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 Death" to describe legacy media pundits partying safely behind castle walls while the plague of modern Republican fascism finally breaks through the door. The episode names the psychological trap keeping disengaged voters stuck in "Yeah, but Democrats..." thinking, and exposes how devastating SNAP cuts are quietly starving hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans while being sold as "reform." It's about who the real cavalry is, why nobody's coming to save us but us, and why the midterms are the only thing that can pull the brakes on a car that no longer has any.

Links for this Episode:

Driftglass on The BradCast  https://bradblog.com/?p=18314

Driftglass on the Nicole Sandler Show 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwmgb421eI 

Stay in Touch! 

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Website: proleftpod.com 

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Mail: The Professional Left, PO Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

You can listen to the professional left wherever you get your podcasts on NetRoots Radio or on our website, proleftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast. There's a PayPal button at our website, or you can mail us a letter and/or a contribution at Post Office Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

SPEAKER_04 0:19

This is the podcast for the week of July 31st, 2026. It's not safe for work.

SPEAKER_05 0:24

Recorded live from the Cornfield Resistance, where we're starting to see a few Republican TV ads for the haircut they're running against Juliana Stratton. And boy, howdy, it's the professional left with Drift Glass and Blue Gal.

SPEAKER_04 0:44

I gotta say, he's an old white guy sitting in a barber shop.

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Literally a haircut.

SPEAKER_04 0:50

He's literally a haircut.

SPEAKER_05 0:51

And it's the radical left.

SPEAKER_04 0:53

Oh, there's a whole bunch of uh ad copy on there beaming out at you about the radical left.

SPEAKER_05 1:00

The radical left. The point Julian Stretton is the radical left is just is fucking hilarious. That's all they got. That's all they got. So that's what they do. That's all they got.

SPEAKER_04 1:11

All right. Well, Driftglass, today we have a theme for our podcast, and the theme is they're not sending their best.

SPEAKER_05 1:18

They're really not.

SPEAKER_04 1:19

No, they're not. And we're gonna start with this thought experiment. Why was the Fauci witch hunt like the White House correspondent's dinner?

SPEAKER_05 1:29

I love a good thought experiment. And we've already talked about the correspondence dinner earlier this week. And since then, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a national hero who should be treated as such, has been dragged before the Congress by Republican scumbags.

SPEAKER_04 1:45

He's testified without incident or rancor before Congress hundreds of times over the decades. But yesterday was different, and everybody knows why. The Republican goal was to pressure or rattle or otherwise trick Anthony Fauci into saying something, anything, that could be twisted into a perjury charge.

SPEAKER_11 2:10

I served at the NIH for over 54 years, 38 of those as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight. In fact, I testified before and or briefed Senate and House congressional over Senate and House committees well over 200 times over those 38 years. During and after the COVID pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath, and sat for several days-long transcribed sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing. However, given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.

SPEAKER_05 3:52

These are the people who've already whitewashed and shredded the COVID timeline so badly they can't remember that Donald Trump was president during COVID. That Trump was the guy who botched the response, who lied about COVID numbers all the time, because what he cared about was how things looked rather than how they were, who lied about everything.

SPEAKER_07 4:20

Americans are not being very heavily tested for coronavirus before they get here from another country, once they get here from another country, or if they're just here and haven't gone to another country. I mean, that's not happening. That is a whole logistical, functional, operational thing the president has imagined and is now declaring to the American people is the way it is. That was just today, but this is not a one-off. This is every day from him, and it turns out it has serious consequences when in the middle of a severe public health emergency, the president just lies about it over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_08 4:59

Congress's top doctor has told Senate Stafford that he expects 70 to 150 million Americans to contract the coronavirus.

SPEAKER_10 5:08

I mean, view this the same as the flu. The mortality of this is multiple times what seasonal flu is.

SPEAKER_12 5:16

Anyone that needs a test gets a test.

SPEAKER_10 5:18

We don't have enough tests today. We're very close to a vaccine. When you're talking about the availability of a vaccine, you're talking about a year to a year and a half.

SPEAKER_12 5:29

A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat.

SPEAKER_10 5:32

We do not know whether it's going to diminish as the weather gets warm. The risk of contracting the coronavirus to the American public remains low.

SPEAKER_04 5:43

We do expect more cases.

SPEAKER_11 5:45

We can expect to see more cases in the United States. We will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now.

SPEAKER_12 5:54

It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear.

SPEAKER_07 5:58

For us as a country, it is just unfortunate that we have that kind of a president who's that um, who has that uh easy a time lying uh during this kind of a problem when we really need to know the truth.

