Listen to The Professional Left Podcast Episodes

NOTE:  Professional Left Podcast is off until November 5.  Instead, Driftglass will be on Hal Sparks AND The Brad Cast this week on Wednesday October 28, and both Driftglass and Blue Gal will join Hal Sparks on Election Night, November 3.  See you…

Trigger Warning:  This episode quotes Dick Durbin's Senate floor speech from 2005, outlining details of the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.Episode 1033 explores how language changes meaning with context, from Shakespeare inventing hundreds of words to…

Episode 1032 traces Trump’s catastrophic second term, from broken retribution promises to an unwinnable war to a lawsuit he’s too busy campaigning to show up for, proving every MAGA fantasy has collapsed into humiliation. Driftglass and Blue Gal then…

Episode 1031 coins “the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair” to explain why Republican candidates thrive inside their media cave but collapse the moment they face real questions, from Andy Harris illegally threatening a journalist for recording him to Ken…

Episode 1030 catches Marjorie Taylor Greene mid-rehabilitation tour, exposing how her media-friendly break with Trump is laying the groundwork for a “Trump Off Machine” that lets unrepentant election deniers stay angry at Trump while still believing their…

Episode 1029 uses H.G. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks from “The Time Machine” to explain how the Republican intellectual class spent decades designing policy in comfortable think tanks while ignoring the ugly, racist work being done below them to actually win…

Episode 1028: We open with a surprising local story: former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin endorsing Democrat JB Pritzker over Republican Darren Bailey, exposing deep cracks in the state party even as MAGA loyalists like Mary Miller double down. Then we…

Episode 1027 tracks the widening cracks in MAGA's coalition as elite Conservatives and Republican officeholders begin quietly distancing themselves from Trump while his approval craters to 31%, proving the mob was never really following him — he was…

Episode 1026 marks the 18th anniversary of the 2008 financial crash by pointing out MAGA voters' selective amnesia about who was president when, then pivots to a Springfield civic meeting on election security that carefully documented every safeguard in…

Episode 1025 opens with a longer off-the-cuff discussion of Mehmet Oz stripping people from Obamacare and the GLP-1 "bridge" program from Medicare, both moves that seem designed to serve Trump's ego and pocketbook more than public health. Driftglass and Blue…

Republicans are betting the midterms on rewriting recent history. Driftglass and Blue Gal compare Trump's 32% approval to Bush's nearly identical 34% on his way out the door, then trace how "independent" has become the magic word MAGA grifters use to dodge…

Episode 1023 tracks how Republicans keep telling us who they are, from Darren Bailey embracing young-earth creationism to Trump calling Democrats "the enemy from within" over and over again. Driftglass and Blue Gal line up years of Trump's own words describing…

Episode 1022 asks what history's hardest lessons — Reconstruction's collapse, the Allies' insistence on unconditional German surrender — have to teach about defeating a movement built on grievance and racial resentment rather than "economic anxiety."…

Episode 1021 exposes a $6 million Republican ad campaign that manipulated grieving parents of murder victims into unknowingly slandering North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper with lies their own children's killers had nothing to do with. Driftglass and…

Episode 1020 opens with a deep dive into the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron novelty songs — where continuity gets rewritten and enemies become "friends" who never have to answer for their body counts — before turning that fairy tale into a warning about how…

Episode 1019 asks the question rarely posed — "Is our Republicans learning?" — and finds them relearning the exact same 2006 playbook: distance yourself from an unpopular president, rebrand as "independent," and blame everyone but yourselves. Driftglass…

Episode 1018 features Driftglass in conversation with Dr. Cinde Wirth, the Democrat running to flip Indiana's 6th Congressional District. A seventh-generation Bartholomew County Hoosier, high school science teacher, and first-generation college graduate with a…

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…

Episode 1016 puts Tone Policing on trial, tracing the long history of the powerful lecturing the powerless about civility while dodging the actual substance of their protests — from abolitionists to MLK to anti-war marchers, memory-holed by CNN in 2005.…

Episode 1015 takes apart James Carville, the "rusted-out antique device" who trashes progressives on Fox News over a single deleted Thanksgiving tweet and then pivots to backing the very candidate he just attacked, all while forgetting his own most famous line…

Episode 1014 dismantles the "Democrats in Disarray" panic after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's progressive primary win in Michigan, tracing Third Way's $15 million war chest against democratic socialism back to nearly identical Red Scare rhetoric almost a century…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…