The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

Episode 1035 celebrates a historic Democratic sweep in the midterms, from a 54-seat Senate majority to flipped governorships and state legislatures across the country, including stunning reproductive-rights and voter-protection wins in Missouri. Driftglass and Blue Gal then walk through the post-election headlines and pundit rationalizations pouring in from across the spectrum, revealing a familiar pattern in how the GOP processes a historic defeat. The episode’s real warning is that Democrat...

NOTE: Professional Left Podcast is off until November 5. Instead, Driftglass will be on Hal Sparks AND The Brad Cast this week on Wednesday October 28, and both Driftglass and Blue Gal will join Hal Sparks on Election Night, November 3. See you then! Episode 1034 traces how polling has systematically underestimated Republican support in every election since 2012, and digs into why Karl Rove’s on-air meltdown that year became the spark for a Republican base that already...

Trigger Warning: This episode quotes Dick Durbin's Senate floor speech from 2005, outlining details of the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Episode 1033 explores how language changes meaning with context, from Shakespeare inventing hundreds of words to a 77-year-old museum curator using Gen Z slang, before landing on Jon Ossoff calling out Mike Collins and getting almost no pushback from Republicans this time. Driftglass and Blue Gal compare that silence to 2005, when Dick Durbin...

Episode 1032 traces Trump’s catastrophic second term, from broken retribution promises to an unwinnable war to a lawsuit he’s too busy campaigning to show up for, proving every MAGA fantasy has collapsed into humiliation. Driftglass and Blue Gal then expose the oldest Republican survival trick in the book: rebranding as “independent” the moment your party becomes radioactive, using a Kurt Vonnegut word from 17 years ago to describe candidates from Wisconsin to Arizona all reciting the same “B...

Episode 1031 coins “the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair” to explain why Republican candidates thrive inside their media cave but collapse the moment they face real questions, from Andy Harris illegally threatening a journalist for recording him to Ken Paxton dodging every debate invitation. Driftglass and Blue Gal praise the “Ossoff-El-Sayed School of Excellent Elocution,” showing how Democratic candidates win by going straight at opponents with facts and refusing to let them change the su...

Episode 1030 catches Marjorie Taylor Greene mid-rehabilitation tour, exposing how her media-friendly break with Trump is laying the groundwork for a “Trump Off Machine” that lets unrepentant election deniers stay angry at Trump while still believing their original lies. Driftglass and Blue Gal then dig deep into what Build Back Better actually promised versus what survived Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s gutting, tracing the bill from its original $2,100-page scope down to the much smaller I...

Episode 1029 uses H.G. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks from “The Time Machine” to explain how the Republican intellectual class spent decades designing policy in comfortable think tanks while ignoring the ugly, racist work being done below them to actually win elections. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how Heritage Foundation types like Sarah Longwell claim total surprise at today’s GOP, despite living through Rush Limbaugh’s reign, the Tea Party’s open racism, and three Trump elections in a row. The ...

Episode 1028: We open with a surprising local story: former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin endorsing Democrat JB Pritzker over Republican Darren Bailey, exposing deep cracks in the state party even as MAGA loyalists like Mary Miller double down. Then we trace Trump's escalating bribery strategy as the midterms approach, from $5,000 promises at a half-empty Dallas rally to $500 Obamacare rebate checks mysteriously concentrated in battleground states to surprise $90 Medicare payments raid...

Episode 1027 tracks the widening cracks in MAGA's coalition as elite Conservatives and Republican officeholders begin quietly distancing themselves from Trump while his approval craters to 31%, proving the mob was never really following him — he was following the mob, and now the mob is splitting. Driftglass and Blue Gal pull a bizarre, rambling Time Magazine interview in which Trump complains about unfair press coverage paragraph after paragraph, then compare it word-for-word to his identica...

Episode 1026 marks the 18th anniversary of the 2008 financial crash by pointing out MAGA voters' selective amnesia about who was president when, then pivots to a Springfield civic meeting on election security that carefully documented every safeguard in Illinois elections while never once naming why the "controversy" exists in the first place. Driftglass and Blue Gal unpack Midwestern code phrases like "this isn't about Republicans and Democrats," showing how the same words mean belligerent d...

Episode 1025 opens with a longer off-the-cuff discussion of Mehmet Oz stripping people from Obamacare and the GLP-1 "bridge" program from Medicare, both moves that seem designed to serve Trump's ego and pocketbook more than public health. Driftglass and Blue Gal then turn to the MAGA voters now performing shocked-pikachu-face on TikTok after ICE came for their own employees and girlfriends, revealing they never cared about anyone else's suffering, only their own. The episode traces how Never ...

Republicans are betting the midterms on rewriting recent history. Driftglass and Blue Gal compare Trump's 32% approval to Bush's nearly identical 34% on his way out the door, then trace how "independent" has become the magic word MAGA grifters use to dodge accountability without changing a single belief. The episode also digs into Christian Nationalism's real numbers and history, from Falwell blaming 9/11 on gays and feminists to a Methodist church group just now discovering that 30% of the c...

