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."
The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal
Ep 1017: Judgment Day
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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 rotten all along. Driftglass and Blue Gal ask the only question that matters — did they know, or were they delusional? — and prove with two decades of receipts that they knew, they profited from it, and now they're profiting again by pretending to be "the first ones brave enough to say so." (Fun Fact: Rick can't even get the timeline right.) The episode also honors Dolly Parton, contrasts a manosphere UFC event (that may have killed the manosphere) with Zohran Mamdani's genuinely joyful "bro culture," and shows Abdul El-Sayed outmaneuvering Jesse Watters by refusing the culture-war bait entirely. It's about judgment as a moral obligation, not a sin, and why remembering things accurately is the one thing the Never Trump grift can never survive.
Links for this episode:
GQ Link: https://www.gq.com/story/ufc-at-the-white-house
Mamdani’s Bro Culture https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/nyregion/mamdani-bro-culture-sports.html
Stay in Touch!
Email: proleftpodcast@gmail.com
Website: proleftpod.com
Support via Patreon: patreon.com/proleftpod
or Donate in the Venmo App @proleftpod
Mail: The Professional Left, PO Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791
You can listen to the professional left wherever you get your podcasts on NetRits Radio or at 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 contribution at PLbox 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.
SPEAKER_06This is the podcast for August 25th, 2026. It's not safe for work.
SPEAKER_04Recorded live from the Cornfield Resistance, where the Illinois State Fair is over, but the butter cow is eternal. It's the professional left with Drift Glass and Bluegal.
SPEAKER_06This morning, before the sun came up and before the kids arrived for a visit, yay! Yay! Uh Drift Glass went out to the highest mountain in all of Sangamon County, Illinois, which for you geography nerds is the Bettus benchmark, so named for the Bettis family when the U.S. Geological Survey established the geodetic survey marker there, sometime around 1934, and which rises either a majestic 715 or 716 feet above sea level. It's very controversial, Driftglass.
SPEAKER_04Yes, a lot of controversy.
SPEAKER_06Anyway, uh Driftglass went there to consult the wisest sage in all the land. Because everyone knows mountaintops are where wise sages live.
SPEAKER_04It's true. And of course, before getting to see the sage, I had to cross a local bridge of death and answer the three challenge questions, which is all pretty standard stuff.
SPEAKER_02Who would cross the bridge of death must answer me these questions three? The other side he sees.
SPEAKER_04So I climbed the narrow and treacherous path, past the tops of the soybeans, past the dog park, and through the corn sweat layer, until I reached the top, and there sat the sage, eating a corndog and muttering about what a shit paper the State Journal Register had become. And to the sage I asked this question Does the biblical injunction, judge not lest ye be judged, mean that no one should ever choose one thing over another, that no one should ever decide between action and inaction? And the sage put aside their corndog, looked at me with one baleful eye, and said, What are you, an idiot? For this you interrupt my breakfast? Of course, Matthew 7-1 is not a prohibition against making distinqu distinctions, exercising judgment, or choosing between right and wrong. Have you even read the book? Because if it really meant never judge anything, it would immediately contradict about a third of the rest of the Bible. Especially the parts where Jesus Himself is repeatedly telling people to distinguish truth from lies, good from evil, and wise actions from foolish ones. I realize now that I just should have stayed at home, made my wife a nice breakfast, and consulted the Bible bitch rather than risking life and limbs scaling the bettis benchmark.
SPEAKER_06It's true. You could have just asked me from your safety of your own house. I was a little bit worried about you. I thought your note said off to sink widgets.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that was seek wisdom, which isn't entirely my fault. Uh it was early and the cats were nagging me, and I was in a hurry and I hadn't had much call.
SPEAKER_06So your handwriting is completely illegible. But if you had asked Bible bitch. Bible bitch. That's not scriptural. I'd have reminded you that a few verses later in the very same chapter, Jesus, you know, you might have heard of him, warns about false prophets and says people will know them by their fruits, which, duh, requires making judgments. And if you read a little further, you'll find this quote, why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Unquote. Now, the target of that is clearly hypocritical, self-righteous condemnation, applying one standard to other people and not applying it to yourself.
SPEAKER_04So what I hear you saying is that if you call a fascist a fascist and they come back with so much for the tolerant left, we can say fuck that fascist and keep right on judging them without feeling even a little bit bad.
SPEAKER_06Exactly right, Driftglass. Uh, this is from Carl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which was published in 1945. I don't know what was going on in 1945, Driftglass. I think it was the jitterbug was invented or something like that. Something like that. Quote, unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and the tolerance with them.
SPEAKER_04And you know what this means, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Driftglass, it means that if we want to be good Christians, if we want to be good people, we need to spend the rest of this podcast judging people, Driftglass.
SPEAKER_07You can testify, but you just can't win. Because I'm here to tell you you guilty as sin. You're gonna be good. You're gonna be good. On the card.
SPEAKER_04Excellent. I'm right there with you, Bluegal. Except, really, is there anything left to judge at all?
SPEAKER_06Uh-huh. I can think uh of a couple of one or two villains whose hypocrisy could use some ventilation.
SPEAKER_04Amen.