SPEAKER_04 6:10

On January 19th, 2021, on his last full day in office, Donald Trump awarded Dr. Fauci a presidential commendation in recognition of his work on the federal vaccine project. And all of that and so much more has vanished down the MAGA memory hole, which is how it came to pass that the Republican Party had renominated Donald Trump again in 2020 and yet again in 2024 because their heavily redacted and edited memories of our plague years are entirely different from ours. They remember mobs of armed goons seizing state houses because freedom.

SPEAKER_05 6:53

Freedom.

SPEAKER_04 6:54

They remember the people's convoy of MAGA truck drivers with nothing better to do. They remember rolling coal, modifying diesel trucks to blast thick black exhaust smoke as a giant fuck you to any government regulation or clean air in general of any kind. And they remember, quote unquote, that Fauci is a villain. This was Lauren Boebert at the 2021 CPAC convention.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

We're here to tell government we don't want your benefits, we don't want your welfare, don't come knocking on my door with your Fauci Audi. You leave us the hell alone.

SPEAKER_05 7:36

And so if you'd been bored enough to watch any of yesterday's witch hunt, you might have heard Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall say this: quote, who didn't have a friend who took this vaccine and had some type of complication, a stroke, a blood clot, a young man getting some type of heart inflammation. That's what destroyed the trust in the American people for our government, unquote. Yeah, that was it.

SPEAKER_04 8:02

That was it. We we should mention this is also just entirely a giant distraction from Epstein.

SPEAKER_05 8:09

Yeah, it everything is. Everything is.

SPEAKER_04 8:12

Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Marina, who by the way has had quite a week. Yeah, uh, his son-in-law is uh well, let me just say this. His daughter accused his ex-son-in-law, who is also a MAGA member of Congress, of beating her up, throwing hot water from a skillet in her face, and breaking a bone of their two-year-old. And this is how that's his this guy's daughter saying that. And this is how Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Marino asks Fauci to apologize to Laura Ingram. That's what he did this week while his daughter was talking about the abuse she suffered from one of his Republican colleagues, dad's Republican colleagues. And uh Laura Ingram was actually standing behind Fauci and other right-wing grifters. Fauci was supposed to apologize to her.

SPEAKER_05 9:10

Right, for you know, whatever, whatever. And this, mind you, these are just little samples. There was a whole array of liars and scumbags and grifters, etc. Uh, Russian asset and Republican senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, is still touting hydrochloroquine and ivermectin as miracle drugs. Miracle drugs, I tells you. And claiming that, quote, inject the injection injured, unquote, are committing mass suicide. Which they're not, because they aren't.

SPEAKER_04 9:40

And on and on like that. So do any of our never Trump allies still want to bitch about Biden preemptively pardoning Dr. Fauci because he knew who these thugs were and what they do? Because they really need a villain right now.

SPEAKER_05 9:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 9:59

A non-Republican villain. They need a demon, a monster, and a scapegoat.

SPEAKER_05 10:06

Yep. And we've seen this before, many, many times before. Uh, for years it was Hillary Clinton, right? And Nancy Pelosi. I still have uh an email inbox full of bug-eyed, terrifying Nancy Pelosi memes sent to me by conservative people I used to work with. And of course, Bill Clinton. And for eight years it was the Kenyan usurper himself, Barack Obama.

SPEAKER_04 10:28

And of course, don't forget the billions of people who are crossing the border.

SPEAKER_05 10:31

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:32

Billions, Drift Class.

SPEAKER_05 10:34

The caravans. The caravans.

SPEAKER_04 10:35

The caravans, yeah, full of billions of people. Right. Um because Republican policies are so universally awful, they always need someone else to blame or some other distraction when their policies inevitably blow up in their faces. And right now, by the way, everything is blowing up in their faces.

SPEAKER_05 10:55

Everything. And they've been shopping for a replacement bad guy for years. Someone or something to scare the rubs bad enough to keep them in the cult. And they tried making Jim Comey the villain, which is funny to us. You know, Jim Comey is a secret liberal, and we hate that guy. Because we on the left despise Jim Comey for torpedoing Hillary Clinton's uh campaign during the final days of 2016 when she was running for president.

SPEAKER_04 11:19

But they still haven't found a scapegoat scary enough to keep the cult energized. So now they're recycling old villains.

SPEAKER_05 11:26

And by the way, uh, just as a report on local MAGA flora and fauna, which is one of the things we provide to our listeners who don't live in Trump country, around here, none of the pushback against all this is getting through to those people. Or maybe it is, but all they hear, all they process it as is fake news, fake news, fake news, la la la la la.

