (Day Street Books, 2016).
Claire mentions the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and how Israel’s war on Gaza draws on American frontier symbolism.
Richie explains how a comic television show like The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) promotes neo-Confederate ideology.
Thinking about how white supremacist myths are passed on from parents to children, Claire mentions Terrance Dean’s article on racism, film and love, “Generations: Toward a Black Love Teaching Ethic,” Public Seminar, April 28, 2022.
Richie points to Donald Trump’s deliberate activation of an American myth that promotes the self-made man. There is probably no better example of this than the former president’s first book,Trump: The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).
Richie mentions opposition to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (One World, 2021) as a point of convergence for the MAGA movement and mainstream conservatives, in part because because it contradicts deeply-held racial myths about the United States.
Claire and Richie discuss Trump as a sacred figure, and Christian nationalism as a powerful political myth that supports the MAGA project.
In discussing the failure of progressive politics, and the New Deal specifically, to generate effective myths, Richie points to the one movie that he considers mythic in that periods, The Grapes of Wrath(John Ford, 1940). Claire mentions a second movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington(Frank Capra, 1939) and suggests that what these two films have in common is not that they are progressive, but that they are populist.
Claire points to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), her March 2023 press conference about the January 6 prisoners and the conditions in the Washington, D.C. jail, and how it evokes the forms of sentiment typified by The Captive: The True Story Of The Captivity Of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Among The Indians, first published in 1682.

Still have questions? That’s great! Go ahead and:

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 41, Heather Cox Richardson Believes In You:A conversation about Richardson's book, "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America,” Substack, and the importance of popular history.
Episode 35, No Age of Innocence:A conversation with historian Drew Faust about fighting back, making change, and her new memoir, "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury."
Episode 28, Terrorism Begins At Home: A conversation with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin about his new book, "Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism."

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If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people wearing tee shirts that have “Gays for Trump” written on the front. Did you think they were planted by the campaign? Or that any gay, lesbian, or transgender person who supported the current Republican Party was deluded? Or a simpleton?

I’ll be the first to confess that, even as a historian who knows that ideology and identity do not map onto each other in obvious ways, I was stunned when I walked out of a Ben Shapiro keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2018, where the rabble-rousing reactionary journalist had rejected homophobia but embraced hatred of trans people. Then, I saw two women holding a trans flag that declared: We Are Trans and We Are Conservative.

It was incredibly brave. But here’s where I reveal my inner b***h queen. When I went downstairs to the exhibit hall and stumbled over a Log Cabin Republicans table staffed by two skinny, rumpled, nervous white men who were made even more anxious when approached by an obvious lesbian, my first thought was: what sad little queers they are.

Well, shame on me.

Those men had fought for their table at CPAC, a particularly difficult task since high-profile gay conservative influencer and youth organizer Milo Yiannopoulos had been disinvited the previous year for having shared fond memories of oral sex with a priest as an underaged teen.

In fact, Yiannopoulos is an exception to the history of LGBT people in the GOP, and not because he was, and is, so out of the closet—although now he says he’s straight. Instead, queer Republicans have historically been the definition of rectitude and respectability, men and women who often did come out in defense of their rights: to be free of state surveillance, to serve in the armed forces, to marry, and to adopt children.

That’s still true today. And like other Republicans, LGBT conservatives are often businesspeople who believe in individual freedom, family, low taxes, deregulation, God, and a strong national defense. If you go to the Log Cabin Republicans site today, you’ll see a full-throated endorsement of these values, updated for the Trump era.

(You can listen to Charles Moran, a representative of Log Cabin Republicans, endorse Donald Trump on Fox News in 2019. As yet, the group has not made an endorsement for 2024.)

And of course, much of what Log Cabin Republicans argued about Trump was true in 2019. Trump was in favor of same-sex marriage during the 2016 campaign, whereas both Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, were reluctant to challenge their political advisors’ wisdom that it diminished their electability. Listeners may recall that it was President Joe Biden, then Obama’s vice president, who endorsed gay marriage in May 2012 on NBC’s Meet the Press.”

The history of LGBT politics is complicated, to say the very least. And that’s why I invited my fellow historian, journalist, podcaster and friend Neil J. Young on the show to talk about his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024). As Neil explains, battling detractors on their left and homophobia to their right, gay Republicans have nevertheless played power politics for over 80 years, sometimes in coalition with liberal groups—and sometimes even founding advocacy organizations like One, Inc. that we think of as liberal in their origins. You’re going to learn things in this episode that I didn’t even know before I read Coming Out Republican.

Show notes:

Claire begins by asking Neil to discuss the role of conservatives in founding the nation’s first homophile organizations. “Homophile” was a word that embraced the spectrum of pro-lesbian and gay politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. You can read more about this movement in a book edited by a character in Neil’s book: W. Dorr Legg, Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice(Gibb Publications, 1994). A critical study of a women’s homophile organization is Marcia Gallo’s Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Seal Press, 2006).
Neil also credits early gay rights activists who were left wing and Communist. You can read about the most prominent man in that group in Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Alyson Books, 1990).
Claire mentions an earlier episode of “Why Now?” with Bettina Aptheker about homophobia in the Communist Party, Lavender and Red, a conversation about Aptheker’s book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s."
Claire mentions Reed Erickson, a transgender man and heir to a business fortune who was an early funder of One, Inc. You can learn more about Erickson in an episode of Eric Marcus’s podcast, “Making Gay History.”
Neil explains that men associated with the so-called New Right were more likely to be closeted, and some were married. Several of these men were associated with William F. Buckley’s projects in New York and Washington. You can read more about this circle of activists in Carl Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Press: 2011).
Claire mentions the queerness of Washington, D.C. The best source on this is James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt and Co., 2022). Neil also points us to the recent Showtime mini-series, “Fellow Travelers.” (Claire likes the novel by Thomas Mallon that the series is based on better.)
Neil mentions closeted Republican gay activist and Reagan-era insider Terry Dolan, who ultimately died of complications from AIDS in 1987. You can read more about him here.
Claire and Neil discuss the 1978 Briggs Initiative, which proposed to ban speech about homosexuality and LGBT people from the classroom in California: voters defeated it in 1978. Neil notes that this is a critical moment for the founding of Log Cabin Republicans.
Claire also asks Neil about the importance of Leonard Matlovitch, a conservative and decorated Vietnam veteran, and his lawsuit against the Air Force for discharging him when he came out as gay. You can learn more about Matlovitch at Making Gay History.
Claire and Neil discuss Andrew Sullivan’s article on gay marriage in The New Republic, “Here Comes The Groom: A (conservative) case for gay marriage” (August 28, 1989), and his critical role in moving liberals to support this issue.
The book about the history of queer parenting that Claire mentions is Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Claire notes the turmoil in the conservative Cheney family over former Representative Liz Cheney (WY-01) repudiating the marriage of her lesbian sister, Mary: you can read more about that here. (Liz Cheney has since admitted she was wrong, and has apologized to her sister.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, or Soundcloud (sorry! Google no longer supports podcasts!) You can also keep up with Political Junkie content, rapid-fire political reactions, social commentary, and satire on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 27, “How Gay Rights Became `Special’ Rights”: A conversation with sociologist Arlene Stein about her book, "The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights; Or, How the Right Divides Us"
Episode 24, Against Government:A conversation with political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas Harris about their book, "At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump."
Episode 8, First, Pick the Right Wife:A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP

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Content warning: this podcast discusses sexual assault and other forms of violence.

We begin this episode with Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She is discussing an international investigation of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed over Israel’s border and triggered the current and devastating war in Gaza.

The most damaging attack since the 1948 war, more Israelis were killed in a single event than at any time since the Holocaust. Hamas fighters killed 695 civilians (36 of whom were children), 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The attackers took around 250 hostages, which included at least thirty children and several dozen contract workers from countries other than Israel. Thousands were wounded.

Within a week, Israel initiated a terrifyingly violent attack designed to destroy Hamas, a military force embedded in a civilian population. By October 13, experts predicted the humanitarian catastrophe that has since unfolded. By the end of January 2024, the civilian infrastructure, layered on top of thousands of miles of Hamas military tunnels, was between 50 and 60% damaged or destroyed. Hamas claims that over 30,000 Palestinians, the majority of them noncombatants, have been killed. As I record this podcast, Israeli forces are planning to move over a million sick, injured, and starving Palestinian refugees out of Rafah, in southern Gaza, to pursue the elimination of Hamas there as well.

I want to note that, while we all deplore unbridled violence, Israel’s strategy is not unique, and it is frequently used in places where insurgent fighters are not fully embedded in urban infrastructure. Carpet bombing civilians was invented in World War II, and the United States destroyed two Japanese cities with nuclear weapons, causing generational suffering. So-called “surgical” strikes were used by the US in both Iraq wars, bombing designed to deny the state access to water and power, and which killed civilians immediately and over time. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin pursued the strategy of destroying entire cities, along with cultural centers, hospitals, and schools, in Chechnya. In Ukraine, Russian missiles continue to pound civilians and civilian infrastructure far from the front. Bashar al-Assad, the authoritarian President of Syria, also used these tactics against political dissenters in his own country.

Forcing states, or insurrectionist forces, to capitulate by killing, starving, torturing, and sexually assaulting civilians is not historically new or uncommon. That said, accusations of rape, sexualized murders and genital mutilation of women and children on October 7 have proven particularly, and unexpectedly, controversial. Despite eyewitness testimony and visual evidence, Hamas has denied these attacks, while some pro-Palestinian journalists in the United States have gone to great lengths to sow doubt about sexual violence, and to deny that it was part of the repertoire of terror that day.

Denialism and doubt serve an important propaganda role, to be sure. But fifty years of feminist scholarship also demonstrates that war does not occur without sexual assault, just as it cannot be prosecuted without civilian casualties. The idea that you can have war without rape, on all sides, is historically implausible.

And yet, to understand how war works, acknowledging and investigating these crimes is not where our conversation about gender and war can end. How men, women, and children experience violent conflict inspires, sustains, and promotes war. Women are not just the passive victims of violence, they are the ones who give birth to soldiers, become soldiers, support military operations, and care for the wounded—often for life. Men are raped. Palestinian mothers and fathers, like women in conflict zones everywhere, currently care for and feed families in reduced, terrifying, and exposed circumstances. Women are counted upon by military authorities to do the work left behind by men who fight; and to do public grieving that supports the continued recruitment of soldiers and the reproduction of patriotism. Women make the visible sacrifices that prop up masculine aggression and nationalist conflict.

For me, one of the most powerful feminist thinkers about violence in international relations is Cynthia Enloe, a political scientist and feminist theorist at Clark University. An award-winning scholar, she is the author of fifteen books that analyze militarism, war, and colonialism through the lens of feminist theory. And when the Middle East exploded on October 7, I reached for her most recent volume, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War(University of California Press, 2023.) Each lesson is easily converted into a question that the reader could ask about any conflict, anywhere, at any moment in history. And as Enloe emphasizes, these questions lead us back to the same place: we are all complicit in the social militarization that sustains war.

Show notes:

One of the central concepts of Cynthia Enloe’s work is militarization, and the ways it is embedded in ordinary objects, culture, and fashion. You can read more about the long history of this phenomenon in David Fitzgerald, Militarization and the American Century: War, the United States and the World since 1941 (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Claire and Cynthia discuss the ways in which women must participate in war in order for wars to succeed. To learn more about how women’s participation has escalated over time, see Leisa Meyer, Creating G. I. Jane(Columbia University Press, 1997) and Carol Cohn, Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures (Polity, 2012).
As Cynthia points out, women have a long history of using their political authority as mothers on behalf of, but also against, militarism. To read more about war and maternal authority, see Amy Swerdlow in Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (University of Chicago, 1993).
Claire highlights Cynthia’s theme of damaged masculinity. To read more about repairing men after war, see chapter 1 of historian David Serlin’s Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
The news item about women in the 10th mountain division at Fort Drum being deployed as combat soldiers is from a March 6, 2020, episode of the Today show on NBC.
Claire notes that sexual assault is a constituent aspect of military service and war. Historian Mary Louise Roberts has written about the many ways “romance” motivates men to fight in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Cynthia points us to the work of Elizabeth Wood, Crosby Professor of the Human Environment and Professor of Political Science, International and Area Studies at Yale University. You can read more about Wood’s research here.
Cynthia argues that the cost of war is difficult to tally because costs do not end when a peace is secured; for a model of how we might think about that, she points listeners to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Interested in what Palestinian and Israeli feminists are doing right now? See Siobhan Byrne, “How women in Israel and Palestine are pushing for peace — together,” The Conversation, October 17, 2023; and the organization Bat Shalom.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 44, Inventing the Police: A conversation with historian Matthew Guariglia about "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York."
Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her new biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."
Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."

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That was a small portion of the State of the Union speech that President Joe Biden gave on the evening of February 7, 2023. By the time many of you listen to this episode, Biden will have delivered his 2024 message to Congress, one that is widely expected to lay out his agenda for a second term and provide a compelling argument for the voters to give him a Democratic House and Senate to work with.

Biden is commonly criticized, not for his abilities, but for his age. And yet, age makes him an important link to the past and tells us a great deal about his embrace of a political agenda forwarded by the Democratic party’s Progressive caucus.

Why has Biden, an establishment Democrat, gotten behind LGBT rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and anti-poverty programs? Because he is a liberal. Although today, the word “liberal” is synonymous with moderation and centrism, that isn’t its history. For much of the twentieth century it was liberals—in both the Democratic and the Republican parties—who pushed American society closer to equality.

Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, liberals—often culling ideas from socialists, feminists, and populists—were the leading figures of the American progressive movement. We forget that at our peril, and if you watch tonight’s State of the Union, you will see how liberals transformed politics. Seated behind Biden’s right shoulder will be Kamala Harris, the first woman, Black, and South Asian person to become Vice President of the United States. In front of Biden will be Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to occupy the Speaker’s Chair and Hakeem Jefferies, the first Black American to serve as the Leader of either party. And there will be Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s only Supreme Court appointment and the first Black woman to serve in that role.

Joe Biden didn’t make today’s Democratic party: he inherited it from Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. On January 3, 1973, when Biden took his first oath as the junior Senator from Delaware, Humphrey may even have been in the audience. Watching this fiery, 31-year-old liberal, Humphrey might have recalled his own arrival on the floor as a freshly minted, 37-year-old Senator. A rising star in the Democratic party when he took the oath in 1949, Humphrey became the leader of the party’s liberal faction when, as the progressive “Boy Mayor” of Minneapolis, he fought for, and won, a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform.

When you listen to the speech, you can hear the boos among the cheers. Humphrey’s words caused numerous segregationist Southern delegates, led by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, to leave the national convention in Philadelphia. Mounting a third party Dixiecrat candidacy with Thurmond at the top of the ticket, within 20 years, these Southerners would find a home in an increasingly conservative Republican party determined to turn back the civil rights achievements of the 1960s and 1970s.

That’s the world we live in today: Republicans occupy the political right, referring to Democrats uniformly as “the Left.”

Ironically, many progressive Democrats disdain liberals, viewing them as the most conservative wing of their own coalition. But that’s not what it means to be liberal. Instead, liberalism, as it first cohered in the New Deal, then Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, and then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, imagines that government’s role is to take the actions, provide the support, and pass the laws that free all Americans to prosper.

This is why I invited James Traub, a journalist, historian, and expert on liberalism to talk to us today about his new book, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America (Basic Books, 2024.) Traub takes us from Humphrey’s roots in a small South Dakota town to his years as party whip in the Senate and then Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and his role in masterminding passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

And yet, if Humphrey’s life’s work demonstrates liberalism’s achievements, it also illustrates its frustrations and flaws: liberal foreign policies that are at odds with human rights abroad; holding together a Democratic party that embraces so many different impulses; and above all, the constant need for compromise. To paraphrase Humphrey himself, liberalism moves freedom forward by asking for a loaf but being willing to take crumbs.

Show notes:

Claire and Jim begin by discussing the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention. A classic account of that convention, and Richard M. Nixon’s well-orchestrated nomination at the Republican National Convention, is Norman Mailer’sMiami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (World Publishing Company, 1968.)
Hubert Humphrey’s experience of watching Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies save the agricultural Midwest from the Great Depression was formative. Interested readers may wish to read Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Mariner Books, 2006.)
Jim pinpoints 1948 as a turning point, not just for Humphrey, but for liberalism. An excellent account of this moment in political history is A.J. Baime, Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul (Mariner Books, 2020.)
The context for both Humphrey and Truman’s civil rights proposals was a vigorous Black freedom movement, further invigorated by World War II: see Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001.)
Jim and Claire discussed Humphrey’s relationship with Lyndon Johnson at length; Jim refers us to volume 4 of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate(Knopf, 2002.)
Jim used the telephone recordings between Johnson and his Cabinet as one of his sources. You can listen to some of these conversations, courtesy of the National Archives and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.
You can watch LBJ’s March 31, 1968, television address announcing that he would not run for re-election here.
Jim mentions the so-called “hardhat riot,” when New York City construction workers attacked and beat anti-war protesters on May 8, 1970. You can access a longer explanation of this event, with photographs, here.
If you are interested in thinking more about full employment, and the solutions that the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 offered, click here.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of political humor on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok. Or you can:

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 39, Old Enough To Fight, Old Enough To Vote: A conversation with historian Jennifer Frost about her book on how 18-year-old Americans won the franchise, "Let Us Vote! Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment"
Episode 10, A Woman's Place Is in the House: John Lawrence, former chief of staff to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, takes us behind the scenes with a new book about a landmark politician who changed the Democratic Party
Episode 6, The Most Powerful Man in America:Yale historian Beverly Gage joins us to talk about her new book, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century"

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The first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in late December 2019, near a lab in Wuhan, China that may or may not have been responsible for accidentally releasing the virus into the wild.

The disaster that took shape around the world in the following weeks was like watching someone fall from a skyscraper in slow motion. The first case of Covid-19 in the United States was diagnosed on January 20, 2020. But even though there had been three weeks to make contingency plans to defend against a fast-moving and deadly virus, the White House seemed almost paralyzed. Donald Trump, consumed with his reelection campaign, did not declare the public health emergency that gave his administration broad powers to act until January 31.

Trump, of course, believed that a wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico would keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern border. So, in retrospect, it makes sense that he rolled out only one major policy response in the next five weeks: he stopped travel from China.

This neither stopped the spread of a virus that was already in the United States, nor did it keep out infected travelers from other countries. By the time Trump allocated $8.3 billion for emergency health care on March 6, and declared a national emergency on March 13, there were 2,000 known infections and 41 deaths. Health care workers were starting to work double shifts; six states had closed their schools to prevent spread; and the New York Times predicted that as many as 2.4 million Americans could soon be competing for 925,000 hospital beds.

New York City was an early epicenter, and everything fell apart on March 20.

We all know what happened next. People who could leave cities did. Medical and nursing schools graduated their classes early and sent young health care workers into the hospitals to support already fatigued staffs. Students attended school, as best they could, online. Amazon and food delivery orders went through the roof. And work, if you still had it, became very complicated. Some non-essential workers were sent home to work online, and others were laid off and left to fend for themselves. Essential workers had to keep working, no matter what. Often the poorest and most vulnerable among us, they were constantly exposed to the virus with little or no protection.

Who would, or would not, physically survive the pandemic was one question, but economic survival was part of that equation. And the divisions between us initially crystalized around which laid off workers had access to the social safety net. W-2 workers were eligible for unemployment: they paid social security taxes every month. But 1099 workers, a growing category of contingent laborers who work as independent contractors, were not.

Then, there are other divides that crosscut the 1099 category: people who worked in bricks and mortar businesses and those whose labor was contracted through platforms like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Instacart—gig workers who made an income with their own vehicles, tools, homes, and hustle. There were people who still had jobs, others who had worked several jobs and lost a few of them, and some who suddenly lost all of their income.

As the world of work sagged and collapsed, University of North Carolina sociologist and W-2 worker Alexandrea Ravenelle decided to document this economic shock in real time. Ravenelle had just published Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (University of California Press, 2019.) She jumped on social media to locate and interview precarious, or suddenly precarious, workers about their survival strategies. Ravenelle listened as people told her how they navigated government programs, avoided scams and predators, and balanced multiple jobs. She found out how a sudden infusion of money--$1000 a week—could create the mental and economic space for a worker to rethink, re-set, and plan their life.

And Ravenelle learned that a universal basic income (UBI), regular cash payments that underwrite a humane standard of living, could work to lift people out of poverty. Contrary to conservative economic theories that position government stipends as a disincentive to labor, Ravenelle’s research illustrates a graphic truth: even after a government check took care of their basic needs, people wanted to work. In a crisis, it gave their lives meaning and purpose. But it also, in some cases, freed them from work long enough to figure out how to live sustainably and with less stress.

The result was Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times (University of California, 2023), a book that both illustrates the holes in our safety net and shows us how to fix them.

Show notes:

The delays in unemployment compensation that Alexandrea discusses, and that pushed Americans into gig labor, were still being reported in July 2021, although they were much shorter.
Being a “public charge” has always been an aspect of immigration law, but in February 2020, the Trump administration tightened those rules further. This is one reason why, as Alexandrea explains, many legal immigrants did not apply for unemployment during the pandemic.
Claire mentions the fear that even documented immigrants might have had about deportation. Currently, the Biden administration is reviewing the cases of thousands of such people who claim to have been unjustly deported under the Trump presidency.
Listeners who are interested in the history of unemployment insurance since it was instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 may wish to consult Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance (Anchor Books, 2020.)
Claire and Alexandrea discus the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion stimulus law passed by a Democratic Congress in March, 2020; it was enhanced by a second $900 billion package in December of that year.
Alexandrea cites Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s work on the culture of economic life.
Claire mentions Elizabeth Warren’s common sense analysis of how the gig economy pressures individuals, and even whole families. Interested listeners may want to read Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle To Save Working People (Metropolitan Books, 2018.)
Claire and Alexandrea discuss Universal Basic Income. One good source on this is journalist Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018.)
As Alexandrea notes, millions of Americans work at least two jobs; in October 2023, that was 8.3 million workers, the highest number since the beginning of the pandemic.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 22, Hit Them In The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty"
Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It"
Episode 7, You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin: A conversation with historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela about her new book, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession"

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If you are my age, you remember exactly where you were when defense attorney Johnny Cochrane delivered his closing statement in The People v. O.J. Simpson, a 1994 murder trial that captured the nation’s imagination. Simpson, a former star National Football League running back, actor, and celebrity was on trial for the gruesome murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. Eventually judged not guilty, Simpson was later successfully sued in civil court by Goldman’s parents and, in a bizarre twist, went to jail in Nevada for armed robbery and kidnapping.

As it was being investigated and tried in criminal court, however, the Simpson murder case became something else, moving to the center of American culture. It is even credited by some with launching the genre of reality TV. Here’s how that started. When attorney Robert Kardashian (maybe you’ve heard of his wife and daughters) notified Simpson on June 17, 1994, that he had been charged and would have to surrender to the police, Simpson famously ran instead.

A tragic, celebrity double murder suddenly became a sensational media event. The police chase was filmed by nine news helicopters: future MSNBC anchor Katy Tur’s mother Zoë broadcast live from one of them. Millions of shocked Americans watched as regular programming was interrupted to watch Simpson’s white Bronco drive down a Los Angeles freeway tailed by police cars.

The trial itself received more nightly coverage from the three legacy networks than the war in Bosnia did. Court TV, a now-defunct cable channel, broadcast the Simpson proceedings live from arraignment to verdict. And because attorney Johnny Cochrane was able to cast doubt on the ability of the Los Angeles police to investigate a Black man fairly—something that wasn’t hard to do in a city where the police routinely brutalized Angelenos of color in the name of the war on drugs—the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty.”

But the Simpson case is only one in a long American history of sensational murder cases, crimes that are simultaneously tried in court and in the public square, yet never fully resolved. There are common elements in many of them: a troubled romance, conclusions drawn from gossip, an especially violent death, contests over expertise, jealousy or blackmail, shredded reputations, and what seems to be an obviously guilty culprit claiming to be innocent.

Most importantly, these trials inflame the public imagination because they capture the zeitgeist: larger political tensions, social inequalities, and cultural preoccupations that we disagree about as a nation. Which is why I asked Bruce Dorsey, a professor of history at Swarthmore College and the author of Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation (Oxford, 2023) to come talk to me about America’s first, great sensational trial.

In December 1832, pregnant mill girl Sarah Maria Cornell was found, apparently hanged from a fence post in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Or perhaps she was strangled, or had killed herself. Numerous mysteries surrounded the death of a girl who had been born into the property-owning middle classes, but gradually fallen into poverty and unemployment, even as she sought to preserve her freedom and respectability as a working girl in New England’s mills.

Now, the police and the community had a mystery on its hands. Did Cornell commit suicide out of shame for her condition? Was she murdered by her lover? Cornell’s reputation in the mill towns that dotted New England, and in the Methodist Church community of Fall River, Massachusetts, just north of Tiverton, suggested both possibilities.

But when a local doctor told the inquest jury that Cornell’s minister, the handsome, married Ephraim Avery, had forced sex on the girl at a camp meeting the previous summer, Avery was arrested and put on trial for killing her—presumably, to silence Cornell about the rape and the child that she had conceived.

Show notes:

To learn more about New England mill girls and the lives they lived, you can begin with Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (Columbia University Press, 1981).
Bruce describes the links between the importance of charismatic, loving religious communities and a newly-fragile middle class in antebellum America. Paul E. Johnson describes this occurring elsewhere at the same time in A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (Hill & Wang, 19781).
Bruce also emphasizes the eroticism of the Methodist church: Henry Abelove explores this dynamic as fundamental to the church’s theology in The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford University Press, 1991).
Claire asks Bruce how historians use trials to recover the past, and he mentions a chapter of Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Knopf, 1991) about a 19th century murder at Harvard University.
Claire notes the exceptional violence of 19th century Southern masculinity, often associated with slavery, but also with the persistence of a code of honor that was regulated through physical combat. Readers might want to turn to Bertram Wyatt Brown’s classic text, Honor and Violence in the Old South(Oxford University Press, 1986.) But, as Joanne B. Freeman has noted in The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), few antebellum men were immune to murderous rage when challenged.
Bruce and Claire discuss the wrenching changes in New England economic life that constricted and changed opportunities for middle-class men and women. Listeners who want to learn more should read Mary Babson Fuhrer, A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 38, The Adventures Of A Very Amateur Historian: A conversation with historical novelist Allison Epstein about her new book about Imperial Russia, "Let the Dead Bury the Dead"
Episode 31, Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, “:The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts."
Episode 11, You Are Dead To Me: A conversation with New York Times editor Clay Risen about obituaries as popular history.