SPEAKER_06But uh first, in the easiest judgment of the day, let us mourn the passing of the great Dolly Parton. In addition to her legendary 60-year career, which included 11 Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts, and inductions into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she was, by all accounts, one of the kindest and most decent people in the world. Generous, tolerant, and incredibly skilled. We need a thousand more like her. But we had her on this earth for 80 years, and for that we must be grateful. Amen. This is from Roger Ebert's 2011 memoir. Quote In Dallas for the premiere of nine to five, I had an uncanny experience. And on the plane home to Chicago, I confessed it to Siskel. I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton. And as we spoke, I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was just healing and comforting. Jean Siskel, right? His his partner in crime there, listened and said, Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her. We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer to it in wonder. Unquote.
SPEAKER_04Lovely.
SPEAKER_06Yep.
SPEAKER_04Lovely. Now, on to the villains and the New York fucking times. A friend of the pod, Walt, sent us this article from The Guardian entitled, quote, Why Does the New York Times keep calling the left divisive? The newspaper, yeah. Yeah. The newspaper often uses the word to describe elections with progressive contenders, implying that a previous hole destroyed by the left, unquote. And Walt included in his email this comment Oh, oh, I know the answer to this one.
SPEAKER_06Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_04And you know what? I think we all do, Walt. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06The article summarizes the many times that the New York fucking Times has identified some election or person as uniquely divisive because a progressive was involved. That word got a hell of a workout during and after the El Sayed versus Stevens senatorial primary in Michigan. And again in the Crowley versus Hong race in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Now we're going to take turns reading from this article, which is not from the New York fucking Times.
SPEAKER_04No, this is from The Guardian.
SPEAKER_06This is from The Guardian.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Quote: That same day in a piece about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez allegedly distancing herself from woke 1.0, the Times cited Middlebury College professor Eric Blyke, who pointed to the calls to defund the police as a divisive goal.
SPEAKER_04Polarizing, a close cousin to divisive, appears regularly too. The Times especially likes to apply it to New York mayor Zoran Mamdani. A reporter insisted in October of 2025, for example, quote, as Mamdani's campaign upends New York politics, no single stance has polarized New York New Yorkers as passionately as his pro-Palestinian activism and his caustic criticism of Israel.
SPEAKER_06Perhaps most outrageous was the Times choice of headline for a recent review of David Zinn's new book about David Zierin's new book about Howard Zinn. That's right. America's most divisive historian gets a new biography. How exactly was Zinn divisive? And who are those other historians who are also divisive, just not as bad? Because this is the most divisive.
SPEAKER_04The most divisive.
SPEAKER_06Most divisive. Neither Adam Hock's child in his review, nor Zirin in his biography, nor any discussion of Zinn I've ever seen in 40 years as a practicing U.S. historian and co-author, along with Robin DG Kelly, of a book with Zinn, talk about Zinn that way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Overall, the Times repeated the charge divisive, along with polarizing, implies a previous and virtuous whole that is currently being destroyed by the left. It assumes voters agree that in the face of deep fear of Trump and his allies, we have to stick together and that progressive candidates can't beat Republicans in the midterms.
SPEAKER_06But the Times mythical unified country never existed. The United States has always been riven by race, class, gender, religion, immigration status, and much more. And vigorous debate has always been at the core of truly democratic politics.
SPEAKER_04For the Times, unity is a stand-in for the powers that be in the Democratic Party and their preferred strategy of running moderate campaigns that won't offend aging incumbents, never Trump Republicans, and the multimillionaire and up donor class, as the editors of Hammer and Hope magazine recently put it, unquote.
SPEAKER_06And speaking Hammer and Hope, they sound like commies drift labs.
SPEAKER_04They might be commies, Blue Gal, but they're going to be very divisive. Their analysis is dead on.
SPEAKER_06Can I have my New York Times job now?
SPEAKER_04I'm afraid they're given that job to uh who uh no, Ross Duthat's leaving.
SPEAKER_06Ross Duth's leaving.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I I'm guessing Ben Dominic is gonna be coming on board or what one of the weirdos that'll scrape off the bottom of the barrel.
SPEAKER_06In in the alternate better universe, Bluegale Bible bitch is given Ross Duthat's job at the New York Times.
SPEAKER_04And the best goddamn healthcare package you've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, in the alternate universe that we both want to live in, that uh fake wall between the columnist is lowered. So the when when fellow conservative asshole David French says something stupid or lies, you're all to say, hey, David French is a liar, here's why.
SPEAKER_06Not talking That's the title of your column in the New York Times, right?
SPEAKER_04Not talk a mile around the block, avoiding naming him by name, saying, Many people are saying that something this uh this guy said who I can't talk about was false. It's just such a such a freaking kabuki. But speaking of telling stories designed not to offend aging incumbents, narrow Trump Republicans, and the multi-millionaire and up donor class, next up on the docket, we tackle the question, looking back, did all these former Republicans actually know what their own goddamn party had become? Or were they just completely delusional?
SPEAKER_07It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.
SPEAKER_06Bold indeed, but it's the only honest way to frame it. Because this past week alone, and this is why this is so current, everybody. Yep, we got four, count them, four prominent, recently former Republicans looking back over the wall at 2016 and admitting in their own roundabout ways that they'd built a doomsday machine with no off switch and acting shocked about it. This was during the same period when liberals were pointing out these giant flashing neon warnings while being told we were hysterical cranks.