SPEAKER_04 11:46

Instead, around here, MAGA mopes are doing things like passing around AI-generated images of Zoran Mamdani standing in front of the burning twin towers, smiling. That was 2001 Driftglass. That was 25 years ago.

SPEAKER_05 12:00

Doesn't matter, he's a Muslim.

SPEAKER_04 12:01

He's a Muslim. Oh my God. Yep. And uh smiling, holding up a sign that says, I'm glad you forgot. Because for many MAGA shitheads, all they remember out of the W administration is that Muslims are evil and how much fun it is to bomb the hell out of Iraq.

SPEAKER_05 12:18

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of um awful racist Muslim memes cropping up all over local.

SPEAKER_04 12:26

Anti-Muslim meme is a big thing.

SPEAKER_05 12:28

All over local MAGA, Facebook, and social media. And we keep track of those things. They're trying to resurrect every boogeyman they can think of. They're, of course, Muslims, communists, terrorists, godless baby killers, and liberals who are, you know, we're all of those things, right?

SPEAKER_04 12:43

Trump is mashing every key on the fear keyboard, hoping something catches on. And for the usual 28 to 34 percent and shrinking, it works just fine because they don't live in the real world anymore.

SPEAKER_05 12:57

So, so as you hear people talking about what happened yesterday in Congress, it's important to understand the Fauci witch hunt for what it was. It was theater, it was a performance staged for the bigots and imbeciles in the MAGA movement.

SPEAKER_04 13:14

And that's where the comparison to the White House Correspondence Dinner comes in. Both events revealed exactly who the participants are.

SPEAKER_05 13:21

The correspondence dinner was not some grand civic celebration. It was a Trump rally in tuxedos.

SPEAKER_04 13:29

Yep, a long stream of insults, grievances, and hate. Trump attacked the very people sitting in front of him, people whose hands he'd been shaking 20 minutes earlier, and they still acted surprised.

SPEAKER_05 13:42

Yeah. And earlier this week, I compared the correspondence center to Edgar Allan Poe's The Mask of the Red Death, which I admit is a metaphor I've used before because it really, really fits here. So if this coming out of my mouth now spoils a plus 150-year-old classic of American literature, well, that's more of a you problem than a me problem. You should take it up with your high school English teacher, because that ain't my fault. Anyway, in the story, uh the plague is ravaging Prince Prospero's kingdom, and his subjects are dropping like flies. And in response, the prince lavishly provisions his castle and then gathers all the fancy people behind uh the safety of its thick walls, and finally, they weld the doors shut so no one can enter or leave. And then they party. Quote, this is from the story the prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatory, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there were cards, there was beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the Red Death, unquote. But uh-oh, spoiler, the plague gets in. Quote, and now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night, unquote. And that was it. That was that. This is this is the end of the story, quote. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired, and darkness and decay and the red death held illimitable dominion over all. Unquote.

SPEAKER_04 15:25

And that's very much what the legacy media looks like to us. Outside the walls, disaster after disaster, all of them traceable back to the plague that is the modern Republican Party. But inside the castle, the pundits are still playing their games, still talking about bipartisanship, still talking about process, still pretending it's both sides, and still more or less unaffected.

SPEAKER_03 15:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:52

Driftglass, half an inch of snow in Washington, DC, is the biggest news story of the weekend.

SPEAKER_06 16:00

Yeah.

unknown 16:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:01

When Iowa can get, you know, four feet in a weekend.

SPEAKER_05 16:06

Yeah. Washington, D.C. has that has a meme attached to it that, you know, there's some lawn furniture, one of a chair is tipped over.

SPEAKER_04 16:13

Snowmageddon.

SPEAKER_05 16:14

And Snow Mageddon. And we will rebuild. You know, there's such precious little creatures there. Not all of them. I mean, you know, many, many great things come out of Washington, D.C. I think Bob Seska came out of Washington, D.C., uh, born and raised there a little bit. So we're not denigrating the citizens of that city, but the institutions of the legacy media are a catastrophe for this country. And and like angry mobs, plagues don't care. And eventually in Poe's story, the Red Death gets inside the castle. And that's what happened at the Correspondence Center. Reality walked into the room. The monster they helped to normalize showed up and behaved exactly like the monster he's always been.

SPEAKER_04 16:55

And in a way, the same thing happened at the Fauci hearing. The Republican Party is no longer just letting the mask slip from time to time. Now the mask is gone entirely. And the real Republican Party is right there, snarling, stupid, hateful, with blood on its teeth. Impossible to ignore unless your paycheck depends on ignoring it.