And here’s a bonus: all new paid, annual subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

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In the introduction to this episode, we begin with some false and partially false claims. Listeners should know that aborting a viable, healthy fetus in the third trimester is a vanishingly rare event, and that this has never been either best medical practice, nor has abortion been guaranteed under federal law in the United States after 24 weeks. And despite a talking point that has been repeated across GOP campaigns, no child is aborted “after birth”—that would be a murder. We can also dismiss the idea that the only two Republican presidential candidates still standing just want us all agree on an arbitrary number of weeks, after which the details of maternal and fetal health will no longer matter.

The ideas that have succeeded in reversing the right to abortion have nothing to do with the procedure as those who are pregnant experience it. What you will hear in the incoherent statements made at the beginning of the episode is not policy, but fear and uncertainty. Former President Donald J. Trump and former South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley know that their own party’s abortion policies have become electoral Kryptonite.

Let’s recap how abortion, after almost 50 years, once again became a matter of state law. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered its split opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,overturning Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that created a federal right to abortion at 24 weeks.A judicial decision that pro-life activists had mourned with a demonstration in Washington every January 22 was eviscerated. Trigger laws, and pre-Roe zombie laws, stripped women of their right to an abortion, and created harsh new penalties for anyone involved in the procedure.

When clinics closed, both economically marginal women and men lost access to a range of reproductive services. Although the cost of raising an additional child is one reason why people choose abortion, no state banning abortion has come up with a plan to support larger families throughout the life of a child.

Furthermore, many physicians are afraid to perform life-saving operations that imperil a pregnancy, out of concern they will be subject to felony charges and fines. As a result, in some states, women have been forced to carry unviable or dead fetuses to term because medical facilities are unwilling to test the law.

Conservative politicians have claimed that things are now as they should be, since Roe foreclosed states making their own decisions about whether to reform or eliminate their abortion laws. And then, a funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 election: as it turns out, Americans of all political persuasions want to make their own decision about whether to have children.

A year after Dobbs, 34% of Americans wanted abortion to be legal in all circumstances, and 51% wanted it to be legal, with some restrictions. And a great many people in that 85% are the Republican and independent voters that any GOP candidate will need to beat Joe Biden in November 2024. They are the voters that the GOP is losing in key elections and referenda, even in red states.

But the idea that restoring Roe would also restore reproductive justice relies on bad history: the two were never the same, and the right to abortion is just one piece of the puzzle we call reproductive rights. To understand that is to understand a bigger failure in 20th century feminism: that mostly white and middle-class pro-choice activists failed to connect with the needs of American women, largely poor and of color, who had been involuntarily robbed of their fertility be deceit and by design.

That story takes us back to the states, specifically to New York, where abortion was decriminalized in 1970—and a state where thousands of women of color, in custodial situations, on reservations, disabled, and on welfare--were also sterilized. It was a state where women mobilized powerfully for the right to abortion, and one where a larger, more diverse movement extended the struggle beyond Roe to fight for the right to have babies.

“It was only after I lost her that I realized how much I had failed to learn from my mother,” historian Felicia Kornbluh writes in A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (2023), just now out in paper from Grove Atlantic. “Why was she so passionate about reproductive rights?”

As it turned out, Kornbluh’s mother, Beatrice Kornbluh Braun, a lawyer, had not only been part of the long struggle to decriminalize abortion in New York State, she had drafted repeal legislation on which the 1970 bill was based and persuaded a lawmaker to promote it. That state-by-state campaign long preceded—and was prematurely cut off—by the decision in Roe v. Wade.

When Kornbluh dug into parallel political activism to end sterilization abuse and transform a medical system that hurt women, she discovered something else. Helen Rodríguez-Triás, the physician who had spearheaded those reforms and founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, or CESA, had lived across the hall in their New York apartment building. A Woman’s Life Is A Human Life tells both these stories in a post-Dobbs world where we are fighting for reproductive justice once again.

Show notes:

Felicia and Claire discuss the history of criminalizing abortion, and explains that the procedure became illegal only in the 19th century. You can read this story in Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas, The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022 (Crossway, 2013).
Claire mentions her research in feminist Susan Brownmiller’s archives: they can be found at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University
Felicia mentions conservatives and liberals who support abortion as a form of birth control. You can learn more about this in Donald R. Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1999).
The clip of George Michaels casting his deciding vote for abortion rights in New York State was broadcast on the ABC Evening News. You can read more about Michaels here.
To listen to Claire’s conversation with historian Annelise Orleck, where they discuss Black women in on Medicaid not having access to birth control, go here.
Felicia points to civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Mississippi appendectomy,” and her heartbreak at being unable to conceive a child. You can read about that, and more about Hamer, in Blaine’s Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021). You can also read more about coercive and custodial sterilization in Molly Ladd-Taylor, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); and about the larger context for violating Puerto Rican women’s rights in Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002).

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 39, Old Enough To Fight, Old Enough To Vote:

A conversation with historian Jennifer Frost about her book on how 18-year-old Americans won the franchise, "Let Us Vote! Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment"

Episode 35, No Age of Innocence: A conversation with historian Drew Faust about fighting back, making change, and her new memoir, "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury"
Episode 33, Seattle, the Feminist Soviet of Washington: A conversation with historian Barbara Winslow about her book "Revolutionary Feminists: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle"
Episode 17, Abortion On Demand: Feminist journalist Katha Pollitt explains why we should treat ending a pregnancy as normal

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On June 10, 2020, grassroots calls to defund the New York City Police Department, initiated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the police murder of George Floyd, grew louder. That morning, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained why to Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos. The NYPD’s $6 billion budget dwarfed the funds set aside for all other city functions. That, she explained was an imbalance that wealthy communities did not permit, and it was money that could be used to prevent crime.

In other words, policy critics of the NYPD wanted to reduce interactions between the police and the poor, disproportionately people of color, by changing policies that put underserved New Yorkers under surveillance. They wanted to redirect these funds to the basic human services that house, feed, and care for Americans, and give them the training and education that create pathways to good jobs.

But as Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain, “defund the police,” while the slogan might mean different things to different people, was not a path to eliminating, or even shrinking, the NYPD, but to reforming it. Specifically, she noted the funds spent on military-grade weapons acquired through the Department of Defense’s 1033 surplus program, and the budget for para-military NYPD tactical groups supplied with body armor, armored vehicles, assault rifles, bazookas, and small tanks. As an aside, the NYPD is also rumored to have an attack helicopter capable of shooting an airliner out of the sky in the event of another 9/11-style attack.

Police recruitment advertisements and public relations videos paint a very different picture. In them, police officers who represent the hundreds of ethnic groups that live in New York, extoll the value of service, their dedication to community, and their desire to protect and serve all New Yorkers. In fact, both things are true: police are violent, and they are useful allies. Police officers are authorized by the state to commit violent acts, invade our homes, and use physical force and cause pain to assert their authority over civilians, whether those people have committed a crime or not. But it is also true that police officers are embedded in New York’s neighborhoods and communities. They are often familiar and recognizable figures, who eat in our restaurants, watch over streets and subway platforms, give directions to strangers, and provide reassurance that New Yorkers will not become victims of random crimes.

This paradox lies at the heart of the social relationship between police and the people. While they are supposed to be the “good guys” who protect citizens from the “bad guys,” the ongoing tragedy of policing in the United States is fueled by the incidents, often fatal, in which these two categories become confused. Parents of Black youth warn their children to never run in public, lest they be mistaken for criminals; random drug searches concentrated in communities of color criminalize young people for simply hanging out; peaceful, law-abiding citizens are subject to traffic stops and searches, and are sometimes brutalized—or even killed—if they do not comply meekly.

It's unsurprising that racial prejudices that are widespread in the United States would infect policing too, but they have a particular implication for the relationship between state and citizen: while white people usually believe the police to be a benign presence, people of color know they could lose their dignity, their jobs, and their lives when stopped by a police officer.

How did we get here? Perhaps a better question, I realized after reading historian Matthew Guariglia’s Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York (Duke University Press, 2023) is—why are we still here? As Guariglia explains, the NYPD has not only always been violent, it has also been a racial project since the mid-19th century, when New York’s political class saw a need to control working-class immigrants pouring into the city from around the world. Initially drawing lessons from global imperial projects, New York’s police force became professionalized under Progressive reformer, police commissioner, and future President, Teddy Roosevelt. But that is only a punctuation point in the NYPD’s ongoing history of evolution and reform. At the center of this process are questions not so different from the ones reformers face today: How much violence is too much violence? What are the characteristics of a good cop, and how does that person establish authority? And most importantly, how do you spot a criminal before a crime happens?

Show notes:

Matt notes the importance of the Eric Garner case in helping think about the themes of the book. You can read the story of Garner’s murder, and the many factors that led up to it, here.
Learn more about a model for the NYPD, London’s Bobbies, in Philip Smith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing, Public Order, and the London Metropolitan Police (Praeger, 1985.)
Claire emphasizes the importance of the Fugitive Slave Act in linking local police forces to national policy: you can learn more about this in Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin Books, 2019.)
Matt notes the racial ambiguity of Irish people in mid-19th century New York City. Noel Ignatiev has explored this in How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995.
Matt and Claire discuss the role of Teddy Roosevelt in reforming and modernizing the NYPD: H. Paul Jeffers has written a biographical treatment of this episode on Roosevelt’s life, Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897 (Wiley, 1994.)
Claire notes the codification of racial observations into something called “racial science” at the turn of the 20th century. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (University of Chicago, 1996), historian Gail Bederman has explained that ideas about race were intertwined with scientific theories about gender.
Matt and Claire discuss the 19th century French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who is credited with inventing the mug shot and identification through fingerprints: you can read a short article about him here.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 30, Inventing A White Race: A conversation with historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter about her book, "The History of White People."
Episode 6, The Most Powerful Man in America: Yale historian Beverly Gage joins us to talk about her book, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century"
Episode 2, The First Family of Abolition: A conversation with historian Kerri Greenidge about her new book, "The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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You just heard an anthem sung by members of the Merze Tate Explorers, a non-profit, grassroots organization founded in 2008 for girls in the sixth through twelfth grade. Like other youth groups embedded in communities of color, the organization introduces girls to mentors, exposes them to career and college opportunities and, most importantly, funds travel and study abroad that wealthier students may take for granted. Merze Tate Explorers was founded by reporter Sonya Bernard-Hollins, who became aware of historian and international relations expert Vernie Merze Tate when she was researching a series of articles about prominent African American graduates of Western Michigan University.

But maybe you are asking—who is Merze Tate?

I’m not surprised if you have never heard of her: I hadn’t before a few weeks ago. Despite Tate’s prominence in her own time, I was never assigned her work in graduate school, nor was I aware of the substantial impact she made to the histories of international relations and American foreign policy. Tate was born into a rural African American family in Michigan in 1905. Growing up in a majority white community, she was one of a few notable figures (another is W.E.B. DuBois) who moved from a desegregated environment to a segregated one as her educational accomplishments propelled her to Western Michigan University, then Western Michigan Teachers College. Tate was the school’s first African American graduate, and after commencement, she took a teaching position at the prestigious Crispus Attucks High Schoolin Indianapolis. There, she did something no other teacher had done, and that was difficult to navigate in a racially segregated country: Tate started a travel club and took a group of Black students to the nation’s capital.

The theme of Merze Tate’s life was travel. This was true in the literal sense—she visited numerous countries on all but two of the world’s continents—and it was also metaphorical, since over several decades, she went from being an ambitious, small-town girl to a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. Tate charted her path as an intellectual and fought for her dreams in a skilled, self-confident style that would equal one of today’s students from any race, gender, or class. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, then won scholarships that took her to Oxford University as the first African American woman to earn the B.Litt. there, and to Harvard University, for a Ph.D. in international relations.

Along the way, Tate won her first college teaching job at Bennett, a four-year liberal arts college for Black women in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a second job at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Then, in 1942, Tate became the first African American woman to be appointed to the history department of Howard University in Washington, D.C., still known by its students and alumni as “The Mecca,” and the national capital of Black intellectual life.

Tate spent the rest of her career at Howard—that is, the time she wasn’t spending on ships, planes, and trains traveling around the world, doing research, and hobnobbing with world leaders, and knitting together a global network of Black intellectuals and policymakers. Oh yes—and writing five books, as well as hundreds of scholarly and general audience articles and essays, taking breaks in the evening to host and attend dinner parties and bridge tournaments.

If achievement is one theme of Tate’s life, being in motion is another. Travel was not just a pleasure, or work. It was central to how she carved out a prominent place in the firmament of twentieth century intellectual life. Travel defined Tate’s proudly independent existence. “We’re on our way, becoming who we are,” the Explorers sing in the clip that opened this segment. “We’re going to live—live the way we want to.” Traveling as a single, Black woman—Tate never married and remained unpartnered—was a challenge, even for a woman who spoke multiple languages. But Tate thrived on these adventures, believed in herself, cultivated global networks of friends, mustered support for her aspirations, and to quote the Explorers, lived the way she wanted to, even when it meant overcoming disapproval, rejection, or prejudice.

Tate’s was an extraordinary life, so I wanted to bring her biographer to the show. Historian Barbara D. Savage is Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought in the Africana Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two previous prizewinning books, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and a co-editor, with Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones, of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (UNC Press, 2015.) In Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale University Press, 2023), Savage skillfully returns this path-breaking intellectual to the distinguished place in American history that she deserves.

Show notes:

Barbara notes her longterm intellectual connection with the archives at Howard University. The collections are held at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Barbara mentions the Homestead Act of 1862, which brought the Tate family to Michigan. If you want to know ore about the complicated legacy of this legislation, you may wish to read Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (University of Nebraska Press, 2019.)
Barbara notes that the history of the American Midwest, and the history of Black people there, is understudied, but she points us to the excellent work of African American historian Darlene Clark Hine.
When she got to Washington, Merze Tate joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded in 1908 by Ethel Hedgemon to forward the interests of Black women. You can read more about AKA here, and learn about the role of the sorority system from Paula Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (William Morrow, 1988.)
Women were only admitted to Oxford University as degree students in 1920, a little more than a decade after Tate arrived there to study. You can read more about that history here.
Barbara puts Tate’s outreach to others in the larger context of early 20th century Black elites’ commitment to uplift. You can learn more about this in Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy: A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."
Episode 32, The Court Room of History:A conversation with historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall about her book "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America."
Episode 6, The Most Powerful Man in America: Yale historian Beverly Gage joins us to talk about her book, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century"
Episode 2, The First Family of Abolition: A conversation with historian Kerri Greenidge about her book, "The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family" (winner of the 2023 American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly prize.)

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By the time he was four, the little boy began to notice that he could see less of the world. Had he not been born into a working-class African American family, or lived in the rural panhandle of Florida, the child might have had his condition diagnosed and treated. However, Jim Crow segregation and poverty prevented that.

By 1937, the seven-year-old, now living and attending classes at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, went from low vision to a complete loss of sight, eventually having one eye surgically removed. As he understood when he was a man, the cause of this vision loss was glaucoma, a progressive but treatable disease that destroys the eye when the pressure of accumulated fluid crushes that organ’s delicate and complex structure.

But the boy’s life was not tragic or sad. Later, Ray Charles credited his mother, Aretha Williams Robinson, with his determination to live a full life as a blind person. “You lost your sight, not your mind,” he remembers her telling him. That clarity also gave him the strength to overcome an institutional education mostly intended to prepare disabled Black children for an adult life of menial, repetitive, underpaid manual labor.

Over the seven years he spent at the school, Charles learned to put brooms together, a profit-making enterprise that helped to support the school, one that white children were not required to perform. But he also learned to read braille, pages of small bumps that translated into language, but also into sheet music. Encouraged by a music teacher at the school, Charles trained as a classical pianist, playing with one hand while reading and memorizing the score with the other, and then reversing that process to memorize the part for the other hand.

In retrospect, although Charles used this technique because he was blind, it's also hard to imagine any activity that could be better for a maturing brain. But Charles’s life, often seen as a triumph over blindness, illustrates a larger point: blindness was part of who he was as a person, and may have been part of his musical genius. It also illustrates that many people who become legally blind have lived part of their lives as sighted and retain some vision. For example, Charles, who burst onto the national scene as a teenager in 1949 when he charted at #2 with “Confession Blues,” was sighted and partially sighted for a significant chunk of his life. Even when his vision loss was complete, Charles’s mind was still imprinted with colors, objects, and people, and throughout his life, he continued to gather sensory data that allowed him to experience the world visually.

In 1972, Charles sat down with television talk show host Dick Cavett, who asked whether, were it possible, the now-iconic musician would want his sight restored. In retrospect, Cavett’s approach to the subject of blindness is often as tasteless as the still-common phrase that describes futility: “the blind leading the blind.”

For example, riffing off of Charles’s abilities as a musician, as if they were improbable for a blind person, Cavett asked the artist about other things he could do. Could Charles land his private plane in an emergency? (Charles responded that he actually thought he knew enough about flying that he could.) Or could he perform an appendectomy? Although Charles had no medical training, there are, in fact, blind surgeons who do the delicate work of dissection through a refined sense of touch. Later, when Charles said that he had been watching the Cavett show for years, the host jumped on the word “watched.” Charles graciously explained that he saw everything sighted people did, because every piece of information entering his mind triggered his visual imagination.

As journalist Andrew Leland explains in The Country of the Blind: A Memoir At the End of Sight (Penguin/Random House 2023), despite the fact that sighted people “equate blindness with darkness, it's rarely experienced as a black veil draped over the world. Only around 15 percent of blind people have no light perception whatsoever.” Most of the 7,675,600 Americans counted as visually disabled in a 2016 survey, “see something,” Leland writes, “even if it isn't very useful, by sighted standards: a blurry view of their periphery, with nothing in the middle, or the inverse--the world seen through a buttonhole. For some, scenes come through in a dim haze; for others, light produces a shower of excruciatingly bright needles. Even those with no light perception at all have little use for the popular image of blindness as darkness: the brain cut off from visual stimulus can still produce washes of brilliant color and shape.”

Andrew knows these things, not just because he is a journalist and has done extensive research on the history and politics of blindness, but also because he has been losing his own vision since he was in his teens. I’ll let him tell you about that. But this is what I can tell you: during our conversation, I learned a lot about my own failure to understand the complexity of all the conditions that fit under the rubric of blindness. Not the least of those limitations was that reading a book, even an excellent book like The Country of the Blind, doesn’t make a person smart about what it means for someone else to live a life with low or no vision.

Here's what I know now: I’ve been walking around with a head full of clichés, assumptions, and stereotypes for decades. Even though I am close to a person with a progressive eye disease, reading Leland’s book, and engaging in conversation with him, only began the process of exposing what I needed to unlearn. Which may be why, as Andrew discusses in our interview, visually disabled people increasingly turn to institutions and support networks that are created, designed, and implemented by other blind people.

Photo credit: Mika Bienias-Łocheńska/Wikimedia Commons

Show notes:

The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind that Ray Charles attended still exists, serves over 1,000 children from pre-K through high school, and is free to all students.
Want to know more about glaucoma? Check out this information page sponsored by the National Eye Institute, a division of the National Institute for Health.
Want to learn more about Ray Charles in his own words? Try his autobiography, written with David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story (Da Capo Press, 2004.)
Here’s a National Eye Institute page that amplifies on Andrew’s description of retinitis pigmentosa.
Claire and Andrew discuss disability as a category that has emerged as a field for critical thought. If you want to think more broadly about this field, and the ways that scholars discuss it, consider Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, Eds., Keywords for Disability Studies (New York University Press, 2015.)
Andrew cites Liz Jackson, a disability design advocate. You can read her article “We Are the Original Lifehackers,” New York Times (May 30, 2018) here.
Andrew mentions the 18th century blind mathematician, Nicholas Saunderson, the prestigious Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University, England: you can read accounts of his life by Saunderson’s contemporaries here.
Andrew credits the beginnings of print for the blind to François Lesueur and Charles Barbier. But perhaps the most important figure in the story of accessible print is Louis Braille: there is a capsule biography, and a bibliography, on this page of the Library of Congress website.
Claire mentions a resource in New York City, the Lighthouse for the Blind. You can explore their services for low vision and blind people here.
Claire mistakenly referred to the National Federation of the Blind as the National Federation for the Blind: Andrew points out why the correct preposition signals the importance of blind people advocating for themselves. You can visit this important advocacy organization’s website here.
Andrew mentions the high unemployment rate among blind people: you can dig into those statistics here.
Andrew also described the training he received, and the self-confidence he developed, at the Colorado Center for the Blind.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 26, Lost and Found: A conversation with historian Martha Hodes about her new memoir, “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice:A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his new book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 4, Bringing the War Home: A conversation with writer Zayd Ayres Dohrn about the Weather Underground, a generation raised in its shadow, and the search for answers in his new podcast, "Mother Country Radicals."

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You remember that morning. It was November 9, 2016, and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had gotten even less sleep the night before than the rest of us. In fact, things had started falling apart early on election night. Confirmed political junkies like me saw the look on James Carville’s face in the hour after the polls closed in Florida, listened to his uncharacteristically clipped, subdued tone, and knew he wasn’t seeing the early numbers for Clinton that he wanted in that state—or anywhere else.

Clinton would not learn definitively that she had lost the election for another nine hours. But the mood in places like my neighborhood in New York City grew increasing gloomy throughout the evening. We watched, stunned, as Clinton lost states to Donald Trump she should have won, and was deadlocked or behind in key midwestern states that the Democrats had held in national elections for generations. By 2:00 a.m., critical bricks in that so-called “Blue Wall”—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—had either fallen, or were falling, to Trump.

I went to bed uncertain what America I would wake up to. Hillary may have gone to bed—but if she did, as I said—I don’t think she slept much.

The next day, Clinton gave what was by any measure an outstanding concession speech, wearing a black suit with purple satin lapels that was supposed to summon the history of women’s suffrage to the victory platform. Now her outfit seemed downright funereal. And compared to what has happened since, Clinton’s words sound like they came from another century, not seven years ago.

“Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope he will be a successful president for all Americans,” she said, recounting the early morning concession call. This was a particularly gracious offer, considering that Trump had encouraged his partisans to chant “Lock her up,” invited women who had accused her husband of sexual assault to one of the debates, and spread false rumors that Clinton herself was chronically, perhaps fatally, ill.

I won’t go on. Unless you are younger than ten, you probably remember it yourself. And you remember what came after: a unilateral ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries entering the United States. The brief elevation of a conspiracy theorist to the position of National Security advisor. An attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into smearing Joe Biden with a fake corruption scandal. Impeachment Number One. An attempt to overthrow a legally constituted United States election. Impeachment Number Two!

By the time Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, we knew that Trumpism was an assault on our democratic system the likes of which we had not seen since the Civil War.

Somewhere in there, Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, started writing long Facebook posts about the state of our nation. Richardson is no stranger to creating history for a general audience. She has written seven books, and nearly all of them could be a holiday gift for your relative who is passionate about intelligent, well-written political history. She has done three podcasts, most recently Now and Then, co-hosted with Yale historian Joanne Freeman.

But those Facebook posts began to gather a mass audience, and in 2019, Richardson launched a Substack, Letters From an American, to help what was now a substantial readership make sense of the first Trump impeachment. Once the impeachment was over, she plucked a news item from the day’s political events to delve into or told a story from our nation’s history that illuminated the present.

Four years later, Richardson is still at it. Every morning, there is a newsletter waiting for subscribers that number in the hundreds of thousands (actually, at last count it was 1.2 million.) Letters From An American is the top politics newsletter on Substack, beating out The Bulwark, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi—among others. It’s so popular, that in 2022, she was invited to interview President Joe Biden one-on-one at the White House.

Now, just in time for the 2024 election season to go into high gear, Heather has a new book out to help us think about how we got here, Democracy Awakening: Notes On the State of America (Penguin/Random House, 2023.) It documents the history of reaction in the United States, and the countervailing progressive forces that have pushed us towards equality and justice.

As importantly, it is written to give us hope. Like our forebears, Americans can fight for the nonpartisan ideals on which this country was founded. We can fight for the rule of law. We can fight for the Constitution—the real one, not the one Steve Bannon made up in the basement of his D.C. townhouse. And like Americans before us, we can wage that struggle in our communities, in alliances that bring those who care about democracy together, and at the ballot box.

Show notes:

Heather talks about the efforts of American businessmen to put a stop to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. If you want to dig into this a little more, try Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.)
The 1937 “Conservative Manifesto” that Heather mentions was also known as “An Address to the People of the United States;” it was written by North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey, a conservative Democrat. You can read more about this founding document of modern conservatism here.
Claire brings up the original America First movement, which emerges in the late 1930s in opposition to the possibility that the United States will enter the war in Europe against Nazi Germany. To learn more about how dangerous this cabal of politicians and businessmen was, listeners may wish to try Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra, which dropped in June, 2023.
Heather notes that she chose the name of her Substack as a gesture to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782.) You can read the 1904 edition here, courtesy of the Library of Congress. The Substack makes a second gesture to English journalist Alistair Cook’s Letter from America, 1946-2004 (Knopf, 2004.)
Heather talks about how she learned to write for a popular audience, and mentions her book Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic Books, 2010) as a turning point.
Claire makes a connection between the Black civil rights movement in the United States and expanding the franchise to include all young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. She talked about this with historian Jennifer Frost in an earlier episode, Old Enough To Fight, Old Enough To Vote.
Claire and Heather talk about the importance of moderation on social media, and Claire asserts that it is a very high-stress job. Listeners who are interested in pursuing this may wish to read Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2021.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy: A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."
Episode 34, We Demand Equality--NOW! A conversation with historian Katherine Turk about her new book, "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America."
Episode 24, Against Government: A conversation with political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas Harris about their book, "At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump."

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We had a feedback issue on this recording. We managed to eliminate most of it, but if you hear a squeak, or a bit of distortion, that’s us—not your equipment. More importantly, the show is about gun violence. If this is a trigger, you may want to skip this episode.