Episode 1023 tracks how Republicans keep telling us who they are, from Darren Bailey embracing young-earth creationism to Trump calling Democrats "the enemy from within" over and over again. Driftglass and Blue Gal line up years of Trump's own words describing political opponents as existential enemies, then ask a hard question: if the Right sees this as a real war, shouldn't we believe them and plan accordingly? The episode also catches Erick Erickson, a longtime Trump critic turned supporte...

Episode 1022 asks what history's hardest lessons — Reconstruction's collapse, the Allies' insistence on unconditional German surrender — have to teach about defeating a movement built on grievance and racial resentment rather than "economic anxiety." Driftglass and Blue Gal make the case for treating the whole GOP as an enemy of democracy, not a rival to reconcile with, and for why repetition of hard truths may be the only weapon the Left has left. Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@g...

Episode 1021 exposes a $6 million Republican ad campaign that manipulated grieving parents of murder victims into unknowingly slandering North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper with lies their own children's killers had nothing to do with. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how this fits a decades-old pattern — Fox News and Hate Radio building a toxic "coal ash pond" of propaganda so complete that facts bounce off true believers, illustrated by journalist Barton Gellman's failed attempt to fact...

Episode 1020 opens with a deep dive into the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron novelty songs — where continuity gets rewritten and enemies become "friends" who never have to answer for their body counts — before turning that fairy tale into a warning about how Republican history keeps getting whitewashed the same way. Snoopy shoots down the Red Baron, then toasts him as a "friend" — no accountability, no memory. Sound familiar? Bush's real damage to America's reputation got erased, replaced by t...

Episode 1019 asks the question rarely posed — "Is our Republicans learning?" — and finds them relearning the exact same 2006 playbook: distance yourself from an unpopular president, rebrand as "independent," and blame everyone but yourselves. Driftglass and Blue Gal line up MAGA voters furious about tariff-driven beef prices, ICE snatching their own spouses, and grocery costs, all while insisting none of it is their fault after voting for Trump three times. The episode traces the eerie parall...

Episode 1018 features Driftglass in conversation with Dr. Cinde Wirth, the Democrat running to flip Indiana's 6th Congressional District. A seventh-generation Bartholomew County Hoosier, high school science teacher, and first-generation college graduate with a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy, Wirth brings an unusual résumé to the race — including a stint as a congressional fellow writing science and education policy. The conversation covers what drove her to run for office, her...

Episode 1017 puts a decade of Never Trump confessions on trial, dissecting this unusual week where Tim Miller, Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough all admitted, in various roundabout ways, that they'd known the Republican base was rotten all along. Driftglass and Blue Gal ask the only question that matters — did they know, or were they delusional? — and prove with two decades of receipts that they knew, they profited from it, and now they're profiting again by pretending to be "t...

Episode 1016 puts Tone Policing on trial, tracing the long history of the powerful lecturing the powerless about civility while dodging the actual substance of their protests — from abolitionists to MLK to anti-war marchers, memory-holed by CNN in 2005. Driftglass and Blue Gal revisit David Brooks' unhinged 2005 meltdown over Harry Reid daring to question the Iraq War intelligence, proving that the Tone Police always overreact hardest exactly when someone hits a nerve. That pattern plays out ...

Episode 1015 takes apart James Carville, the "rusted-out antique device" who trashes progressives on Fox News over a single deleted Thanksgiving tweet and then pivots to backing the very candidate he just attacked, all while forgetting his own most famous line ("It's the economy, stupid"). Driftglass and Blue Gal do the math on his supposed DSA takeover panic — two national officeholders versus 257 mainline Democrats — and coin a new verb, "Carvilling," for pundits who tantrum toward MAGA cam...

Episode 1014 dismantles the "Democrats in Disarray" panic after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's progressive primary win in Michigan, tracing Third Way's $15 million war chest against democratic socialism back to nearly identical Red Scare rhetoric almost a century ago. Driftglass and Blue Gal prove that the same "socialism!" screeching Republicans threw at Obama just two weeks into his presidency in 2009 is word-for-word the same panic thrown at another Democrat facing deep economic crises a...

Driftglass sits down with Blue Rep in a Red State! Democratic State Representative Gregg Bush of Missouri is in the superminority in the Missouri State Legislature. We go over Tuesday's Missouri ballot initiative and how Missouri voters turned back a Republican attempt to take their power away. Also, the future of the Democratic Party, and how a Covid-era nurse got elected to the State House. All this and more in this truly fascinating conversation. More at pr...

In a special crossover episode, Driftglass sits down with Matthew Sheffield of Flux and the Theory of Change podcast — a journalist with a genuinely unusual vantage point on American radicalization. Sheffield grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family, left that world, then spent years as one of the internet's first conservative bloggers before walking away from that movement too, disillusioned by its hostility to facts and to people. The conversation explores why things are happening the way ...

