Wokism is not "over"--these ideologies are dominant in education, medicine, law. Plenty of us are still worried about getting cancelled for "wrong think" even if the Republicans control the federal government.
I wonder if Katie and Jesse are insulated from that reality--they don't have children attending a school peddling ideology, they are not giving birth in hospitals that don't use the word "women," and they are not faced with losing custody of a child for not affirming a trans identity.
Non parents are much more likely to say: "Meh, so what if a few kids get sterilised and rendered anorgasmic by mistake as long as we save the trans kids from a fate worse than death (you fascist)?"
All parents must navigate our educational institutions (public, private, or homeschooling), all of which are riddled with race and gender ideologies. All parents must navigate medical systems, where pediatricians ask children if they’re suicidal or trans. Not all parents land in family court, but if they do, they must navigate gender ideology there.
Not sure it’s standpoint epistemology so much as intensive exposure to powerful institutions that can harm a child’s wellbeing in the name of care.
I have noticed a significant decline in the insanity and a stark increase in the willingness of skeptical people to talk about it in the last couple of years.
I have two kids in elementary to middle school in a bastion of progressive woo.
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Of note, I know some who were all in on the trans woo who got a bit of a culture shock when the anti-semitism after Oct. 7th blew up. Seeing the same people they agreed with on trans ideology go all in on Pro Hamas made them take a step back and question their views across the board.
It's also an ever present threat if you work in otherwise mainstream entertainment and/or literature and network is all, and even the smallest person - read non-creative non-entity - can take away your everything.
Our hosts aren't trying to publish genre novels or get plays produced, or exhibit their work or do poetry readings, or supplement their incomes through school visits.
Yes, it puzzles me that they think the worst is over. There’s still a lot happening. The feds aren’t going to restore jobs for people fired from NGOs or museums or libraries; no one is going to rescue an artist’s career; no one is going to get a cancelled book contract back.
I’m happy that they feel less vulnerable personally (yay!) but come on—the war on “wrong think” isn’t over.
What is happening is an alternative ecosystem. This is particularly obvious in printed Science Fiction where the progressive Worldcon fandom and the "blowing shit up on space or maybe killing dragons" readers have split organisationally and socially, but the latter market is doing fine.
Maybe the big turning point was after Jan 6 when Toni Weisskopf (female Jewish) editor in chief of Baen books was disinvited from being Guest of Honour at Worldcon because a non-entity went on the Baen forums and found people discussing how to paralyse a city etc (this being a Military SF forum), and some Trump supporters who thought the election was rigged.
All that happened was a lot of people who otherwise avoid politics on social media started posting Baen badges in support. There's not much point in staying in the ingroup when it wants to take away your exploding dragons.
A hilarious follow up was when veteran pro-LGBTQ+ Mercedes Lackey was cancelled from being guest of honour at a convention due to misspeaking - another non-entity did the dirty work - her publisher turned out to be Baen, who put out adds saying how pleased they were to publish her.
Wow, amazing. Yes, alternative networks might be easier to build in fandoms and for media outlets but for schools, museums, libraries? Ugh, am feeling discouraged.
I think the difference is that in some fields the platforms aren't real, they are just a collective focus of attention. You can grab an SF publisher and publish woke books, but readers will just buy different books.
Schools, museums and libraries are physical spaces that "own" the stuff - kids, objects, books.
I can't easily, say, start a large independent British Military History museum with a "Brave Deeds" gallery and another for "How we got good at blowing stuff up."
I'm in an ultra progressive space. I know two trans kids (out of maybe 100 kids that I know well enough to know if they are trans), who were trans before they could read so unlikely to have been indoctrinated. They just had language for it now. i don't know what the parents are doing. I know several nonbinary kids who are all females who are gender nonconforming. My kid is super into queerness, but is straight and not trans. I think it has been mostly healthy for them compared to the shitstorm I grew up in in the 80s and 90s which was aggressively sexist and homophobic.
There are horror stories of girls going on hormone blockers, but honestly the bigger concern to me (in terms of sheer numbers and impact) would be my kid moving to a red state and being denied reproductive health care. Almost every single woman I know well enough to know their pregnancy journey has had at least one miscarriage, some multiple. It is terrifying to me that there are places where they couldn't abort a nonviable fetus or would suffer repercussions from having a miscarriage.
I'm in a conservative place and I know over a dozen trans kids, most of whom were gender-conforming girls until they got into online gaming. I, too, am more worried about women being denied reproductive health care since that's a bigger concern numbers-wise.
Currently one of my children is in college and the other in in high school. It's been going on since they were in elementary school, though, starting with the older sibling of a friend of my older child.
It probably peaked with kids who are now in late high school, starting when they started middle school. Both of my kids have entire friend groups where more than half the members are trans, usually but not always FTM, usually but not always it's just the name and pronouns (though I do know of at least one friend who is MTF and at least two minor females who are already taking testosterone).
I tell myself that I am gender-nonconforming myself and always hung out with gay and gender-nonconforming friends when I was their age as well, so probably they're just taking after me. The medical interventions and the warped sense of reality do worry me, though.
It's plausible that the trend of coming out as trans did in fact peak 5 years ago, so kids of junior high age now would be less likely to trans-identify than my kids and their friends when they were in junior high.
Well, my daughter just had an activity with teenagers, and there were several trans kids in that group. From what I saw all FTM, as opposed to the kids who came out in elementary school who were MTF.
It is a bit worrying to me. I'm 100% fine with her being gender nonconforming, not being girly, not doing girly things. I'm also ok with grown ass adults modifying their body to fit how they want to show up in the world. I do not want my child to set that identity in stone or medicalize it as a child though. Yeah, no shit you don't want to be a girl - being a girl sucks (so does being a boy).
I’m glad for you. If you have children in school you might want to look up the school’s policies about affinity groups and gender. Here’s a place to search by school district:
I looked up mine in district very well known for being "ultra progressive". There's plenty in it to trigger someone who's looking to be triggered.
And there's certainly been a few eyebrow raising beliefs the've taken home. My favorite was the belief that anyone could just decide to become a boy, marry a girl, and have babies. Or vice versa. Of course, this is what comes from trying to teach really wishy washy concepts like gender identity before kids are old enough to really understand biological sex and reproduction.
In other words, it was probably equal parts dumb gender studies stuff but also confusion on the part of an elementary kid's interpretation of what they were hearing.
But I just had a conversation with them. Not like we haven't taught them about biological sex in the context of reproduction before. . . . they're just kids, so it's hard for them to wrap their heads around it.
These little things don't really bother me though. Perhaps it's because I'm a life long atheist and have dealt with religious people inserting their beliefs into every aspect of life. If you got all worked up about every instance, you'd spend all day in a tizzy.
Better to just ask questions, talk about the topics, guide your kids through rational thought so they're not vulnerable to all religious pablum.....of which I think these gender beliefs fall.
That's a great analogy. I grew up non-religious in a very religious area, and my parents just told me "some of your friends' parents teach them that people who don't believe what they believe are going to hell. It's just how some people are around here, don't take it seriously." And so I grew up hearing my friends make all kinds of religious claims without ever believing any of them, despite being an otherwise pretty gullible kid.
I hope you're right! And obviously some children are more vulnerable than others. It's just that most of these school districts also have policies to hide transitioning (binding, new names, new pronouns) from parents. I would guess that middle school would be the time to be very alert.
The only things that did "trigger" me as far as that goes are these policies and the laws that were passed in certain states that made not medically transitioning considered legal child abuse.
This was done so the state could put the kids into protective services that hid them from abusive parents looking for them.
Everything up to that point, I blew off as "stupid shit zealots do". Like I said, I've lived in states where it was religious nutters always trying shit at schools. Slipping prayer into sports practices and games, teaching it in class with a wink and a nod.
But, as Picard says, when it comes to legal enshrinement and keeping parents out of the loop......"The line must be drawn HEYAH!" :P
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Oh, there is language in my districts policy about confidential medical information and parents. This one's very tricky to me. These policies all go back to reproductive rights. And the laws that were passed that legally gave minors of a certain age the right to privacy regarding medical care. They were all very explicitly to allow, say, a 13 or 14 year old to get birth control or talk to providers about safe sex practices without being legally required to disclose those discussions to parents.
I say it's tricky, because they were authored very broadly. And while I do think a 16 year old girl should be able to go to Planned Parenthood and get birth control...extending that to medical transitioning and mental health care seems a step too far.
For example, I may support birth control as an acute medicine that can be stopped at any time. But I wouldn't be ok with elective hysterectomy for 13 year olds without notifying parents.