Before September 11, 2001, the cultural moment that everyone my age and older had in common—the sharing of confidences that begins with the phrase “Where were you when….” was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On November 22, 1963, I was five. My mother had picked me up at nursery school and taken me into town to the Reading Terminal Market in South Philadelphia. This is where we were when, thousands of miles away in Dealey Plaza, a central thoroughfare in Dallas, Texas, a 21-year-old drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots. Two hit the president, and one wounded Texas Governor John Connally.

Today, the news would have been tweeted instantly, but back then it took ten minutes or so for it to be reported out, as beat reporters pushed each other out of the way at pay telephones. Most famously, CBS News’s Walter Cronkiteinterrupted the popular soap opera, As the World Turns, to break the story.

My mother, and everyone else line at one of the Italian stalls that sold meat, fish, and fresh vegetables, heard the news on a radio playing behind the counter. I remember only a churn of women’s legs around me—remember, I was five, and was as tall as the average hemline—and my mother seizing my hand and running to the door. “We have to go home,” she said. “The President has been shot.”

We got into her big yellow Mercury and started our drive to the suburbs with the radio on. I wasn’t really listening, but what I remember was this: my mother pulled to the side of the road and began to cry. I looked through the windshield (yes, children sat in the front seat then) and one after another, cars were pulling onto the shoulder.

Afternoon television audiences still watching As The World Turns, saw Cronkite return to their screen, choking back tears, to tell them that the President was dead.

At 2:38 p.m., Air Force One took off with First Lady Jacquelyn Kennedy on board and JFK’s body in the hold on its way to an autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In mid-air Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office as the 36th president of the United States. A few hours later, the assassin—a little-known figure named Lee Harvey Oswald--was captured in a Dallas movie theater, after killing again, this time patrolman J.D. Tippit. Oswald was a former Marine, defector to Russia, and briefly, a streetcorner activist with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Needless to say, initial speculation was that he was a foreign agent striking a blow against the leader of the free world.

That turned out to be wrong. Furthermore, in a brief appearance before a swarm of reporters outside the Dallas Police Department headquarters, Oswald insisted that he didn’t do it.

Of course, since he was a child, Oswald had never accepted responsibility for any of his misdeeds. We’ll get to that—but to say the least, his public disavowal of the crime that day complicated things—forever.

Had there been a trial, and Oswald proven to be the lone gunman, perhaps what became the foundational conspiracy theory in modern political history would never have been born. But on November 24, the day before President Kennedy’s funeral, that conspiracy theory gathered strength. Like millions of other Americans, I watched wide-eyed as a handcuffed Oswald was himself murdered in the basement of the Dallas Police Department by a nightclub owner Jack Ruby linked to the Mafia.

These events were a turning point in American life. Although Presidents had been assassinated before, I was born into an America where gun violence didn’t suddenly erupt in public places. By the end of the decade, that was no longer true. A few months before Kennedy was shot, civil rights organizer Medgar Evers had been gunned down in his own driveway by Mississippi Klansman Byron de la Beckwith. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by James Earl Ray, and on June 6, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother, was shot by a lone gunman after winning the California presidential primary.

Yet it was John F. Kennedy, the first of what became an American political dynasty, whose death became shrouded in speculation and conspiracy-mongering. In the 60 years that have since passed, the pieces of this puzzle--the Soviet Union, the improbability of the shots Oswald took from his post in the Texas Book Depository, Communist Cuba, and Jack Ruby’s mob ties have been moved around the board by experts, journalists, and hobbyists, many seeking to displace Oswald from the center of the story.

And as we know from a new book by journalist Deanne Stillman, American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Story of Lee Harvey Oswald and His Mother(New York: Melville House, 2023), there was someone else competing for the spotlight all along. That was Lee’s mother, Marguerite Oswald.

Marguerite’s response was surprising, to say the least. She showed no regret, or remorse, for the President’s death, and emphasized that she knew that her Lee didn’t do it. Why? Because he said he didn’t do it. And if the federal government had been doing its job properly that day, she scolded, they would know that too because Lee would have been under surveillance when Kennedy was in Dallas.

If you knew the Oswalds, it was predictable. Marguerite had always excused Lee’s violence—it was always someone else’s fault.

It’s also no accident that Marguerite treated the assassination, and her son’s murder, as an opportunity to promote herself. Both she and Lee had always craved the spotlight, the success and fame that they believed were rightly theirs, sometimes even competing with each other. And now that Lee was infamous in his own right, Marguerite, who had always been poor used his crime to make bank and take her own place in history. She sold her son’s belongings, offered exclusive interviews like the one we just listened to for pay, and by 1965, could be found in Dealey Plaza, selling copies of Aftermath of an Execution: The Burial and Final Rites of Lee Harvey Oswald As Told By His Mother (Dallas: Challenge Press, 1965.) In 2020, first edition of this volume, with a tipped-in Christmas card from Marguerite, was sold at auction in Wilton, Connecticut for $1500.

But Stillman doesn’t want us to blame the Kennedy assassination on bad mothering, although there is plenty of that in the Oswald story, but on how this strange dyad, Lee, and Marguerite, drove their desire for fame and their story forward together to that fateful moment on November 22, 1963. And she raises important questions, not just about Oswald’s iconic status as an assassin, but his historical position as a model for the shooters we know today who kill people often unknown to them: lone wolf gunman, enmeshed in fantastical fantasies about themselves, usually mentally ill, who buy guns and mount GoPro cameras on their chests as they seek one, brief moment of fame and glory.

We live in the world Lee Harvey and Marguerite Oswald made.

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Show notes:

The clip from television reporter Frank Kracher is from the archive of WLOS News, Asheville, North Carolina.
Marguerite Kennedy’s interview from December 6, 1963, the first of many she would do, can be found here.
There are many excellent books about Louisiana Governor Huey Long: one of the best is Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression (Vintage Books, 1982.)
Claire mentions Don DeLillo’s novel about Oswald, Libra (Viking, 1988); Deanne added Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (Random House, 1995) to the mix.
Deanne makes a connection between the Oswald family’s unfulfilled desires and the Tennessee Williams play, Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions, 2004; orig. 1947.)
Claire and Deanne discuss the long history of presidential assassination, and Deanne mentions the “ghosts” of past assassins tht are always present, referensing Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (Theatre Communications Group, 1993.)
Deanne notes that Travis Bickle, the shooter in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is Oswald’s fictional cultural descendent.
You can read a contemporary account, and reflection on, Oswald’s years in Russia in The New York Times archives.
In discussing Lee Harvey and Marguerite Oswald’s potential as contemporary reality show contestants, Deanne mentions Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo (2012-2017), and the surprising number of reality show contestants who subsequently have troubled lives.
Deanne discusses the marketability of Kennedy assassination memorabilia: the holidays are coming, and you can get some on Etsy.
I mention the revival of the “second shooter” theory in my postscript: you can read about a new documentary on Paramount+ that reopens a belief long held by some Kennedy assassination enthusiasts here.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you liked this episode, why not try:

Episode 38, The Adventures Of A Very Amateur Historian: A conversation with historical novelist Allison Epstein about her new book about Imperial Russia, "Let the Dead Bury the Dead"
Episode 35, No Age of Innocence: A conversation with historian Drew Faust about fighting back, making change, and her new memoir, "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury"
Episode 28, Terrorism Begins At Home: A conversation with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin about his new book, "Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism"
Episode 26, Lost and Found: A conversation with historian Martha Hodes about her new memoir, "My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering"
Episode 9, I Started Looking Things Up On the Internet: A conversation with political media consultant Ryan Girdusky about the causes and consequences of conspiracy theories

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This episode begins with a 1994 exchange between a teenage American voter and sitting President William Jefferson Clinton. Running against an incumbent, Republican George W. Bush, in 1992, Clinton wanted to emphasize his youth. He played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, and appeared on MTV as part of the cable music channel’s youth voter initiative, “Choose or Lose.” In a town hall-style symposium, when asked by a young voter whether he had ever tried marijuana, Clinton deadpanned: “I didn’t inhale.” It was a canny answer. It showed that he wasn’t a prude, while expressing caution about the wisdom of intoxication. It also made Clinton the first president to talk about recreational drug use outside of a criminal justice context.

Clinton promised to return to the channel if he were elected, and in 1994 he did, leading to the famous “boxers or briefs” episode when he also became the first President to let an audience imagine him in his underpants.

Between 1968 and 1988—that’s five presidential elections—only one Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, won election to the White House. So, MTV was onto something during the Clinton campaign. Recruiting younger voters was a way to break Republicans’ hold on the presidency without being overtly partisan. Like Rock the Vote, an earlier initiative by Virgin Records executive Jeff Ayeroff, MTV sought to elevate its cultural position and use the power of cool to mobilize the 18–29-year-old demographic, only 20% of whom had cast a vote in 1988.

And by the way, of that 20%, a majority, 53%, had voted for Bush.

Between 1972 and 1988, youth voters either tipped Republican, or split evenly, probably reflecting longstanding GOP organizing on college campuses. I talk about this in my book, Political Junkies. Young people voted in relatively small numbers, and they still do. However, in 1992, they tipped Democratic. Only 11% of eligible voters in the 18-24 demographic cast a vote, and 10% between the ages of 25-29, but young people went to Clinton by 13 and 5 points, unseating Bush. And although they voted in even smaller numbers in 1996, young voters leaned even more heavily towards Clinton and away from the lugubrious Republican Senator from Kansas, Bob Dole.

The idea that young people have an investment in the future was the motivating force behind lowering the voting age to 18, a campaign for enfranchisement waged from early 1942 until July 1, 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. For three decades, supporters emphasized military service as the criterion for maturity: men were eligible to be drafted at 18 and could volunteer at 17.

Although they have been voting for 50 years, the 18-24 demographic still does not punch its weight: only 17% cast a ballot in 2020 in an election that boasted a higher participation rate—66.3%--than any other election for 120 years. Yet, even if they do not vote in great numbers, young Americans are increasingly political and, in the absence of a military draft, they mobilize around other issues: the high cost of education, gun violence, racial and economic justice, reproductive rights and climate change are major issues that students promote.

Which is why some politicians, like Representative Ayanna Pressley (D, MA-O7), are suggesting that the federal voting age be lowered to 16, something that has already happened in three Maryland cities and Berkeley, California.

Pressley’s definition of citizenship goes beyond formal national service, linking patriotism to the work young people do in their families and communities. Voting at 16 could become a big issue, in part because it would potentially blunt the impact of voters 65 and over, who vote in much higher numbers and more conservatively. And it’s why I turned to historian Jennifer Frost, Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and her new book, "Let Us Vote!" Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment (2022), just out in paperback from New York University Press.

What would it take to lower the voting age again? How did activists do it the last time?

Show notes:

Do you want to read the 26th Amendent to the Constitution that lowered the voting age to 18? Click here.
Jennifer mentions that she is a historian of the 1960s as well: you might want to check out her book, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York University Press, 2001.)
What Claire calls “the Black Freedom Struggle” is also what is commonly known as the civil rights movement. Introduce a young person to this important history with a graphic book by Sherri L. Smith and Tim Foley, What Is the Civil Rights Movement?(Penguin Workshop, 2020.)
Jennifer mentions the importance of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and its connection to southern politicians’ resistance to youth voting. One good account of Brown, and how it reverberated across the political landscape, is Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975; now out from Vintage, 2004.)
Claire mentions the transition of the anti-war movement from peaceful to violent protest: one good account of this is Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press, 2004.)
Want to read Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) for yourself? Click here.
Claire and Jennifer discuss the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. One early analysis was from legal historian Mary Frances Berry, Why Era Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (Indiana University Press, 1986.)

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If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 34, “We Demand Equality--NOW! A conversation with historian Katherine Turk about her new book, "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America."
Episode 10, “A Woman's Place Is in the House: John Lawrence, former chief of staff to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, takes us behind the scenes with a new book about a landmark politician who changed the Democratic Party.”
Episode 8, “First, Pick the Right Wife: A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP.”
Episode 1, “Pulling Back the Curtain on Political Campaigns: A conversation with sociologist Daniel Laurison about his new book, "Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us."

Want to learn about the history of political media from I.F. Stone to Donald Trump? Consider purchasing a copy of my book,Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2023.)

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You probably recognize the tune this episode begins with: it’s “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” sung by Leonid Kharitonov and the Red Army Orchestra at Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow in 1965. It’s a folk song, originally sung by Russian barge haulers, or burlaks working on the Volga River in the 19th century. These peasants, in teams, literally hauled barges down the river, like beasts of burden, earning barely enough money to keep themselves and their families alive.

Over time the song came to stand in for the strength and the spirit of a Russian people laboring under an absolute monarchy and the capitalist system that propped it up. Each verse’s repetitive “Yo, heave ho” not only evoked the numbing, back-breaking labor that bound Russians to lives of misery and privation under the Tsar, but also for the capacity of the people to endure and fight for their own freedom. The Russian monarchy finally fell in the face of the successful 1917 revolution, giving way to a Communist state that survived until December 8, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.

But well before 1917, there were periodic uprisings of peasants, intellectuals, and workers who hoped to make a better world. In 1648, Muscovites rebelled against the imposition of a salt tax. In 1698, 4000 soldiers overthrew their commanders and marched to Moscow, demanding that the exiled Russian Princess Sophia Alexeyevna be made Tsarina instead of 17-year-old Peter I. In 1771, rioters entered Red Square, broke into the Kremlin, and sacked a monastery. In 1825, three thousand rebellious soldiers demanded a constitution and that the Grand Duke Constantine be put on the throne. Anti-imperial uprisings occurred periodically in Poland throughout the 19th century, as ordinary Poles demanded freedom from the Tsar’s rule. Despite constant repression and policing, socialism, anarchism, and other radical ideologies spread like wildfire through the Russian Empire.

The quest of the Russian people for democracy continues to this day, something that is worth remembering as the world musters support for the defense of Ukraine against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. We don’t usually do Russian history on this podcast, but when I saw Allison Epstein’s new historical novel, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, just out this month from Penguin/Random House, I knew I wanted to read a story about Russians fighting for freedom. It’s a ripping tale about an officer coming home from the Napoleonic Wars to the man he loves, who just happens to be the tsar’s second son, a diffident, louche fellow who suddenly grows a conscience. And it also stars a brave band of revolutionaries, determined to set their country free, no matter what. And oh, yes—there’s a witch.

This is Allison’s second historical novel, and her first about Russia. They are serious works of historical fiction that you will love, But she’s also funny. A fellow Substacker, Allison writes a newsletter called Dirtbags Through the Ages, which is exactly what it sounds like. Posts have titles like “that don’t empress me much” (about Empress Elizabeth of Russia), “double, double, toil and throuple” (the sexual antics of James I of England), and “a real papal pleaser: Or, the horny and heretical adventures of tenth-century Bad Pope John XII.”

I love historical fiction: as I say in this interview, it’s what got me interested in history as a child, and I still turn to it—for pleasure, and to think through narrative strategies for the nonfiction books I write.

So, I knew I had to get Allison on the show.

Show notes:

Would you like to read a first-hand account of the 1917 Russian Revolution? Try journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, originally published in the United States in 1919.
Allison notes that her novel begins as French Emperor Napoleon’s army is retreating from Moscow through a brutal Russian winter. This event wasmemorialized in Tchaikowsky’s 1812 Overture, but this period in Russian history has also been famously fictionalized in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace(1865.)
Allison mentions the 1825 Decembrist uprising: to learn more about this event, read Ludmilla A. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2009.)
Claire mentions the parallel between the princes depicted in Allison’s novel and “William and Harry:” she is, of course, referring to King Charles III’s two sons. You can read more about those fellows, and their conflict over the future of the monarchy, in Robert Lacey, Battle of Brothers: William and Harry – The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult(Harper, 2020.)
Claire mentions Jean Plaidy, one of the pen names used by historical novelist Eleanor Alice Hibbert Burford (1906-1993.) You can pick one here.
Claire mentions Grigory Rasputin, the spiritual advisor to the Alexandra, the last Empress of Russia. You can read about the role he played in the conspiracy theories that helped to mobilize Russians to overthrow the monarchy in Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (Random House, 1967.)
Claire references Bridgerton (2020), a Netflix series based on Julia Quinn’s historical novels about England and its nobility during the reign of George III. Directed by the great Shonda Rhimes, fans are all holding our breath waiting for season 3 to drop.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 31, Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, "The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts."
Episode 11, You Are Dead To Me: A conversation with New York Times editor Clay Risen about obituaries as popular history
Episode 4, Bringing the War Home: A conversation with writer Zayd Ayres Dohrn about the Weather Underground, a generation raised in its shadow, and the search for answers in his new podcast, "Mother Country Radicals."

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The peaceful march in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 6, 2020 was organized by a chapter of the Black Lives Matter network to protest the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was one of numerous protests held around the United States, and the world, to protest Floyd’s death. But organizers also insisted on not treating this one murder as an isolated incident. Instead, it was another chapter in the daily violence against Black people that has not ceased since human beings were first exported from the African continent, sold, and consigned to forced labor over 500 years ago.

Let’s be clear: Black Lives Matter is a slogan, it’s a hashtag, it’s a way to organize in communities. But scholars refer to this latest incarnation of the Black freedom struggle as the Movement for Black Lives. And it’s not a new civil rights movement, although the tools of civil rights—the right to walk across a university quad without being stopped by campus police, the right not to be murdered for a minor traffic infraction, the right not to be killed in your own home during the execution of a no-knock warrant, the right not to be suffocated during an unnecessary arrest—all of these rights are certainly relevant.

Instead, the Movement for Black Lives seeks to transform a society that has always been lethal for Black people. And in our gun-saturated American culture where white nationalism plays an increasing role in unleashing violence, it isn’t always the police that take Black lives. This new phase of the freedom struggle was inaugurated in 2012 when neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman saw African American teenager Trayvon Martin walking down the street in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman stalked the younger man, and in the course of an illegal attempt to apprehend and question him, shot Martin. Why? Because, as Zimmerman explained, the young man was wearing a hoodie and looked suspicious.

Not only did the Department of Justice decline to prosecute Zimmerman under federal hate crimes statutes, but on June 10, 2013, a jury also acquitted him of all charges. Stunned at the verdict, Los Angeles community organizer Patrisse Cullors wrote on her Facebook: #BlackLIvesMatter. In subsequent days, Cullors, Opal Tometti and Alicia Garza created what they called the Black Lives Matter network, a collection of organizations around the country that reignited the freedom struggle by organizing to stop police violence through community-based direct action and imagining a future where the most vulnerable among us—women, queers, immigrants, trans and disabled people—were at the center of the Movement’s concerns.

The Movement for Black Lives makes demands on municipalities; the decriminalization of society and redirecting police budgets to humanitarian needs are among them. Like some earlier social justice movements, organizers are deeply embedded in their own communities and committed to a democratic praxis, this time informed by Black feminism. But unlike prior movements, which often centered the entry of Black people into existing institutions such as education, politics, and business, the movement centers a broader critique of capitalist society, and demands transformation. As movement scholar Deva Woodly has argued, “What democratic education should do and what social movements must do is to help people connect the dots between the problems that they are experiencing in their own lives, their values, and possible and desirable solutions.”

Because of its decentralized nature, the movement isn’t easy to study. Scholars have to be agile and commit to the small community groups that spend less of their time marching and protesting over the high-profile murders that make the national news than in working through the daily forms of violence that don’t make the news, practicing care in community, processing trauma, and making sure that Black lives are not only mourned, but celebrated, honored, and committed to joy.

This is why I asked Christopher Paul Harris, a graduate of the New School for Social Research in political and historical studies, and now an assistant professor in Global Black Studies at the University of California, Irvine, to join us to talk about his new book. To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care(Princeton University Press, 2023) draws on Harris’s own experiences as an activist and organizer to analyze contemporary Black struggle and places that struggle in the long history of Black oppression, resistance, community making and joy.

Program notes:

The opening clip is from a rally in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 5, 2020. It was one of a series of protests organized in communities across the nation to protest the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis, MN, police department, and published by the Hudson County News.
You can read a first-person account of the origins of #BlackLives Matter in Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter (St. Martins Press, 2018.)
Claire mentions scholar DevaWoodly, who has also written extensively about The Movement for Black Lives. Her most recent book is Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements
You can see the traffic stop which ended in Philado Castile’s murder by by police officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony police department in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, along with Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook live broadcast of the shooting, here. Warning: this video is graphic and violent.
The importance of Black women in the civil rights movement has been written about extensively: you might want to start with Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Frankin, Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York University Press, 2001.)
Chris name checks Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

Episode 22: Hit Them In The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty."
Episode 21: A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."
Episode 4: Bringing the War Home: A conversation with writer Zayd Ayres Dohrn about the Weather Underground, a generation raised in its shadow, and the search for answers in his new podcast, "Mother Country Radicals."
Episode 3: Black and White Together: Historian Victoria Wolcott discusses prefigurative politics and her book, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement."
Episode 2: The First Family of Abolition: A conversation with historian Kerri Greenidge about her book, "The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family."

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At various points in this episode, we discuss sex and sexuality, AIDS, mental illness, and suicidal ideation. If you are experience a mental health crisis or thoughts of self-harm, you can call the National Hotline for Mental Health Crises and Suicide Prevention at 1-800-273 TALK (8255.) And for more information about AIDS prevention and treatment, you can go to HIV.gov or plannedparenthood.org.

In 2012, Amber Hollibaugh, then the executive director for Queers for Economic Justice, explained to radio host Laura Flanders what sex and politics had to do with each other. Desire, she argued, was a way of reflecting on the past, understanding the present, and imagining a future. The erotic, and fantasies about what might be sexually possible, she explained, are essential ways to not just connect to the world around us, but also to the people in it who are imagining that better future.

Hollibaugh, like other queer people born in the 1940s, inherited a conservative American culture where sex was hidden and ideally confined to heterosexual marriage. She had to fight to publicly claim her desiring identities: lesbian, femme, sex worker, erotic writer, feminist, and gay liberation activist. Like Joan Nestle, who appeared in an earlier episode, Hollibaugh went to queer bars to find other sexual outlaws, coming alive in sexual communities that formed under cover of night and operated under the uncertain safety of police and mob protection.

In the 1960s, it was still illegal in many states to sell alcohol to gay and lesbian people, or for queer people to congregate. Bars constantly threatened to expose their patrons with the occasional raid that reassured the public that the police were on the job. Pornography theaters, where gay men met for sex, were subject to similar raids, and sex workers were periodically rounded up, jailed, and fined.

Similarly, obscenity laws governed what could or could not be published and sold, viewed, or exhibited. And outside the arts and the theater and film worlds, a so-called “known homosexual” had difficulty finding work, and could certainly not be employed as a teacher, coach, or minister—in other words, someone who had contact with the young: queer people were all seen as potential child molesters.

Because of the sexual revolution and the gay liberation movement of the 1960s, these prejudices and laws began to fall away, allowing ordinary people to come out, get good jobs, and seek sexual pleasure openly. As importantly, decisions by the Supreme Court rendered many old laws that had confined sex and sexuality unconstitutional. These decisions, and particularly those that applied the first amendment to sexual expression, opened the door to the erotic performances, writing, film, and art we enjoy today. Initially, some of this material was little different from the forms of gritty pornography that had previously operated in a semi-clandestine way. But many newly available books were works of literature—novels like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Vladimir Nabokov’s sensational 1962 novel, Lolita. Movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976) celebrated New York’s Times Square as a neon world of sexual outlaws, hustlers, and grifters.

But when it came to pornography, the Court released a gusher of films, books, and magazines. Some Americans were content to use newly available home video equipment to rent a porn tape now and then or to visit the adult theaters that sprang up in chains across the nation. But feminists like Amber Hollibaugh, anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and writer Patrick Califia took erotic expression in a new direction. They published about their embrace of power exchange sexuality, and their political commitment to outlaw desires like leather, S&M, and other sex play that required training and consent.

Other women promoted an idea born in radical feminist consciousness-raising: that women could take charge of their own pleasure, even if that was ordinary, vanilla, heterosex. In the 1970s, artist Betty Dodson began giving what she called “Bodysex” workshops, which taught women how to masturbate to orgasm, with or without a vibrator. And in 1984, a former performance artist and pornographic actress named Candice Vadala (known by her stage name, Candida Royalle) founded Femme Productions, an erotic film company aimed at women and couples.

While some feminists criticized women who embraced fetishes that they associated with male violence and predatory sex, the genie was out of the bottle. In the 1990s, feminist erotic writing exploded, and academic feminists were taking pornography seriously as an area of study. By the 21st century, a feminist pornography industry had emerged to take advantage of the internet and produce erotic films that were not only sexy but had politics—on the screen and on the set. (You can read an essay I wrote about the industry for Dissent magazine here.)

One of those feminist producers and entrepreneurs is Tristan Taormino, who was born in 1971 on Long Island, and whose parents were divorced when her father came out as gay. Tristan learned to love her body early on, and grew up, as she notes in this episode, without any sense of sexual shame. In 1989, she matriculated at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut (full disclosure: Tristan was my student) and where she also came out into a thriving queer community.

An award-winning writer, sex educator, and film producer, Taormino has written widely on the safe practice of anal sex and has been a popular—if occasionally controversial—lecturer on the college circuit. Today, we are here to discuss her new memoir, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, out this week from Duke University Press. There, she writes about being raised by an open-minded mother and a queer dad, struggling with her mental health, becoming one of the most respected sex educators in the United States, and the right-wing sexual backlash we are dealing with today.