Episode 1011 argues that the Fauci witch hunt and the White House Correspondents' Dinner were the same show: theater staged to give a cult desperate for a villain someone new to hate. Driftglass and Blue Gal use Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" to describe legacy media pundits partying safely behind castle walls while the plague of modern Republican fascism finally breaks through the door. The episode names the psychological trap keeping disengaged voters stuck in "Yeah, but Democrats..." ...

Episode 1010 dissects the White House Correspondents' Dinner disaster, where Trump used his own celebration of press freedom to attack the journalists in the room with vile personal insults. Driftglass and Blue Gal replay a decade-old clip from their own archives—recorded the week Trump effectively won the 2016 nomination—to prove that Liberals saw this coming while the legacy media obsessed over Hillary's emails. The episode argues the real scandal isn't Trump's cruelty, which was never a my...

Episode 1009 asks what happens when you're 20 miles into the political marathon and there's no cavalry coming over the hill to save the day. Driftglass and Blue Gal explore the difference between American "hero arrives just in time" storytelling and the harder truth found in movies like Spotlight and Lincoln—where victory comes from grinding, patient work, not a last-minute miracle. The episode confronts what it feels like to hit The Wall after decades of activism that moved the needle but no...

Episode 1008 continues the "No Fair Remembering Stuff" retrospective: Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the throughline from Biden's early economic wins and Republican obstruction, through the January 6th hearings, to broke state GOP parties and Bari Weiss's billionaire-funded "anti-woke" grift. This sad yet hilarious episode reveals how the same media failures—perpetual surprise at good economic news, endless both-siderism, and refusal to name who actually funds Republican radicaliza...

Episode 1007 celebrates Blue Gal's birthday with a nostalgic trip through 16 years of podcast archives, revisiting what was happening in politics on or around her birthday each year since 2010. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a remarkable through-line from the Tea Party's rise and the "Evil, Stupid, or Crazy" game, through Obama-era both-siderism, Trump's 2016 takeover, and the pandemic's collapse of conservative respectability. The episode reveals how the same cast of media enablers and Republ...

Episode 1006 uses the beloved 1990 teen rebellion movie "Pump Up the Volume" to ask a deeper question: what happens when you take "Truth is a virus" and unrestricted free speech into the real world, where the fascists aren't outsiders trying to break in—they're already running the show? Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 through the rise of Hate Radio, Gingrich's language wars, Citizens United, and the collapse of every institution that was supposed to pr...

Episode 1005 of The Professional Left makes the case that if you really want to understand America — not a focus group of twelve Trump voters in Florida, not three congressional primaries in Brooklyn, not the punditocracy's endless parade of confident predictions about things they fundamentally don't understand — you should probably be paying attention to Illinois, the most statistically representative state in the country, which the elite media treats as flyover country and nothing more. Dri...

It goes in circles but never gets anywhere It’s all horses’ asses And there is no brass ring. Driftglass on the Bob Cesca Show : https://www.bobcesca.com/the-bob-cesca-interview-driftglass-day-7-1-26/ Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.com Website: proleftpod.com Support via Patreon: patreon.com/proleftpod or Donate in the Venmo App @proleftpod Mail: The Professional Left, PO Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791 Support the show

Science Fiction University returns at long last, with an extended deep dive into one of the oldest and most unsettling questions in the genre — who can you trust when the threat is wearing a human face? The episode traces the theme of trust through three very different versions of the same story: John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?", Howard Hawks' 1951 Cold War-era adaptation "The Thing from Another World", and John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece "The Thing" — showing how the same ...

No rebranding! They cashed all those checks with the Tea Party. Episode 1002 of The Professional Left opens with a pop quiz, and the reveal says everything you need to know about how this particular cycle always ends. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, depressing, and darkly funny history of Republicans who were "done with Trump" until they weren't — Beck, Cruz, Graham, Vance, Ingraham, and a cast of dozens — making the case that what looks like a new political reckoning is a...

Episode 1001 of The Professional Left kicks off the post-1000 era with a reading from Octavia Butler — written in 1993, about a fictional America that looks uncomfortably like the one outside your window right now — and uses it as the jumping-off point for a clear-eyed reckoning with why the country got here and who is responsible. The opening of the Obama Presidential Center was a wonderful occasion by almost any measure, but the sight of a certain former president celebrated as a beloved el...

Episode 1000 of The Professional Left opens with the countdown finally hitting zero — and instead of a victory lap, Driftglass and Blue Gal do exactly what they've been doing for 999 episodes: explain the thing hiding in plain sight that everyone else is too polite, too complicit, or too invested in the status quo to say out loud. The Trailer Trash Woodstock that took over the White House lawn gets put in its proper historical context — not as something shocking and new, but as the entirely p...