SPEAKER_04Yep. Hysterical cranks one and all. During just last week, we had Tim Miller, Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, and even Joe Scarborough wandering back past the 2016 Forbidden Zone and admitting that, yeah, maybe there were signs, maybe there were some warning signs that they should have paid attention to. So did they know, or were they just completely delusional? Because those are the only two options on the table today.
SPEAKER_06And who are we talking about?
SPEAKER_04We're talking about Tim Miller, Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough. Four separate confessions, same week. And today we're gonna zip through all of them with about 20 years' worth of receipts and see what we can learn about what they're willing to admit and what they all leave out. So we're gonna start with Tim Miller and Joe Scarborough because this one's just plain funny on a certain dark level. Uh, it was on Morning Joe, and there's this back and forth about how long ago the GOP started going nuts, right? And Scarborough actually mentioned his own Gingrich class of 1994 and how shocked he was that all the things he said he believed in have been jettisoned by those voters, by the voters who voted for him, especially the evangelicals.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, well, it was a it was a humble brag because all of the evangelicals voted for him.
SPEAKER_04He said 80, 90% of them were for me. And then now they're all just no, they all spontaneously changed overnight. Now, Miller, to his credit, admits that he may have had a hand in spinning up the base in ways that he's not always proud of. And Scarborough, and we mean this with real precision, either knew it as well and won't admit it, or genuinely didn't know it was happening because he is kind of stupid.
SPEAKER_06This is also, I think, a trick that Joe Scarborough does of saying this in late August when no one is watching. Yeah. And then if somebody accuses him of never mentioning this, he can go back and point to it. Yeah. But, you know, that I think he does that a lot. Uh and credit where credit is due. Tim Miller actually cuts Joe Scarborough off at the pass when Scarborough tries the old McCain was a maverick line. So clearly, you know, the party was okay back in 2008 because John McCain was a right guy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And they they nominated him, right?
SPEAKER_06So hey, hey. And Miller says, yeah, but McCain's big Maverick move was putting Sarah Palin one heartbeat from the presidency. And he didn't do that because she was qualified. He did it because she got the base up out of their chairs and saluting. She was political Viagra for his limp failing campaign.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. And this is from uh an old New Jersey.com piece from right after the vice presidential debate in 2008. The headline is literally Palin, the lowest common denominator, and it quotes Rich Lowry from National Review notoriously drooling over her. Quote, Palin, too, projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, Hey, I think she just winked at me, and her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew what she was doing well and she was doing it well, it was so sparkling. It was almost mesmerizing. It sent little star bursts through the screen and ricochanging around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned. It's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it, unquote.
SPEAKER_06She's Sarah Palin is, yeah. Well, you know, kitten with a whip. That's what she is.
SPEAKER_04That that was her that was her allure. That was what she had going for. Um now, NewJersey.com continues, quote, post-debate, Hannity gushed about how attractive Palin was. At Palin rallies, you could buy buttons about how hot their VP is and et cetera. And yet they called Biden sexist for saying Palin was more attractive than he was. They called Campbell Brown sexist for wanting an example of Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. Yeah, because that's just too much to ask of that poor woman. Palin employed sex appeal in the debate in a display unbecoming of a 44-year-old mother of five and a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land. As a woman, I was embarrassed and sickened. And that's why the Republicans think she won the debate, because she employed cutesiness, recited all of her rehearsed lines, and didn't answer any questions she didn't want to answer. Often she just out and out lied, unquote.
SPEAKER_06Yep. And the thing is, McCain knew exactly what he was doing. It was the same clear-eyed, ruthless calculation that sent him to Liberty University to kiss Jerry Falwell's ass. The same Falwell that McCain had called an agent of intolerance living on the outer reaches of American politics eight years earlier. Obviously, McCain learned the lesson of George W. Bush that the GOP base are bigots, imbeciles, and fundies, and that they must be catered to if you want to win.
SPEAKER_04And if you don't, you're in trouble. Now, you may also remember that reliable conservative stalactide Kathleen Parker had her bumpet blown back by the response from her loyal readers to her column suggesting that Palin wasn't up to snuff. Now, this is from the long-gone Fire Dog Lake blog of the time, 2008. Quote, Kathleen Parker shocked to find that her party is full of vicious, threatening, delusional wingnuts. Shocked. Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a wingnut two minutes hate. This is now quoting Parker's own column. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have been a should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should off myself. After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail, but the past few days have produced responses of a different order, not just angry, but vicious and threatening. And that's the end of her column quote, and this is back to the Fire Dog Lake blog. And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003 on the Democratic presidential candidates. And she says, here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member who's been observing American politics from the trenches. And this is what her friends said. These bastards like Clark and Carey, and that incipient ass Dean and Gephardt and Kucinich, and that absolute mental midget Sharpton race baiter should be all lined up and shot. Unquote. Fire Dog Lake continues. Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabbit animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you. Now she whines, when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into a territory that puts all freedoms at risk. I am truly speechless. Unquote.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. When she was dishing it out with notes from a friend and covering herself, covering her own ass by saying a friend writes, it was okay. Well, she got a real taste of that. And she directed at her. And it's like, we need more civility, right?
