#1742 Captured Court, Captured Nation: SCOTUS Serves Trump's Authoritarianism
Air Date: 10-7-2025
The Trump administration has been doing what we knew it would: breaking laws and losing about 95% of their court battles. And the conservatively stacked Supreme Court has been doing what we knew it would: overwhelmingly ruling for Trump to cover his tracks because that's what they were put there to do.
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#1737 State of the Resistance: Labor, Anger, and Knowing That We've Been Here Before
Air Date: 9-16-2025
Between recent Labor Day rallies and Republican Town Hall meetings, we're seeing that resistance to Trump's deeply unpopular policies is alive and well. Plus we're going to look at some historical legacies of resistance movements that can both inform and inspire us today.
Read more#1735 Trump's Making Friends of Enemies and Enemies of Neighbors (Foreign and Domestic Wars)
Air Date: 9-6-2025
Trump has been setting a new tone both at home and abroad which is shaking up everything from the war in Ukraine to threats of force against Mexico, Venezuela, and our own American cities with the militarization of domestic policing. And we made all of this before Trump posted an Apocalypse Now meme about using the Department of War against Chicago.
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#1730 The Axis of the Dark Personality Triad: Unfit Leaders and the Suffering They Cause
Air Date: 8-16-2025
There's the old Douglas Adams quote stating that, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" which is a good general rule to live by. But then there are the real baddies, those would-be leaders who possess one or more of the dark triad of traits that spells real doom for the societies that elevate them to power: narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Today we compare and contrast Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Xi Jinping also fits nicely on this list as an honorable mention but happens to not be part of the focus today.
Read more#1728 The Lawfare Presidency: The Case of Trump v. Journalism
Air Date: 8-10-2025
Trump has been condemning the media for all of his professional life and is pretty open about doing it so that people won't believe the negative press he so richly deserves. Now, with the power of the presidency, he's turned his battle with the press into a protection racket complete with payoffs and side deals in an attempt to turn the media into pro-Trump propaganda.
Read more#1727 Super-Powered Men For Good and Ill: Fascism, Media, and the Manoshpere
Air Date: 8-6-2025
Today's slate of topics may feel disjointed at first until you realize that they're not. We set out to produce an episode in which we explored powerful men and those who look up to them from various angles and so that ended up including both real and fictional men from supervillains to superheroes.
Read more#1726 Epstein Forever: Trump flails as criticism finally comes from inside the MAGA house
Air Date: 7-31-2025
Who would have thought that a political movement built almost exclusively on conspiracy theories and a cult of personality would end up being threatened by the cult leader being implicated in the biggest and worst conspiracy coverup… even though it’s been well documented for decades?
Content warning for detailed accusations leveled against Trump and Epstein by their alleged victims.
Read more#1723 Scam Nation: Trumpism is the Art of Screwing You Over in Every Way Possible
Air Date: 7-16-2025
It increasingly feels like we are completely past the era of legitimate differences in political philosophy and policy preferences. Now that the Republican governing style has been completely consumed by Trumpism, we've entered the era of scam politics which fits nicely with Trump's traditional retail scams, capitalism's continual reinvention of financial scams, and the new age of crypto scams.
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