Social transitioning? Honestly, who gives a shit? Binding. Not sure. But if it crosses into harm (you can hurt your ribs and such), I think that requires notification. Medical transitioning. No fucking way. Parents must be involved.
Yes, not enough people know about those laws or realize they may be subject to them.
As to "triggering"--it's not irrational to be concerned about these policies. The problem is that large numbers of children *have* been influenced--most likely by peers and social media, and then the school institutes the new identity without parental notification, elevating the child into a special category. If a child is struggling socially, imagine how powerful a feeling it would be to have the entire school administration telling him he's special.
I think this is much more than religious nutters because the force of all the institutions are behind it--the school policies, the doctors (who take the child aside and ask if they're trans), and the law and politicians claiming to "save trans kids." That's a lot of institutional power--and many parents have been shocked to find themselves up against it. Look up the stories of parents like Erin Friday, January Littlejohn, Erin Lee, Beth Bourne, etc etc.
Our kids' school recently sent out a "principal's notes" on a Friday where the term Latinx was used repeatedly. I was honestly shocked. I didn't think anyone was still tone deaf enough to use that term but I guess it's still common enough in schools.
Yes, educational institutions aren’t changing just because people on social media mock certain terms. No, many things have been enshrined into *policy* that staff must adhere to. Go dig into your district’s policy documents and see.
I kinda see it as wishcasting. Everyone I know who is anti woke loves to pretend it died with Trump 2.0. Really, they're just hoping it into existence.
It's true that we're past peak woke, but if peak woke in 2020 was 100%, we only brought it down to 80%, and it reigns supreme in left of center spaces and institutions. And in its vacuum, a much more nefarious right wing cancel culture supplanted it.
In the set up, Katie claims it’s not 2020 anymore—that the power of woke has declined. In the previous episode, she and Jesse speak at more length about how it’s not 2018 anymore, how the cancel culture stuff is kind of done. It seems to be an operating assumption.
I don't remember them mentioning it, but Katie and Jessie do mention it offhand quite frequently so it wouldn't surprise me if they did this episode. I think they are very focused on national politics so they sort of miss the reality of day-to-day life since they both live online mainly.
Lol sure buddy, so many hospitals never use the word “women”. It’s always amusing watching you people make things up in your head despite having so much actual material to work with.
Katie and the guest did a poor job of putting this in context. Blue truthers are a tiny movement that is going nowhere, while Stop The Steal was started by an outgoing president and quickly became part of mainstream Republican orthodoxy. The guest wanted to give us an impression of parity which doesn't exist.
There doesn’t have to be an exact match in intensity and number for something to be an apt comparison. Humans are humans. Take the recent cancellation frenzy. Nobody was literally burned in the town square for being a witch, but certainly the same impulses were activated in both.
No there doesn't need to be. But when there is a massive disparity in intensity of the problem between the sides and you say "both sides have that problem" without providing that context, and at times straight up ignoring the context when Katy pointed it out... You might be a FP commenter.
Katy did a pretty good job this episode, and I have to disagree with the OP on that. She provided ample opportunities to contextualize what the guest was saying. The guest simply wasn't biting.
I can't tell if she is the kind of person who comments in the Free Press, or is just so afraid of their audience that she can't acknowledge the reality and has to both sides.
This is the sort of empty headed both sidism is the bread and butter of the free press. The left must at all times be as guilty, if not more guilty of anything the right is accused of. Of course this is incredibly misleading presentations of events that is curated through cherry picked examples, as well as utilizing apologetics in an incredibly biased way.
They strive for this faux presentations of balance and have almost completely abandoned objectivity in their reporting. It has been shown that their coverage is heavily biased towards the right (which is pretty much self evident at this point). Also staking out position that his halfway between a truth and lie is still lie. It is just dressed up in nuance.
Are you referring to the same "free press" which supressed stories from 2009-2016, including the "kids in cages" camps to which they followed AOC to watch her cry in front of the gates in 2017 and pretended that those facilitues hadn't been operating for three or more years at that point?
Or the "free press" which was an active participant in trying to conceal Joe Biden's mental degeneration from the public (or at the very least, who never questioned any spokesperson about the dearth of Presidential Q&A under that administration?
Or the "free press" which has uncritically published DNC-issued talking points as "news" for more years than I can count? Who approached a major and true story which would have hurt Joe Biden in 2020 with the kind of skepticism that they couldn't seem to imagine possible when reporting on a "scandal" which it turned out had been fabricated by the HRC campaign and a manipulated report ordered by Obama in December 2016?
If that's the press that's thrown in whith the right, it chills me to imagine how far they'd have to go into the tank before you'd considet them to be neutral.
Capitalization might be a "boomer" and "Genx" thing, but it also can do wonders to prevent confusion. Especially in a country where the press is legally free from government control, but often chooses to be more comoliant than Pravda in the 1950s.
The ancient Romans got by with block capitals with no separation between words, I think you could’ve used context clues to realise that ‘the free press’ in lowercase still referred to the publication this episode’s guest is introduced as writing for, and which was the main topic of the previous episode, rather than the general abstract concept.
It’s incredibly important that trump refused to accept that he lost. He’s the leader of his party and the country. Him refusing to accept the results directly led to more people not believing in the democratic process.
Harris publicly agreed she lost. She just wrote a book about it.
This is true, but if she had claimed that the election had been stolen, I think the numbers would be much higher than 41%, whereas absent Trump's terrible (but unfortunately predictable, given his character and personality) refusal to acknowledge the loss the R numbers would be much lower. There's a problem with partisans generally (I have thought this since the '04 conspiracies, I don't blame anyone in '00, since that was just completely insane), but there is specifically a problem with Trump that (crossing-fingers) perhaps will get better once he is gone.
I’m not sure it’s a small group. I live in a purple Midwest state and I have two friends in their 60s who are totally convinced that Elon helped Trump steal the election. That adds up to 30% my close female friends.
"41% of Harris voters say Trump's 2024 victory was not legitimate".
I know, I know, it's easy to say stuff like that to a pollster. And the figure is far worse for Trump voters in 2020, 70% of whom say Biden's victory was not legitimate. But, as usual, the desire to believe that the other side are evil cheaters transcends political affilation.
The desire to believe the other side are evil cheaters transcends political affiliation.
However, the desire to believe lies about electoral outcomes is much more prevalent on one side, and only explicitly pushed by one side's leaders. Let's not pretend like they're even remotely close.
Thanks, was worried that I was the only one who got this sense from the guest.
Spends entire career lambasting cancel culture from the left, when asked about the new paradigm that is way worse from the right, "oh I don't think about it politically... Oh and by the way tiny minority of liberals pushing Kamala truthers are comparable to Trump's attempt to overthrow the government and Jan 6th..."
I can't tell if she is the kind of person who comments in the Free Press, or is just so afraid of their audience that she can't acknowledge the reality and has to both sides.
what is an amusing group of crazy people that should be covered for amusement was covered as if it's a major serious political movement. feels really manipulative, almost Fox News level
Since the first time I heard any mention of the Rockland County case, I never could figure out how anyone thought that boosting Kamala's vote count in New York State might actually affect the electoral result since she won that state regardless.
From the perspective of the people who back the GOP and/or trump, the current "blue truthers" are just a continuation of the strong contingent of the Democrats (including current leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Liz Warren) which has denied the validity of every Dem loss since 2000, and which would disenfranchise all of the "flyover states" tomorrow if they could. Not to mention having put the opposition candidate's campaign under secret government suveilience based on a false premise, and which turned the Capitol Building into a militarized fortress surrounded by razor wire and patrolled by uniformed National Guard soldiers carrying automatic rifles for most of a year in response to a riot in January (after refusing to acknowledge the damage done by widespread looting and arson during "mostly peaceful" protests during the summer of 2020), and pretending that a mob who even the FBI investigators determined only included a few dozen people who had planned to go near the building, and that even those people had no real plan for what to do if they somehow got inside; as if there were ever any danger of another riot like that happening. The TSA even put two freshman GOP House members onto a watch list because their having traveled to DC just ahead of Jan 6th (to take up their seats in the new Congress which was convening on the first business day of the year) was "suspicious".
In their "context" that movement has gone much farther to undo the results of elections which they didn't like, to silence dissent (via the influence that FBI and DHS were applying to twitter, facebook, and google/youtube under the Biden administration), has weaponized the IRS and a number of other regulatory agencies to punish the opposition party, and until fairly recently has had a willingly complicit propaganda arm in the form of ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, NYT, WaPo, and CNN (with MSNBC being the counterweight to FNC)
I can't believe that after 10 years with Trump, people are still holding onto these "one weird trick" hopes for getting him out of our politics. I'm as much in despair about Trump 2.0 as any of these people, but I actually think it would be a disaster for the country for his election to somehow miraculously get overturned because of election fraud. That would mean there are some real vulnerabilities in our system that bad actors had managed to exploit. But moreover, the level of anger and vitriol on each side would be so divisive, I actually would fear some kind of widespread violence. As devastated as I was waking up on Nov 5, it was at least mercifully decisive.