Program notes:

Tristan notes that when she was a child, there were few resources for gay parents like her father; later, we discuss the ways that many children lost access to an LGBT parent altogether. Listeners who want to follow up on the history of gay parenting may wish to read Daniel Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2013.)
Tristan describes a first-year orientation in college, during which students discussed living in a sexually diverse community. These workshops were called BiLeGas (Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Alliance), and are now called BiLeGaTAs (add transgender to the acronym!) Here is a detailed 2009 description by a Wesleyan student.
Claire references “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” a 1967 movie about putting one’s social beliefs into practice. Released at the height of the civil rights movement, it is about two white liberals coming to terms with their daughter’s impending interracial marriage.
Tristan learned when she was a young adult that she had a family history of bipolar disorder: if you want to learn more about this, try Kay Redfield Jamieson, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf, 1995.) She also discusses how hidden depression was in the 1990s: listeners may wish to follow up with Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease(Simon & Schuster, 2010.)
Claire mentions one of Tristan’s mentors in the erotic film industry, the late Candice Vadala, a feminist erotic filmmaker whose working name was Candida Royale. You can read more about Vadala at her website, and look forward to a new biography of this artist by historian Jane Kamensky, now available for pre-order.
A second pathbreaker who made Tristan’s career possible is therapist and pornographer Patrick Califia: you can read some of his work for Poz magazine here. Tristan mentions Califia’s Macho Sluts (Alyson Books, 1994) as a particularly inspirational text.
Tristan also mentions the feminist erotica magazine On Our Backs, which ceased publication in 2006 and the work of feminist sex journalist Susie Bright. You can read more about Bright here.
In a conversation about how she built her business, Tristan mentions her first website, Puckerup.com (adults-only, please.) There isn’t a lot to read about the effect of the internet on pornography that is not about addiction, but listeners may wish to check out Margret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters(Stanford University Press, 2013.)
Tristan also discusses the influence of the riot grrrl movement: check out Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Harper Perennial, 2010)
In a conversation about why there is so little history written about the queer 1990s, Tristan name checks Sarah Schulman’s book about ACT-UP, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you liked this episode, try another:

Episode 29: “To Sexual Outlaws, With Love: A conversation with the legendary lesbian writer, activist, and community herstorian Joan Nestle about her new collection of essays, `A Sturdy Yes Of A People.’"
Episode 27: “How Gay Rights Became Special’ Rights: A conversation with sociologist Arlene Stein about her book,The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights; Or, How the Right Divides Us.’"
Episode 25: “Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book `Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s.’"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber—or try reading for free to decide if you like it.

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The cartoon ad for retired General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s presidential run, “I Like Ike,” was created in 1952 by a Disney employee. It was part of a campaign designed by the advertising agency BBDO and paid for by "Citizens for Eisenhower," an independent group run by lawyer and New York politician Herbert Brownell.

“I Like Ike” was a one-minute spot, distributed in the campaign's last two weeks, and its upbeat message was intended to create excitement around Eisenhower's Republican candidacy. It featured Uncle Sam leading a parade of homemakers, pipe fitters, cowboys, and other ordinary working Americans who marched past several doleful Democratic donkeys to the beat of a cheerful elephant banging a drum with its tail.

The spot spoke to a society of men in grey flannel suits: I like Ike because—well, because—everybody likes Ike!

Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Eisenhower in 1952, would try to replicate this magic in 1956 by rhyming "madly" and "Adlai,” which worked less well: across party lines, voters flocked to Eisenhower in that rematch too. But what you will also notice about “I Like Ike” if you watch it, other than its upbeat tune (and constant repetition of "like" and "Ike"), is that all the human cartoon characters are white. In at least 13 states, Black Americans voted in tiny numbers because state laws had created an elaborate set of barriers, often in majority-Black counties, to prevent them from wielding political power. In 1952, Black Southerners were also subject to Jim Crow, formal and informal practices that relegated most African Americans to inferior schools, prevented them from accessing public accommodations, put children to work at an early age, and required complete deference to whites. These laws, and social mandates, were enforced by violence: beatings, imprisonment, forced labor, and lynching.

In the former Confederacy, those values were the values of state Democratic parties, if not the national Democratic party, and Democrats ran those states with an iron fist. (Today, those same Democrats and their descendants are Republicans.) So, the ad sought to reassure white Americans everywhere that their values were Ike's values, too. And “I Like Ike” had a seismic effect in a South where civil rights activists were already mobilizing against racist violence and official bigotry. Eisenhower not only took 39 states, he also captured the Democratic strongholds of Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. In 1956, he added Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

Eisenhower’s political affability, and his sheer blandness, often concealed and distracted from profound and growing political dissent in the United States. For decades, the 1950s was imagined in popular culture as an age of innocence and a site for white nostalgia. Dozens of books have declared the Age of Eisenhower to be a decade of conformity and consensus, of poodle skirts and the birth of rock n' roll, high wages, home ownership, and college enrollments that boosted white working Americans into the middle class.

This collides uncomfortably with parallel histories of those years. The 1950s was also a time of political repression, led by anti-Communists in Washington and statehouses across the country. Students and progressives were already mobilizing to end nuclear proliferation. Gays and lesbians were beginning to organize publicly.

And most importantly, a mass movement of African Americans was mobilizing to end Jim Crow. As Eisenhower was still waffling on whether to run in April 1951—after all, he had never registered with a political party or even voted because he had spent his whole adult life in the military—Black activists had begun to launch civil disobedience campaigns to support existing National Association of Colored People lawsuits. Students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, launched a student strike to protest the conditions in their school. In 1952, that suit would be wrapped into Brown v. Board of Education.

The Supreme Court decided that case in favor of the plaintiffs in 1954, ordering that the nation's schools be desegregated. That decision launched what was called "massive resistance:" white Southerners determined to defend segregation and white supremacy by any means necessary.

But as we know from prior episodes of this podcast, some white Southerners saw the world of privilege and violence they lived in and recoiled from it. One of them was Catharine Drew Gilpin, the daughter of two old Virginia families. Born in 1947, her youth unfolded during the phase of civil rights activism and massive resistance inaugurated by Brown. Increasingly, she looked at the society surrounding her beautiful Shenandoah Valley family home and understood that a world which expected her to uphold its values, and take her place as a well-behaved young lady, was wrong. As she grew up, she joined the ranks of Southern white women who have fought to make the United States a more democratic and just nation.

We now know this woman as Drew Gilpin Faust, a prize-winning historian of the United States South and the first woman president of Harvard University. And now, she's the author of a new memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Mid-Century, out this month from Macmillan Publishers. In it, she recounts how she came to consciousness as a person who not just cared about social justice but also did something about it.

Program notes:

Drew mentions Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman (1886-1953) who wrongly characterized segregation in Virginia as a tacit agreement between Black and white Americans to remain separate which he called “the Virginia way.” You can read a critical study of the politics behind this myth in Jeff Thomas, The Virginia Way: Democracy and Power after 2016 (The History Press, 2019.)
You can learn more about massive resistance to school integration in Virginia in Matthew Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, eds., The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 1998.)
Claire and Drew discuss the creation of so-called “segregation academies,” private schools that white Southerners established so that there children would not have to attend school with African American children. You can read more in this article by Slate’s Rebecca Onion (November 7, 2019.)
You can read more about Headmistress Elizabeth Hall in a speech that Faust gave at Concord Academy on November 2, 2012.
Drew mentions attending a talk by Martin Luther King at The Groton School, where he challenged white liberal students to support the movement for racial justice, a speech which echoed his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963.)
You can learn more about the history of Bryn Mawr College, as well as its similarities and differences from other women’s colleges, in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.) Horowitz has also written a biography of M. Carey Thomas, who shaped the college in the decades she was president.
Drew mentions the Port Huron Statement (1962), which called to college students to exercise moral leadership.
Drew discusses the changes women students demanded from college administrations as they sought to take control over their own lives and bodies. You can read more about this in Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2002)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

You may want to try:

Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his new book, Skinfolk: A Memoir.
Episode 26, Lost and Found: A conversation with historian Martha Hodes about her new memoir, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering.
Episode 31, Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts.
Episode 32, The Court Room of History: A conversation with historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall about her book Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America.

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As we saw in the last episode, women were engaged in passionate activism to achieve gender equality by 1970. But unlike grassroots radical feminist groups, the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other organizations like the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), had begun to look to state legislatures, Congress, and the courts to rectify the injustices women encountered every day in the workplace, as consumers, and in their homes. To demonstrate how much the nation depended on women, in contrast to how little they were valued, NOW asked women across the nation to withhold their labor—from bosses, husbands, and even their own children--on August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment. In rallies held in major cities across the nation, activists would demand free, legal, and unrestricted abortion, equal opportunity in the workforce, and free childcare.

But this was only a start. Why fight this battle law by law, grievance by grievance, when a Constitution amended to recognize women’s full citizenship could do the job in one fell swoop? Only a few weeks earlier, on August 10, 1970, Michigan Democrat Martha Griffiths had re-introduced an amendment to the United States Constitution that had been kicking around since suffragists Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman marched it up the steps of the Capitol in 1923. The Equal Rights Amendment consisted of one, clear, sentence: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

I don’t need to tell this audience that the ERA didn’t pass. And although many things changed for women in the 1970s—abortion became legal, sexual harassment became illegal, and women gained access to professions, occupations, and schools that had previously been closed to them—after a adecade of intensified activism, the battle for ERA was all but lost, and gender bias remained rampant.

Women looked to NOW to defend them. Although the organization had dedicated itself to the fight for ERA to the point of near bankruptcy, during that campaign NOW had become a feminist institution where cross-cutting forms of discrimination by gender, race, sexuality, ability, class, and immigration status were forged into a bigger fight for social justice. Founded in 1966 by a diverse group of dedicated activists that included attorney Pauli Murray, journalist Betty Friedan, politician Shirley Chisholm, labor organizer Aileen Hernandez, and historian Caroline Ware, NOW’s loose, networked, chapter-style organizational structure brought diverse women across the United States together under a single umbrella to fight for their rights.

It's an important story—not just about women, but about the difficulties and contradictions of doing American politics. That’s why I was excited to see that Katherine Turk, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just published a history of NOW, from its founding to the moment it emerged, bloodied but unbroken, from the fight for ERA. Turk is an expert in the histories of women, gender, and sexuality; law, labor, and social movements; and the modern United States. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) won the Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians, and her new book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America, is out this month from (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023.)

Program notes:

The opening clip from August 25, 1970, produced by WHDH Channel 5 is included courtesy of the Boston Digital News Library; you can view it here.
Read more about the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality here.
I mention the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). That organization still exists, and is now NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Oprah Winfrey’s memories of being refused equal pay in 1980 were produced by the nonprofit activist group Ultraviolet. You can see the full clip here.
Are you interested in what the National Organization for Women is doing today? Go take a look!
Claire and Katie discuss Aileen Haernandez’s important role as NOW’s second president: you can read a tribute to her here. Another key figure is Pauli Murray: you can watch a documentary about this path-breaking attorney and spiritual leader.
Claire namechecks Laura Lovett’s 2021 biography of feminist activist and community orgnaizer Dorothy Pittman Hughes.
Why did ERA fail? Legal historian Mary Francis Berry wrote an early analysis; and Rebecca DeWolfe has written an account of the amendment’s first four decades.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you liked this episode, you might want to try:

Episode 5: Verdi, Dante, and Dahlia Lithwick: A conversation with Slate's Supreme Court reporter about her new book, "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America"
Episode 8: First, Pick the Right Wife: A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP
Episode 10, A Woman's Place Is In the House: John Lawrence, former chief of staff to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, takes us behind the scenes with a new book about a landmark politician who changed the Democratic Party
Episode 17, Abortion On Demand: Feminist journalist Katha Pollitt explains why we should treat ending a pregnancy as normal
Episode 33, Seattle, the Feminist Soviet of Washington: A conversation with historian Barbara Winslow about her book "Revolutionary Feminists: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle"

Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism

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In 1970 Marlene Sanders, a legendary woman journalist, and Emmy-award-winning correspondent produced and reported an ABC News feature about the women's liberation movement. Sanders began her career in an entry-level job in 1955 at WNEW-TV in New York, and she worked her way up to become the producer of the show, an almost unprecedented achievement for a woman in television then. After that, Sanders broke barrier after barrier. She was the first woman to cover the Vietnam War on the ground, co-anchor a national nightly news show, and become a vice president in the ABC News division.

Unsurprisingly, Sanders was well-connected in New York's small but thriving women's liberation community. The feature included an interview with Betty Friedan, the author of the 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique and one of the founders—along with luminaries like Pauli Murray, Aileen Fernandez, and Shirley Chisholm--of the National Organization for Women, known as NOW .

Although NOW had radical goals, the organization sat firmly in the tradition of American liberalism, seeking to reform the system, not overthrow it, and to do so through politics, legal action, and the occasional peaceful protest. NOW wanted equality, not revolution.

But Sanders also included footage of women who wanted a wholesale re-envisioning of the social order. They were radical feminists like Susan Brownmiller, who Sanders knew from the New York movement and journalism circles, and activists in places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There, radical feminists—mostly students, and wives of students--were upending traditional gender roles, parenting, marriage, and sex and laying the groundwork for an academic field called "women's studies."

Radical feminist organizations were often short-lived, beginning as conversation or "rap" groups among women whose politics and sense of grievance had been formed in the Black civil rights and anti-war movements. Those movements had taught them the pervasiveness of racism in American society, so they invented a word that expressed the potential for women's class consciousness: sexism. And they adapted another name from the Old Left for their process: they called it consciousness-raising.

Revolutionary feminists often came from a Marxist background. Like many on the New Left, some were the children of communists, so-called "Red Diaper” babies. Others were neighborhood organizers, college graduates who had ended up at home with children or in jobs where they couldn't be promoted any higher than secretary--or wife. They wanted egalitarian relationships with men, but that was only a starting place--if an important one for the heterosexually inclined.

Unlike NOW, they organized speak outs, demonstrations, and sit-ins, making demands that liberal professional women often saw as too confrontational and alienating to men: universal childcare, an end to "mindless boobie-girl syndrome" promoted by capitalist enterprises like the Miss America Pageant, Playboy magazine, and yes—the housewives' friend, the Ladies Home Journal.

These groups named themselves after radical women like Emma Goldman, angry Greek goddesses and demi-goddesses, names that catapulted radical feminists onto the front lines of a social revolution and a new society. New York Radical Feminists broke into "brigades" anchored in neighborhoods; another group adopted the name Redstockings. The Jane Collective came together in Chicago to steer women to safe, affordable abortion providers. Eventually, they taught each other to perform the procedure themselves. In Washington, D.C., one of many lesbian separatist groups called themselves The Furies: heterosexuality, along with private property, they argued, was an impediment to a women's revolution.

Of course, only a fraction of the stories about radical feminism have been told: one of those untold stories may even be in your city or town. And a story that has never been told until now is of the revolutionary feminist community in Seattle. In this city, white women and women of color worked successfully in coalition with each other and with neighborhood organizers. Activists made it a priority to support unions, and selective use of the political process resulted in the first successful ballot referendum to decriminalize abortion.

This is why I wanted to talk to Barbara Winslow, Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. Winslow's new book, Revolutionary Feminists: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke University Press, 2023) tells the story of feminists who were not only at the forefront of a women's revolution but who saw their anti-racist, anti-imperialist, class-conscious organizing as the natural outcome of that city's radical past. They were Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyists, socialists, Black Panthers, farm workers organizers, and members of SDS—but together, they imagined a non-sectarian feminist revolution in a city they only semi-facetiously thought of as "The Soviet of Washington." And as early as 1965—earlier, in fact, than the founding of many more famous women's liberation movements—Seattle women began to find each other and organize.

And Barbara Winslow was one of them.

Program Notes:

Claire and Barbara talk about Seattle’s long tradition of interracial activism: you can read more about this in Diana K. Johnson, Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023.)
Barbara notes the International Workers of the World (IWW), and Seattle’s radical past, as context for the rise of a distinctive feminist movement. Listeners may want to follow up with Philip Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Industrial Workers of the World (International Publishing, 1973) and Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1994.)
Barbara mentions feminist leadership of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, a work stoppage when workers ran the city for days.
Barbara points us to Julia Reichart’s 1976 labor history documentary “Union Maids.”
Claire brings up Sarah Evans’s book Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (Random House, 1979.)
Listeners interested in where radical feminism fits in the history of the New Left may wish to consult Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

If you liked this episode, you might want to try:

Episode 5: Verdi, Dante, and Dahlia Lithwick: A conversation with Slate's Supreme Court reporter about her new book, "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America"
Episode 17: Abortion On Demand: Feminist journalist Katha Pollitt explains why we should treat ending a pregnancy as normal
Episode 22: Hit Them In The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty"
Episode 25: Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s"

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You just heard an excerpt from Vice President Kamala Harris’s response to the new standards for teaching African American history in Florida. Released by that state’s Department of Education on Thursday, July 20, 2023, the standards, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put it, return Florida’s students to “an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.”

So, on July 21, Harris jettisoned her plans and instead headed to Jacksonville, a historically Black city in northeastern Florida. There, she delivered a blistering response to extremist Republicans who have systematically created a political football out of Florida’s public education system.

Florida had already been in the spotlight for demanding revisions to a new African American studies Advanced Placement course, changes that would affect education across the whole nation. As Governor Ron DeSantis, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, charged, the course promoted “a political agenda,” not factual knowledge. More importantly, it violated new Florida education laws designed to purge publicly funded classrooms of conversations that might lead students to think about sexuality or racism; or see American history in anything but a positive light.

These laws also make it illegal to teach the history of white supremacy in Florida, a history not accessible in libraries because those books—along with books about queer people—have mostly been removed from that state’s schools and public libraries. This empty curriculum also obscures the historical conditions that have produced social inequality across lines of class, race, and gender in the United States.

But the Florida standards for teaching African American history went a step further, filling a space that ought to be devoted to fact and truth with lies and evasions. For example, they discuss the institution of slavery but not who was responsible for it, that it was physically and psychologically brutal, and that it was followed by a century of disenfranchisement that was systematically enforced by white violence.

Instead, the curriculum features entrepreneurship and independence, conservative values that were certainly denied to African Americans in bondage and often in freedom as well. In perhaps the most well-publicized lie, according to the standards, enslaved people learned skills during their captivity that they could use to take care of their families after Emancipation. When pressed as to which African American lives would be featured, Florida bureaucrats responded with the names of people, many of whom had never been enslaved at all.

In other words, slavery was—beneficial to Black people? White people made the best of a bad situation by encouraging and training the people they held in bondage?

No.

As Bouie points out in his essay, neither of these are new lies: they were promulgated in children’s books and history texts into the 1960s and beyond. Florida’s standards are a zombie curriculum, grimly kept alive by organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the white supremacist website VDare.

But for generations after Emancipation, these lies were also spread in scholarship, fiction, and popular culture, often accepted by white Americans beyond the South as white southerners, often women presented themselves as “experts” on Black life. For example, in the classic 1939 film made from Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1935), plantations are presented only as places of grace and beauty. Enslaved Black people refuse freedom and instead devote themselves to serving and even rescuing the white family that had held them captive.

It took decades of research and publishing, beginning with Black scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Carter Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, and John Hope Franklin, to expose the true history of America’s racial past. It is one that might rightly inspire sorrow and shame in young white students today—and that is expressly against the law in Florida.

But here’s the other history the standards don’t tell: that determined Southern white women have also played an important role in fighting white supremacy in the United States. They have a proud tradition of using their status as “experts” on the South to fight the lies that racist politicians tell and to end anti-Black violence. In the absence of any federal or state action, in 1930, Texas suffragist Jesse Daniel Ames launched the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching to put an end to political and social terrorism, as well as the false narrative that white women wanted protection from Black men. Novelist Lillian Smith followed suit with her novel Strange Fruit(1944). Southern white women like Dorothy Tilly risked their lives alongside Black activists and students from outside the region in the Black civil rights movement. And contemporary historians raised and educated in the South, like Karen L. Cox, have been leading voices in dismantling the fuzzy, feel-good, fake history that Confederate monuments preserve.

This is why I wanted to bring Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, and the founding director of that university’s Southern Oral History project to our show. She has devoted her career not just to researching and writing a progressive Southern history but also to the possibilities that the South’s racial past offers for a nation where political equality is still unrealized. The author of an award-winning 1979 book about Jesse Daniel Ames, Hall is also famous for her co-authored work on the South’s mill towns.

In this episode, we are talking about her most recent book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (W.W. Norton, 2019), which tells the story of three sisters, women from the slave-holding Lumpkin family of Georgia. Each woman represents a way that Southern women, and most white people, engaged with history in the twentieth century. Elizabeth became a proud conservative partisan who traveled the post-Reconstruction South giving speeches memorializing the Lost Cause; Grace became a writer, a Greenwich Village bohemian, and a Communist fellow traveler; and Katherine, the youngest, devoted her life to liberal causes and scholarship that exposed the propaganda that kept Black southerners in bondage long after slavery.

You can listen to this podcast by downloading from this newsletter, or you can subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or Soundcloud. You can also find Tiya Miles at her Substack, Carrying Capacity.

If you enjoyed this episode, try:

Episode 8: First, Pick the Right Wife: A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right."
Episode 14, The Past Is Never Dead: A conversation with historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer about their new, best-selling essay collection, "Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his new book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 30: Inventing A White Race: A conversation with historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter about her book, "The History of White People."

Program notes:

Jacquelyn namechecks Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (Vintage, 1983.)
Throughout, Claire and Jacquelyn refer to a revisionist history of Southern plantation society and its political commitments, known in the South as the Lost Cause. Perspectives on this political mythmaking can be found in Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Indiana University Press, 2000.)
Are you interested in the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Check out their website!
Listeners interested in the cult of the Confederacy, as well as the bonds between former Confederates and former Union soldiers formed at reenactments, may wish to read David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press, 2001.)
Jacquelyn discusses Grace Lumpkin’s immersion in Communist circles and her later disillusionment with the party: Lumpkin writes about this as fiction in her final novel, Full Circle(Western Islands Press, 1962.)
You can learn more about the politics of women’s interracialism, to which Katherine Lumpkin was committed in Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 (University of Illinois, 2010.)
Jacquelyn mentions her own rethinking of racial politics in the United States as “the long civil rights movement.” You can read that article, published in the Journal of American History (March 2005), here.

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That was a February 2011 news segment recorded by journalist Sam Ford for WJLA TV, an ABC affiliate in the Washington D.C. area. In the first of two episodes about slavery among indigenous nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes, Ford explored the fact that his African American ancestors had been enslaved by members of the Cherokee Nation in the first half of the 19th century. These family members were then transported to Oklahoma Territory, when the federal government expelled those who held them in bondage from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern United States.

Over the course of several decades, more than 100,000 people endured a forced migration to what became known as Indian Territory. War, forced treaties, legislation, and court-ordered expulsions made room for land-hungry whites in what is now Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and Tennessee: sometimes those new landlords took over full, working plantations. The ethnic cleansing began in 1830, when gold was discovered on Cherokee land, and was largely complete by 1850. In a mass expulsion in the winter of 1838, more than 13,000 Cherokee walked 1000 miles from Tennessee to their arid new home; about 15% of those expelled from these southern states died of starvation, cold, and disease before they arrived.

The 1838 expulsion became known as the Trail of Tears. But these two decades of forced migration were a tragedy on multiple levels. The Cherokee, for example, were prosperous and peaceful. They had hoped to remain in the young United States by becoming more like the European colonizers and living in harmony with them. This was a political and cultural transformation welcomed by President Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Jefferson’s writings on race indicate his belief that, while the descendants of enslaved Africans would always represent a distinct and inferior "race," Native people would eventually evolve to become indistinguishable from whites.

To some extent, Cherokee elites embraced this vision too. They developed a written alphabet and language, a Constitution, a formal political system, and an agricultural and business economy. And, while captivity and bondage had not been uncommon in indigenous North America, the Cherokee adapted older traditions to the modern world, incorporating the permanent racial slavery of African-descended people into their economy. During the Civil War, the Cherokee fought, and lost, as allies of the Confederacy.

And yet, when Emancipation came, formerly enslaved people became part of the new Cherokee Nation. Yet distressingly, in 2011, that tribal government sought to sever its ties with some of those Black descendants. After generations of welcoming those who called themselves the Freedmen, the Nation expelled 2800 citizenswho could not prove that they were genetically descended from indigenous people, a step previously taken by the Muscogee, or Creek, Nation, in 1979. Fortunately, a federal court reversed this decision in 2017, and the Cherokee Nation’s Supreme Court affirmed it in 2021.

Needless to say, entangled Black and Native American histories are both rich and vexed, and I am highlighting but one aspect of them. This past, often handed down in family stories and heirlooms, has also created a desire for some Black people, as in some whites: to discover a Native American identity. It is a reality for some and a fantasy for others. It often includes the desire for a Native American past that is accessible and retrievable—sometimes through the tangible benefits of tribal membership, but often through art, crafts, and genealogical research. They take trips to ghostly, sometimes abandoned, plantation houses where remnants of these histories tease seekers with a fragmented, lost past. For a few descendants, it has led to the purchase and renovation of dilapidated Cherokee plantation houses, abandoned by whites: some have purchased old estates, or portions of them, where their ancestors were actually enslaved.

Hundreds of YouTube videos, sometimes produced by real estate agents, provide tours of such places, future homes that they cheerfully assure viewers are "haunted" by ghosts. Who are these ghosts? It isn't clear. Nearly all mention slavery, but only in passing, as an unavoidable but safely historical “reality of the times.” Video cameras pan lovingly over peeling, white Ionic columns and wooden exteriors, sagging roofs, and brick verandas in desperate need of repointing. Others feature a fully restored home, complete with period furniture and elegant portraits of the tribal leaders whose fortunes were built on the backs of captive Africans and their children.

This is why I picked up Harvard historian Tiya Miles's novel, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, out this summer in paper from Penguin/Random House. A MacArthur Prize winner, Miles is one of our preeminent scholars of the 19th century Native American and African American past. But she is also a historian of material culture: she tells the stories that objects, houses, and images long to teach us. Miles is one of the most accomplished historians and writers I know, and the author of seven books, including The Cherokee Rose and All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (Random House), winner of the 2021 National Book Award.

But it was the research for Miles’s 2010 book, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (University of North Carolina Press), that wouldn't let go—and that led Miles to write a novel about how three women of color resolve, and uncover, a shared past on the grounds of the fictional Cherokee Rose, a plantation in Georgia. The Cherokee Rose is not only good historical fiction—it’s a book you will want to take on vacation.

Program Notes:

Tiya namechecks Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian(Yale, 1998); she also mentions curator and documentary historian Rayna Green.
Listeners who want to explore the interrelations of African Americans and the Cherokee Nation further may wish to read Celia E. Naylor,African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and Barbar Krauthammer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2013.)
In pointing to the complexities of relationships between Black women, Tiya reminds us of Audre Lorde’s 1981 essay, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.”
Claire and Tiya discuss how young people may have difficulty writing the histories they want and need to write, and problem that caused the fictional character Jinx to leave graduate school. Readers who wish to learn more about the obstacles facing women of color in higher education may wish to read Kimetta R. Hairston, The Ivory Tower: Perspectives of Women of Color in Higher Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.)
Claire explains how her admiration for African American history as a field was sparked by Deborah Gray White, whose book Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South W.W. Norton, 1985.)
Tiya makes some recommendations about where your interest in her work might take you, including the work of Alaina Roberts, Kyle T. Mays, and Kendra Taira Field.