SPEAKER_05 17:17

Yeah. Both the Fauci Witch Hunt and the Wash and the White House correspondence dinner were occasions for Republicans to show the world exactly who they are and to rub our faces in it.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

Yeah, and and they're awful. Awful. Dishonest, bigoted, and fascist. In other words, exactly who we've known them to be all along. And as always happens, the MAGA faithful will delight in it. The politically disengaged will barely notice it. The both ciderists will continue to blame both sides, and the rest of us will go on waiting for the cavalry to arrive.

SPEAKER_05 17:52

Yeah. And here comes another spoiler. Uh nobody's coming to save us because there is no cavalry. Or rather, we're we are the cavalry. The people performing these spectacles in Congress are doing it for Fox News clips. They're doing it for attention, they're doing it because it's profitable as hell. They're doing it because they are there are no brakes left on that car. And the only thing that can stop them is losing power. Which brings us to the midterms.

SPEAKER_04 18:19

There's a huge debate right now about how Democrats win. Progressives are arguing, moderates are arguing, everybody's pissed, and everybody has a theory. And oh, what if we blow it? Oh, it just drives us crazy. Uh, but the real questions are actually pretty simple. What will get enough disengaged voters off the sidelines and to the polls? And conversely, what will it take for enough Republicans to be disgusted enough to stay home?

SPEAKER_05 18:48

Yeah. And yesterday I was on the Bradcast with uh Digby and Brad and Desi, and we talked about exactly this subject how the stakes are so high and the consequences are so grave that people are grabbing for anything that promises to tell them what the future holds. They're desperate because decisions made over the next four months are going to shape the rest of our lives. It's frightening, which is why half the political news these days is poll numbers and focus groups. We might as well be reading goat and trails or visiting a medium. And I forget who it was. I think it was Brad who brought up the 2006 election and asked whether the Republican Party is headed for another, you know, thumping. And I said, Yeah, maybe, I sure hope so. But there is one major difference between 20 years ago and now.

SPEAKER_04 19:34

Yeah, and that is the Republican Party of today is much worse than the Republican Party of 2006. It's fully a cult now. And it's long past time to stop pretending otherwise. And cult members don't leave because gas prices went up. They don't leave because tariffs hurt, they don't leave because healthcare disappears. They've spent 40 years being told one thing Democrats are always worse. Always, no matter what happens. Which means the real challenge isn't converting cult members.

SPEAKER_05 20:05

No, because that doesn't work. It's reaching everybody else. The so-called independents that we mock a lot on this show, and rightly so, the disengaged voters, the people who think that they're above politics.

SPEAKER_04 20:16

Um I'm not above politics, Drift West. I'm just an independent.

SPEAKER_05 20:20

I'm an independent. You know, I don't I don't like politics. I don't get involved in politics. Well, you know, politics is deeply involved in your life, whether you know it or not, and it's getting worse. Earlier this month, we talked about on this very podcast uh the shave and a haircut effect from who framed Roger Rabbit. This that's that irresistible urge to complete a familiar pattern. All Roger Rabbit has to do is not complete the shave and a haircut line, and he'll be fine. But it turns out no tune can resist it. So after fighting and fighting against it, to his own detriment, Roger Rabbit bursts through the wall behind which he'd been hiding and sings, Two Bits, and is promptly captured by Christopher Lloyd. Well, you know what? It turns out there's an actual psychological term for this compulsion. It's called the Ovsian Kian effect, named after a Russian, German, American psychologist with four names that I'm not even going to try to pronounce. But the compulsion really is affecting. That specific compulsion is really affecting our politics in disastrous ways.

SPEAKER_04 21:24

Yep. Republicans do something awful, and millions of Americans instantly complete the thought. Yeah, but Democrats.

SPEAKER_05 21:31

Yeah. Republicans embrace fascism. Yeah, but the Democrats.

SPEAKER_04 21:34

Republicans destroy institutions, yeah, but Democrats. What we need, Drift, is a third party.

SPEAKER_05 21:40

What about a third party? A third party is what will solve all of our problems, Blue Gal.

SPEAKER_04 21:44

Yeah, it's automatic. It's been programmed into them by decades of media conditioning and brainwashing. Because admitting one side is dramatically worse than the other would require a moral choice. It would require criticism. Thinking. And a lot of people desperately want to avoid that responsibility.

SPEAKER_05 22:04

Yeah, that's not something they want to think about. This is what we're up against. It's not just Fox News, it's not just hate radio, it's not just Donald Trump. We're up against 40 years of elite media conditioning that taught people to believe that every story has two equally valid sides. Even when one side is openly authoritarian and brazenly corrupt and proudly fascist.