SPEAKER_04Remember, this is 2008. And she learned nothing. She learned absolutely none of these people learned a goddamn thing. They saw what these people were like, and they still pretended they didn't exist.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. You may also remember the most ubiquitous conservative writer in the solar system wiping his brow in relief. Because now that Palin was fading like a bad dream, everything was looking great for the future of David Brooks' Republican Party. This was mere months before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator. And you all know what happened next. It's going to be Ruby.
SPEAKER_04Wrongest man in politics. Now, the next confession from Stuart Stevens flat out saying, I was wrong, wrong, wrong about my own party, and all the terrible things people, and he means liberals, I think, but he can't quite say the word because it burns their tongues a little bit. What those people said about the GOP, it all turned out to be true.
SPEAKER_00One thing that starts me, you know, as a guy that used to work in the Republican Party, Trump is laying the predicate for, I think, an acceptance of a far more center-left government than would have been, because you have an absence of a sane conservative alternative. And Trump has proven that every criticism about the Republican Party was right. Everything that it to the extreme that we were accused of, that, you know, we were a party that was racist, a party that was backward-looking, that a party that favored the rich, that a party that really only focused on helping those who were like us, which meant helping us like you know, white folks. Um it's, you know, I I argued against that for years, and I was wrong. It turns out that is exactly what the Republican Party is, and is is very happy to be it.
SPEAKER_04Which is about as clean an admission as you're ever going to get. And it sets up the next guy who is so very much worse.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Yeah, this is kind of absurd, but we got to include it. It's Rick Wilson, the Lincoln Project guy, who was flown over to the UK and fed by the Quiet Riot podcast so that he could eat their bully beef, drink their maul wine, and lie about his origin story. This is Wilson on their podcast. Quote, I've done this longer than any other Republican leader. I did this starting in 2015. I was the founder of the NeverTrump movement. Yeah, I've run the Lincoln project now over 10 years now, unquote. And he'd better be grateful that these Brits don't do real-time fact-checking, because that was all bullshit. The Never Trump name and concept were just a Twitter hashtag in early 2016 that cropped up during the Republican presidential primaries. Then, thanks to a continuous, flattering coverage by MSNBC, goofs like Charlie Sykes and Bill Crystal became the public face of a tiny number of Republicans who were freaked out that wingnut judgment day might finally be just around the corner. And what Wilson was trying to pass off as founding Never Trump in 2015 was just him doing normal, well-paid campaign dirty work for a candidate. He worked for the Marco Rubio campaign until Rubio flamed out, then hired himself out to the Ted Cruz campaign. Which, yeah, that's anti-Trump. We get it. But it's no more the founding of anything other than working for Santorum in 2012, was founding a never Romney movement. He's just opposing Trump and collecting money for it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, he's running a candidate against him, which happens in every political campaign.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Also, fun fact: the Lincoln Project was actually founded in December of 2019, Rick, when conservative grifters figured out that credulous liberals would throw huge bags of money at any former Republican who could produce slick Trump is an asshole ads that never budged a single vote, but was political porn hub to those credulous liberals. And also would be aired on MSNBC.
SPEAKER_04Oh, just oh my God, did you see the latest ad? Oh my God. Rick, tell us about your latest ad. Rick.
SPEAKER_06Whereas if a liberal made that ad, they would have never had them on.
SPEAKER_04Now, Rick, you've got a book out now, right? Yes, I have a book.
unknownYou should buy my book.
SPEAKER_04Which is crap, by the way.
SPEAKER_06By the way, I read that book.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, because I accidentally bought it.
SPEAKER_06He accidentally Driftglass accidentally bought. Well, we should tell the story now that we've gone that far. Yes. Uh everything Trump touches dies. Right. Driftglass wanted to leaf through it at the bookstore and he spilled coffee on it on the copy. So he felt guilty, so he bought it. Fuck. The cop the copy with the coffee on it.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_06And uh I read it. We he since it was in my house, I decided to read it. And I could pick my blog posts at random and put them in a book, and it would be better than this book.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Because that's what it looks like he did.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Honestly. Just string together some stuff.
SPEAKER_06String together some stuff about people he doesn't like. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And you know what? Um, the competing book in my mind was Stuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie, which is an actual good book.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04You know, it was early, early days, and he was like, Nope, nope, Republican Party was always terrible. I was wrong, I was wrong. He was out there early. And that that sets him apart from all these other guys who won't make that, who would just won't admit that.
SPEAKER_06Well, and he talked about how the reason he was wrong was he was being paid well to be wrong. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So when you're getting all that money coming in, you think, oh, I must be doing a good job. I must be have something going here good for me.
SPEAKER_04Well, and now tell us about who actually founded the Lincoln Project.