Plus there are reasons people voted for him and unless the reasons people voted for him are addressed, there's a possibility that next time around a candidate like him but with some self-discipline will win. I don't want to think about what would happen if the 2024 election gets overturned because of some byzantine election fraud.
I heard someone say the other day that democrats have to wrap their head around the fact that the best way out of this Trump presidency is to get through it and work on having a worthy politician for the 2028 election. I agree.
The first Trump term could be written off as an anomaly, a whim of the electorate which eventually learned better. The second Trump term has shown that, given the proper circumstances, Americans are quite willing to overlook criminality, corruption, and downright idiocy. It's scary.
As a British person, I enjoyed that aspect of this episode - like, at least there are *some* people in the world who believe that the British establishment is capable of getting something done that benefits the country. It was kind of sweet and refreshing.
I thought this too. The only other people in the world who think the British establishment is a powerful and effective cabal is in some of the Iranian Secret Services. The rest of us know it's more like a low-budget episode of Slow Horses here.
Came here to say this. I once was captured by their cult. Boy it’s quite a story if anyone wants to hear.
I wonder if I still have all of his literature buried in a box somewhere. If any of you out there haven’t heard of him it’s way way crazier than you may imagine. It’s very captivating for young people. British empire stuff is nothing compared to his geometric proofs about physical economic vs speculative assets. It’s an endless pit of “ah ha!” moments for disaffected people who overestimate their own intelligence.
I'd love to hear your story. There's a pod called Trust Me in which two former cult/high-control group members do interviews of the same. Maybe you'd want to talk with them...
Honestly if I was the Russian I would probably be too. On the one hand they deserve a lot of the shit they got over the past 200 years. On the other hand you can sort of view a lot of European history as a concerted attempt to keep them down.
I just finished listening to this episode and i can’t remember what this episode was about. What I want to know is the back story to that custody case.
I appreciate how Frannie goes to bat even for the crazies she reports on so that it’s sometimes almost hard to tell exactly where her own views lie. Her “assume your gut reaction is wrong and go from there” heuristic seems very wise- I’m thinking of trying it myself someday, maybe. I can definitely see why Katie syncs with her.
At 14:40 into the podcast Katie says "Republicans are attacking civil liberties from every angle."
I would love to hear some examples. I guess you could have a very broad definition of civil liberties, like being allowed to be in this country illegally. This just seems like another example of the hosts assumption that we all just agree with their Trump hatred. If they're going to make outlandish statements like this, they need to get some examples.
I am no legal scholar, in fact I am not even american. But I have some ideas about what I believe are laws derived from the US constitution which seem to have been violated lately. Feel free to correct me, I might have it wrong or maybe some of these are norms rather than laws:
The cabinet answers to congress, at a congressional hearing they are required to answer direct questions or be held in contempt (re: AG Pam Bondi).
The military is not to be used to exert pressure on opponents or be deployed domestically except as a last resort.
Law enforcement cannot detain people without probable cause and officers must be accountable, which means they must be identifiable.
Per the first amendment, the president cannot use government agencies to blackmail media outlets.
The president may not order federal prosecutors to go after his percieved enemies.
Anyone who holds public office must avoid any impression of corruption, bribery or benefiting himself or his family.
I don’t find it an outlandish claim. The most egregious and clear-cut case I’m aware of is the detention of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts student (and legal immigrant) who was arrested by masked, plainclothes ICE officers and detained for over a month in an ICE prison in Louisiana because she wrote a column critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. (That’s not an understatement; the column was quite mild.) In America immigrants have free speech.
Do you think there should be a rule-based process by which people in the country are identified and deported? Because we have multiple instances of the Trump administration claiming without evidence that certain people are terrorist illegals, and then racing to deport them before the courts can intervene.
We also had the administration coercing law firms into firing any lawyer who has ever been involved in a case against him or any of his supporters.
And we have them deporting *legal* immigrants and canceling the visas of people who are discovered to have the wrong political beliefs.
And of course there's Jimmy Kimmel.
That said, I don't think Trump is going after "civil liberties" in particular. He's going after the rule of law, any and every time the law might constrain him. Sometimes this involves civil liberties, sometimes it doesn't. The big picture problem is that Trump rejects the legtimacy of any rule that might stop him from doing the thing he wants to do right now.
The problem with some examples is that the Biden admin was guilty of them too. The prosecution of political enemies- although there was one step of remove, as it was the NY attorney general. Applying pressure to social media companies to suppress Covid misinformation- including the lab leak theory, which is not outlandish in any way. Biden’s son using his relationship with his dad to make money from foreign interests. At times getting Biden on the phone to speak to them.
Yes, I believe Trump is uniquely awful. I find new things to be horrified about almost daily.
I just think it’s an awfulness in degree, not kind.
I think that if people on the left were more honest and less tribal about this stuff we might be able to get somewhere. We seem to think we have a moral high ground we really don’t.
Good point. If you dig deep enough, some of the things Trump does have precedent. But he shocks people with his brashness and brazenness when he does these things.
I can't remember where I recently heard this perfect description of Trump: the Kool-Aid Man of American politics
I think trying to ensure best practise in the midst of a unique and unprecedented global pandemic and attacking a comedian are two entirely different things and not at all worthy of your comparison.
COVID was a real scare to all institutions who had to react on the fly. The Biden administration wasn't hardlining Facebook because 'ulterior motives' they were hardlining Facebook because it was full of snake oil salesmen telling people to inject anything they could sell them into their veins.
This is the perfect example of how insane the right has become. And the fact that this podcast has a whole bunch of subs who blamed the left when non-institutional political activists were engaging in attacks on freedom of speech.
Now you have full blown Republicans destroying civil liberties and the same people who enjoyed this podcast suddenly can make excuses for the most obviously abhorrent behaviour imaginable.
That's how you know it's a cult. The fact you posted this and 14 people liked it just shows how screwed the US is. The rest of the world is watching in disbelief as to how any people can even think nevermind post this kind of stuff you and Midwest Molly do.
I was puzzled--did I miss it?--that the guest didn't address the problems inherent in anyone trying to rig a national election. Aren't elections managed by state and local officials, using a variety of technologies and practices? Wouldn't it be close to impossible to coordinate election fraud across so many different voting procedures?
I imagine there's some places that need to clean up their act (like the place that destroys ballots and then couldn't retrieve a false ballot later?). All conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at bottom--but without any info about how vote counts actually happen, I'm just as ignorant as before.
I didn’t take the topic of the episode to be that election fraud did or didn’t or could or couldn’t happen, but that the belief that it happened is fairly widespread on the left, as well as obviously the right.
I believe she mentioned a YouGov poll from 2025 in which 41% of Harris voters responded that they believed Trump’s 2024 election win was “not legitimate.” But you’re right it would have been good to have explored this more.
Not to defend conspiracy theories, but thanks to the electoral college, recent elections have often come down to narrow margins in a few swing states. 2000 was more or less decided by the unintentionally poor design of the butterfly ballot in one part of Florida.
This was my thought. I don't find it beyond believability that if you had a rolodex of the right numbers to call and demand the officials "find the votes" that if they had the right people there....well, the votes would be found.
After that it's a matter of proving someone fabricated the votes. And the problem with that is the very people responsible for that investigation would be in power.
Course, that's pure insanity. I don't think we'd ever be in a spot where a sitting president would call governors and election officials and literally demand they find votes. . . and be recorded, no less!
That our elections are managed locally is a good thing. I worked the polls for a couple of elections. The level of exacting procedures and double checking of same was impressive. There were always workers of different parties scheduled together, that was required, at every level of the operation. And there were volunteer observers who watched the work, too.
They both kept saying "the election system" and it's like no, there are thousands and thousands of election systems, there isn't a federal election system because we live in the got dang United States of America
> Aren't elections managed by state and local officials, using a variety of technologies and practices? Wouldn't it be close to impossible to coordinate election fraud across so many different voting procedures?
But that shows it doesn't need coordination, just distributed action that's a natural extension of the usual partisan electioneering tricks.
Maybe Katie and Frannie figured we could apply what we've learned from the many post-2016 explainers about the technicalities of our decentralized voting system.
Hard to believe we’re still actually casting votes when AI large voting models can simulate our elections for us with over 99.97% accuracy in just minutes.
