CivilDiscourse101

Live from election night 2026. As West Coast polls close, Joe and Jesse track a night of Democratic flips: Annie Andrews takes Lindsey Graham’s old South Carolina seat, Roy Cooper wins North Carolina, James Talarico wins in Texas and Amy Acton beats Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio. Plus Susan Collins’ nail-biter in Maine, war profits for Big Oil, and where California landed on the billionaire tax, voter I...

Our final episode before Election Day. Obama says Trump has the White House looking like a Cheesecake Factory, and we dig into the Ramaswamy attack ad that split Ohio Republicans. We hear from a two-time Trump voter who changed her mind at a rally and ask how we welcome people back. Then: DOJ pressure on California ballots, and the Prairieland protest sentences of up to 70 years for people who nev...

With the midterms days away and Trump’s approval in the low 30s, is a blue wave coming or another blue puddle? Joe and Jesse dig into the FCC chair’s warning about “fake polls” and what it means when one private citizen can throttle a war zone’s satellite internet. Then, for California voters, a plain-English run through the props: the billionaire tax and its two kill switches, voter ID, housing b...

A protester in a 'Release the Epstein Files' shirt is punched at Trump's Youngstown rally while the president mocks her from the stage. Joe and Jesse ask what kind of strength America wants to project, from a livestreamed firing-squad execution to a judge finding the White House press ban likely broke the law. Plus Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers, Musk's $276M midterm...

Part two. Four weeks from the midterms, Joe and Jesse ask who's watching the vote: the U.S. turned away international OSCE observers for the first time since 2002, Latino support for Trump is sliding, and Republicans are openly worried about losing power. Then a detour into modern fatherhood and being the breadwinner, before Joe puts on his immunologist hat for a Siberian plague scare and Penn...

Part one of a two-part week. Trump tells a Nebraska rally to "let them take out Los Angeles" and the crowd cheers. Joe and Jesse unpack why a commander in chief's words matter even when they're played for applause, then turn to Pete Hegseth's Pentagon: the first U.S. military execution since 1961, a new Office of Religious Affairs, and an honest debate over justice, vengeance...

Two weeks of news, one very large number. Joe and Jesserace through the Iran war and where we currently stand, Jack Smith has been dragged back in front of the Senate for yet another hearing (and the Hawks-versus-Hawkeyes gotcha that wasn't), Trump's rebrand of AI as "super intelligence," and a Greenland deal that changed less than advertised. Then Jesse gets into a mini deep div...

This week, Thousand Oaks City Council District 2 candidate Kyle Rohrbach joins Joe and Jesse for a full conversation about the city's future - the contested Downtown Project, why homeownership feels out of reach, the transit system, wildfire evacuation planning, and what he's looking to deliver in the next four years if elected. So sit back, relax, and get ready to have a civil conversatio...

Twenty-five years after 9/11, New York finallyreleases 170,000 pages showing officials knew about toxic Ground Zero air and stayed quiet. We dig into the GOP's first-ever midterm convention — Trump's $5,000 promise and a pledge to “cheat like hell” — a Supreme Court loss for Trump on mail ballots, Mitch McConnell's return to the Senate, gas prices spiking after a Saudi pipeline attack,...

The Trump administration makes its third bid to the Supreme Court to restrict mail-in voting — even as ballots are already going out. Meanwhile, DOJ and DHS are quietly building the first-ever federal citizen voter list, missing their own deadline in the process. Then: an armed man rushes Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton at a county fair, the latest in a troubling pattern of political violen...

Venezuela's oil, an Oklahoma data center drained mid-drought, and tariff-free beef with no country-of-origin label. Joe and Jesse cover a news week that had a little bit of everything. They break down the new 65-billion-barrel Venezuela deal, dig into fresh strikes on Iran and the blast radius of the weapon behind them, and run through Congress censuring one of its own, SCOTUS clearing Trump&#...

Hakeem Jeffries' secret meet with Jared Kushner sets off a Democratic Party firestorm and we aren't buying the "real talk" video. The DSA backed insurgent knocks off a $16M funded Democrat in Florida, Darlene Graham wins her her primary, the U.S.-Canada trade war goes boom, the national debt just hit $40 trillion, and a new ICE operation nets over 1,300 arrets in Virginia and Mar...

