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
1045 episodes
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...
Ep 996: The Maine Event
Episode 996 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the media circus surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate primary, asking who is actually stirring the pot, why they're stirring it, and who benefits when a private matter between a marri...
Ep 995: The Politics of Pronouns
Episode 995 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into one of the most revealing tricks in modern political history — the quiet, deliberate shift from "we" to "they" that happens every time a prominent Republican needs to pretend they had ...
Ep 994: An Epidemic of Recycled Lies
Episode 994 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the war on memory — the long, grinding campaign to erase what actually happened to this country and replace it with a comfortable myth that lets the people who caused the damage off the ...
Ep 993: Fools In a Burning House
Episode 993 of The Professional Left finally arrives at the pivotal year of 2008 — the moment the Republican party began eating itself alive — and traces exactly how a party that had just driven the country into a ditch decided that the best re...
Ep 992: Both Sides Don't Have A Budget Surplus
In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how the Clinton-era budget surplus was dismantled piece by piece during the Bush years, setting the stage for the catastrophic financial collapse of 2008. While millions of...
Ep 991: Underbabied?
Episode 991 of The Professional Left starts with a question that sounds absurd on its face — are Americans "underbabied"? — and then spends an hour making the case that the people asking that question are the same ones who have spent decades do...
Ep 990: Straining Gnats, Swallowing Camels
Episode 990 of The Professional Left takes a step back from the daily chaos to talk about something the mainstream media almost never bothers with — scale — and why understanding it is the difference between seeing propaganda clearly and gettin...
Ep 989: 'Velveeta'
Episode 989 of The Professional Left takes on one of the most overused words in modern politics — "authenticity" — and asks whether anyone in American political media is actually serving the real thing, or just a smooth, processed, cheese-like ...
Ep 988: Schrödinger's Alliances
Episode 988 of The Professional Left is a drama in three acts, each one taking a hard look at a political strategy that keeps failing — and the people who keep insisting it will work next time. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the endless, madd...
Ep 987: The Vice of the People
Episode 987 of The Professional Left takes a deep look at the concept of authority — where it comes from, who really has it, and what happens when the people in charge decide the rules no longer apply to them. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a cl...