I expect AI evangelists to start arguing for that soon, which will be great because it's like the Asimov short story "Franchise", only slightly more dystopian.
There's an artistry in the way there free press white washed and soft peddle right wing narratives. I think this story in and of itself could be just entertaining silly, but it is clear that fits the narrative that driven in pretty much free press story that makes it hard to take seriously. They experts and digging up these often obscure, fringe culture war type stories that center around some sort of left wing overreach, or silliness and seek to elevate to the mainstream and conflate it with national contemporary politics. I found it amusing that I the end she actually endorsed this just asking questions approach to question or election integrity, even if the evidence is slim. I wonder how she views Trumps attempt to steal and election?🤔🤣
They subtly, and often not so subtly, use these stories equivicate between the political parties in order to white wash whatever obviously egregious thing the Trump presidency has engaged in (in this case the attempted stealing of elections). Funny how they never did this for Biden. In the narrative of the free press, it always comes back to the issue is cultural rot, and not just any cultural rot, but the progressive cultural rot.
Our current right wing authoritarian movement is to be understood through this lens, which is not exactly wrong, but they always fails to understand how these forces are vastly different in respects to their threat liberalism, our constitution and democracy. They often justify or white wash what the administration is doing because they ultimately align with their view that their is a cultural rot in the left that must be rooted out.
What i find extra annoying is that their coverage is not driven by some deep rooted principle, they're frequently hypocritical, but it just guided through deeply biased reporting that lacks self awareness and shirks responsibility or safe gaurds. They frequently sacrafice objectivty and balance when it fits their bias, but they always present themselves with thin veneer of upholding said principles.
This was kind of apparent in the way Franny answered Katie's soft probing question essentially asking how do you justify focusing on left wing culture war issues when our current administration is much a bigger threat to liberalism. Her circular answer is essentially came down to i write about these issues because for some reason I just care about this particular issue. She backs away from claiming there is any partisan angle in her reporting in her reporting. I wish katie had pushed on her that point, but that is not how they interview.
No, bias is inevitable and pervasive in media. But other outlets do a much better job of owning their bias and/or controlling for the bias.
What i find particularly annoying with the free press is not only that its journalism is often egregious bad, it is that constantly presents itself as something it is not. Even the name the free press shows laughable hypocrisy. This self aggrandizement and hypocrisy makes them especially hard to stomach
If TFP would just admit that their editorial angle is moderate MAGA rather than trying to pretend they’re a much-needed home for ‘heterodox liberals’ they could head off a lot of this criticism.
I got into a back-and-forth on this Substack with someone who wanted me to prove that TFP was not "fiercely independent", but after a few exchanges it became clear that the only standard of evidence that would satisfy was a letter from Bari Weiss saying, "TrackerNeil is correct."
What a news outlet *doesn't* cover is just as important as what it does. So TFP basically shrugging past Trump's felony convictions is the same as saying they just don't think they are newsworthy. That is a choice, and one TFP makes all of the time.
Yes absolutely. You can see the bias in what they choose to cover and more importantly not cover (like you say). You also see in how they cover topics and choose to interject comments that are meant to white wash the right or exaggerate the issues witht the left.
It does drive me crazy that Bari weiss/ the free press defenders act like Bari has to explicitly state her bias in order to be biased. It would actually do her good to own her bias and lessen the criticism. You don't have to be a mind reader to see the bias in her coverage and much of the issues her coverage comes from her attempt to obfuscate that bias. Plenty of outlets are biased, but still have good coverage because they own their bias and hedge around their bias as to not be misleading their audience.
The false equivalencies in this interview are actually pretty good examples of what makes the Free Press's Pro-trump slant so obnoxious. She's framing it as though a small group of kooks who've managed to grift a few hundred k and have no institutional relationship to the actual democratic party are somehow equivalent to an actual sitting president using his official power to attempt to overturn an election and mounting a violent coup attempt when that failed and the entire official republican party being dragged into supporting the lie that trump won the election. This might have made good barpod fodder but the FP person constantly trying to draw these ridiculous analogies and tar the entire leftwing with the brush of this tiny internet conspiracy cult is ridiculous.
I have liked this episode even more than I thought I would. We are so conspiracy brained as a country that we are in deep shit. it’s really killing us. I think people just feel so powerless.
Trump outperformed most Republican US Senate candidates; Harris underperformed most Democratic US Senate candidates. So therefore stolen election? An alternative explanation immediately comes to mind: Harris was less popular than most Democratic US Senate candidates.
This becomes crystal clear when you notice that the "dropoff" for Harris is larger in the red states they list (Montana, North Dakota, Ohio) and smaller in the blue ones (Hawaii, Connecticut). The Democratic US Senate candidates in red states are going to be moderate-to-conservative Dems, far less liberal than Kamala Harris. Therefore they get a lot more votes than Harris did in these states. And then we look at the swing states (Arizona, North Carolina) and, sure enough, the size of the "dropoff" smaller than in the red states and larger than in the blue states.
"Smart elections" also tries to argue for anti-Harris fraud by noting that the dropoff was smaller for Biden in 2020 than for Harris in 2024. Well yeah, Biden was seen as a moderate centrist. So he got more votes than Harris did from people who lean right. And he was just more popular overall. I fail to see what is surprising about any of the state-level results that they're highlighting.
(I'll admit that the results in those two New York precincts are strange.)
We hopped off the interstate in Ramapo to go to a supermarket while on a long drive home, and I think I might have been one of a handful of women in the store who was not wearing a wig/headscarf and long skirt.
Thank for the links, they explain a lot. I would have liked to see a few more prior year results from the precincts in question to confirm the claim that split-ticked bloc voting is a normal thing around there, but the explanation that some tightly knit religious communities all vote together *on purpose* makes sense.
Katie's claim about not trusting the system because the electoral system is "fucked", conflates two entirely different things. Suggesting people are right to believe in widespread election fraud in America is psychotic, and I don't think I would have heard such a sympathetic note from Katie in 2020.
Rockland County is heavily hassidic, and hassidic vote as a bloc. They are absolutely Trump-voters, and they would wisely vote for democratic local politicians, who will give them more money and services.
Wokism is not "over"--these ideologies are dominant in education, medicine, law. Plenty of us are still worried about getting cancelled for "wrong think" even if the Republicans control the federal government.
I wonder if Katie and Jesse are insulated from that reality--they don't have children attending a school peddling ideology, they are not giving birth in hospitals that don't use the word "women," and they are not faced with losing custody of a child for not affirming a trans identity.
I'm generally against standpoint epistemology but make an exception for being a parent.
It changes your perspective in a lot of ways unexplainable unless you experience it.
Non parents are much more likely to say: "Meh, so what if a few kids get sterilised and rendered anorgasmic by mistake as long as we save the trans kids from a fate worse than death (you fascist)?"
“Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten.” is an expression for a reason.
All parents must navigate our educational institutions (public, private, or homeschooling), all of which are riddled with race and gender ideologies. All parents must navigate medical systems, where pediatricians ask children if they’re suicidal or trans. Not all parents land in family court, but if they do, they must navigate gender ideology there.
Not sure it’s standpoint epistemology so much as intensive exposure to powerful institutions that can harm a child’s wellbeing in the name of care.
I have noticed a significant decline in the insanity and a stark increase in the willingness of skeptical people to talk about it in the last couple of years.
I have two kids in elementary to middle school in a bastion of progressive woo.
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Of note, I know some who were all in on the trans woo who got a bit of a culture shock when the anti-semitism after Oct. 7th blew up. Seeing the same people they agreed with on trans ideology go all in on Pro Hamas made them take a step back and question their views across the board.
It's also an ever present threat if you work in otherwise mainstream entertainment and/or literature and network is all, and even the smallest person - read non-creative non-entity - can take away your everything.
Our hosts aren't trying to publish genre novels or get plays produced, or exhibit their work or do poetry readings, or supplement their incomes through school visits.
Yes, it puzzles me that they think the worst is over. There’s still a lot happening. The feds aren’t going to restore jobs for people fired from NGOs or museums or libraries; no one is going to rescue an artist’s career; no one is going to get a cancelled book contract back.
I’m happy that they feel less vulnerable personally (yay!) but come on—the war on “wrong think” isn’t over.
What is happening is an alternative ecosystem. This is particularly obvious in printed Science Fiction where the progressive Worldcon fandom and the "blowing shit up on space or maybe killing dragons" readers have split organisationally and socially, but the latter market is doing fine.
Maybe the big turning point was after Jan 6 when Toni Weisskopf (female Jewish) editor in chief of Baen books was disinvited from being Guest of Honour at Worldcon because a non-entity went on the Baen forums and found people discussing how to paralyse a city etc (this being a Military SF forum), and some Trump supporters who thought the election was rigged.