Joe’s school couldn't afford paper for homework, but his classroom got a brand-new computer it didn't need. Twenty years later, he found out why — and it starts with a lottery that isn't legally allowed to exist unless the government runs it. This week we go through the California Lottery, a 2019 state audit that found $36 million missing, then follow the money into CSU's broken &q...

Just as we promised , a deep dive where Jesse explores the gap between legal and just — tracing Milton Friedman's shareholder-profit doctrine and Akerlof's "market for lemons" through four decades of wage stagnation and record corporate profits. We break down $50-340 billion in annual wage theft, why Walmart and McDonald's top every state's SNAP and Medicaid recipient lis...

Tech gremlins struck mid-recording, so this week it's a fast, punchy news-only episode — Joe and Jesse tear through McConnell's suspicious 53-day disappearance, ICE's incoming body cams (and one unverified rumor about electrified gloves), new Coast Guard numbers that undercut the "narcoterrorist" framing of the drug boat strikes, Abdul El-Sayed's underdog win in Michigan...

It's election night, and Joe and Jesse are watching the returns come in live from Michigan's open Senate primary and Missouri's high-stakes Bell-Bush rematch — using both races as a window into the real fault lines inside today's Democratic Party. From there they catch up on everything that piled up during their Citizens United break: Mitch McConnell's six-week disappearance an...

Part Two of our Citizens United deep dive. Jesse walks Joe through how Mitch McConnell engineered the post-2010 dark money architecture: the PAC network, the disclosure rules that disclose nothing, and a mother-in-law’s estate gift that still doesn’t add up. We track the number that matters most: $340 million in outside spending in 2008 to $1.9 billion in dark money by 2024. Then we look at what h...

Three U.S. service members killed in as manydays — and the Pentagon's injury numbers don't add up. Lindsey Graham's Senate seat stays in the family as his sister enters the August 11 primary. And the State Department declares “far-left terror” a civilizational threat while its own data shows 13 deaths from left-wing violence in a decade — versus 112 from the right. We play the tape: Mu...

Sixteen years after Citizens United, is anyone still pretending disclosure and self-restraint are enough to keep corporate money out of politics? Joe and Jesse open with breaking news — the Iran ceasefire's collapse, a third ICE-linked death in a week, and E. Jean Carroll finally getting paid — before Jesse takes on a full data-driven deep dive into how a dismissed FEC complaint became the cas...

Trump heads to NATO in Ankara the same week the U.S. strikes Iran again after tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz — and we can't decide if it's retaliation or a friendly-fire cover story. Then: a First Amendment lawsuit against DHS after a Rochester man got a home visit over a critical email, and three weeks of silence on Mitch McConnell's hospitalization raise real questions about...

Part 2 of our unemployment insurance deep dive picks up where the trust fund bomb left off. We model what survival actually looks like at - minimum wage, $100k, $200k combined and single- and map it state by state. The results are start: no income bracket and no family structure comes out okay in most of this country. We cover SNAP, Section 8, COBRA, Medicaid, and the mental health tool of re-entr...

The Supreme Court closes its term with five major rulings in 48 hours — birthright citizenship survives, trans athletesdon't, and campaign finance law just blew past Citizens United. We cover all of it. Then: the 988 crisis line loses its LGBTQ youth option just as Pride Month ends, a Louisiana Senate runoff completes Trump's retribution primary playbook, and drug prices become both partie...

Congress passed a war powers resolution 110 days into a war that was supposed to end in 60 — and somehow that’s the optimistic part of the news. We break down the Iran ceasefire, the Senate’s symbolic rebuke of Trump, a disease outbreak block that connects directly to vaccine policy rollbacks, and a SCOTUS ruling on voting rights that most people missed. Then: a deep dive into unemployment insuran...

It's been a week. The US and Iran signed a peace deal — the same one Trump tore up six years ago — and Jesse has thoughts. Congress let a critical surveillance law lapse while leaving for recess, and Trump turned 80 with cage fights on the White House lawn. Then we go deep: Part Two of our healthcare series follows the money — lobbying billions, the public option autopsy, vertical integration,...

California just put a Republican on the November governor's ballot for the first time in twenty years — and that's just where we start. We get into why mail-in voting keeps ending up in the crosshairs, and what gerrymandering looks like when the Supreme Court has just handed one party a blank check on redistricting. Then Joe and Jesse get into something bigger: what if every American had t...