SPEAKER_04 22:27

And even when it's not two equally valid sides, because but the Democrats is often Democrats are worse.

SPEAKER_05 22:34

Right. That's what that's what conservatives tell themselves, Republicans tell themselves, and but it's the it's the disinterested voter. It serves both horrible causes. It teaches conservatives there's no need to Republicans, there's no need to leave the party because Democrats are always worse.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 22:49

And it teaches that both sides do it, idiots, reinforces to them that, well, I don't need to get involved because everyone's terrible and everyone's awful equally.

SPEAKER_04 22:57

Yeah. And that's the problem this country is going to be wrestling with Drift Glass long after you and I are gone.

SPEAKER_06 23:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:03

And the only advice we have comes from brother Charlie Pierce writing about the slug fest going on in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Quote, whoever wins this race, if he or she manages to avoid stepping on rakes all the way through to the general election, has one job and one job only, to repair the damage done to the Republic over the last decade, to do it relentlessly and ruthlessly, and to shore up and reform the institutions of government so a similar pack of bastards can't gather in those institutions again. Jesus, eyes on the prize, people. Now that's Charlie Pierce talking.

SPEAKER_05 23:48

I can I can hear him saying it.

SPEAKER_04 23:50

I can hear him saying it.

SPEAKER_05 23:51

We could not have said it better ourselves, which is why we stole it from Charlie Pierce.

SPEAKER_04 23:55

And we did this before in 1974. The Democratic Congress that that swept in in 74.

SPEAKER_05 24:03

Post-Watergate, right?

SPEAKER_04 24:04

Post-Watergate did that. A lot of reports passed bill after bill to prevent another Nixon. And we can do this again. And I think we ought to put some people on trial, too.

SPEAKER_05 24:18

And six years later, the Reagan administration took started taking a cold chisel to those reforms until they were no more. And because so many Republican policies are built around the assumption that suffering imposed on vulnerable people is an acceptable price for ideological goals and tax advantages for the wealthy. Today we're going to talk about something so basic to human life that the very idea of depriving people of it should have mobs with pitchforks and torches surrounding the White House. But since it's happening to poor people, there are no mobs or pitchforks or torches. We're talking about the effects of disruptions and cuts to the federal supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP. And what's happening to SNAP, the program formerly known as Food Stamps, is one of those stories that ought to be leading every newscast in America. But instead, it's mostly being covered as a budgetary footnote or line item, a policy tweak, a thing that's happened somewhere to somebody else, except it isn't.

SPEAKER_04 25:18

You might remember that the first time in its 60-year history that SNAP benefits were disrupted was due to the federal government shutdown in November of 2025 when we lost our Obamacare subsidies. Yep. Gone. That's uh during this 43-day funding lapse, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initially suspended and delayed scheduled allotments for millions of low-income households. And the results were calamitous.

SPEAKER_05 25:45

Yeah, and last Friday, a monthly Springfield policy forum group called the Citizens Club, uh, we had a conversation about SNAP. And I attended it, I was a member of the audience, it was very enlightening. And this is a report about that meeting from Capital City Now. Quote, the talk swung to safety net services in general. And Central Illinois Food Bank Executive Director Pam Molitoris said the temporary suspension of the program was devastating. A lot was disrupted when the Snap disruption happened, she said. It was just the food bank. Oh, I'm sorry, it wasn't just the food bank. It was not just people that were on Snap. It was all the vendors too. And the thing people, I don't know if they always thought about what did this do in terms of impacting the food supply? And you'd be amazed at how disruptive this was and how difficult it was, but we got it done. An audience member asked, what can we do? Which is a very good question. Molotaro said the first thing is to care. Another panelist, Table of Life Ministries pastor Jesse Herring, said sometimes she feels like crying. And she this came with a throb in her throat. She was very, very upset by this. But she's also proud of what the work they'd done. We're making a difference in this community, said Herring. I did a survey and they were saying how much they appreciate us and the things we were doing and the food because they do not have the income, unquote. And there were plenty of anecdotal stories about people who were going to get hit with work requirements who are single mom, raising kids, trying to go back to school, already volunteering. So they have no time for anything else, and they're just going to lose their food, which is despicable.

SPEAKER_04 27:23

Yeah. There there were some stories in the New York fucking times about some of the people in Arizona, and I think it was Arizona losing their SNAP benefits, and a woman who uh has cancer and is raising her family. And she weighs like 67 pounds and they're taking food away from her.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

And she's she's disabled by cancer. This is not somebody who's, well, if she'd only go, why didn't she go get a job? And and I want to say something. I know people at the time and still are mad at Democrats because they didn't hold out for extending the subsidy.