Episode 999 of The Professional Left takes a detour through the smoke-filled back rooms of mid-century Chicago machine politics to explain something essential about the moment we're living in right now — because it turns out that Mike Royko had the whole Trump era figured out decades before Trump came along, he just called it by a different name. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through how patronage systems work, why people stay loyal to them, and most importantly, what happens when the patron s...

Episode 998 of The Professional Left opens with a game of "Who's This Jagoff?" — a quiz that turns out to be a master class in how the Both Sides Do It lie gets laundered through the media, repeated without evidence, and rewarded with radio shows and television bookings no matter how many times it's been proven false. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the deep roots of that lie, traveling back twenty years to a single Neal Conan moment on NPR that perfectly captures how "to be fair" became a r...

Episode 997 of The Professional Left uses the sudden, very public firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes as a jumping-off point to ask a much bigger question — why do the people with the biggest megaphones still have absolutely no idea what Democrats actually want, or who they actually are? Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, embarrassing history of elite pundits who spent decades inventing a fictional Democratic party, got everything catastrophically wrong about the Republican one, and a...

Episode 996 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the media circus surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate primary, asking who is actually stirring the pot, why they're stirring it, and who benefits when a private matter between a married couple drowns out every important conversation about the Republican incumbent's actual record. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through a long and inglorious history of political sex scandals — from FDR to Gary Hart to Newt Gingrich — to put the whole th...

Episode 995 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into one of the most revealing tricks in modern political history — the quiet, deliberate shift from "we" to "they" that happens every time a prominent Republican needs to pretend they had nothing to do with the monster they spent decades building. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace this sleight of hand from the early days of Trump's rise all the way to a recent live Bulwark event, showing how the same lie gets polished and repackaged every fe...

Episode 994 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the war on memory — the long, grinding campaign to erase what actually happened to this country and replace it with a comfortable myth that lets the people who caused the damage off the hook. A fascinating breakfast conversation between a writer and ten of his late father's Trump-voting friends provides the jumping-off point, raising a question that cuts right to the heart of everything: where exactly are these voters getting their opi...

Episode 993 of The Professional Left finally arrives at the pivotal year of 2008 — the moment the Republican party began eating itself alive — and traces exactly how a party that had just driven the country into a ditch decided that the best response was to sabotage the guy trying to pull it out. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through the deliberate, coordinated Republican strategy to destroy Barack Obama before he even got started, complete with the death panels lie, the "government takeover" ...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how the Clinton-era budget surplus was dismantled piece by piece during the Bush years, setting the stage for the catastrophic financial collapse of 2008. While millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes, the mainstream media — led by Both Sides propagandists like David Brooks and the newly hired Bill Kristol — refused to lay the blame where it actually belonged: on the Republican Party. Driftglass and Blue Gal have ...

Episode 991 of The Professional Left starts with a question that sounds absurd on its face — are Americans "underbabied"? — and then spends an hour making the case that the people asking that question are the same ones who have spent decades doing everything in their power to make starting a family feel financially impossible. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long arc from the post-war baby boom through the Reagan era's war on the social safety net, showing how decades of Republican policy q...

Episode 990 of The Professional Left takes a step back from the daily chaos to talk about something the mainstream media almost never bothers with — scale — and why understanding it is the difference between seeing propaganda clearly and getting played by it every single time. Driftglass and Blue Gal run the actual numbers on one of the most successful political smear campaigns of the last decade, and what those numbers reveal about how a fringe slogan gets laundered into a party platform by ...

Episode 989 of The Professional Left takes on one of the most overused words in modern politics — "authenticity" — and asks whether anyone in American political media is actually serving the real thing, or just a smooth, processed, cheese-like substitute that melts consistently and tastes like what people want to hear. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, strange history of politicians and pundits who have made a very comfortable living telling their audiences exactly the lies those audien...

Episode 988 of The Professional Left is a drama in three acts, each one taking a hard look at a political strategy that keeps failing — and the people who keep insisting it will work next time. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the endless, maddening cycle of reaching out to voters who have made it abundantly clear they don't want to be reached, and why the media keeps writing the same breathless story about it anyway. Then things get complicated when a very familiar face from the enemy camp s...

Episode 987 of The Professional Left takes a deep look at the concept of authority — where it comes from, who really has it, and what happens when the people in charge decide the rules no longer apply to them. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a clear line from the lawless Bush years straight through to today, making the case that what looks new and shocking is really just the same old playbook with the volume turned all the way up. A surprising visit from a 500-year-old German philosopher helps ...

Episode 986 of The Professional Left traces how one simple political rule — Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" never to speak ill of a fellow Republican — quietly mutated over decades into something far more dangerous. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into how that rule created a closed loop where loyalty to the team mattered more than the truth, and how the endless flood of dark money on the Right kept feeding the beast no matter how extreme it got. A disturbing New Yorker article about a new...

