Political Junkie Podcast

You just heard an excerpt from Vice President Kamala Harris’s response to the new standards for teaching African American history in Florida. Released by that state’s Department of Education on Thursday, July 20, 2023, the standards, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put it , return Florida’s students to “an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basi...

That was a February 2011 news segment recorded by journalist Sam Ford for WJLA TV, an ABC affiliate in the Washington D.C. area. In the first of two episodes about slavery among indigenous nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes, Ford explored the fact that his African American ancestors had been enslaved by members of the Cherokee Nation in the first half of the 19th century. Ford’s family mem...

We begin this episode with a June, 2021 school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a mob of angry white parents had taken over the room. They demanded that the district stop using tax dollars to make curricular and structural interventions about race and racism.  They also raised the flag of “ parents’ rights ,” a pandemic-born political call to arms that insisted on their right as pa...

In “The Initiation,” a 1959 educational film probably shown in high school health classes, the American girls who were its intended audience learned that lesbianism—and lesbians--lurked everywhere. The film begins at the end of a little party where an innocent known as “the Deb,” short for “debutante,” has been invited for the sole purpose of making her into a lesbian. If she were not such an inno...

On January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters, enraged by waves of misinformation and outright lies, attacked the federal government. They sought to prevent the counting of electoral votes that would mark Democrat Joe Biden’s victory—and incumbent President Donald Trump’s loss—in the 2020 election. The crowd called for Vice President Mike Pence’s death by hanging, and a noose had been prepared...

On May 18, 2023, Florida Governor and Republican presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557 , perhaps the most significant retraction of LGBT+ rights in almost half a century. Officially called the Parental Rights in Education Act , critics nicknamed it the "Don't Say Gay" bill because it made any expression of identity beyond the gender binary or heterosexual family illega...

On September 6, 1970, CBS News Anchor Harry Reasoner and London correspondent Charles Collingwood reported on the hijacking of three international flights and the attempted hijacking of a fourth. A news junkie at 12, I must have watched the reports all week as my parents sipped a pre-dinner cocktail. What I didn’t know was that someone who would become my friend was on one of those planes. In 1970...

Born in Kansas City, Leslie Feinberg was raised in a working-class, Jewish home and realized early on that ze was what we would now call gender fluid. Feinberg identified as lesbian and trans, experiencing decades of violence and rejection from peers, family, the police, and even some feminists because of a physical appearance and self that confounded gender norms. But Feinberg also found a home i...

The government is taking your hard-earned money. Politicians create inflation through big spending, destroying individual initiative and endangering your children’s future. Joe Biden is hiring 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents to kick down your door and steal your hard-earned money! You’re familiar with these ideas, but they first took the national stage in Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1...

Although creativity sits at the center of many things we value as Americans—art, inventiveness, problem-solving, and all the culture industries—most people would be hard put to define what creativity is. However, to paraphrase Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart in the 1964 pornography case, Jacobellis v. Ohio, we know it when we see it. Today, being creative is almost seen as a right,...

In January 1971, the state of Nevada—following an experiment launched by California governor Ronald Reagan—had slashed welfare benefits, catapulting single mothers and their families from poverty to near-starvation. Women who were minimum wage workers in the Las Vegas hospitality, entertainment, and gambling industry—even then, a multi-billion-dollar business—watched their children go hungry. But...

This episode begins with an exchange between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, NV, on October 13, 2015. At the time, Sanders was in what turned out to be a close race with Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, a contest that Clinton ultimately won. While some blamed a primary battle that went deep into the sp...

It looks like the Dominion trial has been delayed for a day, but your craving for more information about the political right in the United States can be satisfied here. And if you know someone else who would be interested, please: In the late 1950s, the John Birch Society may have been on the fringe of the Republican Party. Still, it was not an insignificant force in American politics. Gathering t...

I have never done two podcasts in a week before today, but rather than describe what I saw yesterday down at Manhattan Criminal Court, I thought I would bring the experience to you—as I heard it and saw it. If you know someone who would be interested, please: There are views in this episode that, while sincerely held by those who expressed them, aren’t exactly true: please see the fact check below...

Politicians are trying to legislate what is taught in American public colleges and universities—and they want to enforce their own ideological preferences by firing faculty who disagree. It’s time to take the defense of academic freedom seriously. As University of Nebraska English professor Julia Schleck explains in her book, " Dirty Knowledge : Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism" (Unive...

If you enjoy this podcast, you may want to read Pollitt’s book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador, 2014). At the beginning of this podcast, you’ll listen to a demonstration: “Abortion saves lives,” one group shouts; “You’re sacrificing the mothers for the children,” another yells. The battle over women’s bodies has always been given to rhetorical extremes. Think about the imagery—a fetus su...

On a flight from Vietnam in April 1975 were three siblings, two boys and a girl, all fathered by different African American soldiers. Their mother, Mae, rightly believed that her children would not only be discriminated against because they were racially mixed but because they were a visible sign of her own, probably necessary, collaboration with the occupiers. These children—Bear, Amy, and Peter—...

An important theme of this episode is gossip about powerful men having erotic relationships with other men. I want to be clear that there is no new evidence that proves or disproves sexual insinuations about the men we discuss below: by definition, gossip is a believable rumor that isn’t necessarily factual . When Joseph R. Welch called for decency in the June 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, it was n...

Today, a radicalized Republican party insists that the actual, complex, and often violent American past is not only false but divisive, left-wing, anti-white propaganda. It is not intended to teach the facts of history, GOP firebrands argue, but to indoctrinate helpless children with left ideology. As a result, around the country, much of the historical scholarship that twentieth-century historian...

On this episode, my guest is here to help us parse the world of government secrecy—its history, practices, and dilemmas—and how the classification system undermines our democracy. Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and the co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. He’s the principal investigator of History Lab,...

Today, conservative critics condemn the so-called “liberal media” for being in cahoots with policymakers and politicians—but there was a time when that was a formal, accepted way of doing business. In her new book, City of Newsmen : Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022), University of Wisconsin historian Kathryn J. McGarr takes us into that...

Content warning: Because this episode is about obituary writing, it contains discussions of death and self-harm. It may not be appropriate for everyone. As I confess in this episode, when I open the newspaper in the morning, I turn to the obituaries first. It’s not because I’m getting older, although I am. It isn’t because I’m morbid, fascinated by death, or even worried about my own exit from the...

When President George W. Bush spoke the words “Madame Speaker” in his State of the Union address to the 110th Congress on January 23, 2007 he acknowledged one of the biggest changes in American political life since the 19th amendment to Constitution was ratified. Ten weeks earlier under the leadership of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, American voters had swept Democrats back into power after 12 yea...

After he wrote an article about conspiracism in both political parties on December 14, 2022, I asked my friend Ryan Girdusky to come on the show to discuss why conspiracy theories have infected our electoral system.  A conservative media and messaging expert, Ryan has worked as a journalist, a campaign consultant, a Super PAC organizer, and a television pundit.  He’s also the author, with Harlan H...

Join me as I talk to Robin Morris, a historian at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia about her book, Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women : Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (University of Georgia Press, 2022). Beginning with the African American club women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women, Robin shows us how these Black women lost their organization and th...