SPEAKER_06 28:02

Right.

SPEAKER_04 28:02

And I just want to, as someone who was thoroughly victimized by that event, you know, our my insurance went up to $2,561 a month. I had to go and start working full-time at a job at any job, and it's not a great job.

SPEAKER_05 28:19

I mean, I do I do job, but it's hard. As long as it has health care, right? As long as it has healthcare.

SPEAKER_04 28:23

But it has health insurance. And uh, you know, I I am within my rights to be upset with Democrats for quote unquote giving up at that time. But they didn't have the votes.

SPEAKER_05 28:38

No, they just didn't.

SPEAKER_04 28:38

They just didn't simply didn't have the votes to continue. They didn't have the votes to extend the subsidies because Republicans. Right. Because Republicans. And so uh seeing this devastation that happened as a result of just a a blip of an interruption, and now that's not a blip anymore. It's gone. It's policy now.

SPEAKER_05 29:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 29:07

And people are going hungry in this country.

SPEAKER_05 29:10

In this country, millions of people are all going hungry. Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 29:14

And it's such a silly thing because this program is not full of fraud, folks.

SPEAKER_05 29:20

No. It will, and you know, nobody uh they mentioned the article the vendors that are affected. The farmers that are affected. There's there is a whole chain of culture program.

SPEAKER_04 29:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 29:29

Yeah, there's a whole chain of people who are involved in getting food to people. And when you screw with it, you mess everybody up along that chain, including the farmers that voted for Donald Trump. And and it's just it's absurd. But remember, every time something like this happens, every time you want to take a stand, and we do too, remember, Republican parties are perfectly okay with shooting the hostage.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:52

They don't care about these people. They would rather see them starve to death. They don't give a shit about you or me. They don't give a shit about any of us. So saying, well, don't you realize how much you're hurting people? Might as well be talking to Mitch McConnell's corpse. They don't care.

SPEAKER_04 30:05

What is happening is that millions of Americans are being pushed off food assistance in the name of get this fiscal responsibility, government efficiency, and the conservative mantra that if we just make life a little harder for poor people, prosperity will surely break out any day now. Yeah. I mean, this was in Project 2025. This is another wish list thing.

SPEAKER_05 30:29

Yeah, if we just kick them harder, things will get better.

SPEAKER_04 30:32

Yeah. This the latest round of federal changes expands work requirements, you know, for cancer patients. Narrows exemptions and layers on new reporting and paperwork obligations. It also shifts the cost burden massively to the states. The cost split used to be 50-50 state and federal. Under the new regulations, the cost split is now 80-20 state and federal. Now, guess which states are going to be hurt hardest by that.

SPEAKER_05 31:03

Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 31:04

Red states.

SPEAKER_05 31:05

Red states, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 31:06

And while the sales pitch is all about eliminating fraud and encouraging work, the reality is that many of the people losing benefits, by the way, were already working, struggling, already trying to navigate a maze of rules that seem designed by people who have never once worried about how to stretch a week's worth of groceries into two or four.

SPEAKER_05 31:30

Or, you know, make sure their kids can eat and then they don't.

SPEAKER_04 31:34

Yep, yep. Yep. The state estimates that roughly 360,000 Illinoisans will lose SNAP benefits because of the federal changes. While Illinois has not yet published a county-by-county tally, a population-based estimate suggests that somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 Sangamon County residents, that's our county, could be affected.

SPEAKER_05 31:59

The dirty little secret behind programs like SNAP is that the overwhelming majority of recipients are not the cartoon villains of right-wing mythology. They're children, they're kids, they're seniors, they're disabled people, people with cancer, their working families whose wages have failed to keep up with the cost of housing and health care and childcare and transportation and the food itself. But for decades, Republicans have sold the country a fairy tale, which poverty is primarily a character flaw, and government assistance is primarily a scam. And for decades, far too much of the mainstream media has dutifully translated that fairy tale into respectable sounding policy language. Benefits become entitlements, hunger becomes a dependency issue. Cutting food assistance becomes reform. So here we are.

SPEAKER_04 32:47

Millions of people are losing help buying groceries at exactly the same moment food prices are exploding, and economic insecurity remains widespread. Food prices are already skyrocketing thanks to Trump tariffs and the knock-on effects on fuel and fertilizer costs from Trump's war for idiocy in Iran. Food banks across the country are already warning that they cannot possibly absorb all of the demand that will result from these cuts. They can help, they can supplement, but they cannot replace a national nutrition program.