If you enjoyed this episode, try:

Episode 2, The First Family of Abolition: A conversation with historian Kerri Greenidge about her new book, "The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his new book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 26: Lost and Found: A conversation with historian Martha Hodes about her new memoir, "My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering."
Episode 30: Inventing A White Race: A conversation with historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter about her book, "The History of White People."

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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We begin this episode with a June, 2021 school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a mob of angry white parents had taken over the room. They demanded that the district stop using tax dollars to make curricular and structural interventions about race and racism. They also raised the flag of “parents’ rights,” a pandemic-born political call to arms that insisted on their right as parents to make decisions about what their children learned about the nation’s racial past and present.

Along with the rest of the state, Loudoun County had mounted massive resistance to desegregation in the 1960s, closing its schools rather than mix Black and white students. But the school district had traveled a long way from its own racist past. Responding to the county's demographic transformation from a white, rural enclave to a diverse, tech-oriented suburb of Washington, D.C., Loudoun had introduced an equity plan in 2019 that promised better inclusion for students of color. In the words of NPR reporter Colleen Grablick, the plan consisted of "implicit bias training, enhanced protocols for handling racist behavior, and improved reporting systems for students."

Subsequently, five parents sued the school board, launching a new political struggle that put the teaching of race, as well as education about gender and sexuality, in the national spotlight. While that lawsuit, and a second one, were dismissed, the parents' group, Fight for Schools and Families, continued to harass the school board and pursue recall campaigns against its members.

But Fight for Schools and Families wasn't the grassroots group it claimed to be: it was a political SuperPac, formed on June 1, 2021, just before the Loudoun County action. The bulk of its spending went to midterm attack ads against Democratic House candidates Jennifer Wexton and Abigail Spanberger, who were running for the House in Virginia's 10th Congressional district, which makes up much of Loudoun County, and the neighboring 7th. While those attack ads took up another theme—false charges that activists wanted to jail school officials who failed to address students by their chosen pronouns on felony charges—in 2021, it was also clear that the attack on Loudoun’s schools was intended to boost the candidacy of Republican Glenn Youngkin for governor.

Did it work? You tell me. Wexton and Spanberger won—but so did Glenn Youngkin, even though he lost Loudoun County. Democratic challenger Terry McAuliffe only won this blue county by 55%, a reduced margin from Biden's 61% in 2020. It was a key factor in a narrow loss.

Curriculum controversies are not just abstractly political. The strategists that run campaigns believe that they have the potential to turn blue districts purple, and purple districts—whole purple states—bright red. Predictably, since Youngkin’s victory, arguments about teaching race in school have only become more heated and riddled with disinformation disseminated by right-wing extremist groups like Moms for Liberty, the 1776 Project, and the Ron DeSantis-led Republican state government of Florida.

But these attacks are also riddled with tales of woe illustrating the harm that white true believers conjure from Black history and literature. At the contentious Loudoun hearings, white parents reported that their children, and even teens, were traumatized by encountering the United States' racial past in fiction and history texts. And after the election, Republicans repaid this small group of voters for their efforts, stripping Virginia’s curriculum of many of the subjects and interpretations they had protested.

Suppose you are a dedicated reader of this podcast's companion Substack, Political Junkie. In that case, you know that versions of this story—a broad-based Republican campaign to win a permanent governing majority under the false flag of an AstroTurf "parents' rights movement" is playing out nationwide.

Furthermore, these inquiries cut to the heart of the alternative past that the right cherishes but refuses to name: that the history of so-called Western Civilization is the property of European-descended people. In other words, if we are to understand the revived vitriol towards Blackness, we might want to start by re-examining the murky past of American whiteness.

So, I returned to historian and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter's 2010 book, The History of White People (W.W. Norton, 2010). Painter, one of this country's pre-eminent historians of the nineteenth century, race and the African American past, traces the history of this fictional white race from antiquity to the present. She began her research with a simple question: why, for several hundred years, had white people in the United States called themselves Caucasian—when the Caucuses, an Eastern European region bordering on Asia, were a place where most white people's ancestors did not originate?

Program notes:

The full Reuters feature on the June, 2021, Loudoun County school board meeting is posted here.
Nell references the early German anthropologist and race scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840): you can read a profile of Blumenbach here.
Nell mentions artist’s books where she also worked on the problem of whiteness: you can see that, and her other work, on her website.
Claire mentions the Tea Party’s reaction to the election of Barack Obama, and the re-orientation of racism on the right at that moment. One resource for that is Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williams, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford, 2016.)
Listeners who are interested in whiteness studies may wish to do more reading: sociologists Cara Cancelmo and Jennifer C. Mueller are the authors of a 2019 Oxford bibliographical essay; Matthew Wills has written an accessible historical essay at JSTOR Daily (September 12, 2016.)
Claire namecheck’s Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (Pantheon, 2003.)
Nell points to the importance of Orlando Patterson’s work on slavery: listeners may wish to begin with Patterson’s classic text, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative History (Harvard, 1982.)
Nell also references an organization that is fighting the new censorship, Freedom to Learn.
Nell references a 2015 article she wrote in the New York Times that white people might want to call themselves abolitionists, to tap into a long historical tradition of white antiracism: you can read it here.
You can explore the antiracist group John Brown Lives! by navigating to the group’s website.
Nell points to a growing literature on how to be an antiracist: readers may wish to start with Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist(One World, 2019.)

You can listen to this podcast by downloading from this newsletter, or you can subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or Soundcloud.

If you enjoyed this episode, try:

Episode 22, Hit Them In The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty."
Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his new book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."
Episode 3, Black and White Together: In this episode of "Why Now?" historian Victoria Wolcott discusses prefigurative politics and her book, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement."
Episode 2, The First Family of Abolition: A conversation with historian Kerri Greenidge about her new book, "The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family"

These podcasts are produced because of the support of Political Junkie’s paid subscribers: please join us for only $5/month, or try us first for free.

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In “The Initiation,” a 1959 educational film probably shown in high school health classes, the American girls who were its intended audience learned that lesbianism—and lesbians--lurked everywhere. The film begins at the end of a little party where an innocent known as “the Deb,” short for “debutante,” has been invited for the sole purpose of making her into a lesbian. If she were not such an innocent, of course, she might have picked up a big clue at the beginning of the evening that something was up. Most of the women have shoulder-length hair and are dressed in conventional feminine clothes. But one—who seems to be running the group like a quasi-cult—wears a men’s suit, has cropped hair, and puffs on a pipe.

We join the party at its culmination, as one of these sexual outlaws takes the innocent “Deb” upstairs; the others draw straws to see which one of them will have the pleasure of initiating “the Deb” into sexual practices, to which she will then, the narrator implies, become addicted. Not surprisingly, the single mannish lesbian pulls the short straw. As the other women pin the struggling “Deb” down to a bed, this sinister figure who toggles between genders—hereafter known as “the Dyke”—performs a sexual act that the narrator leaves to our imagination.

In this Cold War scenario, “the Dyke” is technically a butch. But the filmmakers identify her as an imitation man who has cultivated a harem of femmes bewitched by her sexual prowess. But the film does not portray “the Dyke” as a lover: instead, she is a compulsive, narcissistic rapist who cannot get what she wants except by trapping and converting other women. “The Dyke” makes it clear who lesbians are: a menace to society who are in deep need of psychological treatment—preferably in a locked ward somewhere. This was where many lesbians did, in fact, end up, before the 1970s, undergoing barbaric treatments until they renounced homosexuality.

And yet, silly and homophobic as it is, to modern eyes, “The Initiation” is also weirdly…hot? Much like the pulp novels about lesbians available in any 1950s drugstore, the film offers a glimpse of a sexy, hidden world of butches and femmes that was an undeniable and pleasantly dirty alternative to conventional heterosexuality. In fact, in the working-class bar world, butches were in charge of sexual pleasure, even though femmes were full participants in weaving the erotic web that made that pleasure possible.

Tantalizingly, the plot of “The Initiation” infers that if one sexual experience could be transformative, even addictive, not only did every woman have the potential to be a lesbian, but she also might want to act on it. So, the film unintentionally leaves one question wide open: why is lesbian sex bewitching? How is it that “the Dyke” has managed to turn so many women away from sex with men?

What the film can’t imagine between lesbians is love—the love butches and femmes had for each other, the love they made, and the love for the spaces—at bars like the Sea Colony, Laurel’s, Bagatelle, the Duchess—they carved out for themselves. At these bars, butches and femmes paid for over-priced, watered-down drinks in exchange for the privilege of being together, touching, making love, and inhabiting the selves they had to hide from the world. Historians have written about that working-class bar world of butches and femmes, one continually under siege from the police, but it is the personal essays—by Amber Hollibaugh, Cherríe Moraga, Leslie Feinberg, Patrick Califia, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Gayle Rubin, and others—that often give us the most authentic sense of, not just the struggles, romance, and pleasure of a pre-gay liberation world of public sex, but of the political consciousness that butch-femme community created. It was steeped in suffering but also infused with joy.

The author who has done as much, or more, than any other to preserve our lesbian political past, and the history of our very existence, is my guest for this final episode of Pride Month, 2023. Joan Nestle has been a critical voice in lesbian feminism since the 1970s and a beautiful femme who embraced the unrespectable as a path to truth and justice. A teacher, erotic writer, activist, and founder of Brooklyn’s Lesbian HerStory Archives, Joan has a new selection of essays out last year from Sinister Wisdom Press, A Sturdy Yes of a People. It’s a first-person political history of living a queer life that not only returns us to the pre-liberation roots of the lesbian and feminist community but links LGBTQ+ struggles to the fight for justice that marginalized people everywhere deserve.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

Program notes:

The opening sequence is from “Lesbian Initiation,” a Cold War educational film intended to persuade audiences that lesbians prey on straight women.
Listeners can explore the rich collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which are open for research to all.
Amber Hollibaugh explores butch-femme culture in her collection of essays, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Duke University Press, 2000.) The collection includes the famous essay about lesbian eroticism, co-written with Cherríe Moraga, “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With.”
For fictionalized accounts of butch-femme culture in Greenwich Village, listeners may wish to read Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series.
Joan namechecks Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis’s history of butch-femme bar culture Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1994.)
You can read more about the Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse here.
Joan recounts the experience of her family being discriminated against at a dude ranch because they were Jewish: this was a common experience before the 1970s. You can read more about this in Britt P. Tevis’s article, “`Jews Not Admitted:’ Anti-Semitism, Civil Rights, and Public Accommodation Laws,” Journal of American History (March 2021.)
Joan speaks about her friend Mabel Hampton, an iconic lesbian and civil rights activist from Harlem: you can read excerpts from Joan's interview with Ms. Hampton in Signs, Volume 18, Number 4, Summer, 1993.
Joan and I talked briefly about the so-called radical feminist “sex wars:” one good book of essays written by women who defended public sex alongside Joan is Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, Sharon Thompson, Powers of Desire(Monthly Review Press, 1983.)

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On January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters, enraged by waves of misinformation and outright lies, attacked the federal government. They sought to prevent the counting of electoral votes that would mark Democrat Joe Biden’s victory—and incumbent President Donald Trump’s loss—in the 2020 election. The crowd called for Vice President Mike Pence’s death by hanging, and a noose had been prepared on the Capitol grounds. Pence’s offense was that he had refused to stop the count, an act he correctly understood as illegal and unconstitutional. Informed of this turn of events by an aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump’s chief of staff, shrugged. “The President thinks he deserves it,” Mark Meadows allegedly responded about the threat to Pence’s life.

Trump’s people had long known that his supporters were dangerous. On social media platforms like Gab, Parler, and Telegram, partisans had been calling for blood since election night. Armed men had been arrested in downtown Washington on the night of January 5. And at the rally that preceded the insurrection, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies were aware that a large portion of the almost exclusively white crowd, many of whom elected not to pass through the metal detectors that are standard at all events featuring the President, was heavily armed.

Many of us glued to our televisions on January 6 were shocked and horrified, partly because the conspiracy to overthrow the election had infected the government more broadly. Sitting Republican politicians egged the crowd on with lies and fist pumps.

But if we were shocked, we were not surprised. The last four years of rising right-wing populism in the United States had led to this moment. It wasn’t just that the Trump presidency was authoritarian and had produced a spike in visible white supremacism. The former President also issued dark warnings throughout the 2020 campaign season about what his partisans might do if the election, as he put it, was “stolen.” These utterances became more sinister as Trump fought to recapture, through fraudulent means, an election he had lost.

But former prosecutor, legal analyst, and journalist Jeffrey Toobin saw the link between past and present in the tear gas and Trump flags surrounding the Capitol on January 6. These extremist groups—the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and various militias—had a violent history. Before the election, Toobin had noted a foiled plot by members of the so-called Michigan Militia movement to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

It resonated with his memory of an earlier, successful attack on the federal government.

The event Toobin recalled was, at the time, just as shocking as January 6. On April 19, 1995, Desert Storm veteran, passionate gun enthusiast, white supremacist, and anti-government crusader Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder van packed with homemade explosives to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse, and hurried away.

The explosion ripped off the front of the building, severing a crucial pillar and causing a third of the structure to collapse in seven seconds. Glass, concrete, and steel became shrapnel, ripping into and burying the humans inside. It was the worst mass casualty event in American history: 168 people died that day, including 19 children in the daycare at the front of the building, and 680 were wounded. Subsequently, Toobin covered the trial held in Denver, Colorado. While McVeigh was not connected to any organization, his confederate—Terry Nichols—was associated with the Michigan militia.

McVeigh’s trial contained a wealth of information about a culture of guns, violence, and conspiracy that had propelled McVeigh, and Nichols, forward to commit such a horrible act. It re-introduced Americans to the notion that political terrorism isn’t foreign but begins at home. As Jeff Toobin watched the events of January 6, 2021, the narrative that McVeigh’s actions and trial had revealed in the mid-1990s started to look less like an isolated historical event than a vision of the future: armed American citizens fueled by conspiracy theories, trying to topple their government.

And he began working on the book we are discussing in this episode, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism(Simon & Schuster, 2023.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

Program notes:

The sounds of January 6, 2021, with which I begin the episode, can be found here, courtesy of The Telegraph.
The exchange between White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and Mark Meadows was part of her testimony to the Special Select Committee to investigate January 6.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s remarks on June 28, 2022, were published online by the Washington Post. You can listen to the full hearing here.
CNN reporters Christina Carrega, Veronica Stracqualursi, and Josh Campbell covered the arrest of 13 members of the Michigan Militia for plotting to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer on October 8, 2020.
Jeff and I both mention the vital work of historian Kathleen Belew on white supremacy and the formation of violent, anti-government militias in the post-Vietnam United States, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018.)
Jeff distinguishes between Timothy McVeigh and a true “lone wolf” killer, the recently deceased Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Jeff also notes the importance of right-wing radio—Bill Cooper and Rush Limbaugh in particular—to McVeigh’s radicalization and his belief in political conspiracy theories. Listeners wanting to learn more about this phenomenon should read Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books, 2022.)
Claire and Jeff discuss the centrality of William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978) to McVeigh’s worldview and the book’s role as a map for going to war with the federal government. You can read more about this widely-circulated racist and antisemitic right-wing text here.
Claire mentioned FreeRepublic.com, an early conservative social media site that incubated Clinton conspiracy theories. You can read more about the site’s long history as a conservative hub here.
Jeff points to the importance of the 1993 stand-off between the federal government and the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas in shifting Timothy McVeigh to an act of anti-government violence.
McVeigh was also angry about the 1994 federal ban on semi-automatic weapons steered through Congress by then-Senator Joseph R. Biden.
Jeff discussed the role of the Oklahoma City bombing in expanding the victims’ rights movement: his colleague at The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, wrote about this connection in 2018.

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On May 18, 2023, Florida Governor and Republican presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557, perhaps the most significant retraction of LGBT+ rights in almost half a century. Officially called the Parental Rights in Education Act, critics nicknamed it the "Don't Say Gay" bill because it made any expression of identity beyond the gender binary or heterosexual family illegal in Florida schools in pre-K through the 8th grade. That includes a teacher publicly referring to a same-sex partner or acknowledging that there is such a thing as gay marriage—or that children in the classroom have two moms or two dads.

Books that help children think about these things in any way, like many books about race, have been removed from Florida's classrooms and to the back rooms of public libraries. Subsequent legislation has expanded these policies to cover more grades and more of the curriculum and restrict teachers' freedoms further. Sex education in Florida not only must prioritize abstinence and personal responsibility as the only methods of birth control, but the curriculum can also only refer to heterosexuality. All employees must use the pronouns appropriate to their sex at birth, effectively barring transgender teachers, administrators, and custodians from Florida's public schools.

But efforts to push queers out of public life aren't a recent development. As soon as LGBT+ people began to acquire the legal right not to be discriminated against in the 1970s, conservatives and religious groups attacked such legislation as conveying" special rights." They launched campaigns to rescind such laws, characterizing them as a response to an emergency: protecting children from homosexuals and homosexuality. In 1977, Christian singer Anita Bryant launched the successful "Save Our Children" campaign two months after Dade County, Florida, passed an anti-discrimination bill. The following year, Orange County legislator John Briggs put Proposition 6 on a statewide ballot, an initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in California's public schools.

This all started back in the 1970s. A few months after Bryant’s campaign, California conservatives launched their own anti-gay initiative, one aimed at getting lesbian and gay teachers out of public schools. Known as the Briggs initiative, it failed because of a massive organizing effort by California's queer community and its supporters.

But as I learned from sociologist Arlene Stein's 2001 book, The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights; Or, How the Right Divides Us (reissued by Beacon Press, 2022), even failed initiatives identify pockets of support, generally outside major cities, for attacking LGBT rights at the local level. Thus, in 1992, when a group of religious conservatives called the Oregon Citizens Alliance sponsored Measure 9, a ballot initiative that would strip lesbians and gays of civil rights protections, they lost. But they then re-launched their culture war in eight counties and three dozen towns where the proposal had succeeded.

One of these places was a small Oregon city that Stein calls Timbertown. In 1994, she traveled there from liberal Eugene, where she lived and worked, to understand the cleavages that anti-queer politics had created. How did a place where lesbians and gays lived openly and unobtrusively become a place where neighbors suddenly seemed like dangerous strangers? What were the larger economic, political, religious, and cultural forces at work? And how do anti-LGBT campaigns become a stalking horse for dividing us as a country?

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

Program notes:

The opening clip is from Ron DeSantis’s statement about signing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill on May 18, 2023 (courtesy of NBC News.)
I discussed the extension of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and its implications, here.
You can read a contenporary account of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in New York Times reporter B. Drummond Ayres, Jr.’s “Miami Debate Over Rights of Homosexuals Directs Wide Attention to a National Issue,” (May 10,1977.)
You can learn more about the larger political context of Proposition 6, authored by John Briggs in 1977, in historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s history of education in late 20th century California, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015.)
Juana Samayoa’s complete conversation with Lee Lee on her show “News Talk” about Lee’s activism on behalf of the 1977 Briggs amendment can be found on YouTube.
You can learn more about the Oregon Citizens Alliance in this June 1992 article from the Associated Press.
Arlene Stein is the author of a number of books, uncluding Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity (Vintage, 2019),Shameless: Sexual Dissidence in American Culture (NYU, 2006.)
We have addressed the deliberate creation of political division on the podcast before—interested listeners may also wish to listen to Episode 24: Against Government: A conversation with political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas Harris about their book, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press, 2021.)
Claire and Arlene discuss the decline in traditional forms of church membership among many Christian believers, one that has continued since the 1990s: you can learn more about that social phenomenon here.
To see how right wing organizations explain their accusation that LGBT+ people are demanding special rights, visit the anti-abortion website Human Life International.
Arlene discusses the importance of coailition in defending LGBT+ rights. Timothy Stewart-Winter has written about such coalitions at the dawn of the gay lliberation movement in Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania, 2016.)

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On September 6, 1970, CBS News Anchor Harry Reasoner and London correspondent Charles Collingwood reported on the hijacking of three international flights and the attempted hijacking of a fourth. A news junkie at 12, I must have watched the reports all week as my parents sipped a pre-dinner cocktail.

What I didn’t know was that someone who would become my friend was on one of those planes.

In 1970, hijackings were shockingly common, and while piracy is a centuries-old crime, aircraft hijacking was a relatively recent one. The first hijacking probably occurred in 1929, when revolutionaries in Arequipa, Peru, ordered an American pilot to fly them to Lima, the capital, where an insurrection was taking place. But there were fewer than two dozen hijackings before World War II—partly because commercial air travel was so rare. But the post-1945 world left millions of people stranded in countries undergoing the reimposition of colonial regimes, behind Europe’s Iron Curtain, and who were ideological minorities in a politically bipolar Cold War world.

Airline hijackings tended to be political from the get-go, and they nearly always involved hostage-taking to ensure the survival of the hijackers and, increasingly, as television broadcast images and sound across great distances, global attention to a cause. While airlines counseled flight crews to obey hijackers in the interests of passenger safety, these policies also meant that a planeload of civilians became an easy pool of hostages, bargaining chips that compelled governments to negotiate air pirates’ demands.

Those of us who flew regularly in the politically turbulent 1960s were aware of the relative frequency of hijacking. It was a crime that escalated sharply by the end of the decade as, among other things, resistance to United States imperialism and the suppression of colonized people around the world became violent. In the 1960s, there were around 100 hijacking attempts, 40 successful, but between 1968 and 1972, there were 326 of these events around the world. In those four years, ninety hijackers demanded transportation to Cuba, a Communist safe haven that could easily be reached from North America without refueling. In 1970 alone, more than 7,000 passengers were taken hostage around the world. And the risk of harm, while minimal, was ever-present for passengers conscripted into a global narrative: 96 people were killed and 56 injured as armed terrorists took charge of flights originating in almost 50 different countries.

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration enhanced penalties for hijacking, began to put plainclothes federal marshals on many flights in the 1960s, and initiated the airport screenings that have become so rigorous today. But the crime didn’t go away completely. In 2001, there were only five hijackings, but they were deadlier than all previous incidents combined. On September 1 of that year, hijackers deliberately crashed two of those planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth went down in Pennsylvania when passengers fought the hijackers for control of the flight.

On that day, the first of the new semester, New York University history professor Martha Hodes was headed to her 9:30 class. She heard a boom, pausing briefly to see smoke pouring from the North Tower of the World Trade Center and, as she recalls, “an orange ball of fire” bursting through the South Tower. Yet, she had a class to meet, and she met it. An hour later, the class ended: notified that the towers had fallen, as she puts it, Hodes and her students “emerged into a world transformed.”

Most of us who experienced 9/11 were shattered by it. Our worlds were upended. I still remember watching the towers crumble, knowing in my heart that our neighborhood ladder company—men who shopped for the firehouse in the local Key Food—were inside and not coming home again.

But Hodes had a different experience. She began to be troubled by memories—because she, too, had been on a hijacked plane on September 6, 1970. TWA flight 741, seized after takeoff from Tel Aviv, Israel, by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was diverted to an old airstrip near Amman, Jordan. Hodes was twelve at the time, traveling with her older sister Catherine but unaccompanied by an adult family member. She spent a week on the plane—toggling between boredom, new alliances with the other passengers, and writing in her diary.

Those, and more troubling recollections, began to surface. How could she be sure what had happened? What was the status of these new, conflicting memories?

Historians rely on diaries and on the memories of living people when we reconstruct events. But as Hodes began to re-read her childhood account of this harrowing week, she realized that her diary concealed as much as it illuminated. So, she did what any upstanding scholar would do in a similar situation: research.

I’ll let Martha tell her own story, as she has in her new book, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Remembering and Forgetting (HarperCollins, 2023). But let me begin by saying the book does its work. Spinning backward in time, sifting Hodes’s memories to find the truth of her experience, My Hijacking reminds us that our past selves and the people we write about sometimes evade us by refashioning the past.

They beckon us to find them—even as they artfully conceal themselves.

They have their reasons.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

Program notes:

The opening clip is from the CBS Evening News report on the hijackings, broadcast on September 6, 1970: you can listen to the full report. I also invite you to read a brief history of “skyjacking” by The New York Times’s Nicola Clark, and a summary history of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
You can read a little bit about Martha Graham dancer Stuart Hodes, who passed in March 2023 at the age of 98.
Martha Hodes’s mother, Linda Margolies, is also a distinguished dancer and choreographer: you can read a capsule biography of her, nad her work with Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, here.
In September, 1969, the Cuban government soon made their nation less safe for hijackers: Allison Miller recounted that history in April, 2021.
Martha mentions the immediate historical context of the hijacking: the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, sometimes known as the Six-Day War.
Sociologist Sylvia Jacobson, a fellow hostage who interviewed the Hodes sisters sisters after the hijacking, recounted her experiences for the Florida Times-Union here.

If you liked these reflections on writing personal history, you might also like Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice, a conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."

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Born in Kansas City, Leslie Feinberg was raised in a working-class, Jewish home and realized early on that ze was what we would now call gender fluid. Feinberg identified as lesbian and trans, experiencing decades of violence and rejection from peers, family, the police, and even some feminists because of a physical appearance and self that confounded gender norms. But Feinberg also found a home in blue-collar communities, where ze developed a worldview based on radical resistance to all injustice everywhere. Hir journey is fictionalized in a classic 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues.

But Feinberg also represents a vital convergence between queer liberation and Communism. In the mid-1970s, ze attended a demonstration on behalf of dispossessed Palestinians and met members of the Workers World Party, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Communist faction. Membership in the WWP and a life partnership with poet and essayist Minnie Bruce Pratt defined the rest of Feinberg’s life as an activist and citizen.

A deeply gentle and compassionate soul, for fifteen years, Feinberg wrote a column, “Lavender and Red,” for the Workers World, the newspaper of the WWP, and in 1995 became managing editor of the paper. But hir commitment to revolution never wavered. Shortly before Feinberg’s death in November 2014, Leslie and I had a Facebook exchange in which I referred to hir as a “socialist.” Ze was horrified and corrected me instantly: “Claire,” ze responded, “I am a revolutionary Communist!”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Communism is an old tradition among queer people, and if what remains of the Communist Party today were being honest, being queer is an old tradition among Communists. In the first years after the Russian Revolution, sexual liberation was the rule, not the exception. But after Josef Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922, things changed. By the 1930s, the word went out around the world: homosexuals undermined the principal foundation for the world revolution, the Communist family. Gays and lesbians, the CPUSA proclaimed, were not just a security risk because they could be blackmailed, a position that would, ironically, also be adopted by the United States government in 1947. They were degenerates on par with drug addicts, alcoholics, and criminals. That edict lasted, enforced by the occasional investigation and purge of members, until the early 1980s.