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." -- The Maltese Falcon Episode 985 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into the word "normalizing" — a term that gets thrown around constantly in political coverage, but rarely gets a clear definition. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how a stubborn 30% of Americans have believed one wild conspiracy theory after another for decades, and argue that what looks like normalization on the Left is really just exhaustion from years of fightin...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal take a hard look at how America ended up in yet another Middle East war — and why the whole thing feels like a rerun that somehow got worse the second time around. Drawing a sharp line from the lies that launched the Iraq War to the chaos of today, they walk through the playbook Republicans use every time reality refuses to cooperate with their sales pitch. The real question isn't just what happened — it's what comes next, and ...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the decades-long project that brought American politics to its current breaking point — and what it really means that we've arrived here. A viral social media feud involving a Twitch streamer leads to a sharp look at who gets handed a megaphone in today's political landscape, and why the wrong people keep holding them. The episode closes with a story about a specific third party and the oldest trick in the book. Stay i...

Episode 982 asks: Did Trump magically bamboozle 70 million voters overnight, or did the GOP spend 40 years deliberately breeding an army of angry, paranoid, racist chumps? How is it that we are living in "Dune III" right now, when the movie doesn't come out until later this year? And why is the MAGA universe suddenly eating itself—MTG attacking Fox News, Rogan ditching "dorks and weirdos," and then there's Iran demanding JD Vance -- THAT JD Vance -- lead negotiations with the Trump administra...

Episode 981 traces the Republican descent from the 1990 New York Times editorial warning about Gingrich's "slash and burn" politics through Limbaugh, Fox News, and Trump—a 36-year disaster that Liberal bloggers warned about while being dismissed as cranks. Driftglass and Blue Gal use a science-fiction classic AND a rebuilding story from the not-too-distant past to argue that democracy can be rebuilt and improved, with new/old systems to prevent the next Trump. This episode marks 21 year...

Episode 980 uses The Walking Dead's central question—"The world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice"—to examine whether we accept that the political and cultural America we once knew is finished. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the Republican zombie apocalypse from its inciting incident (Bush's 2004 reelection) through Obama's failed experiment in compromise, to Hillary's "deplorables" moment that proved prescient, to today's desperate pleas to coddle Trump voters with ou...

Episode 979 begins with Project Hail Mary and science fiction nerds auditing movies on street corners, then pivots to Ozymandias and what lasts versus what crumbles to dust. Driftglass and Blue Gal ask why there are hundreds of documentaries about the Roman Empire but not one major film tracing the Republican party's descent into fascism—and answer that question by naming who it would implicate. The episode examines what history will remember about Trump and Bush, what gets footnoted and what...

Driftglass and Blue Gal compare Bush's Iraq debacle with Trump's Iran war—the lying, the cover-ups, the profiteering, the attacks on critics—revealing Trump isn't a break from the Republican past but a continuation of it, just bigger, dumber, and louder. The episode also discusses how the New York (effin') Times deliberately cleans up Trump's incoherent rambling while adding "uhs" and "ums" to try to make AOC look stupid. All this plus Illinois primary results and the national media's despera...

(And we talk about the Illinois Democratic Primaries! They were counting votes as we recorded.) Episode 977 examines the 2026 Illinois Democratic primary while dissecting David Axelrod's fantasy that Democrats should rerun the Obama 2008 campaign in 2028, as if the berserk Republican backlash to Obama never happened. Driftglass and Blue Gal discuss how legacy media pundits use lazy abstractions about "the people" and "the voters" while pretending the Republican party didn't become...

Episode 976 examines the signs and portents showing Trump's base starting to fracture as broken promises about Epstein files and "no foreign wars" collide with reality. Driftglass and Blue Gal track special election upsets across the country, from New Hampshire to Georgia's R+19 district where even Trump's handpicked candidate couldn't avoid a runoff after 22% of MAGA voters disobeyed orders. The episode explores why Joe Rogan claims Trump supporters feel "betrayed" while refusing to admit hi...

Episode 975 takes a trip back to Chicago to explore how big cities weather economic shocks that would destroy smaller towns—a lesson that matters as Trump's oil crisis, job losses, and ACA cuts hit rural Trump voters hardest. Driftglass and Blue Gal examine the fragile interconnectedness of small-town economies and why cascade failures are coming to red America, where MAGA voters are about to learn the hard way that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing. The episode explores how scale matt...

Episode 974 examines why Trump's illegal war with Iran is splintering the MAGA base and fueling Democratic victories in special elections across the country. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how Trump won in 2016 by offering Republican voters absolution for the Iraq War disaster—then broke his sacred "No Foreign Wars" promise just like he's covering up the Epstein files. The episode dissects who gets forgiveness in American politics and who doesn't, exposing how Never Trumpers demand we forget L...

