PAST, PRESENT, PUSHBACK

Most of us were raised to believe marriage is about love. For most of history, that was not the main reason. XO, AZ, and CDA go through where arranged marriage came from: property, family alliances, royal deals, and caste. Why love marriage took over in so many places, including Japan, where arranged marriages fell from about 70 percent in the early 1940s to under 10 percent by 1998. What the rese...

Clocks fall back this Sunday, November 1. XO, AZ, and CDA ask who actually came up with this and why we still do it. Ben Franklin's joke that people took seriously. The railroad time zones of 1883. Germany in 1916. America's first try in 1918, the repeal, and the veto fight. The 1942 war time. The 1966 law that ended the chaos. The 1974 year-round experiment that people hated in ten months...

verybody has heard 'three strikes and you're out.' Almost nobody knows where it came from. XO, AZ, and CDA go through it. The old roots in repeat-offender laws. Washington State in 1993, the first modern three strikes law. Then California: a father who lost his 18-year-old daughter Kimber, a 12-year-old named Polly Klaas, and a ballot vote that passed with almost 72 percent. The 1994 f...

When the Constitution took effect in 1789, only about 6% of the population could vote. XO, AZ, and CDA go through how that changed: property rules, Black men losing the vote in the North, the 15th Amendment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Selma, and the Voting Rights Act. Then they ask the big questions. Why does voting matter? Who does it affect most? And what...

When the Constitution took effect in 1789, only about 6% of the population could vote. XO, AZ, and CDA go through how that changed: property rules, Black men losing the vote in the North, the 15th Amendment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Selma, and the Voting Rights Act. Then they ask the big questions. Why does voting matter? Who does it affect most? And what...

Nobody invented Halloween. It was built over about 1,500 years by monks, immigrants, pranksters, toy makers, candy companies, and a cartoon duck. XO, AZ, and CDA fact-check the Samhain story that everybody repeats, trace All Saints Day, souling, and guising, follow the Irish to America, and show how trick-or-treating got a push from candy ads and Disney. Then the money: $13.5 billion in 2026, how...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION: People say 'martial law' all the time. Most don't know what it means. In this episode, XO, AZ, and CDA go through the real history and fact-check everything. Part 1: What martial law is, where the idea came from, and how it is different from the Insurrection Act, the National Guard, a curfew, and a state of emergency. Part 2: How it has been used in America. Andrew...

Columbus Day is this Monday, October 12. Most of us were taught one story in school. In this episode, XO, AZ, and CDA go through what the record actually shows -- and we fact-check both sides. Part 1: Where the holiday really came from. In 1891, a mob in New Orleans killed eleven Italian men. Italy pulled its ambassador. Within a year, a U.S. president declared a Columbus celebration. We trace how...

Only 230 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults in America are ever reported to police. Of those, 46 lead to an arrest. Of those, 9 get referred to prosecutors. Of those, 5 lead to a felony conviction. 5 out of 1,000. In this episode -- the most important Past Present Pushback has ever produced -- XO, AZ, and CDA go through three cases that expose everything wrong with how this country handles sexual...

The Book of Revelation is the most debated, most misunderstood, and most relevant book in the Bible right now. Written around 95 AD by John while exiled on the island of Patmos, Revelation describes a sequence of end-time events that billions of people believe are unfolding before our eyes -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Mark of the Beast, the number 666, the rise of the Antichrist, wa...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION - Ready to publishSports fans are living through the rarest kind of chaos right now - NFL Week 3 shocks, WNBA playoff upsets, MLB October heating up, and NBA Media Day all hitting at once. Mexo and CDA break down the biggest wins, the wildest injuries, and the matchups that could swing everything this week. The conversation starts with the kind of NFL slate that makes every fan...

It is the last episode of September and Past Present Pushback is doing something different. We are looking back at everything covered this month -- the origin of police, traditional vs. modern gender roles, the trucker strike rumor, why food keeps getting recalled, and the full history of Labor Day. XO hits AZ and CDA with multiple choice Q&A questions from each episode -- they pick their answ...

