The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

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...

Episode 994 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the war on memory — the long, grinding campaign to erase what actually happened to this country and replace it with a comfortable myth that lets the people who caused the damage off the hook. A fascinating breakfast conversation between a writer and ten of his late father's Trump-voting friends provides the jumping-off point, raising a question that cuts right to the h...

Episode 993 of The Professional Left finally arrives at the pivotal year of 2008 — the moment the Republican party began eating itself alive — and traces exactly how a party that had just driven the country into a ditch decided that the best response was to sabotage the guy trying to pull it out. Driftglass and Blue Gal walk through the deliberate, coordinated Republican strategy to destroy Barack Obama before he even g...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how the Clinton-era budget surplus was dismantled piece by piece during the Bush years, setting the stage for the catastrophic financial collapse of 2008. While millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes, the mainstream media — led by Both Sides propagandists like David Brooks and the newly hired Bill Kristol — refused to lay the blame where it...

Episode 991 of The Professional Left starts with a question that sounds absurd on its face — are Americans "underbabied"? — and then spends an hour making the case that the people asking that question are the same ones who have spent decades doing everything in their power to make starting a family feel financially impossible. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long arc from the post-war baby boom through the Reagan era'...

Episode 990 of The Professional Left takes a step back from the daily chaos to talk about something the mainstream media almost never bothers with — scale — and why understanding it is the difference between seeing propaganda clearly and getting played by it every single time. Driftglass and Blue Gal run the actual numbers on one of the most successful political smear campaigns of the last decade, and what those numbers...

Episode 989 of The Professional Left takes on one of the most overused words in modern politics — "authenticity" — and asks whether anyone in American political media is actually serving the real thing, or just a smooth, processed, cheese-like substitute that melts consistently and tastes like what people want to hear. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace the long, strange history of politicians and pundits who have made a ver...

Episode 988 of The Professional Left is a drama in three acts, each one taking a hard look at a political strategy that keeps failing — and the people who keep insisting it will work next time. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the endless, maddening cycle of reaching out to voters who have made it abundantly clear they don't want to be reached, and why the media keeps writing the same breathless story about it anyway. Then th...

Episode 987 of The Professional Left takes a deep look at the concept of authority — where it comes from, who really has it, and what happens when the people in charge decide the rules no longer apply to them. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a clear line from the lawless Bush years straight through to today, making the case that what looks new and shocking is really just the same old playbook with the volume turned all the way ...

Episode 986 of The Professional Left traces how one simple political rule — Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" never to speak ill of a fellow Republican — quietly mutated over decades into something far more dangerous. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into how that rule created a closed loop where loyalty to the team mattered more than the truth, and how the endless flood of dark money on the Right kept feeding the beast...

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." -- The Maltese Falcon 

Episode 985 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into the word "normalizing" — a term that gets thrown around constantly in political coverage, but rarely gets a clear definition. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how a stubborn 30% of Americans have believed one wild conspiracy theory after another for decades, and argue that what looks like normal...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal take a hard look at how America ended up in yet another Middle East war — and why the whole thing feels like a rerun that somehow got worse the second time around. Drawing a sharp line from the lies that launched the Iraq War to the chaos of today, they walk through the playbook Republicans use every time reality refuses to cooperate with their sales pitch. The...

In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the decades-long project that brought American politics to its current breaking point — and what it really means that we've arrived here. A viral social media feud involving a Twitch streamer leads to a sharp look at who gets handed a megaphone in today's political landscape, and why the wrong people keep holding them. The episode closes with a story a...