Episode 973 explores biblical healing miracles to reveal what they teach about choice, cruelty, and the difference between victims who deserve compassion and abusers who don't. Driftglass and Blue Gal revisit the story of the Gerasene man possessed by "Legion" to examine the long-term trauma inflicted when military forces terrorize civilian populations—then and now. The episode lays out why there can be no forgiveness without repentance, no redemption without atonement, and why "cheap grace" ...

Trump's State of the Union was a two-hour Willie Horton ad designed to keep his shrinking base loyal through blood-soaked imagery borrowed from imperial Rome. Proleftpod traces how Michele Bachmann's 2011 Tea Party response prefigured today's MAGA lies by pretending the Great Recession never happened, just as Trump pretends away ICE murders, the Epstein files, and economic chaos. It's about memory, manipulation, and why the anomalies we remember from the past tell us exactly where we're heade...

Episode 971 examines why fact-checkers keep losing to Republican lies in America's ongoing culture war, and why better stories—not more facts—are the only way to win. Driftglass and Blue Gal break down Will McGrath's powerful essay "In the Resistance, We Drive Minivans" to show how real stories about real people cut through propaganda in ways statistics never can. The episode also tackles why centrist pundits are tying themselves in knots now that "resistance liberals" turned out to be right ...

Episode 970 asks why Democrats are always expected to play by rules that Republicans openly mock and destroy, and whether apologies from Trump voters mean anything without actual accountability. Drawing on one writer's (Jamil Smith) refusal to accept an apology from a Trump voter, the show tackles the question of what comes after "I'm sorry" in American politics. Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.comWebsite: proleftpod.comSupport via Patreon: patreon.com/proleftpodor Donate in ...

Episode 969 explores how politicians and media use vague phrases like "the American people," "the voters," and "the public" without anyone agreeing on what these terms actually mean. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace these polyfunctional words through American history, from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Nixon's "silent majority" and today's political battles over who gets to speak for the nation. They examine how these phrases do political work rather than descriptive work, often excl...

Probably no need to play catch-up on this, except for future reference when we hit episode 2000 and are trying to convince the Neo-Republi-tarian Constitutional Independents who will come to dominate the media in 2045 after the Great Forgetting of 2032, that all of this actually happened... More at proleftpod.com. Link for this episode: Chelsey Gods with that song about Kristi Noem. Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.comWebsite: proleftpod.comSupport via Patreon: pa...

Average voters stay permanently undecided because they get their information from toxic media sources that have been poisoning them against Democrats for decades, making "running to the center" mathematically impossible and politically useless. Links for this episode: Volts ϟ 1.30.2026 – Michael Hobbes (All About "Reactionary Centrism") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5cFRQtPbcM Ian McKellen (on Colbert) 'using Shakespeare to tear off the false moral mask that xenophobes wear acr...

The legacy media's "Both Sides Do It" conventional wisdom is a rotting corpse they've been sleeping with for decades while pretending they couldn't see Trump's fascism coming. David Brooks gets rewarded with cushy jobs at The Atlantic and Yale after being spectacularly wrong for 22 years, while PBS replaces him with a right-wing nobody who praises Trump as "the voice of reason" because of course they did. It's past time to destroy the media's claim that "nobody saw this coming" by point...

The amnesia machine is already warming up as Republicans rehearse their "I was never really MAGA" speeches while Trump falsely claims Ilhan Omar staged her own chemical attack by a convicted felon Trump supporter. The episode tears apart the advice that Democrats should run against their own party to win over "average voters" who get their information from toxic sources that have been poisoning them against Democrats for decades with the Both Sides lie. As the Washington Post collapses and Da...

The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are called what they really are—lynchings carried out by Trump's armed thugs who were then protected from investigation and sent back out on the streets. A direct line connects decades of right-wing hate radio promising to eliminate liberals to today's fascist violence, explaining why there will be no magical "national awakening" to save us. Never Trump pundits who now support "Defund ICE" after spending years attacking Democrats over "Defund the Pol...

Welcome to 'The end of the world [order] as we know it' in which we defend anti-ICE protesters who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, after discovering the pastor moonlights as an ICE official, calling out the shocking hypocrisy of a supposed man of God working for Trump's deportation machine. Contrast this peaceful protest with ICE's actual fascist behavior—armed agents terrorizing churchgoers in Chicago and preventing clergy from providing religious services to detainees. We...

The greatest political mirage in modern American history returns as Trump's second term reveals that while the ingredients stay the same, something fundamental has shifted. Driftglass and Blue Gal dissect how corporate media like Newsweek hides its appeasement under the banner of "Courageous Centrism" while Republicans once again flee the scene of their crimes by rebranding as independents—though this time, many seem too exhausted to bother with the charade. Unlike the counterculture movement...

We start with some personal news: Blue Gal's father passed away on January 9. In other news, she's leaving Crooks and Liars after 18 years for a day job with health insurance—thanks to Republican healthcare f*ckery. The podcast continues twice weekly, just dropping later in the day with Driftglass handling all the prep work. Then we dive into why Trump's regime is doubling down on violence and lies about Renee Good's murder by ICE. We explain how decades of right-wing media have convinced MAG...

