#1822 The State Media Playbook: The FCC and Billionaires Are Waging a War on the Free Press
Air Date: 9-13-2026
Today we trace the two-front war on the American press. On one side, government regulators and members of Congress are going after news outlets for the stories they choose to run. On the other, politically friendly buyers are taking ownership of major networks to turn them into free-market versions of state media.
Read more#1815 Sanctioned Ignorance: The Assault on Museums, Libraries, and American Memory
Air Date: 8-16-2026
Today we look at what Toni Morrison called "sanctioned ignorance," the deliberate manufacture of a version of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now. They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that comes with the free exchange of ideas.
Read more#1746 What an actual attack on free speech looks like
Air Date: 10-25-2025
Trump's attacks on free speech, particularly with the use of the Federal Communications Commission, goes far beyond the Jimmy Kimmel story. We're in the middle of an all-out assault on freedom of speech, a free and unbiased press, and freedom of association.
Read more#1740 Monthly-ish Mix: The Enemy Within and the Enemy Without—America's Two-Fronts
Air Date: 09-30-25
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we track the dangerous convergence of domestic collapse and international chaos by looking at political violence and martyrdom accelerating division, institutional capture from the courts to the media, the dismantling of voting rights and public health infrastructure, military deployments at home and wars abroad, plus the resistance movements fighting back through town halls, labor organizing, and revolutionary art despite overwhelming odds.
Read more#1739 The Charlie Kirk Assassination and the Plans to Weaponize It
Air Date: 9-23-2025
All that is happening in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination was quite predictable because we've actually seen this game plan play out before. The only thing we didn't know was what would be the catalyst to really put the autocracy into high gear.
Read more#1738 Escalations: Russia, Israel, And What We Are Allowed to Say About It
Air Date: 9-20-2025
The escalations are happening so fast now that even though this episode is about Russia increasing tensions by violating NATO airspace in Poland with drones and Israel intensifying their belligerence by bombing inside Qatar, those aren't even the most recent incidents now that Russian jets have entered NATO airspace in Estonia and Israel has launched a new attack on Gaza City while Netanyahu says he wants Israel to become like the doomed city-state of Sparta, which was weird.\
Read more#1732 It's Never Just About the Kids (Online Censorship, Age Verification, and the Project 2025 Agenda)
Air Date: 8-24-2025
The nature of politics and public policy is that there's always a need to balance opposing interests. Almost nowhere is there a more intractable set of opposing interests than in the attempt to protect children from harmful content on the internet while maintaining free access to adults, particularly because people wildly disagree about what qualifies as harmful and what degree of privacy invasion is an acceptable tradeoff.
Read more