SPEAKER_06The Lincoln Project, yes. It was founded jointly by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslo, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid in 2019. Two years later, it had all but collapsed due to sexual and financial scandal.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yeah. It was bad. And the 60 Minutes was today glowing. Oh my God, these guys are so fucking amazing. Where, oh, you're saying such mean things about Donald Trump. No one's ever done that before. Um had to do like a little bit of a retraction back in 2020, where like, we did this thing about the Lincoln project, and it turns out, uh, yeah, they're not as great as we said we were. Please up, forgive us, forgive us. And that was it. But inside of Wilson's flim flamming of our British friends, we do find a grain of truth. Because after a lengthy blah, blah, blah, in which Wilson shows that he knew perfectly well that going into the 2016 election, a huge percentage of Republican base was motivated by this unhinged racist hatred of Barack Obama. One of the Brits says, Yeah, well, but hadn't this sort of thing been going on for decades? I mean, what about Nixon's Southern strategy? And bully for you for doing that homework. I appreciate that people do the reading. And 30%, that 30% who hate Obama isn't enough, is it? It's not enough. They have to be amped up. That hatred has to be used by someone, which is a great point. And Wilson replied thusly, quote, listen, the old theory of the Republican Party was we knew that 25% of the base, if I may put it as bluntly as it used to be said in the room, they were cousin fucking weirdos, unquote. And there's this big shocked laugh from the audience, because, you know, nobody says the sort of thing.
SPEAKER_06Is that deplorables, drift class? Is that what that is?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that certainly is deplorables. And then he went on. This is Rick Wilson continuing, and you brought them out of the closet every four years. You hosed them off and you sent them off to vote. We did not want to talk about those people. We did not particularly like those people. I come from, you can call it the Rhinos or the Country Club Republicans or whatever you want to call it, but we were the guys who could win races, and the weirdos could not win races. But that coalition, they were part of it. Now they're in the government, unquote.
SPEAKER_06Again, Rick Wilson is a liar.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_06And you may have noticed there are actually three different flavors of lies here. First, it was never 25%. No. One out of four, really, Rick. As Stuart Stevens now effectively admits it was much higher than that. Probably closer to 70%, or maybe even 80% of the Republican Party is fundamentally racist and uneducated and all the bad things that we're talking about here. Second, everyone in the room means that everyone in the Republican leadership knew damn well what kind of dangerous nutcases these people were.
SPEAKER_04And the third lie, as the as to this, we were the guys who could win races claptrap. That's a lie by omission. The only way your country club Republican clients could win anything ever was by flattering and pandering to the cousin fuckers, by ratcheting up their hatred every election cycle and using Fox News and hate radio to keep them at a full boil in between elections. Without the cousin fuckers, you'd never have won a fucking thing, and eventually they figured it out. And they turned the tables on you, but they were always there and you always depended on them. And you know who was jumping up and down, screaming warnings about Frankenstein and the Gollum and the Sorcerer's Apprentice while Rick Williston was getting rich, whipping the cousin fuckers into a frenzy? Liberals. This is from me in 2005. In this will not surprise you, when they both sides do a column about who else? David Brooks. This is me quoting myself. I'll name 15 leaders of your party who are intolerant, hate-mongering theocrats, superstition-touting extremists, your opinion leaders, the ones who get out the vote for your candidates, and without which, you cocksucking cocktail party Republicans would never win anything. Unquote by me, quoting myself from 21 years ago. And which is a sentiment I've repeated in dozens and probably hundreds of posts ever since. But to be clear, it wasn't just one or two of us saying this.
SPEAKER_06No, I was saying it too in my blog. And this was a great chorus of liberal writers and bloggers who were all sounding the alarm. That to stay in power, the leaders of the GOP were now explicitly bending the knee to hate radio and Fox News because their dependence on conservative media to get out the vote and drum up contributions was now complete. To anyone paying attention, this was all clear as day, when in 2009 the head of the RNC had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh to beg forgiveness for saying, and I'm going to check the notes here, true things about that despicable scumbag. This is from Politico.
SPEAKER_05Oh, politico. Politico.
SPEAKER_06Quote, Steele to Rush, I'm sorry. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an entertainer whose show can be incendiary. I'm surprised anybody got upset about that.
SPEAKER_04Well, and then Rush Limbaugh dropped a house on it.
SPEAKER_06Well, that was it. Rush Limbaugh got upset about it.
SPEAKER_04Yep. And we can't.
SPEAKER_06And everybody followed along because they didn't know what incendiary meant, but they knew Rush was mad at him. My intent, this is again Michael Steele, my intent was not to go after Rush. I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh, Steele said in a telephone interview. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.
SPEAKER_04Now, cool question. Whatever happened to Michael Steele? Anybody ever see him ever again?
SPEAKER_06Oh, that's right. He has his own show, an MS Now, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_04Yes, he does. Yeah, he sure does.
SPEAKER_06But look, this is not subtext. That's the GOP org chart in public in writing. And we know who's at the top of that org chart these days.
SPEAKER_05Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_06And the louder we liberals sounded the alarm, the more strident the dismissal and mockery became because no one wanted to believe it, especially in the country clubs. Oh, God. And the pages of the New York fucking times.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. The quiet car and the Acella Corridor. This was never brought up.
SPEAKER_06Well, and and David Brooks actually said on the news hour, I don't know what Rush Lebau is talking about. I don't listen to Rush Lebas. I'm not sure what's going on there. And this went on and on, right up until Trump showed up, and it had become all far too late to stop what was about to happen. And what happened next?
SPEAKER_04Well, I will tell you. First, media corporations, which were wildly overstocked with savvy pundits who had assured the public the GOP was fine and healthy, and this sort of thing could never happen, began scrambling for talking heads who could explain this inexplicable thing that had happened. And second, they wanted nothing to do with all those liberal alarmist crackpots who, as it turned out, had been right all along. Because those liberal alarmist crackpots tended to arrive with receipts and calendars and stuff. And those receipts made their vastly overpaid savvy pundits look like a bunch of idiots. And we cannot have that, can we?