John Amato of Crooks and Liars discusses his journey from music to political blogging, including his early experiences with video content creation and sharing during the 2000s. Our convo covers the evolution of digital media in politics, with particular focus on the early days of blogging and the collaborative spirit among left-leaning bloggers who shared content through blog roundups. We conclude with reflections on media credibility and misinformation, as well as discussions about favorite ...

We start with the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and the Trump administration's obvious lies about what happened, despite clear video evidence. Then we cover the shocking news that nine House Republicans actually broke ranks to force a vote on extending healthcare subsidies that keep insurance affordable for 22 million Americans—will the Senate kill it anyway? Plus our news roundup, including the dissolution of NPR and PBS funding, and you'll never guess who got busted with fe...

We open on the fifth anniversary of January 6th by examining MAGA's stunning overnight flip-flop on war and foreign intervention. How did "America First" isolationists like Matt Walsh, Laura Loomer, and Cat Turd suddenly become cheerleaders for regime change in Venezuela? Why are pundits so confused by this reversal when we've seen it all before? Using clips from The Lion in Winter and Lawrence of Arabia, we explain why MAGA isn't a set of policy beliefs—it's a genre, a vibe. Republican voter...

In their final episode of 2025, Driftglass and Blue Gal try to sum up the entire awful year in just a few key words or phrases. As they close out nearly 16 years of podcasting together, the hosts reflect on the core lies drilled into Americans' heads so long that people automatically reach for them whenever the truth becomes too uncomfortable to face. Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.comWebsite: proleftpod.comSupport via Patreon: patreon.com/proleftpodor Donate in the Ve...

Driftglass and Blue Gal bring their epic year-in-review series to a close, covering September through December and finally boxing up 2025 to send it to hell. The hosts examine the final months of a year that saw legacy media trapped in their own 'Both Sides Do It' prison, DOGE's promises evaporate into nothing, and the Epstein files get a (incompetent, but still) cover up. But there's also hope in this finale—a massive Blue Wave in November's elections, governors standing up to federal ...

Driftglass and Blue Gal continue their review of 2025, covering May through August in this second part of their series. The hosts show how the Republican Party's corruption and chaos isn't something new or unexpected—it's exactly what the party has been building toward for decades through right-wing talk radio and Fox News. They walk through major events from those months, including media companies giving in to Trump's demands, the White House deleting official transcripts, federal agen...

Driftglass and Blue Gal reflect on what they call an "annus horribilis"—a genuinely awful year that fundamentally changed America as Trump's second term brought unprecedented corruption, chaos, and the erosion of democratic institutions. From Qatar's $400 million Boeing 747 bribe to Trump's crypto schemes and the $300 million White House ballroom boondoggle, they catalog the scandals that made 2025 feel like the longest decade of their lives. More at proleftpod.com. Stay in Touch...

Trump's "affordability" tour crashes into reality, with the president telling struggling Americans to buy fewer pencils and dolls while his own supporters admit they can't afford groceries. David Brooks' embarrassing 2009 love letter to John Thune as the GOP's wholesome future collides with Thune today holding the biggest bag of political excrement in modern history as the ACA subsidy vote collapses. Republican lies are finally colliding with the lived experience of MAGA voters who can't fake...

We examine the difference between political "weather" and "climate" this week, starting with Trump once again bribing farmers with $11 billion after his own tariffs destroyed their markets. We play audio demonstrating Trump's cognitive decline and discuss his increasingly unhinged Truth Social posts, including a bizarre rant about Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican Party is now held together by violence and threats, from ICE brutality to intimidation of Indiana legislators. We revisit the...

The dangerous convergence of Trumpian immunity and media complicity creates for Trump an imaginary “kingdom” once reserved for anointed kings. Our Constitutional form of “government of the people” has been corrupted by both MAGA's belief that Trump operates with divine authority above the law and a mainstream media that protects its own incompetent insiders at all costs. As a side quest, what does Mark Halperin's endless media rehabilitation tour have in common with Trump's pardon...

No show today; we've had quite a weekend. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled podcasting on Thursday. See you then! Support the show

In this week's episode, we experience the whipsaw—that aggressive, back-and-forth sawing motion that's now a perfect metaphor for what Republicans are doing to millions of American families over the Affordable Care Act. We watch in real time as Trump's promised two-year ACA subsidy extension is announced, then delayed, then killed by Mike Johnson—all within 48 hours. Why did Republicans pull the rug out from under tens of millions of Americans who depend on these subsidies? Because destroying...