All that happened was a lot of people who otherwise avoid politics on social media started posting Baen badges in support. There's not much point in staying in the ingroup when it wants to take away your exploding dragons.
A hilarious follow up was when veteran pro-LGBTQ+ Mercedes Lackey was cancelled from being guest of honour at a convention due to misspeaking - another non-entity did the dirty work - her publisher turned out to be Baen, who put out adds saying how pleased they were to publish her.
Now if only that could happen in other fields...
Wow, amazing. Yes, alternative networks might be easier to build in fandoms and for media outlets but for schools, museums, libraries? Ugh, am feeling discouraged.
I think the difference is that in some fields the platforms aren't real, they are just a collective focus of attention. You can grab an SF publisher and publish woke books, but readers will just buy different books.
Schools, museums and libraries are physical spaces that "own" the stuff - kids, objects, books.
I can't easily, say, start a large independent British Military History museum with a "Brave Deeds" gallery and another for "How we got good at blowing stuff up."
Where are you getting this? Jesse isn't a part of this episode.
TBF I have kids and am not facing any of these things, either. A lot depends on region and social milieu.
I'm in an ultra progressive space. I know two trans kids (out of maybe 100 kids that I know well enough to know if they are trans), who were trans before they could read so unlikely to have been indoctrinated. They just had language for it now. i don't know what the parents are doing. I know several nonbinary kids who are all females who are gender nonconforming. My kid is super into queerness, but is straight and not trans. I think it has been mostly healthy for them compared to the shitstorm I grew up in in the 80s and 90s which was aggressively sexist and homophobic.
There are horror stories of girls going on hormone blockers, but honestly the bigger concern to me (in terms of sheer numbers and impact) would be my kid moving to a red state and being denied reproductive health care. Almost every single woman I know well enough to know their pregnancy journey has had at least one miscarriage, some multiple. It is terrifying to me that there are places where they couldn't abort a nonviable fetus or would suffer repercussions from having a miscarriage.
I'm in a conservative place and I know over a dozen trans kids, most of whom were gender-conforming girls until they got into online gaming. I, too, am more worried about women being denied reproductive health care since that's a bigger concern numbers-wise.
huh. my kid is jr. high age so maybe that makes a difference.
Currently one of my children is in college and the other in in high school. It's been going on since they were in elementary school, though, starting with the older sibling of a friend of my older child.
It probably peaked with kids who are now in late high school, starting when they started middle school. Both of my kids have entire friend groups where more than half the members are trans, usually but not always FTM, usually but not always it's just the name and pronouns (though I do know of at least one friend who is MTF and at least two minor females who are already taking testosterone).
I tell myself that I am gender-nonconforming myself and always hung out with gay and gender-nonconforming friends when I was their age as well, so probably they're just taking after me. The medical interventions and the warped sense of reality do worry me, though.
It's plausible that the trend of coming out as trans did in fact peak 5 years ago, so kids of junior high age now would be less likely to trans-identify than my kids and their friends when they were in junior high.
Well, my daughter just had an activity with teenagers, and there were several trans kids in that group. From what I saw all FTM, as opposed to the kids who came out in elementary school who were MTF.
It is a bit worrying to me. I'm 100% fine with her being gender nonconforming, not being girly, not doing girly things. I'm also ok with grown ass adults modifying their body to fit how they want to show up in the world. I do not want my child to set that identity in stone or medicalize it as a child though. Yeah, no shit you don't want to be a girl - being a girl sucks (so does being a boy).
I’m glad for you. If you have children in school you might want to look up the school’s policies about affinity groups and gender. Here’s a place to search by school district:
https://defendinged.org/investigations/list-of-school-district-transgender-gender-nonconforming-student-policies/
I looked up mine in district very well known for being "ultra progressive". There's plenty in it to trigger someone who's looking to be triggered.
And there's certainly been a few eyebrow raising beliefs the've taken home. My favorite was the belief that anyone could just decide to become a boy, marry a girl, and have babies. Or vice versa. Of course, this is what comes from trying to teach really wishy washy concepts like gender identity before kids are old enough to really understand biological sex and reproduction.
In other words, it was probably equal parts dumb gender studies stuff but also confusion on the part of an elementary kid's interpretation of what they were hearing.
But I just had a conversation with them. Not like we haven't taught them about biological sex in the context of reproduction before. . . . they're just kids, so it's hard for them to wrap their heads around it.
These little things don't really bother me though. Perhaps it's because I'm a life long atheist and have dealt with religious people inserting their beliefs into every aspect of life. If you got all worked up about every instance, you'd spend all day in a tizzy.
Better to just ask questions, talk about the topics, guide your kids through rational thought so they're not vulnerable to all religious pablum.....of which I think these gender beliefs fall.
That's a great analogy. I grew up non-religious in a very religious area, and my parents just told me "some of your friends' parents teach them that people who don't believe what they believe are going to hell. It's just how some people are around here, don't take it seriously." And so I grew up hearing my friends make all kinds of religious claims without ever believing any of them, despite being an otherwise pretty gullible kid.
Now imagine if not teaching your kids that meant the state could come take them away. Oy vey.
My school district isn't listed. I know, though, that some of the individual teachers were sort of overwhelmed when the culture changed so quickly.
I hope you're right! And obviously some children are more vulnerable than others. It's just that most of these school districts also have policies to hide transitioning (binding, new names, new pronouns) from parents. I would guess that middle school would be the time to be very alert.
The only things that did "trigger" me as far as that goes are these policies and the laws that were passed in certain states that made not medically transitioning considered legal child abuse.
This was done so the state could put the kids into protective services that hid them from abusive parents looking for them.
Everything up to that point, I blew off as "stupid shit zealots do". Like I said, I've lived in states where it was religious nutters always trying shit at schools. Slipping prayer into sports practices and games, teaching it in class with a wink and a nod.
But, as Picard says, when it comes to legal enshrinement and keeping parents out of the loop......"The line must be drawn HEYAH!" :P
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Oh, there is language in my districts policy about confidential medical information and parents. This one's very tricky to me. These policies all go back to reproductive rights. And the laws that were passed that legally gave minors of a certain age the right to privacy regarding medical care. They were all very explicitly to allow, say, a 13 or 14 year old to get birth control or talk to providers about safe sex practices without being legally required to disclose those discussions to parents.
I say it's tricky, because they were authored very broadly. And while I do think a 16 year old girl should be able to go to Planned Parenthood and get birth control...extending that to medical transitioning and mental health care seems a step too far.
For example, I may support birth control as an acute medicine that can be stopped at any time. But I wouldn't be ok with elective hysterectomy for 13 year olds without notifying parents.
Social transitioning? Honestly, who gives a shit? Binding. Not sure. But if it crosses into harm (you can hurt your ribs and such), I think that requires notification. Medical transitioning. No fucking way. Parents must be involved.
Yes, not enough people know about those laws or realize they may be subject to them.
As to "triggering"--it's not irrational to be concerned about these policies. The problem is that large numbers of children *have* been influenced--most likely by peers and social media, and then the school institutes the new identity without parental notification, elevating the child into a special category. If a child is struggling socially, imagine how powerful a feeling it would be to have the entire school administration telling him he's special.
I think this is much more than religious nutters because the force of all the institutions are behind it--the school policies, the doctors (who take the child aside and ask if they're trans), and the law and politicians claiming to "save trans kids." That's a lot of institutional power--and many parents have been shocked to find themselves up against it. Look up the stories of parents like Erin Friday, January Littlejohn, Erin Lee, Beth Bourne, etc etc.
Our kids' school recently sent out a "principal's notes" on a Friday where the term Latinx was used repeatedly. I was honestly shocked. I didn't think anyone was still tone deaf enough to use that term but I guess it's still common enough in schools.
Yes, educational institutions aren’t changing just because people on social media mock certain terms. No, many things have been enshrined into *policy* that staff must adhere to. Go dig into your district’s policy documents and see.
I was surprised because Latino people have been pretty vocal about how much they dislike the term. It's considered basically a slur at this point.
I kinda see it as wishcasting. Everyone I know who is anti woke loves to pretend it died with Trump 2.0. Really, they're just hoping it into existence.
It's true that we're past peak woke, but if peak woke in 2020 was 100%, we only brought it down to 80%, and it reigns supreme in left of center spaces and institutions. And in its vacuum, a much more nefarious right wing cancel culture supplanted it.
I missed where this came up in this episode.
In the set up, Katie claims it’s not 2020 anymore—that the power of woke has declined. In the previous episode, she and Jesse speak at more length about how it’s not 2018 anymore, how the cancel culture stuff is kind of done. It seems to be an operating assumption.