SPEAKER_06Nope. Nope. We come there with crooks and liars clips of what they were saying in 2014. Shut up.
SPEAKER_05Go away. Shut up.
SPEAKER_06The much better alternative was to platform the shit out of a handful of now unemployed Republican comms people who they already knew and were only too happy to spin the story of the rise of Trump in a much more savvy, pundit-friendly way that would keep them in paychecks. That this was some kind of black swan event, a fever that was sure to break sooner or later, a glitch in the matrix that no one could have seen coming, and for which certainly none of them was responsible.
SPEAKER_04But you know, Bluegale, come to think of it, you know who might be kind of responsible for a big chunk of the horrors that were now raining down on their heads?
SPEAKER_06The WNBA?
SPEAKER_04No. Keep guessing. You only have 20 more guesses.
SPEAKER_06Well, I'm watching a lot of Fox these days, and I noticed it must be the WNBA. They're to blame for everything.
SPEAKER_04It is, it is by extension. Remember, we're going back a decade here. I'm sorry. The people responsible for Donald Trump and all the racism were the damn liberals. Because just maybe it was those liberals saying the Republican Party was a racist party. That made so many Republican voters so mad because it was so unfair. Well, they just went ahead and started doing racism because that's how racism works, Lou Gal. Don't you know it? And they did it just to say, fuck you to the liberals.
SPEAKER_06Oh, yeah. When Hillary Clinton said deplorables, they all went and joined the Klan just to show her.
SPEAKER_04Just to show her, by golly. Now, this is funny, but this is an actual theory floated by Charlie Sykes and a number of his guests when he was the public voice and face of the bulwark. As the bulwark was in turn being relentlessly promoted by CNN and the MSNBC and the New York fucking Times and the Washington Post because for hardwired right-wing goons like Sykes, regardless of the circumstances, somehow, some way, the left always must always, always turn out to have been the villains.
SPEAKER_06There is no other conclusion to be reached than that they all either knew that they were playing with something dangerous and radioactive, or they were just willingly blind to it. And that's impossible because they were marketing to it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they were targeting that audience. You had to know something about them, and they were being paid for their expertise and their ability to target that audience.
SPEAKER_06Charlie Sykes's radio show was pure red meat.
SPEAKER_04I mean Yeah. It was he was the Rush Libob Wisconsin.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. So they had to have known what this media was doing to people's brains because they were using that to get them to vote, their knowledge of that.
SPEAKER_04But but they were sure, I believe, there would never be a price to pay for it. They never have to the the day would never come.
SPEAKER_06Right. There'd be no day of recording.
SPEAKER_04Forever and ever. This is gonna be great forever. It is a bottomless ATM machine.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And as the toxicity of the GOP base spiked higher and higher year after year, the more they were either willing to go along with it for the money and the influence, or the tighter they had to squeeze their eyes shut. We're looking at you, David Brooks, to what was happening all around them. It's gonna be Rubio, Driftglass. Yeah. It's gonna be Rubio.
SPEAKER_04Well, can you tell us what happened then, Blue Gal?
SPEAKER_06Well, believe it or not, Drift Glass, once Donald Trump was elected, a huge and very profitable market opened up for people claiming to have been right about the Republicans earlier than anyone else.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06This is Rick Wilson turning his marketing quote unquote skills to his own career.
SPEAKER_04Well, I created the Never Trump movement in 1997, and I was the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans when I was nine years old. Really, Rick Wilson? Is that all it's 100% true?
SPEAKER_06You're amazing.
SPEAKER_04He's amazing. He's fucking amazing.
SPEAKER_06It's true. Now that it had all fallen apart, there was this mad scramble among these people who had been wrong all along, not for accountability, nope, except for Stuart Stevens, who does take accountability, but for credit, pat me on the back some more.
SPEAKER_04Believe it or not, they sell merch like they sell merch like this now. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06Listen to any Never Trump podcast for any length of time, and you'll hear them boasting about how they were warning everybody back in 2016 or 17 or 18 and rolling their eyes about how people called them alarmist crack crackpots then. They called us names and stuff. And look at them now.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they're vindicated now.
SPEAKER_06Right. Their whole business model is built on that. Their entire marketing pitch is we saw this coming when nobody else did. So send money, heed our advice that the Democrats need to move to the center because we're in charge of the Democratic Party now. Exactly. We know all about the comms that the Democrats need to use. And of course, buy my book. Buy my book.
SPEAKER_04Buy my book. Subscribe and buy my book.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And now that they've successfully colonized what little is left of liberal cable media, it's safe for them to casually admit that, yeah, we always knew the base was full of bigots and imbeciles and fundamentalists. That's just who you had to work with if your job was getting Republicans elected. And there were four or four of them.
SPEAKER_04Oh yeah, last week. This one. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_06Saying that again in August when no one's watching. Too bad, so sad. Also, buy my book.