And yet, undeterred, radical gays and lesbians in the United States joined the party anyway, inspired by its global vision, and its solidarity with working people, African Americans suffering under Jim Crow, immigrants, and the poor. And as long as they disguised their private lives and pretended to be heterosexual, sometimes through marriages of convenience, they got to plunge into the work that moved them most, hoping perhaps that one day, their own liberation would be on the agenda too.

Not surprisingly, by the time queer liberation arrived in the 1960s, many activists had cut their political teeth on Communist Party organizing. They jumped in to make their own revolution, one that we celebrate every June. This is why I asked Bettina Aptheker, a Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, to talk to us about her new book, Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s, out last fall from Routledge Press. In it, Aptheker sketches the hidden history of queer Communism, illustrated with capsule biographies of some of the party’s most distinguished gay and lesbian activists—as well as her own decision to first hide her sexuality and then, inspired by finding the love of her life and supported by a robust feminist community, leave the party to live openly as a lesbian.

Program notes:

The clip of Leslie Feinberg speaking about solidarity is from a talk ze gave at California State University-Sonoma on April 26, 2008.
You can read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues here.
Interested in the Workers World Party? Check it out!
Bettina namechecks historian Aaron Lecklider: Aaron is the author of Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, (University of California Press, 2021).
Claire mentions Bettina’s father, the historian Herbert Aptheker. You can read a biography of this pioneering political rebel and committed anti-racist in Gary Murrell and Bettina Aptheker, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker (University of Mssachusetts Press, 2015).
Bettina also mentions that she was inspired by Jonathan Ned Katz, who gre up in a Communist family, is the author of the first comprehensive history of gays, lesbians, and trans people in the United States, and was an organizer of a Marxist study group that became a key intellectual influence on the emerging field of LGBT history. You can learn more about Jonathan and his work here.
Claire and Bettina discuss Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay: you can read about Hay’s evolving philosophy of sexual and political liberation in a collection of his writings edited by Will Roscoe, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Beacon Press, 1997).

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Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (Large Print 16pt)

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The government is taking your hard-earned money. Politicians create inflation through big spending, destroying individual initiative and endangering your children’s future. Joe Biden is hiring 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents to kick down your door and steal your hard-earned money!

You’re familiar with these ideas, but they first took the national stage in Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

Funny how Goldwater keeps showing up in this podcast. If you are a dedicated listener, you know he lost that presidential race—badly. But you also know that the Goldwater campaign brought the far right into the Republican party as a force to be reckoned with, and 60 years later, they are running the show. Goldwater also invented an interesting political paradox that Republicans have been refining ever since. It goes like this: “You can’t trust Washington, you can’t trust politicians, but you can trust me.”,

One of Goldwater’s most prominent and dedicated backers, actor Ronald Reagan, felt the political winds changing in 1964. With no political resumé but plenty of experience in movies, television, and giving speeches on behalf of General Electric, Reagan made anti-government politics the keystone of his successful campaign for governor of California in 1966 and became President of the United States in 1980.

As President, Reagan promised to eliminate waste, bureaucracy, red tape, and incompetence—but these were red herrings and covered for other conservative goals: dismantling the welfare state, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and eliminating regulations that protected the public but cost business money.

The government wasn’t smaller when Reagan left office in January 1989—it was bigger--and, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, the federal deficit ballooned from 79 billion to 1.1 trillion. Moreover, despite all the talk about small government, Republican Presidents have historically driven deficit spending and increased the size of government. For example, starting in 2008, Barack Obama added 2 million jobs but cut them in his second term; Donald Trump re-added those 2 million jobs in only four years.

In the 21st century, as the GOP has left libertarian economic principles by the wayside, they have increasingly adopted strident libertarian rhetoric urging right-wing partisans to distrust any government initiative. Whether it is shrinking the welfare rolls, cutting taxes, or eliminating regulations, the message is: Government can’t be trusted.

The anti-government sentiment that Barry Goldwater mobilized and Ronald Reagan rode to the White House on has become a nightmare of conspiracy theories and fantastical accusations about a “Deep State” plot to destroy democracy.

To understand more about the history of anti-government thinking, I picked up Amy Fried and Douglas Harris’s book, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press, 2021.) Amy is the John M. Nickerson Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine and works on public opinion; Doug is a professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland and a scholar of Congress and political media.

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us!

Program notes:

In the opener, I feature clips from a 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign commercial, Ronald Reagan, Congressman Jim Jordan, and Donald Trump.
The accusation that the Biden administration is hiring an army of IRS agents to audit ordinary Americans has been debunked here.
You can read the Cato Institute’s examination of Ronald Reagan’s “Big Government” legacy.
Amy mentions Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as a pivot point for government distrust in the 1990s. In addition, listeners may want to check out Julian Zelizer’s Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Press, 2020).
Listeners know that Claire is obsessed with Phyllis Schlafly, and she brings her up yet again in this episode: you can read A Choice Not an Echo (Regnery Press, 2014. Originally 1964).
Amy mentions William Kristol’s belief that the GOP Congress should firmly reject any policy initiative from the Clinton administration. This view became popularized on the right by right-wing broadcaster Rush Limbaugh. You can read more about Limbaugh’s efforts to drive the Republican party to the right in Zev Chafets, Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (Sentinal, 2010).
Doug mentions the agricultural bailout during the Trump administration: you can read more about that here.
Claire mentions the controversial CNN Trump Town Hall on May 10, 2023.
Claire and Amy discuss the importance of the ERA in mobilizing the distrust of government on the right: you can read about this in Donald G. Matthews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 1990.)
Political scientist Stuart Shapiro has written about Donald Trump’s plan to erode or eliminate the civil service here.
Doug mentions Republican political consultant Frank Luntz. You can learn more about Luntz’s strategic thinking in Candidates, Consultants, and Campaigns: The Style and Substance of American Electioneering (Blackwell, 1988)

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Although creativity sits at the center of many things we value as Americans—art, inventiveness, problem-solving, and all the culture industries—most people would be hard put to define what creativity is. However, to paraphrase Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart in the 1964 pornography case, Jacobellis v. Ohio, we know it when we see it.

Today, being creative is almost seen as a right, a quality that, when we are permitted or able to express it, will lead us to our best and most satisfying life, perhaps even to wealth and recognition.

But as it turns out, creativity has not always been a ubiquitous American value. In fact, Americans rarely talked about creativity until after World War II, when suddenly psychologists became curious about how the industries that had won that war could compete with the Soviet Union without taking on that nation’s totalitarian mindset. Was there a human quality that could be cultivated in a free society, something other than intelligence or the willingness to work hard, something that could be tested, measured, and discovered in otherwise ordinary people that could push the nation to even greater achievements?

That thing, the realized, was creativity: the capacity to look at a problem and solve it in a uniquely effective way or be presented with an entirely new phenomenon and harness the brainpower of multiple people to understand it.

As historian Sam Franklin came to realize in his new book, “The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History” (University of Chicago Press, 2023), what began as a scientific inquiry with scientific hypotheses spread like wildfire through Cold War America. The new American—whether a scientist, a military officer, a kindergartner, or a media professional—was urged to unleash creativity and given methods for doing so. While initially, creativity was the province of men, by the 1960s, feminists seized on creativity as a human right that could only be achieved through what men already had: meaningful work. Perhaps the best expression of the hold creativity had on American culture was expressed in advertising. There, “creatives,” as they were called, were revered for their ability to tap into the psyche with counterintuitive commercials that conveyed feelings rather than information, using humor to remind audiences that their product could solve a problem that hadn’t even been named.

Program notes:

The opening clip from a Jordan Peterson lecture can be found here.
You right want to listen to this classic Alka-Seltzer ad from beginning to end.
Sam addresses the idea that there is something called a “creative class:” a good follow-up here is Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002.)
Sam namechecks science writer Jonah Lehrer: the book he refers to is Imagine: How Creativity Works(Canongate Books, 2012).
One movie that idealizes Thomas Edison as an individualist is Young Tom Edison (Norman Taurig, 1940). One influence on both Sam’s and my thinking on the classic, mid-century Western movie as a paean to American individualism is Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum Press, 1992).
Sam and Claire discuss Betty Friedan’s intervention in discussions about creativity in her book The Feminine Mystique(W.W. Norton, 1963.)
In discussing the evolution of the post-World War II advertising industry, Sam cites Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957).

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In January 1971, the state of Nevada—following an experiment launched by California governor Ronald Reagan—had slashed welfare benefits, catapulting single mothers and their families from poverty to near-starvation. Women who were minimum wage workers in the Las Vegas hospitality, entertainment, and gambling industry—even then, a multi-billion-dollar business—watched their children go hungry.

But Nevada hadn’t reckoned with what these women knew how to do. Migrants from the Jim Crow South, they had faced down tougher bosses and crueler state officials. Although Las Vegas was a racist city it was also a union town. As union members these mothers not only knew they had rights, but they had experience fighting for them.

More importantly, by 1971, there was a social movement for women supplementing their earnings with, or living on, welfare. In 1964, Wiley and Los Angeles mother Johnnie Tillmon had launched a national organization that linked together autonomous chapters of poor mothers to fight for the benefits that had been promised to them by federal law. It was called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO.) In 1967, that movement reached Las Vegas. Rosie Seals and Alversa Beals, using the organizing techniques they had learned in a lifetime of agricultural labor and service work, their wisdom as mothers, and their determination to make life better, started the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization (CCWRO).

So, when Nevada withdrew those welfare benefits, the women of Clark County knew what to do. As one national organizer had explained to Ruby Duncan, the only way to fight back was “to hit them in the pocketbook.”

Duncan, now president of the CCWRO, contacted Tillmon and Wiley for help, and with Maya Miller of the National League of Women Voters, the group planned Operation Nevada, a massive series of demonstrations designed to bring Las Vegas’s famous strip—it’s gambling, entertainment, leisure hotels, and all-night free buffets—to a screaming halt.

Because that strip, as Duncan explained to historian Annelise Orleck two decades later, was the pocketbook. It was, she said, “the main vein.”

Orleck told the story of these women, a few of the thousands of mothers organized in hundreds of welfare rights chapters across the country, in her 2006 book Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. The book is now a PBS documentary directed by Hazel Gurland-Pooler and released in March 2023.

But there are other reasons to return to this book. It describes a part of the African American civil rights movement that many people don’t know—perhaps because it was run, and the battles were fought, by Black women who saw their activism as an extension of their commitment as mothers.

Or maybe we don’t know their story because it’s not the story of oppression and dependency that the enemies of government programs like to tell. The Clark County Welfare Rights Organization called their project Operation Life, and they literally brought their community to life with cultural programs, healthcare, childcare, and job training that they devised, built, and ran themselves.

Yes, the women of Clark County fought for their right to receive welfare, and to not be shamed by it. But they also used their organizing and fundraising skills to create the institutions their community needed to thrive. They lifted themselves out of poverty.

Program notes:

The opening clip features NWRO national organizer George Wiley speaking in 1971 as local welfare rights organizers launched their campaign on Nevada’s state government and hospitality industry. (Courtesy: Hezakaya Newz.)
Caesar’s Palace was built by developer Jay Sarno, and opened on August 5, 1966. It’s “Roman” theme shifted the vibe on the Las Vegas strip, opening the door to a higher level of what Annelise refers to as “the glitzy-glam” of this resort and gambling oriented town.
Annelise mentions the idea of “chain migration,” a term that is often used to describe international immigration as well. In the United States, it usually refers to African Americans leaving the Jim Crow South for northern and western cities. To learn more about this, listeners may wish to read Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Vintage, 2011.)
Annelise mentions African American men coming to Nevada first to work on the Colorado River’s Boulder Dam during the New Deal. Now named Hoover Dam, you can learn more about it here.
To get a sense of Las Vegas’s rise as a city based on entertainment and tourism, listeners may wish to read Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (Vintage, 2002.)
Claire mentions Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward as two intellectuals who were engaged with the National Welfare Rights Movement. One book that came out of the work they did with NWRO is Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Vintage, 1978)
Claire also mentions the contemporary misuse of welfare funds in Mississippi: $94 million have allegedly been misused or are completely unaccounted for.
Annelise mentions the 1998 lynching of James Bird in Jasper, Texas: you can read more about Bird’s tragic and violent death here.
Claire and Annelise discussed Las Vegas employers’ historical use of welfare to lay workers off in the offseason, or to supplement poverty-level wages. As Annelise pointed out, multibillion dollar companies that lobby against raising the minimum wage still rely on a range of federal programs, including Medicaid: Walgreens and McDonalds are the top offenders, but Amazon, Kroger, and Dollar General are close behind.
While the women of Operation Life were denied the resources to limit childbirth, other women—like civil rights giant Fanny Lou Hamer were involuntarily sterilized. You can read about what Hamer and other women called “a Mississippi appendectomy” here.
Annelise reminds us that many of the institutions created by Clarke County’s welfare moms still exist, and that a school was named after Ruby Duncan: learn more about the Ruby Duncan that School Dreamkeepers here.
The portion of Ruby Duncan’s 2017 interview that we end with was originally recorded by the Nevada Women’s History Project and is posted to YouTube.

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This episode begins with an exchange between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, NV, on October 13, 2015. At the time, Sanders was in what turned out to be a close race with Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, a contest that Clinton ultimately won.

While some blamed a primary battle that went deep into the spring campaign season for Clinton’s ultimate loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, there is a better way to look at Sanders’ epic run. No self-declared socialist had made such a mark on a presidential cycle since Eugene Debs won almost a million votes as the Socialist Party of America candidate in the 1920 election. And imagine how well Debs might have done had he not been incarcerated in federal prison.

Sanders was, and is, a lifetime socialist. He was first elected to Congress from Vermont’s at large district in 1990, and he made the jump to the Senate in 2006. He’s very popular where I live in New England. It’s not because those states are socialist, as the Republican Party would tell you, but because he has consistently championed the interests of all working people. “Bernie has my vote,” said one blue collar guy who answered the door in southern New Hampshire when I was canvassing for Elizabeth Warren in 2020. “Whenever there’s a strike around here, he walks the picket line with us.”

Lots of Democratic Senators back labor, of course. But how many mainstream politicians are willing to say that capitalism is broken? That we need the state to safeguard all workers from exploitation by providing a living wage, nutritious food, Medicare for all, safe working conditions, childcare, the right to unionization, affordable housing and food, renewable energy, and free education? That it is an affront to human decency to allow banks, hedge funds, and corporations to poison the environment, turn all labor into piecework, and financialize the basic necessities that all humans need to live?

Perhaps what the 2016 Sanders campaign said most clearly to Americans was: we have choices. In a democratic system, we don’t have to allow corporations to run our lives, make us work harder for less, profit from poverty, siphon those profits upwards, and pay no taxes. And the moments where that clarity has come to more people are coming faster and faster: the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle; the 2011 takeover of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan by Occupy Wall Street that launched a global anti-capitalist protest; a resurgence of Democratic Socialists of America after 2013, that is credited with the emergence of millennial socialism. Many of those young people swelled the ranks of Black Lives Matter, which took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to put racism back on the national agenda.

In all of these movements, activists and intellectuals worked to expand the socialist vision by weaving critical race, feminist, indigenous, queer, labor, and climate politics together to help us learn how to stand as one to make a better—and some might argue, even survivable—world. And yes, Bernie Sanders lost not one, but two, bids to become president—but in the wake of those campaigns, his supporters have mobilized to elect socialists, usually running as Democrats, to local, state, and national office.

One of Karl Marx’s most famous lines from his 1848 blockbuster, The Communist Manifesto, was: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” We do have a world to win, and what we need is a road map.

Which is why I asked my colleague, New School for Social Research political theorist Nancy Fraser, to come on the show to talk about her book, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It, out last fall from Verso Books.

Program notes:

The opening clip is taken from a 2016 exchange between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at the Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, NV, on October 13, 2015.
In the introduction, Claire namechecks Eugene Debs as the first major socialist candidate for President of the United States. To learn more, go to Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 2007)
Nancy talks about the increased role of animal-human virus transfer in global pandemics. The New Yorker’s Matthew Hutson wrote about this phenomenon in September, 2022.
Listeners who are interested in learning more about Karl Polanyi, a strong influence on Nancy’s analysis of contemporary capitalism, may wish to start with The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, first published in 1944.
In the discussion about exploitation, Claire mentions' Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Henry Holt, 2017), which includes a lengthy description of how white farmers were driven into bankruptcy in the 19th century by being lured onto, and destroying, the North American prairie. Nancy also recommends William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991) as a second example of how capital accumulation and environmental degradation work hand-in-hand.
For more on how the exploitation of labor drives white supremacist political movements, listeners may want to read David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991).
Nancy mentions another book, co-authored with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, that explores the ideas we discussed today specifically in relation to feminist politics: Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019).
Listeners interested in how the idea of “essential workers” illuminated the nature of our economy during and after the worst months of the Covid-19 pandemic might want to read Kim Kelly, “Covid 'essential' workers were always important. Don't abandon them post-pandemic,” The New Republic (April 9, 2021)

Do you have ideas about how we can make the world we want to work, live, and love in? Then:

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Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

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It looks like the Dominion trial has been delayed for a day, but your craving for more information about the political right in the United States can be satisfied here. And if you know someone else who would be interested, please:

In the late 1950s, the John Birch Society may have been on the fringe of the Republican Party. Still, it was not an insignificant force in American politics. Gathering the remnants of Senator Joe McCarthy's supporters, white supremacists, libertarians, and former America Firsters under one umbrella, the John Birch Society was playing an active role in American politics only four years after it was founded.

By 1962, Birchers were running for office as Republicans, and some were winning. More often, like other ultra-right organizations that would evolve from the John Birch Society, during campaign seasons, these zealots provided an army of willing labor for far-right Republicans trying to topple the eastern, elite establishment that the Birch-affiliated activist Phyllis Schlafly dubbed "the king makers" in her 1964 self-published book, A Choice, Not An Echo.

Who were the kingmakers? They were the business and political establishment within the GOP, Schlafly charged, who foisted candidates on the people. These soft conservatives, who would later be derided as "squishes," were comfortable with the status quo. Like Democrats, they were soft on communism, spent taxpayer dollars on foreign entanglements, believed in big government, and left Americans vulnerable to crime, immigrants, and the whims of international financial interests.

And in 1964, the Birchers got their presidential candidate: Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Although Goldwater was not a member of the John Birch Society, he certainly sounded like one in his acceptance speech.

Goldwater lost, but the effort to elect him had strengthened ultra-conservatives in the GOP, and they continued to organize.

As a result, Birchers' ideas took hold in the Republican Party in the following decades, and they began to build new conservative institutions. Bircherism became part of the populist Republican insurgency that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, promoted the presidential candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992, strengthened the 2008 presidential bid of libertarian Ron Paul, produced the Tea Party, and elected the Tea Party's Congressional arm, the Republican Freedom Caucus.

Listeners may remember that the Freedom Caucus bent the Republican Party to its will during the contested election of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in January 2023. And we all know that since the 2016 election, Welch's radical ideas have become mainstream among conservatives: isolationism, returning to the gold standard, a government plot to weaken the American people and make them vulnerable to international financial elites, slashing the federal government, using the military against civilians, states' rights, and xenophobia.

Program notes:

You can listen to more of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch Jr.’s speech here; Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech for the 1964 Republican nomination is here.
You can purchase one of the original copies of Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not An Echo (Pére Marquette Press, 1964) online and own a little bit of history.
The Donald Trump clip is from the former president’s 2024 campaign kickoff in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023.
Here is a wonderful biography of Welch by Edward Miller.
Dallek describes the censure of Joe McCarthy in 1954. Here is the record of that moment from the United States Senate; here is a transcript of the proceedings from the National Archives.
Robert Taft was a conservative Republican Senator who worked to rebuild the GOP after the Great Depression and New Deal. You can read a biography of Taft here.
John Birch Society conspiracy theories are legendary in their weirdness, but as Claire and Matt discuss, many have survived in quite similar forms today. You can read more about this in D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014.)
Who was John Birch? T learn more, you can read Terry Lautz, John Birch: A Life(Oxford University Press, 2016.)
As Matt mentions, Robert Welch also wrote a biography of John Birch.
Matt talks about the complexity and contradictions of the relationship between iconic conservative William F. Buckley and the John Birch Society. You can read more about that here.
Matthew also references one of his own articles in Politico.
You can read more about Richard Nixon’s struggles with the John Birch Society here; a more recent article in The New Yorker elaborates on the Society’s lasting influence.
Matt also discusses the Birchers’ focus on law and order campaigns. Go here for a conversation between Jarrod Shanahan and Tyler Wall about the connections between these older campaigns and today’s Blue Lives Matter movement.
For more information about Lawrence ‘Larry’ McDonald, you can read his biography and this article on Politico.
Claire mentions the fact that the John Birch Society exists today: check out how the organization represents itself on its website.

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I have never done two podcasts in a week before today, but rather than describe what I saw yesterday down at Manhattan Criminal Court, I thought I would bring the experience to you—as I heard it and saw it. If you know someone who would be interested, please:

There are views in this episode that, while sincerely held by those who expressed them, aren’t exactly true: please see the fact check below. And listeners—there are interactions and language that aren’t exactly appropriate for all ages. Parents may wish to screen this episode first.

It was April 4, 2023, 10:32 a.m. The unthinkable was happening.

An American president was about to be arrested. On March 30, a grand jury convened by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg voted to indict former president Donald J. Trump on what we learned today were 34 felony charges. On Saturday, March 20, on a stage in Waco, Texas, Trump called on his supporters to assemble in Lower Manhattan on the day of his arraignment to “protest” and “take our nation back.”

So, when the court set the date, I knew I had to report the story.

As it turned out, this demo wouldn’t be good for anyone’s brand but mine: the New York Daily News called it a “three-ring circus.” So I wanted to capture this moment—for the historical record, of course. So, these are the conversations I had.

I’ve also included some pictures of my interlocutors below. Along with a few show notes, in the interest of not platforming conspiracy theories and misinformation, I have included a fact check of things that were said. If you want to see the full grand jury indictment of The People of New York vs. Donald J. Trump, go here.

Show notes (and fact check):

Want to know more about Collect Pond Park? It wasn’t always concrete!
Blacks for Trump is led by Maurice Symonette, an antisemite and former cult leader who is well-known for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation about prominent Black Americans. You can read for about him here.
Long Island’s GOP Congressman George Santos, a serial fabulist, was spotted at the protest. Reports say that Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to speak but was shouted down by counter-protesters: she may have also been a little freaked out by the collection of alte kakers, performance artists, and crackpots who routinely show up at New York demos.
Michael Picard believes that Donald Trump is the president; he is not, and did not “win by a landslide.” Whether Trump helped farmers, as Michel claims, is debatable. Farm subsidies boomed under Trump, but they were “ad hoc and temporary,” according to one source. And in 2019, farm bankruptcies increased by 20%.
Gregory Price claimed that Trump has been charged with money laundering: the 34 counts do not include this crime.He has also not been formally charged with tax evasion or fraud by New York D.A. Alvin Bragg. The Trump Organization was convicted of tax evasion last year.
Counter to Diane’s statement, there is no question about who won the 2020 election; people in the Philippines are not required to present identification when they vote. Alvin Bragg did not promise to indict Trump during his campaign, but he did promise to hold the former President “accountable.” A rumor has circulated on the right since 2015 that there are Russian and Chinese arrest warrants for George Soros: that is untrue. So-called “Soros prosecutors” are not funded by the billionaire himself: they received donations from pro-democracy organizations to which Soros gives money, but does not direct. Diane is also mistaken, like many on the right, about Obama’s “citizen army:” The proposal was not to create a liberal militia, but to establish a reserve health corps of 6,000 medical providers.

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Politicians are trying to legislate what is taught in American public colleges and universities—and they want to enforce their own ideological preferences by firing faculty who disagree. It’s time to take the defense of academic freedom seriously.

As University of Nebraska English professor Julia Schleck explains in her book, "Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism" (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), academic freedom is the linchpin of excellence in higher education, and it relies on the protection of tenure. The erosion of both are one consequence of how higher education has been transformed by the market-based thinking—known as neoliberalism--that pervades 21st century institutions.

But tenure isn’t just threatened by politicians in Florida, Texas, and other states who want to take it away. It’s threatened by the vast number of contingent faculty who don’t have it and who, as a consequence, have no academic freedom. Three-quarters of the personnel teaching in American colleges and universities teach on short-term contracts. They are not, and will probably never be, eligible for tenure.

Although contingent faculty they have free speech they are not entitled to the core principle of academic freedom: judgement of their work by faculty peers—not administrators, politicians, or political appointees. Furthermore, as Schleck explains, academic freedom and free speech are too often conflated in the public mind. Whereas we are all entitled to free speech, except in the rarest of circumstances, only the principle of academic freedom protects professors—their research, their teaching, and their public utterances—from the powerful.

And why should anyone who isn’t a college professor care? Because, as Schleck argues, the Ivory Tower has always been a bad metaphor for what higher education is and does. Knowledge isn’t pure, or separate, from the society in which it exists, and scholars do the messy thinking that benefits everybody.

Program notes:

The opening clip is from a student walk-out and academic freedom protest against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on higher education, held at the University of South Florida on February 23, 2023. The speaker is marine biology professor Christina Richards: you can read her webpage here.
You can read WUSF reporter Bob Barrett’s story about the erosion of tenure at Florida’s public higher education institutions here.
If you would like to learn more about the University of Nebraska’s action against Dr. Courtney Lawton for her protests against the Turning Point USA table, you can go here; to learn more about Turning Point USA, go here.
The adjunct crisis in higher education has been building since the late 20th century, but has escalated dramatically since 2008, particularly in the humanities. If you want to know more, read Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (University of Chicago, 2019).
Interested in learning more about academic freedom? Try this great book by Henry Reichman, Understanding Academic Freedom(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) that explains the concept and contemporary challenges to it.
A key concept in Julia’s thinking is university research and teaching as a “common good”: listeners who want to know more about this idea as a counter to market-based thinking may wish to read Robert Reich’s The Common Good(Knopf, 2018).
Claire and Julia discuss the controversy over University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax; to learn more, you can go to this article in the New York Times and this one in the Philadelphia Tribune.
If you are interested in the relationship between higher education and society, and how neoliberalism shapes both, you can read Davarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), and Kalwant Bhopal and Farzana Shain, eds. Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion (Routledge, 2018).
Claire’s comment that older students are more likely to major in the humanities was drawn from Nathan Heller, “The Decline of the English Major,” The New Yorker (February 27, 2023).