I don't remember them mentioning it, but Katie and Jessie do mention it offhand quite frequently so it wouldn't surprise me if they did this episode. I think they are very focused on national politics so they sort of miss the reality of day-to-day life since they both live online mainly.
Jesse is not in this episode.
Yeah I am aware of that. It was a general comment.
Add corporate America to the list.
Just send your kids to a private Catholic school.
Yes, that’s where the grandchildren are going.
Lol sure buddy, so many hospitals never use the word “women”. It’s always amusing watching you people make things up in your head despite having so much actual material to work with.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nhs-calls-mothers-birthing-people-100000194.html
Ahh very fair if you’re referring to the UK. Is that why you were talking about republicans
and the federal government? You were talking about the UK NHS, eh?
Oh okay it’s happening in US too. https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/592335-experts-warn-gender-neutral-language-like/amp/
Lol citing a 2022 article that argues against such language goes directly against your original point. But of course you wouldn’t even realize that.
I saw it myself when I took my wife to have a pregnancy scan a few months ago. Shouldn't you be trusting my lived experience?
Katie and the guest did a poor job of putting this in context. Blue truthers are a tiny movement that is going nowhere, while Stop The Steal was started by an outgoing president and quickly became part of mainstream Republican orthodoxy. The guest wanted to give us an impression of parity which doesn't exist.
There doesn’t have to be an exact match in intensity and number for something to be an apt comparison. Humans are humans. Take the recent cancellation frenzy. Nobody was literally burned in the town square for being a witch, but certainly the same impulses were activated in both.
No there doesn't need to be. But when there is a massive disparity in intensity of the problem between the sides and you say "both sides have that problem" without providing that context, and at times straight up ignoring the context when Katy pointed it out... You might be a FP commenter.
Katy did a pretty good job this episode, and I have to disagree with the OP on that. She provided ample opportunities to contextualize what the guest was saying. The guest simply wasn't biting.
I can't tell if she is the kind of person who comments in the Free Press, or is just so afraid of their audience that she can't acknowledge the reality and has to both sides.
Actually there does if you're going to suggest it's an institutional problem.
Nice false equivalency.
This is the sort of empty headed both sidism is the bread and butter of the free press. The left must at all times be as guilty, if not more guilty of anything the right is accused of. Of course this is incredibly misleading presentations of events that is curated through cherry picked examples, as well as utilizing apologetics in an incredibly biased way.
They strive for this faux presentations of balance and have almost completely abandoned objectivity in their reporting. It has been shown that their coverage is heavily biased towards the right (which is pretty much self evident at this point). Also staking out position that his halfway between a truth and lie is still lie. It is just dressed up in nuance.
Are you referring to the same "free press" which supressed stories from 2009-2016, including the "kids in cages" camps to which they followed AOC to watch her cry in front of the gates in 2017 and pretended that those facilitues hadn't been operating for three or more years at that point?
Or the "free press" which was an active participant in trying to conceal Joe Biden's mental degeneration from the public (or at the very least, who never questioned any spokesperson about the dearth of Presidential Q&A under that administration?
Or the "free press" which has uncritically published DNC-issued talking points as "news" for more years than I can count? Who approached a major and true story which would have hurt Joe Biden in 2020 with the kind of skepticism that they couldn't seem to imagine possible when reporting on a "scandal" which it turned out had been fabricated by the HRC campaign and a manipulated report ordered by Obama in December 2016?
If that's the press that's thrown in whith the right, it chills me to imagine how far they'd have to go into the tank before you'd considet them to be neutral.
They’re talking about Bari Weiss’ publication literally called The Free Press.
Capitalization might be a "boomer" and "Genx" thing, but it also can do wonders to prevent confusion. Especially in a country where the press is legally free from government control, but often chooses to be more comoliant than Pravda in the 1950s.
The ancient Romans got by with block capitals with no separation between words, I think you could’ve used context clues to realise that ‘the free press’ in lowercase still referred to the publication this episode’s guest is introduced as writing for, and which was the main topic of the previous episode, rather than the general abstract concept.
It’s incredibly important that trump refused to accept that he lost. He’s the leader of his party and the country. Him refusing to accept the results directly led to more people not believing in the democratic process.
Harris publicly agreed she lost. She just wrote a book about it.
There’s no comparison.
This is true, but if she had claimed that the election had been stolen, I think the numbers would be much higher than 41%, whereas absent Trump's terrible (but unfortunately predictable, given his character and personality) refusal to acknowledge the loss the R numbers would be much lower. There's a problem with partisans generally (I have thought this since the '04 conspiracies, I don't blame anyone in '00, since that was just completely insane), but there is specifically a problem with Trump that (crossing-fingers) perhaps will get better once he is gone.
I’m not sure it’s a small group. I live in a purple Midwest state and I have two friends in their 60s who are totally convinced that Elon helped Trump steal the election. That adds up to 30% my close female friends.
"41% of Harris voters say Trump's 2024 victory was not legitimate".
I know, I know, it's easy to say stuff like that to a pollster. And the figure is far worse for Trump voters in 2020, 70% of whom say Biden's victory was not legitimate. But, as usual, the desire to believe that the other side are evil cheaters transcends political affilation.
The desire to believe the other side are evil cheaters transcends political affiliation.
However, the desire to believe lies about electoral outcomes is much more prevalent on one side, and only explicitly pushed by one side's leaders. Let's not pretend like they're even remotely close.
> Blue truthers are a tiny movement that is going nowhere
Thank god. The episode left me vaguely depressed.
Thanks, was worried that I was the only one who got this sense from the guest.
Spends entire career lambasting cancel culture from the left, when asked about the new paradigm that is way worse from the right, "oh I don't think about it politically... Oh and by the way tiny minority of liberals pushing Kamala truthers are comparable to Trump's attempt to overthrow the government and Jan 6th..."
I can't tell if she is the kind of person who comments in the Free Press, or is just so afraid of their audience that she can't acknowledge the reality and has to both sides.
what is an amusing group of crazy people that should be covered for amusement was covered as if it's a major serious political movement. feels really manipulative, almost Fox News level
Since the first time I heard any mention of the Rockland County case, I never could figure out how anyone thought that boosting Kamala's vote count in New York State might actually affect the electoral result since she won that state regardless.
From the perspective of the people who back the GOP and/or trump, the current "blue truthers" are just a continuation of the strong contingent of the Democrats (including current leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Liz Warren) which has denied the validity of every Dem loss since 2000, and which would disenfranchise all of the "flyover states" tomorrow if they could. Not to mention having put the opposition candidate's campaign under secret government suveilience based on a false premise, and which turned the Capitol Building into a militarized fortress surrounded by razor wire and patrolled by uniformed National Guard soldiers carrying automatic rifles for most of a year in response to a riot in January (after refusing to acknowledge the damage done by widespread looting and arson during "mostly peaceful" protests during the summer of 2020), and pretending that a mob who even the FBI investigators determined only included a few dozen people who had planned to go near the building, and that even those people had no real plan for what to do if they somehow got inside; as if there were ever any danger of another riot like that happening. The TSA even put two freshman GOP House members onto a watch list because their having traveled to DC just ahead of Jan 6th (to take up their seats in the new Congress which was convening on the first business day of the year) was "suspicious".
In their "context" that movement has gone much farther to undo the results of elections which they didn't like, to silence dissent (via the influence that FBI and DHS were applying to twitter, facebook, and google/youtube under the Biden administration), has weaponized the IRS and a number of other regulatory agencies to punish the opposition party, and until fairly recently has had a willingly complicit propaganda arm in the form of ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, NYT, WaPo, and CNN (with MSNBC being the counterweight to FNC)
I can't believe that after 10 years with Trump, people are still holding onto these "one weird trick" hopes for getting him out of our politics. I'm as much in despair about Trump 2.0 as any of these people, but I actually think it would be a disaster for the country for his election to somehow miraculously get overturned because of election fraud. That would mean there are some real vulnerabilities in our system that bad actors had managed to exploit. But moreover, the level of anger and vitriol on each side would be so divisive, I actually would fear some kind of widespread violence. As devastated as I was waking up on Nov 5, it was at least mercifully decisive.
I agree. Sadly we are stuck with him. Hard to believe he’s only been president since January
Feels like 5 years
Agree 1000%.
Plus there are reasons people voted for him and unless the reasons people voted for him are addressed, there's a possibility that next time around a candidate like him but with some self-discipline will win. I don't want to think about what would happen if the 2024 election gets overturned because of some byzantine election fraud.
Underrated comment!
I heard someone say the other day that democrats have to wrap their head around the fact that the best way out of this Trump presidency is to get through it and work on having a worthy politician for the 2028 election. I agree.