SPEAKER_04Don't forget to buy my book. In between the ads for sheets and booze and shoes and vacation homes are the pitches to subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, and buy my book. Yeah. So, and no one, that's why they hate liberal bloggers and podcasters. No wonder they pretend we never existed. Their whole thing is built on remembering this mythic, perfect past and hating anyone who remembers the past accurately. And we screw up their entire business model. We were saying it the whole time, going back decades, for free with receipts and getting called crackpots for doing so. Now, moving on, we're not going to talk about Trump today being lazy or wrecking the White House or slandering Canada or any of the other smoke bombs he's lobbing around to distract people from his failed war, his tanking economy, the Epstein files, all of his corruption, and his thousands of other broken promises.
SPEAKER_06Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the thousand stock trades you made last month.
SPEAKER_04Nope, we're not going to talk about that because we're running short on time, Blue Gal.
SPEAKER_06I do like the idea of changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake Epstein Files.
SPEAKER_04Yes. Yeah. Well, the Lake Michigan to Lake Epstein. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Oh, there you go. Look, instead of all of that, the last item before the court today is doing politics right versus doing politics wrong. Part one, what to do when you're in enemy territory. As you probably heard, and this just makes me sigh very heavily. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries recently held talks with President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. According to the New York Fucking Times, the meeting was arranged by a mutual friend of Jeffreys and Kushner and was aimed at finding areas of common ground if Democrats regain if Democrats regain control of one or both chambers of Congress in November's midterm elections. And Josh Marshall's reaction is pretty much the same as ours. I quote, I couldn't care less that Jeffries met with Kushner, means nothing, but I'm not impressed that the optics were lost on him and that he didn't realize Jared would set up the meeting and then immediately go to and tell the New York Times about it. That's not reading the room, unquote. You know, that's not reading the room.
SPEAKER_04And I want to see the Venn diagram of who the mutual friend is between Jared Kushner and a com Hakita.
SPEAKER_06I would only be more upset about this meeting if it was Obama who put them together.
SPEAKER_04Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So Jeffries is acting as if he's already won and was already measuring the drapes in the speaker's office, which was just it's just stupid politics. Yeah. Yeah. And and holding such a meeting when the base, us out here in the real world, are already furious at anyone. Still trying to find common ground with these monsters was also just stupid politics, unnecessary.
SPEAKER_06The base is the people that are going to be mailing postcards and phone calls and knocking on doors. Yeah. In and and getting this election won, which this election is in 10 fucking weeks. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And and you know what? My guess is Democrats are going to win the House.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And my guess is that Jeffries is good at counting votes and that he knows he has 218 or whatever.
SPEAKER_06And I think Kushner knows too.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. But the point being, shut up about it.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Don't get out there pretending you're already the speaker of the House. No. And don't start talking to the enemy before you have any power at all and making talking to someone who will leak it immediately to the media. I'm not saying that that there's something nefarious going on here. There could be. But I am saying that it was just dumb.
SPEAKER_06Well, my my immediate response after, you know, barfing a little in my mouth was they may be talking about Trump's health. Could be. And he if if I was gonna quote unquote trust, and I put that in big air quotes, um any member of the Trump family to talk honestly about Donald Trump's health, it would be Jared and Ivanka. Well, if I needed if I needed to try to find the people who had already cashed in and are looking for money from the Saudis and not from Donald.
SPEAKER_04If I may quote from Josh Marshall, yeah. I could care less that Jeffrey's met with Christmas. I know. I know it means nothing. The the optics of it, the politics of it was just so dumb and so unnecessarily stupid. They're so dumb. And I'm just and and you know what? The base is already tired of stupid people doing stupid politics and fumbling the ball when they should be running into the end zone. Yeah. This just doesn't help. Now, here's an example of smart politics.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04This is from CNN's reliable sources. Quote, Abdul Al-Saeed generated lots of buzz and clippable content by appearing on Jesse Waters' Fox News show last night. I counted half a dozen headlines about it on Mediaite this morning. Al Said showed a keen understanding of Fox News' outrage machine, refusing to take the bait when Waters asked whether it's okay for, quote, a parent to slash his kid's dingling off, unquote, or whether trans athletes should compete in women's sports. Each time he redirected towards gas and grocery prices, the war in Iran, and health care. I'm out here trying to take on the healthcare crisis and big pharma, and you're asking me about who gets to play what sports, El Saeed told Waters at one point. It's silly. The New York Times Bayliss Wagner wrote that the interview demonstrated El Saeed's general election strategy to cast culture war issues as a distraction from everyday political problems Americans face, like rising costs and worries about healthcare, unquote, which is smart politics. If you're going to go into any territory, that's how you do it.
SPEAKER_06I'm sorry, but they they wanted to talk about the WNBA drift class.
SPEAKER_04I know, and he wasn't having it.
SPEAKER_06And he's not just gas prices.
SPEAKER_04He's being divisive, Brugal.
SPEAKER_06He's being divisive and controversial, divisive. Yeah. Yes. All right. Here is uh one of uh my favorite topics of the week. This is uh part two: toxic masculinity versus healthy masculinity. This from GQ takes a look at how the MAGA manosphere is looking less like a movement and more like the last reel of a face in the crowd.