SPEAKER_05 33:21

And yet the people responsible for these policies will continue to insist that this is all about encouraging self-reliance and balancing the budget while somehow never applying the same stern standards to billionaires collecting tax breaks or corporations collecting subsidies or defense contractors feeding at the federal trough.

SPEAKER_04 33:40

Or a president who just decides that the taxpayers will pay for his ballroom after all.

SPEAKER_05 33:45

Right. Or when pistol Pete Heggsith comes back and says, I need another $37 billion.

SPEAKER_04 33:50

Or else.

SPEAKER_05 33:51

Or else. Okay, we'll just write him a check. Because in modern American politics, hunger is apparently a character building exercise, at least when it happens to somebody else.

SPEAKER_04 34:00

And who exactly are the people responsible for these policies? They're the ones who voted for Trump's big ugly budget bill, which was last July.

SPEAKER_05 34:10

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 34:10

A year ago.

SPEAKER_05 34:11

A year ago, that's right.

SPEAKER_04 34:13

No surprise that every Democrat in Congress voted against the bill, and almost every Republican voted for it. The handful of Republicans who voted no did so for reasons largely unrelated to protecting SNAP. Most argued that the bill did not cut spending enough or would add too much to the deficit. It was so close that Vice President J.D. Vance had to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. So put that in your both sides do it pipe and smoke it. You know, we're gonna tie that around his neck.

SPEAKER_06 34:46

Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 34:47

It's time for a news roundup. All right from the New York fucking Times. Quote, Trump will end subsidies for Medicare drug premiums.

SPEAKER_05 34:56

Great. That's great.

SPEAKER_04 34:57

And one of my co-workers at the hospital where I work or the medical center where I work, who I don't think is a particularly news junkie type person.

SPEAKER_06 35:07

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 35:08

Did you hear what Trump did to Medicare? I was like, oh, something is really breaking through here. Millions of older Americans could pay more for their prescription drug coverage next year. The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug coverage for people on Medicare. The decision means that millions of Americans 65 and older could face higher Medicare drug premiums next year when the cost of living is already a major concern. That could be politically damaging for Republicans in the midterm elections. In the weeks leading up to November, Medicare beneficiaries could experience sticker shock while shopping for next year's drug plan. For 2025 and 2026, the federal government gave health insurers billions of dollars in subsidies to help them keep down drug premiums for people on Medicare. Without the subsidies, millions of people could pay hundreds of dollars more a year for their drug plans. I'm not suggesting that giving subsidies to drug companies and insurers is the answer.

SPEAKER_06 36:13

No.

SPEAKER_04 36:15

But there's gonna have to be some uh complicated, involved, wonky decisions made about healthcare again.

SPEAKER_05 36:28

Well, yeah, but this one is the choice is either pay what drug companies ask, just you know, the government soaks up a big chunk of that, or do what every other government in the civilized world does, which is allow the government to negotiate drug prices with pharma companies, which drives down the prices across the board. Yeah. That's it's an easy fix in terms of a policy decision, but Republicans will not stand for it because they all own stock in drug companies.

SPEAKER_04 37:00

That's why.

SPEAKER_05 37:02

Anyway, um, this is from CNN quote Trump asked the Supreme Court to overturn the $83.3 million defamation judgment against him for defaming the writer E. Carroll, citing the court's 2024 decision granting presidents sweeping immunity for actions taken in office. So apparently, defaming someone that you have been adjudicated to have raped is part of the job description of the president of the United States.

SPEAKER_04 37:29

And he wasn't president when he did it, by the way. No, that's the other thing.

SPEAKER_06 37:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 37:34

I mean, it this is a simple call. He wasn't president.

SPEAKER_06 37:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 37:38

This is from Axios, quote, just 33% of Americans approve of the Supreme Court's performance, which is a record low, and down six percentage points from the court's previous low. You know when that was, Driftglass? 1934? 1924? No, last year.

SPEAKER_05 37:55

Last year. It wasn't. It wasn't the Plessy court. Plessy Ferguson court. No, it was it was last year. Um, this is also from CNN, quote, 73% of Americans say Trump hasn't paid enough attention to the country's most important problems, while 27% think he's doing a great job, unquote.

SPEAKER_04 38:13

27% is down, Earth Glass.

SPEAKER_05 38:15

Well, you know, but they're the majority, blue gal.

SPEAKER_04 38:19

Okay. From the Associated Press, quote, Americans rewire their grocery shopping routines while digesting the biggest price jump in food in 50 years.

SPEAKER_06 38:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 38:32

That's it's all coming from.

SPEAKER_04 38:34

50 years was the the oil shock.

SPEAKER_05 38:37

Yeah. Yep. I remember that vividly. And you know what? People didn't like that.