In 1940, the U.S. military believed Black men were not mentally or physically capable of flying combat aircraft. The Army labeled it an experiment. The NAACP called it a compromise they didn't fully support. The white commanders in the field tried to get them removed from combat duty. And the men themselves -- academics, scientists, Olympians, and some of the most qualified pilots in the world...

Most people know that police exist but very few people know where they actually came from, who built them, and what they were originally designed to do. The history of policing is not one story -- it is several stories running at the same time. Ancient night watches and constables going back to medieval England. Sir Robert Peel, who built the first modern police force in London in 1829, partly bas...

The conversation about traditional versus modern gender roles is everywhere right now -- on social media, in group chats, at cookouts, between couples. And nowhere is it more layered and more urgent than in the Black community. In 1890, 80% of Black households were headed by two parents. By 2024, only 31% of Black Americans are married -- the lowest rate of any racial group in America. Black women...

It feels like every week there's a new food recall. McDonald's Quarter Pounders. Boar's Head deli meat. Cucumbers. Carrots. Onions. Lettuce. Mushroom chocolate bars. Tofu with ink in it. Meat with metal shavings. It seems like everything is being recalled -- and people want to know why. In this episode, XO, AZ, and CDA sit in the man cave and go through the full picture. The documented...

Most people know Labor Day as the end of summer -- barbecues, sales, and the last Monday off before fall. Almost nobody knows the actual story behind it. The story of workers who labored 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, including children as young as 5. The story of the Haymarket Affair of 1886 -- where a bomb was thrown at police during a labor rally and workers were executed for it. The stor...

Project 2025 is a 900-page plan written by over 350 conservative policy experts and coordinated by the Heritage Foundation to fundamentally restructure the entire United States federal government. It calls for eliminating the Department of Education, cutting Medicaid, ending DEI programs across all federal agencies, restricting voting access, overhauling criminal justice, and replacing thousands o...

Between 1865 and 1950, nearly 6,500 Black people were lynched in the United States. Many of those deaths were public spectacles — advertised in newspapers, attended by crowds of thousands, with postcards made of the bodies and mailed as souvenirs. Congress introduced more than 200 anti-lynching bills over the course of a century. The Senate blocked every single one. The Emmett Till Antilynching Ac...

In 2005, the NRA's then-president Marion Hammer drafted a bill in Florida. She brought it to two Florida state legislators who were both members of ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council. Governor Jeb Bush signed it. And within a year, 13 more states had passed nearly identical laws. Today Stand Your Ground exists in some form in more than half of U.S. states. And the research is cle...

Every American student is taught that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. That the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 ended slavery in America. That Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. But the full story is more complicated than that — and more important. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to Confederate states where Lincoln had no actual authority to enforce it. It specifically exe...

Most Americans think Jim Crow ended in 1965 and America moved on. But the systems that followed — redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending, and the War on Drugs — were built on the same foundation with different paperwork. In this episode of Past Present Pushback, XO, AZ, and CDA sit in the man cave and go through the full documented history of all three systems. How Jim Crow was built and what...

Most church-going Christians have been taught that tithing means giving 10% of your income to the church — and that if you don't, you're robbing God. But where did that actually come from? Abraham's tithe in Genesis was a one-time voluntary gift from war spoils — not his income. The three tithes in the Mosaic Law were paid in crops and livestock — not money. And the New Testament never...

Most of us spend 90% of our time indoors. We breathe the air in our homes, cook on our pans, wear our clothes, and light our candles without thinking twice. But what if your nonstick pan is releasing forever chemicals into your food every time you cook? What if your polyester workout clothes are shedding microscopic plastic particles that end up in your bloodstream? What if the candle in your livi...

Most of us eat every single day without knowing what we're actually putting in our bodies. The chicken at the grocery store was likely raised in a facility where it never saw sunlight. The salmon on your plate may have been farmed, fed processed pellets, and dyed pink with synthetic pigment. The cooking oil in your cabinet is probably extracted with chemical solvents. Your tap water contains c...