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If you enjoy this podcast, you may want to read Pollitt’s book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador, 2014).

At the beginning of this podcast, you’ll listen to a demonstration: “Abortion saves lives,” one group shouts; “You’re sacrificing the mothers for the children,” another yells.

The battle over women’s bodies has always been given to rhetorical extremes. Think about the imagery—a fetus supposedly writhing with pain and fear in the widely-distributed 1984 anti-abortion propaganda film, The Silent Scream. Meanwhile, pro-abortion demonstrators insist with their own imagery that without legal abortion, women will gouge at their uteruses with coat hangers and knitting needles.

While fetuses experience neither pain nor fear, women did, and do, die without safe, accessible, and legal abortion. How many? Historian Karissa Haugeberg estimates that before 1973 when Roe v. Wade decriminalized the procedure in all 50 states, a fifth to a quarter of all pregnancies ended in abortion. Then, approximately 200 women died every year from a secret, illegal procedure often done by a medical professional. While recorded abortions increased dramatically after legalization, deaths from terminating a pregnancy dropped equally dramatically to fewer than two dozen a year. And as birth control becomes more effective, the rate of abortion has plummeted.

Yet right-wing activists and legislators want a return to a pre-Roe world, one in which effective birth control is less accessible, and women of color are far more likely to die or lose their fertility from an illegal procedure than white women. They imagine a society where pregnant Americans, no matter how young or how conception occurred, will be forced to give birth unless they can make their way to a sanctuary state or are willing to risk prison and death for an illegal abortion closer to home.

In fact, the Dobbs world is more dangerous than the pre-Roe United States, where women and girls of some means, usually white, could go abroad to terminate a pregnancy without penalty. Or they might access what was called “therapeutic abortion,” a legal medical procedure available if the mental or physical health of a woman or girl was judged by a medical professional to be endangered by carrying a pregnancy to term.

Today, in many states, all abortions of viable embryos and fetuses are banned regardless of why are where they occur.

But feminist journalistKatha Pollitt asks: why can’t all Americans admit that abortion is, and should be, a normal event in a woman’s life? Why can’t feminists reclaim abortion for what it is—a common medical procedure that permits pregnant people to take charge of their physical, psychological, and economic health?

An award-winning poet, essayist, and longtime columnist for The Nation, Pollitt made this powerful argument in 2014 in Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, a book I decided to revisit as we anticipate the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs leak, the day we understood that the battle for abortion rights would have to be renewed.

Program Notes:

John Yang’s report on the leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization appeared on the PBS NewsHouron May 3, 2022.
Claire references the anti-abortion propaganda film, The Silent Scream: you can watch it here.
You can find Kristin Haugemann’s discussion of how women experienced abortion immediately before Roe here. For abortion trends over the last 60 years, see Jeff Diamant and Besheer Mohamed, “What the data says about abortion in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, January 11, 2023.
The full story on a 10-year-old girl denied an abortion in Ohio in July 2022 is here, and you can read a second story about a Louisiana woman instructed by the state court that she had to carry to term a fetus destined to die at birth here. Claire also notes that many women denied the right to abort a dying fetus in Dobbs states will risk death from advanced septic shock.
You can listen to CBS News correspondent Fred Graham’s interview with “Mary Doe,” one of the two anonymous plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade, broadcast on January 22, 1973.
Katha argues that women rarely have abortions for acute medical conditions: the data shows that 60% of patients served are having their first abortion, nearly all are in their first trimester, and more than half already have two or more children and are choosing to limit the further growth of their families. A quarter of women will have at least one abortion during the course of their reproductive lives.
Does the United States ask men asked to shoulder the true “cost” of childcare? According to the Good Men Project, “view child support as `extortion’ instead of taking care of their responsibilities to their children. A 2017 government estimate shows that noncustodial parents, the vast majority of whom are men, owed over $114 billion in past-due child support. And while men have done more childcare since the pandemic, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer (March 23, 2023), “mothers performed 52% of child care, while 43% of the responsibility was shared. Fathers reported doing the majority of child care 5% of the time.”
Claire mentions historian Jennifer Holland’s Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020): you can read an interview with Holland here. She also notes that many women don’t know they are pregnant: about 30% of fertile women have periods that are so irregular that a pregnancy can advance well beyond six weeks before it is detected.
Is Salt Lake City, Utah, the porn-watching capital of the United States, as Claire says? That was true in 2009, but according to Pornhub, the top state for porn watching is deep-red Kansas, and the top city.
Katha and Claire discuss the popularity of abortion in the United States: for a study done by the Pew Center immediately after the decision in Dobbs, go here.

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On a flight from Vietnam in April 1975 were three siblings, two boys and a girl, all fathered by different African American soldiers. Their mother, Mae, rightly believed that her children would not only be discriminated against because they were racially mixed but because they were a visible sign of her own, probably necessary, collaboration with the occupiers. These children—Bear, Amy, and Peter—landed in Seattle with their belongings, where they were put on a red-eye flight to Philadelphia International Airport and from there onto a van that dropped them off at a farmhouse near Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Waiting there are Bob and Sheryl Guterl, a white, Catholic, professional couple from suburban New Jersey who had watched the evacuation from afar and already contacted the adoption agency to see if there was a child for them. Bob and Sheryl had a dream, one that they had already embarked on: an interracial family that would enact their progressive principles. These commitments included anti-racism, and zero population growth. Already they have a natural son, Matthew, and his brother, Bug, who was adopted from Korea shortly after Matt was born. They know they want at least two more children. And on that April morning in 1975, Bob and Sheryl will take custody of five-year-old Bear, the same age as Matt.

Bear will be separated from his siblings—for now.

Bob and Sheryl Guterl would add three more children to the family after Bear. Sheryl will give birth to another son, Mark. Next, there will be Anna, also from Korea, whose father was a white American serviceman. And last will be Eddie, from the South Bronx, left stranded by the collapse of his community from the twin epidemics of drugs and poverty.

Bob and Sheryl would raise the family of their dreams in their white house with the white picket fence in their white New Jersey suburb. And all the while, their son Matt—known to other historians and his colleagues at Brown University as Matthew Pratt Guterl—was unconsciously starting to take notes on race and racism. Three decades later, this project would cohere after Bob’s death when Sheryl gave Matt some large, dusty boxes containing the family’s archive. The result is Skinfolk: A Family Memoir (Livewright, 2023), a beautiful and complex book about racial identity, love, and the contradictions of Bob and Sheryl’s dream, listed by the New York Times as one of the 14 books to watch in March 2023.

Program notes:

The title of this episode is from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Because it is often selectively quoted by those who seek to subvert racial justice, why not take a minute and read the whole speech?
The opening sound clip is from a news report on Operation Babylift that aired on KTVU San Francisco in April 1975. For a complete account of this event, you may read Dana Sachs, The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Beacon Press, 2011).
To learn more about American adoptions from Korea, a set of policies now viewed critically by many of those brought to the United States as children, see Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford University Press, 2015). Readers might also be interested in Laura Briggs,Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (University of California Press, 2015)
Matthew Pratt Guterl references the carceral state and the “school to prison pipeline.” To learn more about these ideas, in which people of color are directed towards incarceration by structural racism, read Emma Shaw Crane’s article, “The New Geography of the Carceral State,” Public Books (September 21, 2022) and a University of Michigan research initiative, “What Is the Carceral State?” (May 2020).
Explaining his parent’s political ideals, Guterl mentions Hakim Bey’s theory of immediatism. You can purchase Bey’s book, Immediatism (AK Press, 2001), or you can read an open-source edition at The Anarchist Library.
Guterl also mentions the abolitionist John Brown. You can watch a PBS documentary on Brown here or read W.E.B. DuBois’s classic 1909 biography of Brown. The most recent biography of this activist is by Stephen B. Oates,To Purge This Land with Blood (Echo Point, 2021).
To learn more about the “white gaze,” see George Yancey’s Black Bodies and White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). For an example of the “white gaze” in action, see Ian Frazier’s article in The New Yorker (August 19, 2019) about the display of Black bodies and a public debate between DuBois and white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard.
Guterl references the epigraph of David Levering Lewis’s pathbreaking book about Black cultural history When Harlem Was in Vogue (Penguin Books, 1997; originally published in 1979).

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An important theme of this episode is gossip about powerful men having erotic relationships with other men. I want to be clear that there is no new evidence that proves or disproves sexual insinuations about the men we discuss below: by definition, gossip is a believable rumor that isn’t necessarily factual.

When Joseph R. Welch called for decency in the June 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, it was not just a reference to Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s attack on a younger lawyer. It was another way for Welch to draw attention to the gossip everyone in the room and many in the television audience had heard: that McCarthy’s associates, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, were allegedly in a romantic relationship. And there was yet another rumor well known to those in the chamber that day: that McCarthy, married to prominent anti-communist activist Jean Kerr, not only had had sex with men but was enamored of one or both of his handsome young staffers.

Welch’s challenge to McCarthy seemed to turn the tide against one of the most prominent demagogues in modern American history. In December 1954, the Senate acted against their colleague. A coalition of Democrats and liberal Republicans voted to condemn McCarthy for numerous offenses against the ethics rules and dignity of the Senate.

But McCarthy and Cohn were not the only prominent anti-Communists who gossiped and were gossiped about: unmarried FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover deployed sexual rumors as weapons and, at the same time, seemed to have an unusually close friendship with his second in command, Clyde Tolson. As Beverly Gage and I discussed in Episode 6, the two were often seen double-dating with pretty women—dates that never seemed to result in heterosexual romance or marriage.

As historian Christopher Elias argues in his book Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation(University of Chicago Press, 2021), these three men—Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn—shaped right-wing politics in the second half of the 20th century, using gossip, insinuation, and rumor to intimidate their political opponents, even as their own personal lives were the objects of popular speculation. Arguably, these men also paved the way for the disinformation and lies that pervade today’s political media strategies, as well as the performances of brute masculinity that became a dominant feature of the Trump presidency. And as Elias points out, these tactics didn’t come from nowhere: they were close kin to a 20th-century tabloid and gossip magazine culture that Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn leaked to—and were perpetually threatened by.

Program notes:

Joe McCarthy’s commentary on the “Commiecrat Party” is excerpted from a speech made at a campaign rally supporting Forrest C. Donnell, an incumbent Republican senator from Missouri, in 1950. You can listen to it here.
Read the full text of McCarthy’s accusations against the State Department in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950.
Joseph Welch’s rebuke of McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings can be found here. You may also want to read Andrea Friedman’s account of Democratic homophobia during the hearings in “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 4 (December 2005), 1105-1129.
The Senate’s December 1954 censure case against McCarthy is also worth a read—for what it says and what it insinuates.
To read more about how to interpret the gossip about sexuality as a form of political history, you may wish to read Claire’s article, “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality,

Vol. 15, No. 3 (September 2006), 355-38.

For more on Roy Cohn, you may wish to read Nicholas Von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn (Doubleday, 1988). Donald Trump’s association with Roy Cohn has been documented by the New Yorker’s Marcus Baram in “Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump” (April 14, 2017). You can also watch this documentary.
Benjamin Ivry recently wrote about the connection between Roy Cohn and Barbara Walters in the Jewish Daily Forward (December 30, 2022).
Chris mentions Claire’s book, War on Crime: Gangsters, G Men and the Politics of Mass Culture: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1988).
You can watch a documentary about the official persecution of queer Americans during the Cold War, known as the “Lavender Scare,” or read David K. Johnston’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
For more on Cold War masculinity, see K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War(Routledge, 2004).

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Today, a radicalized Republican party insists that the actual, complex, and often violent American past is not only false but divisive, left-wing, anti-white propaganda. It is not intended to teach the facts of history, GOP firebrands argue, but to indoctrinate helpless children with left ideology. As a result, around the country, much of the historical scholarship that twentieth-century historians fought to get into the high school curriculum is being systematically and forcibly censored.

Seven states, most famously Florida, now ban the teaching of race in public schools, while legislatures in 16 more states are contemplating similar bans. And under the rubric of “parental rights,” Florida has also banned classroom materials that address sex and gender: similar bills are also advancing in 26 other state legislatures. Even classic books are being removed from classrooms and public libraries.

But historians, like librarians, community activists, and high school teachers, are pushing back. A few months ago, a new collection of essays edited by Princeton University historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer hit the bookstores, and readers are snapping it up. In Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (Basic Books, 2022), twenty historians discuss key themes and issues from our national past that the GOP’s right-wing loves to politicize but doesn’t tell the truth about.

Program notes:

You can listen to Amy Goodman’s complete interview with Howard Zinn here and learn more about the impact of A People’s History of the United Society States at the Zinn Education Project website.
Claire mentions “history from the bottom up” in her introduction. This school of history arose in England and the United States at approximately the same time and was heavily influenced by Marxism. To learn more, see Staughton Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Haymarket Books, 2014.)
At the beginning of the interview, Claire mentions two other historians who challenged the patriotic narrative: Gerda Lerner, who jumpstarted the field of women’s history with her book The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (University of North Carolina Press, 1967) and James Loewen, who challenged the textbook industry withLies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press, 1995.)
Julian refers to Donald J. Trump’s patriotic history project, the 1776 Commission, which was created by executive order on November 2, 2021: no professional historian was appointed to the commission.
Kevin brings up Karen L. Cox’s essay about the origins and purpose of Confederate monuments: interested listeners may wish to read Cox’s book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2021.)
Julian discusses Michael Kazin’s essay about socialism in the United States: the idea that the lack of socialism made the United States unusual among industrialized countries originated with sociologist Werner Sombart in his classic Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?(1906.)
Kevin mentions historian of France David Bell and his essay on American exceptionalism: you can hear Bell discuss this essay on Professor Buzzkill’s History Podcast (January 24, 2022.)
Kevin also notes that American exceptionalism has been used differently over time: American Marxists used the concept to explain their lack of success in the United States during the 20th century, and Julian discusses how Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich politicized and manipulated the phrase differently in the 1990s.
Kevin and Claire also discuss how mythic history can have political outcomes and the long-term influence of The Dunning School.
Claire mentions Alan Brinkley’s influential book about World War II as the “Fourth New Deal,” The End Of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Oxford University Press, 1996.)
Julian speaks out against politicians becoming involved with education standards and references the new laws in Florida.
Julian references Eric Alterman’s bookLying in State: Why Presidents Lie -- And Why Trump Is Worse (Basic Books, 2020.)
Kevin refers to Republican denials that they ever had a “Southern Strategy” that sought to bring the South into the GOP by adopting causes associated with massive resistance to racial equality. Interested listeners may wish to read Kevin’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005.)
Claire mentions the controversy over the Advanced Placement African American Studies course in Florida and Lynn Cheney’s attack on the National History Standards in 1994.
Kevin discusses Glenda Gilmore’s essay about the civil rights movement. Listeners who want to know more can read Gilmore’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (W.W. Norton, 2009.)

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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On this episode, my guest is here to help us parse the world of government secrecy—its history, practices, and dilemmas—and how the classification system undermines our democracy. Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and the co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. He’s the principal investigator of History Lab, a National Science Foundation-funded project that applies data science to the problem of preserving the public record and accelerating declassification. Out of that work came a new book, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets (Penguin/Random House, 2022), a book about the vast and dizzying world of national security, from Pearl Harbor to the garages and closets of 21st-century ex-presidents.

If you are trying to decide whether to buy Matt’s book after listening to the episode, you might want to read the review in the New York Times.

Program notes:

Opening clips are from President Richard Nixon's taped telephone conversation with National Security Advisor Alexander Haig, as he learns about the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on JUne 13, 1971; Donald Rumsfeld’s briefing to the press about the state of U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan on February 12, 2002; Jake Tapper’s CNN interview with Chelsea Manning on October 19, 2022; and former President Donald J. Trump’s words on protecting classified information come from a collection of statements complied by the Washington Post on February 11, 2022.
Claire mentions historian Blanche Wien Cooke’s Declassified Eisenhower: A Startling Reappraisal of the Eisenhower Presidency (Penguin Books, 1984.)
Matt and I both namecheck National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden: you can read an account of his journey to becoming a government whistleblower in his memoir, Permanent Record (Picador, 2020.)
Matt notes that one government agency generates a petabyte of secret data every 18 months: a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, or one quadrillion bytes of information.
Claire mentions her interview with historian Kathryn McGarr about Cold War journalism and Washington’s secrets: you can listen to that episode here.
Matt mentions intelligence analyst Sherman Kent: Kent’s 1966 classic, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, was reprinted by Princeton University Press in 2015.
Claire mentions Richard Condon's Cold War thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1959.)

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Today, conservative critics condemn the so-called “liberal media” for being in cahoots with policymakers and politicians—but there was a time when that was a formal, accepted way of doing business. In her new book, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022), University of Wisconsin historian Kathryn J. McGarr takes us into that world—one in which journalists agreed, as McGarr explains in today’s episode, to publish government lies—but not lie for the government; to work to prevent World War III by serving as informal advisors to the powerful, and in return, filtering news to keep the United States safe from nuclear holocaust.

Program notes:

The clip of James Reston discussing Eisenhower and the U-2 overflight is originally from C-Span’s American History TV, June 2, 1995. You can see the whole interview here and learn more about Reston here.
For a lively history of the New York Times that inadvertently highlights its culture of white masculinity, see Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World (Random House, 1966).
Last week, the errant Chinese weather balloon that entered United States airspace sparked an account of the U-2 incident in the New York Times. Francis Gary Powers’ account of the U-2 incident is in Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident (Potomac Books, 2003).
What are the advantages and pitfalls for journalists to learn things “on background?” You can learn more from Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute (November 11, 2021).
What did liberal internationalism mean after World War II? You might want to dig into Elizabeth Spaulding’s The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (University of Kentucky Press, 2006).
To learn more about how female and Black journalists experienced gender and racial segregation in political journalism, take a look at Nan Robertson, The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York (Random House, 1992), and Wallace Terry, Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History (Basic Books, 2007). Terry’s book includes an interview with Ethel Payne, who Kathryn discusses.
Kathyrn also mentions Walter Lipmann, a towering figure in journalism of the period. If you are interested in Lipmann’s views, you can read his Public Opinion: How People Decide; The Role of News, Propaganda and Manufactured Consent in Modern Democracy and Political Elections (1922).
Claire and Kathryn discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962. There is a new international account of this nuclear confrontation by Serhii Plokhy,Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W.W. Norton, 2022).

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Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

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Content warning: Because this episode is about obituary writing, it contains discussions of death and self-harm. It may not be appropriate for everyone.

As I confess in this episode, when I open the newspaper in the morning, I turn to the obituaries first. It’s not because I’m getting older, although I am. It isn’t because I’m morbid, fascinated by death, or even worried about my own exit from the planet. It’s because I’m a historian. Obituaries are integral to my work. Is there a collection of letters and memorabilia I want to peek at? Is this a life that should be in whatever book I am writing?

But also, obituaries are a form of historical writing, 1200-to-1500-word narratives that not only illuminate a life but also often illuminate our century. This is why I asked my friend Clay Risen, an obituaries reporter at the New York Times, to come on the show to talk about obituary writing as a historical genre. Clay is a political historian and a prolific writer. In addition to writing about whiskey, he is the author of The Crowded Hour: Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and the Dawn of the American Century, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History; A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (2014), and The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (2009).

Find out more about Clay and his work here.

Program notes:

The deaths memorialized in the opening waterfall were those of literary giant Toni Morrison, career FDNY firefighter and 9/11 first responder Lawrence Stack, NBA star Kobe Bryant, New York City businesswoman Ivana Trump, Ottawa college student Teslin Russell, Oakland dentist Lily Xu, and David Crosby.
You can read Clay’s obituary of Marion Smith, “the world’s most prolific cave explorer,” here.
For the range of obituaries that appear in the New York Times, you might want to read Marvin Siegal, ed. The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells: A Celebration of Unusual Lives (William Morrow & Company, 1997).
Clay emphasizes that obituaries are historical writing: New York Times editor and reporter Erica Ackerman has created a lesson plan for teachers to assign an obituary as an assignment.
Amy Padnani created “The Overlooked Project,” which addresses the New York Times’ past biases by creating obituaries of people who were not seen as significant by the paper at the time of their deaths. You can read about the project here and listen to Padnani talk about the project here.
Clay’s obituary of Ivana Trump from July 2022 is available here.

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When President George W. Bush spoke the words “Madame Speaker” in his State of the Union address to the 110th Congress on January 23, 2007 he acknowledged one of the biggest changes in American political life since the 19th amendment to Constitution was ratified. Ten weeks earlier under the leadership of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, American voters had swept Democrats back into power after 12 years in the political wilderness.

Looking back on it, the midterm election of 2006 was a turning point. The United States had been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for five years, and it wasn’t going well. In the next two years Americans would experience three historic events: a financial meltdown of unprecedented scope, and a presidential campaign that would elect the first African American president, Barack Obama. And after Obama was elected, the populist Tea Party would be born, pushing the GOP even further to the right.

But on the evening of January 23, 2007, that was all in the future, and all eyes were on Nancy Pelosi. An eight-term Congresswoman from San Francisco and a former House Whip, Pelosi had been chosen by the Democratic Caucus as the first woman Speaker of the House three weeks earlier.

Pelosi also knew when it was time to give way to the younger, more diverse generation of leaders who she herself had promoted in the party. In 2018, faced with a challenge to her speakership by seven Democrats, Pelosi agreed to support term limits in the leadership, and step back in 2022 when she would be 82 years old. She kept that promise in December 2022, after limiting the midterm backlash and ceding only a four-vote margin to the GOP in the House. As the Republican party led itself through 15 agonizing votes to elect California Congressman Kevin McCarthy as their speaker, those of us who were watching often saw Pelosi at the elbow of a new Democratic Leader, New York’s Hakeem Jeffries, counting votes while Democrats mercilessly, sometimes merrily, and with perfect discipline, watched the GOP circus play out.

So, there was no more perfect time to ask my friend John A. Lawrence, a historian and career Capitol Hill staffer, to come on the show to talk about his new book, The Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi's Speakership, 2005–2010 (University of Kansas Press, 2022.) John had 30 years of experience on the Hill when, as he puts it in our conversation, he was “traded” to Pelosi in 2006 on the brink of her historic speakership to serve as her chief of staff—a position he held for eight years.

Program Notes:

Claire begins with a clip from President George W. Bush’s sixth State Of The Union Address to a joint session of Congress, broadcast by MSNBC (with commentary from Brian Williams and Chris Matthews) on January 23rd, 2007.
John Boehner’s remarks on January 3, 2007, as he handed over the gavel, can be heard here.
In her introduction, Claire refers to Molly Ball’s Pelosi(Henry Holt, 2020) and her interview with Ball in February 2021 in Political Junkie.
Lindsey McPherson reported Nancy Pelosi’s deal to enact term limits for Democratic leadership positions in Roll Call on December 12, 2018.
John has written about how his Ph.D. in history enhanced his career in politics in “A Historian on the Hill,” Perspectives on History, September 1, 2013.
Democrat George Miller, John’s first boss in Washington, represented CA-7 in Congress, and was elected in 1974 as one of the “Watergate Babies,” which John has also written about. He was also famous for running a house where other Democrats boarded when they were in Washington.
Claire mentions a series of books called “We Were There,” novels for kids that tell American history from a kid’s point of view: check them out here.
Claire got her figures on women in Congress from the Pew Research Center and the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute.
When John mentions TARP, he is referring to the Troubled Assets Relief Program, established by Congress under the Obama administration and intended to “to help stabilize the U.S. financial system, restart economic growth, and prevent avoidable foreclosures” after the 2008 financial crisis. When he mentions the “health care bill” he is referring to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or what we now know as Obamacare.
Claire’s snarky response to Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership—that she is heading out to buy a head of lettuce—refers to the British tabloid, the Daily Star, putting a livecam on a picture of Prime Minister Liz Truss and a head of lettuce to see which one would be finished first. It was Liz Truss.

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After he wrote an article about conspiracism in both political parties on December 14, 2022, I asked my friend Ryan Girdusky to come on the show to discuss why conspiracy theories have infected our electoral system. A conservative media and messaging expert, Ryan has worked as a journalist, a campaign consultant, a Super PAC organizer, and a television pundit. He’s also the author, with Harlan Hill, of They’re Not Listening: How The Elites Created the National Populist Revolution (Bombardier Books, 2020).

As importantly, Ryan has friendships as diverse as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ann Coulter, and, well, me. Ryan and I disagree about many things regarding the national political agenda, as you will learn if you peruse his Substack, The National Populist Newsletter. And yet, I always find our dialogue useful—mainly since it helps me listen more carefully to a broad range of political voices that today’s media environment makes easy to ignore.