SPEAKER_04 38:41

No, they did not.

SPEAKER_05 38:42

They got real mad about that, and they elected a terrible person because of it. Uh, meanwhile, in local news, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, ever heard of him, announced that the state's new food assistance program will help tens of thousands of residents who were kicked off of SNAP. At a time when the cost of groceries, gas, and utilities are all rising, Donald Trump and Republicans decided to strip food assistance from nearly 100,000 people, said Pritzker. In Illinois, we passed the Fresh Program to help provide some relief for families kicked off of food assistance. But no state can backfill the cruel and imminent cuts set in motion by Trump's budget bill. Illinoisians who lost their SNAP benefits will now have a one-time $400 benefit per eligible household member through Illinois families receiving emergency support for hunger fresh program. Approximately 100,000 Illinoisans will receive assistance beginning August 1st. A notice will be mailed to eligible households.

SPEAKER_04 39:42

Thank you, Drift Glass.

SPEAKER_05 39:44

Oh, well, you know, our governor is doing what he can with what's within his power to do to mitigate the catastrophes that are being caused by the federal government under Republicans.

SPEAKER_04 39:56

And I gotta say, Pritzker has the flexibility to do that because of his supermajority in the state legislature.

SPEAKER_05 40:01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 40:02

And the the ability to raise taxes a little bit to do it. Exactly. And uh on rich people, you know, and find things to stop, find places to do that. Red state governors don't have that kind of flexibility. All right. Driftglass, each week we post to our Patreon page and website an internet kitty sent in by you, the listeners. This week's internet kitty is Kitty. We have to assume she's named after Miss Kitty, but her name's Kitty.

SPEAKER_05 40:27

Gunsmoke.

SPEAKER_04 40:28

Yeah, kitty is a Nashville cat. She plays clean as country water and wild as Mountain Dew. With summer heating up, she is deciding whether to come indoors and bond with her adopted human family or continued making neighborhood rounds to see if the neighbors have set out treats. Her blue eyes do more than hint that she is part Siamese, if you please. Very lovely Kitty. And of course, Kitty eats freshly poured cat food, our fake sponsor, whether you serve Pet Store Perfection or Dollar Store Dreck. Your cat will come home from her neighborhood rounds and bond with you by demanding that the food they eat is only freshly poured. And you can visit Kitty at our Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash prolef pod or our website, prolefpod.com. And you can send your internet kitty, dog, or other pet to us at our email address, prolefpodcast at gmail.com, where you can also write to both of us. Feel free to write to us. We love hearing from you. Be aware that if you write to us at any of our addresses, we reserve the right to read your email or U.S. Postal Service Go Postal Unions letter on the air, unless you say otherwise. We had a lovely letter today, didn't we, Drift Glass? Yes, we did. Email uh from a woman who uh was inspired by a group of citizens who went to visit their congresswoman's office. Tell him more. Tell me more of it I think it was 10 people who uh went to visit their congresswoman's office. One person had driven two and a half hours to get to their congresswoman's office. Most of them had driven an hour because this was Illinois 15 that they were come coming from, which is one of the largest districts ever.

SPEAKER_05 42:34

Yeah, in the world.

SPEAKER_04 42:35

Well, in the US, it is, you know, the Indiana border to the Iowa-Missouri border, this huge swath of farmland. And our correspondent noticed that the name of the Congresswoman was Mary Miller. Mary Nancy Miller. And guess what, Dirt Lath? They wanted to talk to her about health care, and she would not open her door for them. Go away! Even though they were constituents of hers. Anyway, this correspondent wrote to us and said that uh uh the even in the deep red districts, there are good people doing good work and doing uh good political work to try to visit their congresswoman and make a stink about it.

SPEAKER_05 43:17

Yeah. We never doubt that.

SPEAKER_04 43:21

We feel like a red state, we love you very much.

SPEAKER_05 43:24

Yeah, we're sorry for you. We're sorry you're surrounded by idiots. We hope things will get better in the future. Uh speaking of the future, don't forget our go on my coffee guideline. If you can afford an espresso-based beverage for yourself, buy one for us at patreon.com forward slash proleft pod. This is not a charity. This is our job, and we do it every week with your help and support. You can also help us continue to grow by sharing our show on social media. That works really well. So if you love this podcast, introduce it to a friend. And thank you so very much for helping us do what we do.

SPEAKER_04 43:54

Hey Driftglass, how are the internet kitties doing this week?

SPEAKER_05 43:57

Well, Blue Gal, the Internet Kitties know that nobody is coming to fill their bowls but us.