SPEAKER_03Listen, I'm not through yet! You know what's gonna happen to me. Oh, let me tell you exactly what's gonna happen to you. You're gonna be back in television. Only it won't be quite the same as it was before. There'll be a reasonable cooling up, period, and then somebody'll say, Why don't we try him again in an inexpensive format? People's memories aren't too long, and you know, in a way he'll be running. Some of the people forget and some of them won't. Oh, you'll have a show. Maybe not the best um in the top 10, maybe not even in the top 35. But you'll have a show. Just won't be quite the same as it was before. Then a couple of new fellas will come along, and pretty soon a lot of your fans will be flocking around them. And then one day somebody'll ask, whatever happened to uh, what's his name? You know, the one who was so big. Number one fella a couple of years ago. He was famous. How can we forget a name like that?
SPEAKER_06This from GQ. Quote, I went to the White House brawl and watched the Manosphere Go Limp. Great title. It was supposed to be an exhibition of freedom without restraint, a bombastic birthday boy, the president, 14 uncontrollable athletes, courtesy of the UFC, and a South Lawn build-out that was piss your pants patriotic. Dive bombing bald eagles. But what united onlookers in the end was the sudden realization that American machismo had hit a hard limit. The heavyweight MMA fighter Josh Hokett is flailing badly, sweating, and in pain. His UFC cage fight on the White House South Lawn is still four days away. But here on stage at Media Day, in the somewhat gloomy basement ballroom level of the JW Marriott, the pressure is on. It's because he has, for some reason, chosen to do a comedy bit for the reporters. But it's a confusing and unsuccessful bit. He tells a joke about photographing an overweight woman and the picture's still being printed. And a joke about another overweight woman making French toast who got her tongue stuck in the toaster. Okay. Um, with each punchline, the room remains chillingly silent. No one even politely chuckles. It's the kind of hellish silence that would haunt a comedian to the grave. Fuck, Pocket says. I'm bombing, guys. Wake up. He pauses. Give me something. Someone ask me a question. Unquote.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Toxic masculinity drowning in its own grotesquery. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And now healthy masculinity. This is from the New York fucking times again, August 14th. Quote, as much as New York mayor Zoran Mamdani's team runs on leftist idealism and social media bravado, it is also imbued with sports fanaticism, nonstop razzing, practical jokes, and various forms of nicotine, especially Zinn. It runs on people committing to the bit. Not everyone in City Hall fits in, prompting some good-natured eye rolls, especially when late-night budget talks among city council members had to compete with the cheers of 20-somethings down the hall watching soccer. The serious suit and tie wearing denizens of City Hall are still represented, like Deputy Mayor Dean Fulihan and the corporate counsel Steve Banks, trusted names in New York City who basically doubled the administration's median age. There's also governance by group chat, the circle of bros, women included, communicating through a shared sense of the mayor's humor, according to conversations with more than a dozen of his friends and colleagues. The mayor is at once a class clown, earnest civics teacher, scamp, and serious disciple of Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Zoran can be a bro in a positive way, said Grace Mazur, 31 co-chair of New York City's chapter of the Democratic Socialist of America. He embraces popular culture in a way that could be broy or jockey, but he wants to bring joy, unquote.
SPEAKER_06It's really interesting to uh to compare this story to what's going on with Natalie Harp.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_06Because the New York fucking Times went and talked to Zilron Mom Donnie's team on background, and they had nothing but nice things to say about what a nice guy he is.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06And that it that ain't happening in the Trump White House these days. This is the bunker now.
SPEAKER_04Well, and and dig into any of them. And and Pete Heggseth wants a religious war because he can't get his dick up.
SPEAKER_06Right, right.
SPEAKER_04And he wants, you know, he won no trannies. Which he said, no more trannies, just no fatties and no trannies.
SPEAKER_06Only anybody who's hot, in my estimation, can be in the military.
SPEAKER_04Pump them full of testosterone. We're gonna check your testosterone every week, and we're gonna be warriors. You know, and and Stephen Miller, you know, this little shaved weasel of a Nazi, you know, strutting around like it's the early days in Berlin and not the fall of Berlin coming around the corner.
SPEAKER_06Exactly.
SPEAKER_04And everywhere you look, it's just this grotesquely toxic masculinity of the city.
SPEAKER_06Well, and it's it's also just you know, barely beneath the surface homoerotica going on.
SPEAKER_04It's something. But what it is, whatever the hell, and of course, a great deal of alcohol and broke these broken, pathetic losers who have enormous power and don't know what to do with it because they're awful people and you can't escape yourself.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. But look, the Zoran Mom Donnie campaign, that's what healthy masculinity looks like. See, kids these days, it really isn't that hard to distinguish. The difference between truth and lies, tolerance and hatred, good and bad, and wise actions from foolish ones. And as citizens in a democracy, not only are we called upon to make these judgments, we're also called upon to act on those judgments every day out in the real world. As our kids would say. Amen.
SPEAKER_04Amen. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_06So feel free to write us to both of us at pro leftpodcastgmail.com. 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. And thank you for supporting our show at patreon.com forward slash proleft pod.
SPEAKER_04And if you can, please share our show on social media. That has worked out very well for us, and the people we get feedback from say, I heard about you from Bob Seska, or someone else hears about something else cool from us. The social media stuff does work. So if you love this podcast, please get someone else to listen to it too.
SPEAKER_06Hey Driftglass, how are the internet kitties doing this week?
SPEAKER_04Well, look at all the internet kitties say they're really going to miss Dolly Parton.