Program notes:

Read a profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene by The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro here, and watch Greene’s February 4, 2021, speech on YouTube.
As Ryan points out, polling shows that trust in institutions hit an all-time low in 2022: see Jeffrey M. Jones, “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low,” Gallup.com, July 5, 2022.
Ryan mentions Charles Murray’s theory of “the great sort:” this idea comes from Murray’s book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum, 2013).
The account of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that Ryan namechecks is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign (Crown, 2017).
Hillary Clinton accused Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein of being Russian assets in October 2019 on David Plouffe’s podcast “Campaign HQ.” They both deny it.
As Ryan says, on January 31, 2019, Rachel Maddow imagined Russian President Vladimir Putin attacking the power grid in the Dakotas during subzero winter temperatures.
Ryan mentions Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s attempt to overturn her election loss: on December 9, 2022, she filed a series of lawsuits, two of which were eventually heard in court. Lake failed to overturn the election.
Claire and Ryan had an exchange about why George Soros is targeted by the right: Soros was most recently accused by Fox News of giving $131 million to liberal media outlets between 2016 and 2020. According to CNBC, Soros’s nonprofit gave $140 million “to advocacy organizations” in 2021 alone, on top of personal donations of $171 million.
Discussing Americans’ retreat from their communities, Ryan cites a landmark sociology study, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000.) You can read about the book, and access the data it is based on, here.
Republican conservatives based much of their post-war political strategies on community building. Before Claire interviewed Ryan, she had just finished a podcast recording with historian Robin Morris about her book, Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (University of Georgia Press, 2022). You can listen to that episode of “Why Now?” here.
Ryan refers to policy decisions towards China in the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations that cost American jobs. Listeners who want to learn more might want to read Ramon H. and Michel C. Oksenberg, Eds., Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Are you puzzled about why Ryan believes George W. Bush is the worst American president? Then, you may wish to read Doug Bandow’s “Righteous Anger: The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush,” The Cato Institute, December 11, 2003.
You can listen to Rudy Giuliani’s accusations of election fraud delivered at Four Seasons Total Landscaping on November 7, 2020, here. There was no systematic voter fraud in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election: investigators for the Associated Press found only 26 cases of illegal voting in Pennsylvania among less than 500 nationwide.
Answering Claire’s question about antisemitic conspiracy theories, Ryan mentions accusations against the minister and MSNBC political Al Sharpton based on his time as an organizer in New York City. The riot Ryan refers to was in Crown Heights on August 20, 1991. It was triggered by the accidental death of a Black child, Gavin Cato, and accusations that he died because a Jewish community ambulance had failed to treat him. In addition, Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death by a protester in three days of violence amid accusations that he was targeted because he was Jewish. Sharpton used the phrase “diamond merchants” in a speech and later apologized for inflaming the protests. While Sharpton played a prominent role in those three days of violence, it was Jesse Jackson who used the phrase “Hymietown” to characterize New York City. Jackson apologized for this during his 1984 presidential campaign.

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Join me as I talk to Robin Morris, a historian at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia about her book, Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (University of Georgia Press, 2022). Beginning with the African American club women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women, Robin shows us how these Black women lost their organization and the party to an ambitious cadre of white women who, in turn brought their brand of Republican conservatism to the Sunbelt South. Along the way, this “New Right” made Southern resistance to integration, sexual censorship, and populism not just respectable, but as American as apple pie.

Program Notes:

President Richard Nixon’s advice that aspiring politicians “choose the right wife” is taken from "A Visit with the First Lady," a one-hour special report by ABC News correspondent Virginia Sherwood, which aired on September 12, 1971. You can listen to the whole show here.
When either Robin or I refer to the “southern strategy,” we are talking about a plan that began as early as Herbert Hoover’s “Lily White” campaign in 1928 for Republicans to win national elections by wooing white voters in the South. Listeners might be interested in Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields’ book, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics(Oxford University Press, 2021).
One excellent account of how Black southerners lost the right to vote in the former Confederate states after 1877 is Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
I noted how few white women in Georgia voted for Stacy Abrams, and asked Robin if this was a legacy of the women’s political organizing that turned Georgia into a Republican-dominated state by the 1970s. For more on this topic, see Karen Attiah, “White Southern women are holding us back,” Washington Post, November 11, 2022.
Robin mentions the critical of African American women’s political clubs in maintaining a Black presence in southern politics. For more on the central role of Black women in American politics, see Martha Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic Books, 2020).
Robin discusses the importance of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign to a conservative takeover of the GOP. Listeners might also be interested in the California version of this story, recounted by Lisa McGirr in Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right(Princeton University Press, 2001).
The context for the growth of the GOP in Georgia was the large number of white people moving to the south for work, and the subsequent expansion of segregated suburban communities. Interested listeners might want to read Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South(Princeton University Press, 2006).
Robin mentions Operation Lend an Ear: she gave a whole talk about this Republican recruiting effort at Emory University on September 20, 2020. You can listen here.
In discussing the importance of Atlanta to modern African American politics, Robin namechecks Maurice J. Hobson’s The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta(University of North Carolina, 2019).
Robin also mentions a television miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly, “Mrs. America” (FX, 2020). You can binge it here.
The Phyllis Schlafly audio clip was taken from a debate between Schlafly and Betty Friedan, ABC’s Good Morning America on January 28, 1976. Go here to listen to the full debate.

Robin and I discussed the importance of the mailing list to the rise of the New Right. You can read more about that in Chapter 2 of my most recent book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020).

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Brittney Griner follow-ups:

At the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb asks readers to think about how race and racism operate in American foreign policy. Brittney Griner’s captivity had such power in part, Cobb says, because “inequality, or even the appearance of inequality, is not only a liability at home but an impediment in foreign affairs. The irony is that Putin, in the most cynical way possible, has demonstrated that Black lives really do matter, by highlighting just how much you can achieve by placing one in jeopardy.” (December 17, 2022)
What should Griner’s unjust captivity in Russia teach us? The United States is also ruining lives by incarcerating thousands of people yearly on minor drug charges, and in conditions that are inhumane. “There’s plenty to be outraged about concerning Griner’s treatment and plenty more to celebrate now that she is free. But it’s striking how aptly her conditions could describe those in the U.S.,” New York magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice points out. “Poorly compensated labor, overcrowding, squalid housing, solitary confinement, mental stability pushed to the breaking point, mounting hopelessness — all par for the course in the land of San Quentin and Parchman Farm. (December 16, 2022)

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In this episode, I welcome my friend and New School colleague, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, to join me in a conversation about the history of exercise culture in the United States. Her new book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023), tracks the history of Americans’ investment in fitness.

Taking her readers from late nineteenth-century performances of bodybuilding through today’s glittering gyms, elite studio classes, celebrity instructors, and extreme sports, Petrzela—a scholar, journalist, and podcaster who has a not-so-secret life as an IntenSati leader—both explores an American obsession with fitness and health that is, at the same time, out of reach for so many.

Program notes:

The opening sound clip of Jack LaLanne was taken from the first episode of his home exercise television show, which debuted on September 28, 1953. You can watch and listen to the whole show here. Read more about Jack’s path to fitness and the movement he started in The Jack LaLanne Way to Vibrant Health (Prentice-Hall, 1961).
As Claire mentions in the introduction, health expert Sylvester Graham was a prolific author whose beliefs encompassed the consumption of whole grains and the practice of chastity. You can learn more about his theories in Stephen Nissenbaum’s Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform(Praeger, 1980). And consider exploring the theories of John Harvey Kellogg, whose Battle Creek Sanitarium became ground zero for the breakfast cereal industry, in Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek(Vintage: 2018).
Natalia mentions the origins of the “fit body” in popular performances known as “freak shows”: learn more about the history of these turn-of-the-century events in Gary Cross, Freak Show Legacies: How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
While discussing Teddy Roosevelt’s promotion of physical fitness and its relationship to strengthening and perpetuating the “white race,” Natalia namechecked Gayle Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917(University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Natalia and Claire discuss the history of tensions surrounding women’s sports, organized athletic competition, femininity, and female sexuality: listeners who want to dig into this topic should check out Susan Cahn, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women's Sport(University of Illinois Press, 2015).
Natalia discusses the excitement of writing a history of something that has been a part of her life but notes that it has challenges too. Listeners who want to follow up on what it means to write such a history might want to explore the essays in Claire Potter and Renee Romano, Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back(University of Georgia, 2012).
Learn more about Joseph Pilates in John Howard Steele, Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy (Long Leaf Press, 2020), and about yoga in Ramesh Bjonnes, A Brief History of Yoga: From Its Tantric Roots to the Modern Yoga Studio(Innerworld Publications, 2018.)
Jane Fonda discusses her public embrace of fitness and the creation of her workout videos in chapter fifteen of her memoir, My Life So Far(Random House, 2005).
Natalia namedrops Michelle Goldberg’s book on the history of yoga in the United States, The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West(Vintage Books, 2016).
Claire asks Natalia how Fit Nation relates to her first book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Natalia credits Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor as a historian who shaped her thought about race, class, and consumer culture: to read more about concept of “predatory inclusion,” you can read Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership(University of North Carolina, 2021)

Short takes:

This week’s primary social media news was Elon Musk de-platforming six journalists—who cover him—from Twitter. It was stunning and led to a massive jump in my followers on Mastodon and Post: I suspect this was true across the board because Mastodon always gets a little janky when volume spikes. But as Jason Abbruzzese, Kevin Collier, and Phil Helsel noted at NBC.com, what happened next was even more shocking. Musk joined a Twitter Space devoted to talking about the incident “before an audience of more than 30,000 listeners,” snapped at everyone, and left. Minutes later, Twitter Spaces was disabled for all users. Later, Musk tweeted: "we're fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow." The guy has a bad case of fuckingnutsitis. (December 16, 2022)
How do intelligent people spend their twenties getting some of the best educations the United States offers but with few prospects for employment in the work they were trained to do? At Jacobin, historian Hannah Leffingwell breaks it down for you. As she argues, academic life is not unlike a cult. “Lots of people at the bottom, paying for trainings and working for free,” Leffingwell writes, “sacrificing more and more of their lives to prove their loyalty to the organization; and a small handful of people at the top, reaping the benefits, perpetuating an `illusion of hope’ that those at the bottom can succeed too if they just work hard enough.” (December 13, 2022)
I re-subscribed to The Atlantic just to read this profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene by Elaina Plott Calabro. “She did as she was supposed to do, graduating from South Forsyth High and then packing up and moving an hour and a half away, to Athens, for four years at the University of Georgia,” Calabro writes, tracing Greene’s evolution from a fairly ordinary, upper-middle-class existence in a Georgia suburb to one of the whackiest of all whack jobs in Congress. But Calabro emphasizes one thing: she’s smart. And that’s why she’s so dangerous. (December 5, 2022)

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In this episode, I talk to Yale University historian Beverly Gage about her new biography of J. Edgar Hoover, just out from Viking Press, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century." A meticulously researched and beautifully written book over ten years in the making, G-Man has already received praise from readers as different as Harvard historian Jill Lepore and former FBI Director James Comey. Looking for a holiday gift for that special political junkie in your life? Read a review here.

Program notes:

The opening clip is from a newsreel that features FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testifying before the Senate Crime Investigation Committee in January 1951. You can listen to the full clip here.
Claire mentions earlier biographies of Hoover: Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (Free Press, 1987); Athan Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Ivan R. Dee, 1991); and Curt Gentry,

J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (W.W. Norton, 2001).

The FBI has established its own site about J. Edgar Hoover. You can look at Hoover’s own FBI dossier at the FOIPA digital reading room, The Vault.
Beverly mentions Hoover’s enormous popularity with Americans: in 1954, a Gallup poll affirmed this. Jack Levy’s review of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century in The Atlantic (November 22, 2022) picks up on this point.
Claire and Bev discussed the files on influential Americans that Hoover kept in his office, which were said to give him enormous power over elected officials. You can learn more about this history by watching “The Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover Film,” directed by Jerry Kupcinek, available on Turner Classic Movies.
Beverly generously mentions Claire’s work on the FBI, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers, 1998) and “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 15 no. 3 (September 2006).
Hoover may or may not have blackmailed the subjects of those files, but he did keep an “enemies list.” You can learn more about this in a February 14, 2012 episode of NPR’s Fresh Air.
Beverly makes the point that Hoover sometimes investigated extremists on the right such as the John Birch Society. Did you know that the JBS not only still exists, but is thriving in the current political climate? You can read more about the organization and its history in Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, The John Birch Society and the Revolution of American Conservatism(University of Chicago Press, 2022.)
The Kappa Alpha fraternity, which shaped Hoover’s young manhood and encouraged his racism, also became a resource for recruiting G-Men. It still exists, and you can read more about its history here.
In discussing Hoover’s sexuality, Beverly discusses the “Lavender Scare,” the purging of homosexuals from government jobs, which began during World War I and escalated in the 1950s. David K. Johnson has wrotten a book about this episode, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. At Notches blog, Christopher Elias has also written about “J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the “Sex Deviates” Program.” (June 21, 2016) Journalist James Kirchuck also warns that homophobia is homophobia, even when directed at Hoover. (Politico, February 13, 2019.)

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A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism

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In Episode 5, I talk to Slate’s legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick about her new book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Penguin/Random House, 2022). In this episode, we discuss women’s resistance to Donald Trump, Supreme Court ethics, the recent Hobby Lobby leak, Ginni Thomas, and more.

Program notes:

Listen to Anita Hill’s complete opening statement about being sexually harassed by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, made before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 11, 1991.
You can hear Alabama Senator Howell Heflin’s hostile question here.
For more about the Clarence Thomas hearings, consider Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson’s book, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas(Houghton Mifflin 1994). Hill tells her own story in Speaking Truth to Power (Doubleday, 1997.)
In the introduction, I quote from Lawrence Tribe’s opinion piece, “Clarence Thomas and `Natural Law,’” New York Times, July 15, 1991.
When Dahlia says: “Why can’t we force a hearing on Merrick Garland?” she is referring to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, a seat that Donald Trump filled with conservative Neil Gorsuch. Some have argued that this action on McConnell’s part further politicized the court.
Dahlia name-checked Adam Cohen, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America(Penguin Press, 2020), Ian Milhiser, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America(Columbia Global Reports, 2021), Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (Yale University Press, 2022), and Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court(The New Press, 2022).
If you want to learn more about Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General who was fired because she refused to enforce Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim ban, check out Ryan Lizza’s account of this event in The New Yorker, May 22, 2017.
Dahlia mentions Rebecca Traister’s writing about women and social movements: one book that complements many of the themes in this podcast is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger(Simon and Schuster, 2018).
Dahlia also mentions the ongoing women’s protests in Iran: you might want to read Robin Wright’s article about the origins of those protests, “Iran’s Protests Are the First Counter-Revolution Led by Women,” in the New Yorker, October 9, 2022.
Learn more about the attack on Charlottesville on August 11 and 12th, 2017, by listening to historian Nicole Hemmer’s personal account of the event in her six-part podcast, A12.
Dahlia and I discussed a November 19, 2022, New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker that links Associate Justice Samuel Alito's 2014 leak about the Hobby Lobby decision to a broader pattern of Christian influence on the Court.
In our conversation about corruption and the Supreme Court, Dahlia also mentioned Linda Greenhouse’s recent article in The Atlantic, “What in the World Happened to the Supreme Court?” November 14, 2022.

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The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America

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When I was a kid in the 1960s and `70s, I occasionally accompanied my mother to the post office in the Philadelphia suburb where we lived. While Mom waited in line, I would slide over to a corner of the bulletin board next to the service windows that housed the FBI’s Most Wanted posters. And there they were—Angela Davis, a Black philosophy professor from the University of California, on the run as an accessory to a murder committed in a courthouse during a hearing for Soledad Brother George Jackson, as well as white women in the Weather Underground—Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, Judith Clarke, and Cathy Wilkerson.

In different ways, all these women were grown up versions of me. They were children of privilege--they were middle-class, sometimes educated in private schools, alumnae of elite colleges, holders of advanced degrees from prestigious schools—who had turned their backs on “the establishment” to try to end the war by fighting their own government. They offered an example of empowered womanhood at a moment when feminism had not yet reached into my life.

I loved them.

Of course, I didn’t know them either. I just felt like I did—Wilkerson had gone to my parents’ college, Swarthmore, and Boudin was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, a campus I passed every day. Nor was I old enough to absorb the ramifications of how they had chosen to struggle against the twin injustices of racism and imperialism. But I imagined them as the warriors against an unjust war in Vietnam and police violence: other people were talking or organizing non-violent protests, but these women were doing something about it.

Many years later, after I became a historian, I came to know Boudin a little bit, as well as her son Chesa, and it was only then that I fully understood both the principles they had stood up for, and the residual pain that reverberated from the violence the Weather Underground had embraced. But I also came to understand how activists like Davis, Boudin, Dohrn and her partner Bill Ayers, Wilkerson, and Clarke had never wavered in their struggle against racism. Instead, they had rechanneled their activism into contemporary struggles: mass incarceration, AIDS, children’s rights, and the liberation of Palestine.

In his podcast “Mother Country Radicals,” Zayd Ayres Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s eldest son and a professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University, tells the Weather Underground’s story—and muses about what the next generation inherited from their parent’s radical politics.

Program Notes:

The news item about the Capitol Bombing on March 1, 1971, was from the March 2 edition of ABC News with Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner: you can listen to the whole report and reports of two other Weather Underground bombings here.
The documentary about the movement that Claire references in her introduction is Weather Underground: The Explosive Story of America’s Most Notorious Revolutionaries(Sam Green and Bill Siegal, 2002).
You can hear the complete Declaration of a State of War by the Weather Underground’s Bernardine Dohrn here and read about the work she did after coming up from underground at the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law here.
Weather Underground was a splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society. For an introduction to the group’s history, consider Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle’s Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History(Hill & Wang, 2009), or an insider account by Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS(Vintage, 1974).
Weather Underground was part of an international radical movement, as historian Jeremy Varon explains in Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press, 2004).
Black Panther Jamal Joseph is now a writer, theater producer and professor at Columbia University. Read more about his work, and its connection to his early activism.
You can learn more about the murder of Panther leader Fred Hampton from Shaka King’s 2021 bio pic, Judas and the Black Messiah, now streaming on Amazon.
For a look back at the police murder of 10 year-old Clifford Glover in Queens, New York, go here.
When the 11th street townhouse blew up on March 6, 1970 it was a big story: Douglas Robinsin of the New York Times covered it here, and for a more recent reflection by Robert Rosen at The Village Voice, go here.
Zayd mentions Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver as a Weather Underground ally: you might want to read Cleaver’s 1969 memoir, Soul on Ice.
For a contemporary account of the 1981 Brinks robbery, go here.
Follow up what you learned in this episode with memoirs by Bill Ayres, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Cathy Wilkerson.
Thai Jones, who worked on “Mother Country Radicals” tells his own family’s story in A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience Tthe Free Press, 2004)

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In the last episode, we discussed the aspirations and limitations of the 19th-century Black freedom movement; this week, Black and white Progressives imagine a twentieth century without racism. My guest is Victoria W. Wolcott, professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo and author of Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement(University of Chicago Press, 2022). In this new take on twentieth-century interracialism, Wolcott recreates a world of prefigurative politics that would set the stage for the social movements of the post-war era—not just the Black civil rights struggle but all the liberation movements that arose from and alongside it.

Program notes:

The Freedom Singers’ performance of "We Shall Not Be Moved" was recorded at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, and appears courtesy of the United States National Archives and Records Administration. You can listen to the whole song here.
You can learn more about prefigurative politics in Carl Boggs, Jr.,

“Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers' Control,” Radical America 11 (November 1977) and “Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power,” Theory & Society no. 4, No. 3 (Fall); and D.K. Leach, “Prefigurative politics,” Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

As Claire and Victoria discuss, utopianism has a long history in the United States: read about the philosophy’s links to racial justice in Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing(NYU Press, 2013). For major figures discussed in the show, see Douglas F. Dowd, "Robert Owen, "Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Richard Gunderman "Robert Owen, born 250 years ago, tried to use his wealth to perfect humanity in a radically equal society," New Haven Register, May 11, 2021, and Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, Eds., The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, (Beacon Press, 1971).
For more on the Black cooperative movement, see Irvin J. Hunt, Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and Jerry W Dallas, “The Delta and Providence Farms: A Mississippi Experiment in Cooperative Farming and Racial Cooperation, 1936-1956,” Mississippi Quarterly v. 4 (1987).

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Living in the Future adds to the history of the “long” civil rights movement: Claire mentioned Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s prize-winning article, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," The Journal of American History, v. 91, no. 4 (2005). Claire also mentioned Hall’s most recent book about race and feminism in the south, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
Victoria also discusses the importance of Pauli Murray to the long civil rights movement. You can read more about Murray in Rosalind Rosenberg’s Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray(Oxford, 2017).
A primary source that would help you explore the Brookwood project is a book published by the American Federation of Teachers, Local 189, The Place of Workers' Education in the Labor Movement: Fifth Annual Conference of Teachers in Workers' Education at Brookwood, February 24-26, 1928 (Brookwood, 1928).
Claire and Victoria focused in on the chapter about Father Divine and his movement. You might want to check out Jill Watts, God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (University of California Press, 1992). In this section, Victoria also mentions Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America(Vintage, 2003).
Noting the radicalism of the pre-war movement for racial justice, Victoria mentioned Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (W.W. Norton, 2008) and Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
You can read Victoria’s article about Floria Pinkney, "Networks of Resistance: Floria Pinkney and Labor Interracialism in Interwar America." The Journal of African American History v. 105, no. 4 (2020).

Short takes:

Abortion was on the ballot in five states—and abortion won! Makes me wish they had let us vote on it years ago. As Melissa Quinn writes at CBS News, “Buoyed by the defeat in Kansas of a proposed constitutional amendment removing the right to an abortion from the state constitution, other state lawmakers and activists are already laying the groundwork for ballot initiatives in more states in 2024.” (November 9, 2022)
Donald Trump was the biggest loser on the night of November 8, writes Alex Shepherd at The New Republic. “But Republicans also have a dilemma,” Shepherd continues. “There does seem to be a Trump effect in elections: When Trump is on the ballot, turnout is gigantic—for both parties. When he isn’t, Republicans suffer. If Trump were to somehow lose the Republican nomination in 2024, it’s highly likely he would claim fraud—or encourage his voters to stay home.” (November 9, 2022)
And who won the midterms? Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, says political guru David Frum at The Atlantic. But “If DeSantis is in the game now, he has to play now,” Frum warns, and stop ignoring the chief barrier between him and the GOP nomination in 2024. “Somebody who seeks to replace Trump atop the Republican Party cannot pretend Trump is not there. Trump is a huge personality who makes every contest a battle of personalities. Refusing to engage is not an option because he will engage whether his target likes it or not. There’s no choice except to engage in turn.” (November 9, 2022)

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In Episode 2 of “Why Now?” Kerri Greenidge talks to us about her new book, The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022.) Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University and an expert in abolitionism and 19th-century African-American history. She is also the author of the prize-winning biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (W.W. Norton, 2019.)

As in the Trotter biography, in The Grimkés, Greenidge reopens what many historians believed to be a well-known story about white women and the social movement to abolish slavery in the United States. But in The Grimkés, this talented scholar and storyteller significantly revises historian Gerda Lerner’s 1967 account of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, white sisters from a South Carolina slaveholding family who became abolitionists.

Unlike Lerner, Greenidge addresses the limits of the white Grimkés’ vision for Black freedom and their unwillingness to confront the truth of their own family history. But the book is also the story of the Black Grimkés, their path to freedom and influence, and their leadership role in the post-slavery era. Centering Henry Grimké’s Black children, their families, and their descendants in a family story that stretches for over a century, Greenidge demonstrates the strength of the generations coming out of slavery and the limits of elite politics, Black and white.

Greenidge stresses the simultaneous and rich history of Black abolitionism in the antebellum years and the anti-Black violence that many Northern white activists failed to address—even when it occurred right outside their doors.

The Grimkés asks crucial questions about the intellectual and political limits of abolitionism, the forms of racism that accompanied and evolved from enslavement, and what it cost the Black descendants of white, slaveholding families to make ambitious new lives in the decades after Emancipation.

Program notes:

Interested in buying the book? Read a review of The Grimkésby Michael P. Jeffriesin the New York Times. (October 29, 2022)
The opening music is excerpted from “Song of the Abolitionist,” performed by the Dutchess Antislavery Singers, and initially published in The Liberator on December 31, 1841. The song was written by The Liberator’s publisher, Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.
In addition to Gerda Lerner’s book, you might want to read Mark Perry’s Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders (New York: Viking Press, 2001.)
Listeners might also be interested in biographical material about Francis James Grimké in Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper’s The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007.)
How did white women understand their participation in abolitionism as a racial task? See Mary Catherine Cain, “Rhetorics of Race and Freedom: The Expression of Women's Whiteness in Anti-Slavery Activism,” Studies in Popular Culture Vol. 29, No. 2 (October 2006), pp. 1-19.
Listeners can learn more about the crucial role that free and enslaved Black women played in the fight to end slavery in Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020.
Claire and Kerri drew parallels between Henry Grimké fathering Black children with an enslaved woman and Thomas Jefferson’s own Black descendants, referencing historian Annette Gordon Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1998.)
Listeners can further explore Angelina Weld Grimké's significance as an American modernist writer in Maureen Honey’s book Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.)

Short Takes:

It looks like the election-denying, Trump-fluffing conspiracy theorist Kari Lake may become Arizona governor. The news from that state is not all bad, though, as Sam Brodey reports at The Daily Beast: “One Democratic operative from Arizona, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said a Hobbs win is still possible, but predicted that Democrats’ ceiling on November 8 might consist of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) winning re-election and Adrian Fontes defeating the 2020 truther Mark Finchem in the contest for secretary of state.” (November 2, 2022)
Half of the people who work at Twitter (that’s 3700 tech workers) will be unemployed by Friday. According to Edward Ludlow and Kurt Wagner at Bloomberg News, “Layoff lists were drawn up and ranked based on individuals’ contributions to Twitter’s code during their time at the company, the people said. The assessment was made by both Tesla personnel and Twitter managers.” The remaining employees will no longer be permitted to work remotely. However, since Musk’s plan seems to be to work them like mules because he paid too much for a platform that has only had two profitable years in its entire existence, the survivors may soon be streaming for the exits too. (November 2, 2022)
If you are in the Boston area, drop by the Schlesinger Library to see the new exhibit about Roe v. Wade, curated by legal historian Mary Ziegler. Jenny Schuessler of the New York Times writes that the exhibit “aims to break down any simple understanding of how the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade has shaped America.” It also depicts an honest debate about reproductive rights and shows how the abortion debate implicates other aspects of human existence. As Schuessler reports, “The exhibition draws deeply from a huge collection acquired last year from the Sisters of Life, a Roman Catholic order founded in 1991 by Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor of New York to `promote life’ and discourage abortion and euthanasia.” (November 2, 2022)

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In this debut episode of “Why Now?” I interview Daniel Laurison, Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, who studies the connections between economic inequality, racial inequality, and racism in American society and how privilege shapes our political culture. Daniel is also a political junkie like me: not only does he write about politics, but when he was a graduate student at Berkeley, Daniel worked on the historic 2008 campaign that made Barack Obama the first Black American to become President of the United States.

So as we count down to the 2022 midterms, listen in and learn what is behind the curtain in America’s political campaigns.

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Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast: Recent Episodes

Claire Potter