The first Trump term could be written off as an anomaly, a whim of the electorate which eventually learned better. The second Trump term has shown that, given the proper circumstances, Americans are quite willing to overlook criminality, corruption, and downright idiocy. It's scary.
I knew that lady was a Larouchite as soon as she mentioned Britain.
EDIT: Jormungandr is the Midgard Serpent from Norse Mythology which encircles the world and bites its own tail.
As a British person, I enjoyed that aspect of this episode - like, at least there are *some* people in the world who believe that the British establishment is capable of getting something done that benefits the country. It was kind of sweet and refreshing.
I thought this too. The only other people in the world who think the British establishment is a powerful and effective cabal is in some of the Iranian Secret Services. The rest of us know it's more like a low-budget episode of Slow Horses here.
Ditto. And honestly, I can definitely believe that Tony Blair would like one day to be President of the World
I mean. Yeah, tbf they nailed it with that one.
Came here to say this. I once was captured by their cult. Boy it’s quite a story if anyone wants to hear.
I wonder if I still have all of his literature buried in a box somewhere. If any of you out there haven’t heard of him it’s way way crazier than you may imagine. It’s very captivating for young people. British empire stuff is nothing compared to his geometric proofs about physical economic vs speculative assets. It’s an endless pit of “ah ha!” moments for disaffected people who overestimate their own intelligence.
I, for one, want to hear your LaRouchite story.
I texted a long lost friend last night about this and we had a talk about it. Keep this pinned. I will put this together for you.
As much as I’d like to sum it up for you on the bus ride home it is a novella.
I think Katie should interview you and make a new Larouchite episode
I'd love to hear your story. There's a pod called Trust Me in which two former cult/high-control group members do interviews of the same. Maybe you'd want to talk with them...
I was actually stunned that she didnt know that word. 1 Google search of 1 word would have solved that.
Same, and I'll admit it made me skeptical of her supposed skill as a writer....
Big lost opportunity to talk about the Beatles as mind control here 😂
By that logic, Putin must also be a larouchian. Though he would speak of Anglo-Saxons rather than Brits.
I know, it’s like Putin is still pure steaming about the Crimean War.
Honestly if I was the Russian I would probably be too. On the one hand they deserve a lot of the shit they got over the past 200 years. On the other hand you can sort of view a lot of European history as a concerted attempt to keep them down.
I just finished listening to this episode and i can’t remember what this episode was about. What I want to know is the back story to that custody case.
Frannie's Free Press article about that case is fantastic. Absolutely head-spinning story.
Yeah, the compassionate suicide/divorce from hell story could easily be a whole episode. Maybe with K&J and Frannie as guide?
Yeah, I wish that was the episode topic!
It's a fascinating story, but I hope for the kids' sake, that it goes away, it has to be terrible for them. No winners there.
I appreciate how Frannie goes to bat even for the crazies she reports on so that it’s sometimes almost hard to tell exactly where her own views lie. Her “assume your gut reaction is wrong and go from there” heuristic seems very wise- I’m thinking of trying it myself someday, maybe. I can definitely see why Katie syncs with her.
I really liked her! And she seems super thorough in her research.
At 14:40 into the podcast Katie says "Republicans are attacking civil liberties from every angle."
I would love to hear some examples. I guess you could have a very broad definition of civil liberties, like being allowed to be in this country illegally. This just seems like another example of the hosts assumption that we all just agree with their Trump hatred. If they're going to make outlandish statements like this, they need to get some examples.
I am no legal scholar, in fact I am not even american. But I have some ideas about what I believe are laws derived from the US constitution which seem to have been violated lately. Feel free to correct me, I might have it wrong or maybe some of these are norms rather than laws:
The cabinet answers to congress, at a congressional hearing they are required to answer direct questions or be held in contempt (re: AG Pam Bondi).
The military is not to be used to exert pressure on opponents or be deployed domestically except as a last resort.
Law enforcement cannot detain people without probable cause and officers must be accountable, which means they must be identifiable.
Per the first amendment, the president cannot use government agencies to blackmail media outlets.
The president may not order federal prosecutors to go after his percieved enemies.
Anyone who holds public office must avoid any impression of corruption, bribery or benefiting himself or his family.
Election results must be respected.
Crazy how any of this even needs to be explained. "The president ordering the AG to persecute his personal enemies is bad".
Katie's audience is well... special.
She's curated this environment. Remind me when they did a Trump Truthers episode with a left wing hack as a guest host?
I don’t find it an outlandish claim. The most egregious and clear-cut case I’m aware of is the detention of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts student (and legal immigrant) who was arrested by masked, plainclothes ICE officers and detained for over a month in an ICE prison in Louisiana because she wrote a column critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. (That’s not an understatement; the column was quite mild.) In America immigrants have free speech.
Do you think there should be a rule-based process by which people in the country are identified and deported? Because we have multiple instances of the Trump administration claiming without evidence that certain people are terrorist illegals, and then racing to deport them before the courts can intervene.
We also had the administration coercing law firms into firing any lawyer who has ever been involved in a case against him or any of his supporters.
And we have them deporting *legal* immigrants and canceling the visas of people who are discovered to have the wrong political beliefs.
And of course there's Jimmy Kimmel.
That said, I don't think Trump is going after "civil liberties" in particular. He's going after the rule of law, any and every time the law might constrain him. Sometimes this involves civil liberties, sometimes it doesn't. The big picture problem is that Trump rejects the legtimacy of any rule that might stop him from doing the thing he wants to do right now.
Freedom of speech - Jimmy Kimel
The problem with some examples is that the Biden admin was guilty of them too. The prosecution of political enemies- although there was one step of remove, as it was the NY attorney general. Applying pressure to social media companies to suppress Covid misinformation- including the lab leak theory, which is not outlandish in any way. Biden’s son using his relationship with his dad to make money from foreign interests. At times getting Biden on the phone to speak to them.
Yes, I believe Trump is uniquely awful. I find new things to be horrified about almost daily.
I just think it’s an awfulness in degree, not kind.
I think that if people on the left were more honest and less tribal about this stuff we might be able to get somewhere. We seem to think we have a moral high ground we really don’t.
Good point. If you dig deep enough, some of the things Trump does have precedent. But he shocks people with his brashness and brazenness when he does these things.
I can't remember where I recently heard this perfect description of Trump: the Kool-Aid Man of American politics
I think the thing that's shocking about Trump is he doesn't pretend so can't be challenged with the norm.
I think trying to ensure best practise in the midst of a unique and unprecedented global pandemic and attacking a comedian are two entirely different things and not at all worthy of your comparison.
COVID was a real scare to all institutions who had to react on the fly. The Biden administration wasn't hardlining Facebook because 'ulterior motives' they were hardlining Facebook because it was full of snake oil salesmen telling people to inject anything they could sell them into their veins.
Apples and oranges.
Trump is directly removing people from TV. It's not degree. And the biggest issue the left has is believing they shouldn't get as dirty as the right.
Right now fascism is winning. You can't beat it with politeness.
This is the perfect example of how insane the right has become. And the fact that this podcast has a whole bunch of subs who blamed the left when non-institutional political activists were engaging in attacks on freedom of speech.
Now you have full blown Republicans destroying civil liberties and the same people who enjoyed this podcast suddenly can make excuses for the most obviously abhorrent behaviour imaginable.
That's how you know it's a cult. The fact you posted this and 14 people liked it just shows how screwed the US is. The rest of the world is watching in disbelief as to how any people can even think nevermind post this kind of stuff you and Midwest Molly do.
I was puzzled--did I miss it?--that the guest didn't address the problems inherent in anyone trying to rig a national election. Aren't elections managed by state and local officials, using a variety of technologies and practices? Wouldn't it be close to impossible to coordinate election fraud across so many different voting procedures?
I imagine there's some places that need to clean up their act (like the place that destroys ballots and then couldn't retrieve a false ballot later?). All conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at bottom--but without any info about how vote counts actually happen, I'm just as ignorant as before.
I didn’t take the topic of the episode to be that election fraud did or didn’t or could or couldn’t happen, but that the belief that it happened is fairly widespread on the left, as well as obviously the right.
Fantasy-prone personality disorder is a bipartisan problem
Okay, good point!
That wasn't demonstrated though. We got a profile of some crazies and no sense of their scale.
I believe she mentioned a YouGov poll from 2025 in which 41% of Harris voters responded that they believed Trump’s 2024 election win was “not legitimate.” But you’re right it would have been good to have explored this more.