In this week's episode, we dive deep into the infrastructure project nobody wants to talk about: the construction of political lifeboats. What are we witnessing as Trump's administration unfolds? We're seeing the familiar pattern of those who enabled catastrophe beginning to build their escape routes—just as they did after the Bush administration collapsed, when the "Fake Tea Party" served as the greatest mass escape operation since D-Day—allowing pro-Bush Republicans to magically transform i...

GOP rats are slowly but surely abandoning the sinking Trump ship, and we have to ask: Will "Republican Lifeboats" once again successfully allow the MAGA/Tea Party faithful to escape accountability? We analyze Marjorie Taylor Greene's masterful deployment of the "Magic Words" to blame "both sides of the aisle," framing her slow-motion exit from the Trump pandemonium bandwagon as an act of high principle. She's the first and possibly best lifeboat builder of the post-Trump era, claiming victimh...

This week, we're talking about the Epstein Files, the shutdown that wasn't really about the shutdown, and why six words might just end a presidency. Meanwhile, some privileged podcasters are dismissing angry "online" Democrats as if losing our healthcare is just a theoretical concern. Plus: The increasingly evident mental decline of a president: Trump goes from "inventing" the word "affordability" to *not wanting to hear about it.* George Orwell's question—"Was he, then, al...

This week, we're celebrating our first post-Blue Tsunami show! Democrats won across the board on Tuesday, and we're sleeping a little better. To quote Churchill: "This is not the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Happy 21st blogiversary to the amazing Fran Blue Gal! Zohran Mamdani won NYC mayor with over 50% of the vote. And yet the Wall Street Journal immediately declared, "Election Wins Won't Ease Democratic Party's Troubles." And hoo boy Tucker Carlson just released...

This week, we're recording on election day while awaiting results to find out which version of "Democrats are doing it wrong!" the pundits will run with tomorrow. We open with words of wisdom from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker to the American Federation of Teachers. Then we come to bury Dick Cheney, not to praise him. We'll explore our "12 Rules for Staying Fing Sane," which we redefine as a playbook for Democratic victories. And then we dive deep into Three Days of the Condor (RIP Robe...

This week, we're recording on Driftglass's birthday while he's still battling a cold and sounding disturbingly like RFK Jr. meets Broderick Crawford—so we're keeping it simple and direct. Why should Democrats stop accommodating Republican sociopaths who inflict pain on their own base as leverage? And what happens when Democrats finally say "let them burn" instead of rushing to pay the ransom? Why are there focus groups with Trump voters but never with the Democratic base? Why is it always the...

Does Driftglass with laryngitis sound like Brenda Vaccaro? The podcasters disagree, YOU be the judge! (See you on Thursday, which is also Driftglass's 65th birthday! Woot!) Stay in Touch! Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.comWebsite: proleftpod.comSupport via Patreon: patreon.com/proleftpodDonate via PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/proleftpodcastor Donate in the Venmo App @proleftpodMail: The Professional Left, PO Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 627...

This week, we're examining the legacy media's desperate attempt to plug a 20-foot hole in their Both Sides narrative—and why their favorite solution won't work. The New York Times Editorial Board insists that "moving to the center is the way to win," but the data show that this strategy is already exhausted. Talking of compromise with an enemy who wants no reconciliation is absolutely ridiculous. Links for this episode: On Data And Democracy Substack: "The New York Times Argues 'Moving to the...

Find your No Kings Protest March/Rally at https://www.nokings.org/ This week, we're asking the only question that matters: Will what we do actually help? What does it mean to be "effective" in the fight to save democracy? Did throwing pies at Bill Kristol, Rupert Murdoch, or Newt Gingrich ever change anything? And why should we always ask ourselves the Bridge of Spies question: "Would it help?" We'll explore how the Irish Grapefruit Ladies fought apartheid and won, and why the Civil Rig...

This week, we're watching the media scramble for survival as tectonic forces fracture the landscape—and the billionaires are building lifeboats while Mount Vesuvius smokes overhead. Why is The Bulwark declaring itself "the future" while The Washington Post and CBS News die? And what does it mean that CBS just hired Bari Weiss to, let's face it, manage the death of broadcast TV news? We'll reveal the secret to understanding what's happening to media right now: how Rupert Murdoch bought r...

In this week's episode, we tackle the concept of "ethos"—what people actually stand for versus what they claim to believe. Drawing parallels from the Cornerstone Speech of 1861 to George Wallace's segregationist campaign, we explore how America's ugliest movements had clear, comprehensible (if abhorrent) belief systems. But what about today's MAGA movement? Beyond rage and resentment, what do they actually stand for? (Short answer: nothing!) In other news, we can't resist highlighting the wee...

Welcome to Book Club Day at the Professional Left, where we're spoiling a 141-year-old novel that remains the undisputed champ of American literature—and revealing why it's more relevant than ever. What does Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn teach us about the struggle for America's soul in the age of Trump? Huck faces an agonizing choice: turn in his friend Jim and save his soul, or commit what he believes is a mortal sin and "go to hell." What happens when a sound heart collides with a de...