#1788 Monthly-ish Mix: The America That Almost Was—Empire Abroad, Control at Home, and the Long Arc of Resistance
Air Date: 05-01-2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we open with Jesse Jackson's death as a reckoning with the multiracial coalition America chose not to build, trace the American playbook from the 1953 Iran coup to Cuba to the current war on Iran, examine how the same logic of control operates at home through AI monopolies, sports money, and captured courts, and close with the religious and labor traditions that have always driven change — plus Orbán's defeat in Hungary as proof that authoritarian projects don't last forever.
Read more#1786 Defeating Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Authoritarian Playbook Worldwide
Air Date: 4–24-2026
Today we explore how Viktor Orban spent 16 years transforming Hungary into a blueprint for 21st-century autocracy, how that blueprint traveled directly to the United States and what Hungary's stunning defeat of Orban can teach Americans about fighting back against authoritarianism.
Read more#1776 Trump's Pharaoh Complex, Our Flawed Constitution, and the 250th Anniversary
Air Date: 3–11-2026
Today is episode 1776, in the year of our nation's 250th birthday, and we thought the occasion called for something big. So, we're tracing the full arc — from the constitutional compromises that made this country possible to the authoritarian vanity project that those compromises eventually also made possible. We're talking about the history, the structures, and the insecure current-but-temporary president who thinks a $400 million ballroom and a coin with his face on both sides will make him a pharaoh.
Read more#1767 Wars Are Won By Teachers and Trump is Attacking Them Like a Foreign Adversary
Air Date: 1-25-2026
Today we examine education as the battleground for democracy itself. We'll hear how authoritarians erase history to maintain power, why liberal arts colleges don't exist in authoritarian societies, how the administration is punishing universities for their political views, and what the detention of student protesters reveals about the cost of dissent in Trump's America.
Read more#1764 Wealth Inequality is Bad for Society and There's No Good Counterargument
Air Date: 1-14-2026
Being a bad person who doesn't care about others is helpful in one's pursuit of becoming wealthy. However, becoming wealthy is also helpful in becoming a bad person who doesn't care about others, not that anyone sets out with this as a goal but it is a natural byproduct of wealth and the normal functioning of our market economy. What this means is that the nature of money, market dynamics, and wealth to corrode morality is a systemic problem, not a collection of individual failings, and should be addressed as such.
Read more#1749 Democracy: In Theory, In Practice, and Under Threat
Air Date: 11-4-2025
Elections are always coming up, some sooner than others, so we thought we would take a look at the state of our democracy and what we must do to maintain it in the face of the greatest direct assault on our institutions we've seen in our 250 year history.
Read more#1748 Patriotism in Peril: Democracy, the Military, and the Fight Over What America Means
Air Date: 11-2-2025
A lot of people on the left aren't feeling the love for their country right now and that's understandable but we have some thoughts on more productive ways to channel those conflicting feelings toward a country that is currently falling far short of living up to its founding ideals.
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#1731 Raw Power, the Presidency, the Courts, and Democracy in the Balance
Air Date: 8-20-2025
There's been a faction of conservatives who have been trying to instill king-like powers into the presidency for a long time, so it shouldn't be surprising that Trump is getting so much help from the packed court and the apparatchiks in the states who are more than happy to turn their precious federalism on its head as long as their king is in charge.
Read more#1714 Trump's Anti-Knowledge Agenda is Inviting the Next Authoritarian Dark Age
Air Date: 6-6-2025
Today, Trump's administration is doing everything in its power to end the era of educational dominance the US has enjoyed for decades. The simple fact that explains the change is that democracy used to be valued across the political spectrum while todays Republican Party is authoritarian and understands that an educated public is a public that demands democracy while an uneducated public is much easier to manipulate and oppress.
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