The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal
"Fiercely and unapologetically progressive, and definitely NSFW. 'The Professional Left' features award-winning bloggers Driftglass and Blue Gal as they skewer right-wing absurdities and dismantle mainstream media mealy-mouths with razor-sharp wit and zero filter. From mercilessly mocking partisan hacks to elevating stories the media ignores, it's the profane, unflinching political commentary you didn't know you needed. More at http://ProLeftPod.com."
Episodes
1056 episodes
Ep 1020: Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
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 ab...
Ep 1019: Where's The Beef?
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. D...
Ep 1018 Meet Dem Candidate Dr. Cinde Wirth (IN-06)
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...
Ep 1017: Judgment Day
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 ...
Ep 1016: F**k Civility
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...
Ep 1015: James and the Giant Screech
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 ...
Ep 1014: The New Red Scare
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 ...
Ep 1013 Talking Dem Politics with a Dem Politician
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 ...
Ep 1012: A Convo With Matthew Sheffield
In a special crossover episode, Driftglass sits down with Matthew Sheffield of Flux and the Theory of Change podcast — a journalist with a g...
Ep 1011: Not Sending Their Best
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 Dea...
Ep 1010: WHCD WTF?
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...
Ep 1009 The Wall
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" storytellin...
Ep 1008: Reality Remains Undefeated
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 ...
Ep 1007: Happy Birthday Blue Gal Retrospective, Part I
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...
Ep 1006: Pump Up The Venom
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...
Ep 1005: Meanwhile, In Local News...
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 co...
Ep 1004: The MAGA Merry-Go-Round
It goes in circles but never gets anywhereIt’s all horses’ assesAnd there is no brass ring.Driftglass on the Bob Cesca Show : http...
Ep 1003: Science Fiction University - Trust
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 thr...
Ep 1002: It’s Still the Republican Party
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...
Ep 1001: 119 Billion Kilometers and Counting
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-o...
Ep 1000: For Your Consideration...
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 everyo...
Ep 999 The Patron Saint of Corruption
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...
Ep 998: Who's This Jagoff?
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 sho...
Ep 997: What Do Democrats Want?
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 Dem...