Not to defend conspiracy theories, but thanks to the electoral college, recent elections have often come down to narrow margins in a few swing states. 2000 was more or less decided by the unintentionally poor design of the butterfly ballot in one part of Florida.
This was my thought. I don't find it beyond believability that if you had a rolodex of the right numbers to call and demand the officials "find the votes" that if they had the right people there....well, the votes would be found.
After that it's a matter of proving someone fabricated the votes. And the problem with that is the very people responsible for that investigation would be in power.
Course, that's pure insanity. I don't think we'd ever be in a spot where a sitting president would call governors and election officials and literally demand they find votes. . . and be recorded, no less!
That our elections are managed locally is a good thing. I worked the polls for a couple of elections. The level of exacting procedures and double checking of same was impressive. There were always workers of different parties scheduled together, that was required, at every level of the operation. And there were volunteer observers who watched the work, too.
They both kept saying "the election system" and it's like no, there are thousands and thousands of election systems, there isn't a federal election system because we live in the got dang United States of America
> Aren't elections managed by state and local officials, using a variety of technologies and practices? Wouldn't it be close to impossible to coordinate election fraud across so many different voting procedures?
But that shows it doesn't need coordination, just distributed action that's a natural extension of the usual partisan electioneering tricks.
Maybe Katie and Frannie figured we could apply what we've learned from the many post-2016 explainers about the technicalities of our decentralized voting system.
Hard to believe we’re still actually casting votes when AI large voting models can simulate our elections for us with over 99.97% accuracy in just minutes.
I expect AI evangelists to start arguing for that soon, which will be great because it's like the Asimov short story "Franchise", only slightly more dystopian.
AI has not increased my faith in computers; it has only decreased my regard for human beings.
There's an artistry in the way there free press white washed and soft peddle right wing narratives. I think this story in and of itself could be just entertaining silly, but it is clear that fits the narrative that driven in pretty much free press story that makes it hard to take seriously. They experts and digging up these often obscure, fringe culture war type stories that center around some sort of left wing overreach, or silliness and seek to elevate to the mainstream and conflate it with national contemporary politics. I found it amusing that I the end she actually endorsed this just asking questions approach to question or election integrity, even if the evidence is slim. I wonder how she views Trumps attempt to steal and election?🤔🤣
They subtly, and often not so subtly, use these stories equivicate between the political parties in order to white wash whatever obviously egregious thing the Trump presidency has engaged in (in this case the attempted stealing of elections). Funny how they never did this for Biden. In the narrative of the free press, it always comes back to the issue is cultural rot, and not just any cultural rot, but the progressive cultural rot.
Our current right wing authoritarian movement is to be understood through this lens, which is not exactly wrong, but they always fails to understand how these forces are vastly different in respects to their threat liberalism, our constitution and democracy. They often justify or white wash what the administration is doing because they ultimately align with their view that their is a cultural rot in the left that must be rooted out.
What i find extra annoying is that their coverage is not driven by some deep rooted principle, they're frequently hypocritical, but it just guided through deeply biased reporting that lacks self awareness and shirks responsibility or safe gaurds. They frequently sacrafice objectivty and balance when it fits their bias, but they always present themselves with thin veneer of upholding said principles.
This was kind of apparent in the way Franny answered Katie's soft probing question essentially asking how do you justify focusing on left wing culture war issues when our current administration is much a bigger threat to liberalism. Her circular answer is essentially came down to i write about these issues because for some reason I just care about this particular issue. She backs away from claiming there is any partisan angle in her reporting in her reporting. I wish katie had pushed on her that point, but that is not how they interview.
OK, TFP has biases, editorial double standards, and delusions of objectivity. Is there a media outlet somewhere that doesn’t ?
No, bias is inevitable and pervasive in media. But other outlets do a much better job of owning their bias and/or controlling for the bias.
What i find particularly annoying with the free press is not only that its journalism is often egregious bad, it is that constantly presents itself as something it is not. Even the name the free press shows laughable hypocrisy. This self aggrandizement and hypocrisy makes them especially hard to stomach
If TFP would just admit that their editorial angle is moderate MAGA rather than trying to pretend they’re a much-needed home for ‘heterodox liberals’ they could head off a lot of this criticism.
Last I checked, MSNBC wasn't claiming to be "fiercely independent."
I got into a back-and-forth on this Substack with someone who wanted me to prove that TFP was not "fiercely independent", but after a few exchanges it became clear that the only standard of evidence that would satisfy was a letter from Bari Weiss saying, "TrackerNeil is correct."
What a news outlet *doesn't* cover is just as important as what it does. So TFP basically shrugging past Trump's felony convictions is the same as saying they just don't think they are newsworthy. That is a choice, and one TFP makes all of the time.
Yes absolutely. You can see the bias in what they choose to cover and more importantly not cover (like you say). You also see in how they cover topics and choose to interject comments that are meant to white wash the right or exaggerate the issues witht the left.
It does drive me crazy that Bari weiss/ the free press defenders act like Bari has to explicitly state her bias in order to be biased. It would actually do her good to own her bias and lessen the criticism. You don't have to be a mind reader to see the bias in her coverage and much of the issues her coverage comes from her attempt to obfuscate that bias. Plenty of outlets are biased, but still have good coverage because they own their bias and hedge around their bias as to not be misleading their audience.
The false equivalencies in this interview are actually pretty good examples of what makes the Free Press's Pro-trump slant so obnoxious. She's framing it as though a small group of kooks who've managed to grift a few hundred k and have no institutional relationship to the actual democratic party are somehow equivalent to an actual sitting president using his official power to attempt to overturn an election and mounting a violent coup attempt when that failed and the entire official republican party being dragged into supporting the lie that trump won the election. This might have made good barpod fodder but the FP person constantly trying to draw these ridiculous analogies and tar the entire leftwing with the brush of this tiny internet conspiracy cult is ridiculous.
TFP has an article about Greta being the biggest failure of Europe and the West on their site in the year of our lord 2025.
This "centrist" grift wears thin.
I have liked this episode even more than I thought I would. We are so conspiracy brained as a country that we are in deep shit. it’s really killing us. I think people just feel so powerless.
Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland is a good read. https://www.audible.com/pd/B07576HL6H?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp
The "drop off" argument is weird. Here's the "smart elections" substack going over it:
https://smartelections.substack.com/p/so-clean
Trump outperformed most Republican US Senate candidates; Harris underperformed most Democratic US Senate candidates. So therefore stolen election? An alternative explanation immediately comes to mind: Harris was less popular than most Democratic US Senate candidates.
This becomes crystal clear when you notice that the "dropoff" for Harris is larger in the red states they list (Montana, North Dakota, Ohio) and smaller in the blue ones (Hawaii, Connecticut). The Democratic US Senate candidates in red states are going to be moderate-to-conservative Dems, far less liberal than Kamala Harris. Therefore they get a lot more votes than Harris did in these states. And then we look at the swing states (Arizona, North Carolina) and, sure enough, the size of the "dropoff" smaller than in the red states and larger than in the blue states.
"Smart elections" also tries to argue for anti-Harris fraud by noting that the dropoff was smaller for Biden in 2020 than for Harris in 2024. Well yeah, Biden was seen as a moderate centrist. So he got more votes than Harris did from people who lean right. And he was just more popular overall. I fail to see what is surprising about any of the state-level results that they're highlighting.
(I'll admit that the results in those two New York precincts are strange.)
They're not that strange when you dig a little deeper. This pattern was the same in 2020.
https://verifiedvoting.org/whats-this-rumor-about-rockland-county/
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/12/new-york-lawsuit-2024-election/
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/feb/26/social-media/why-did-kamala-harris-get-zero-votes-in-this-ny-pr/
We hopped off the interstate in Ramapo to go to a supermarket while on a long drive home, and I think I might have been one of a handful of women in the store who was not wearing a wig/headscarf and long skirt.
Thank for the links, they explain a lot. I would have liked to see a few more prior year results from the precincts in question to confirm the claim that split-ticked bloc voting is a normal thing around there, but the explanation that some tightly knit religious communities all vote together *on purpose* makes sense.
Yeah, I think that the numbers are relatively small is also indicative of a nothing burger.
That seems clear from the fact that Dem senate candidates won in some swing states Harris lost.
Katie's claim about not trusting the system because the electoral system is "fucked", conflates two entirely different things. Suggesting people are right to believe in widespread election fraud in America is psychotic, and I don't think I would have heard such a sympathetic note from Katie in 2020.
This was a mediocre episode to drink myself to sleep over.
But did you drink yourself sober?
I was sober when I woke up, so yes?
Rockland County is heavily hassidic, and hassidic vote as a bloc. They are absolutely Trump-voters, and they would wisely vote for democratic local politicians, who will give them more money and services.