The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

Driftglass sits down with Blue Rep in a Red State!   Democratic State Representative Gregg Bush of Missouri is in the superminority in the Missouri State Legislature.   We go over Tuesday's Missouri ballot initiative and how Missouri voters turned back a Republican attempt to take their power away.  Also, the future of the Democratic Party, and how a Covid-era nurse got elected to the State House.  All this and ...

In a special crossover episode, Driftglass sits down with Matthew Sheffield of Flux and the Theory of Change podcast — a journalist with a genuinely unusual vantage point on American radicalization. Sheffield grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family, left that world, then spent years as one of the internet's first conservative bloggers before walking away from that movement too, disillusioned by its hostility to facts and to...

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 tra...

Episode 1010 dissects the White House Correspondents' Dinner disaster, where Trump used his own celebration of press freedom to attack the journalists in the room with vile personal insults. Driftglass and Blue Gal replay a decade-old clip from their own archives—recorded the week Trump effectively won the 2016 nomination—to prove that Liberals saw this coming while the legacy media obsessed over Hillary's emails. The e...

Episode 1009 asks what happens when you're 20 miles into the political marathon and there's no cavalry coming over the hill to save the day. Driftglass and Blue Gal explore the difference between American "hero arrives just in time" storytelling and the harder truth found in movies like Spotlight and Lincoln—where victory comes from grinding, patient work, not a last-minute miracle. The episode confronts what it feels like to...

Episode 1008 continues the "No Fair Remembering Stuff" retrospective:  Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the throughline from Biden's early economic wins and Republican obstruction, through the January 6th hearings, to broke state GOP parties and Bari Weiss's billionaire-funded "anti-woke" grift. 

This sad yet hilarious episode reveals how the same media failures—perpetual surprise at good economic news, endless both-sid...

Episode 1007 celebrates Blue Gal's birthday with a nostalgic trip through 16 years of podcast archives, revisiting what was happening in politics on or around her birthday each year since 2010. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a remarkable through-line from the Tea Party's rise and the "Evil, Stupid, or Crazy" game, through Obama-era both-siderism, Trump's 2016 takeover, and the pandemic's collapse of conservative respectability. The ...

Episode 1006 uses the beloved 1990 teen rebellion movie "Pump Up the Volume" to ask a deeper question: what happens when you take "Truth is a virus" and unrestricted free speech into the real world, where the fascists aren't outsiders trying to break in—they're already running the show? Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 through the rise of Hate Radio, Gingrich's language wars, Citizens U...

Episode 1005 of The Professional Left makes the case that if you really want to understand America — not a focus group of twelve Trump voters in Florida, not three congressional primaries in Brooklyn, not the punditocracy's endless parade of confident predictions about things they fundamentally don't understand — you should probably be paying attention to Illinois, the most statistically representative state in the coun...

It goes in circles but never gets anywhere

It’s all horses’ asses

And there is no brass ring.

Driftglass on the Bob Cesca Show : https://www.bobcesca.com/the-bob-cesca-interview-driftglass-day-7-1-26/ 

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Science Fiction University returns at long last, with an extended deep dive into one of the oldest and most unsettling questions in the genre — who can you trust when the threat is wearing a human face? The episode traces the theme of trust through three very different versions of the same story: John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?", Howard Hawks' 1951 Cold War-era adaptation "The Thing from Another World", and J...

No rebranding!  They cashed all those checks with the Tea Party.  Episode 1002 of The Professional Left opens with a pop quiz, and the reveal says everything you need to know about how this particular cycle always ends. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, depressing, and darkly funny history of Republicans who were "done with Trump" until they weren't — Beck, Cruz, Graham, Vance, Ingraham, and a cast of dozens &...

Episode 1001 of The Professional Left kicks off the post-1000 era with a reading from Octavia Butler — written in 1993, about a fictional America that looks uncomfortably like the one outside your window right now — and uses it as the jumping-off point for a clear-eyed reckoning with why the country got here and who is responsible. The opening of the Obama Presidential Center was a wonderful occasion by almost any measu...

Episode 1000 of The Professional Left opens with the countdown finally hitting zero — and instead of a victory lap, Driftglass and Blue Gal do exactly what they've been doing for 999 episodes: explain the thing hiding in plain sight that everyone else is too polite, too complicit, or too invested in the status quo to say out loud. The Trailer Trash Woodstock that took over the White House lawn gets put in its proper historica...

Episode 999 of The Professional Left takes a detour through the smoke-filled back rooms of mid-century Chicago machine politics to explain something essential about the moment we're living in right now — because it turns out that Mike Royko had the whole Trump era figured out decades before Trump came along, he just called it by a different name. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through how patronage systems work, why people stay...

Episode 998 of The Professional Left opens with a game of "Who's This Jagoff?" — a quiz that turns out to be a master class in how the Both Sides Do It lie gets laundered through the media, repeated without evidence, and rewarded with radio shows and television bookings no matter how many times it's been proven false. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the deep roots of that lie, traveling back twenty years to a single Neal Con...

Episode 997 of The Professional Left uses the sudden, very public firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes as a jumping-off point to ask a much bigger question — why do the people with the biggest megaphones still have absolutely no idea what Democrats actually want, or who they actually are? Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, embarrassing history of elite pundits who spent decades inventing a fictional Democratic party, g...

Episode 996 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the media circus surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate primary, asking who is actually stirring the pot, why they're stirring it, and who benefits when a private matter between a married couple drowns out every important conversation about the Republican incumbent's actual record. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through a long and inglorious history of political sex scandals ...

Episode 995 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into one of the most revealing tricks in modern political history — the quiet, deliberate shift from "we" to "they" that happens every time a prominent Republican needs to pretend they had nothing to do with the monster they spent decades building. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace this sleight of hand from the early days of Trump's rise all the way to a recent live Bulwark e...