The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

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 democra...

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...

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 implica...

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 add...

(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 abstract...

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...

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...

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 episo...

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...

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...

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 a...

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!...

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...

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 Tou...

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=D5cFRQtP...

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 v...

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 ha...

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 sa...

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—arm...

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 indep...

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 v...

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...

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 ro...

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 Wi...

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@gm...