Nostalgia Trap

FAA failures creating realistic fears of looming airline disasters, Trump's cryptocurrency scam, quantum computing and financial apocalypse, Kanye's celebrity vagina mega corporation, Israel's endgame for Gaza, the 4Channing of the world, the Baldoni/Lively mind control machine, and much more.

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April 30, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so I'm marking the occasion by reflecting on the war's meaning all these decades later. I share my own experiences as a historian of the war, along with some clips from books and documentaries that I think capture the impossible decisions the war forced upon millions of people.

Check out the podcast series created by Willa Seidenberg and Bill Short, A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War

Listen to NAM-TV, my documentary series on Vietnam

Buy my book, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouse and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era

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The recent death of Val Kilmer got Justin and I thinking about Jim Morrison and the curious legacy of The Doors in American pop culture. In this conversation, we continue our exploration of the amorphous brand of white masculinity embodied by Morrison and other doomed rock gods of the late 20th century, as we share memories of how The Doors blew our alienated teenage minds before the massive buzzkill of adulthood forced us to reckon with the cringier elements of Morrison's persona and cultural imprint. From psychedelic drugs and beat literature to sex, cars, and jazz – The Doors broke us through a certain mode of American manhood. But what was waiting for us on the other side?

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I'm reading S.C. Gwynne's incredible book Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, and it's making me think about Israel, Gaza, and the fatal arrogance of the leadership class throughout history. A scathing review of Bill Clinton's new book brings that arrogant tendency right up to 2025, as we witness the Democratic Party's inability to conjure a coherent battle plan to confront Trump and company's unbelievably evil intentions.

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As the Trump administration tests the "Hamilton glitch" in the U.S. Constitution by sending Abrego Garcia and others to a foreign concentration camp without legal due process, I thought it might be time to contemplate what ordinary people can do to express their outrage/disapproval/humanity in the face of injustice.

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Trump's tariff carnival is doing real damage to the global economy, and Justin shares his thoughts on how a collapsing financial architecture will impact big capital, our daily lives, and the Trump project itself. Plus, we address the "Hamilton glitch" of judicial weakness, baked into the Constitution, that's creating a rapidly escalating showdown over who's really in charge.

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Trump is dismantling the global neoliberal economic order that has served as the left's boogeyman for years, which SHOULD be an opportunity for the left to offer something beyond shrugging ambivalance and lib-dunking. Why isn't that happening?

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Guitar Center dudes and their insanely rigid opinions lead to a conversation with Justin about the political psychology of FOMO, the rise of the pedophile hunter influencer class, the masculine desperation of emoji-driven war-planning group chat jerkoff sessions, the abject horror of students kidnapped off the streets for their views on Israel and Palestine, and Trump's assault on free trade scrambling the political alignments of the past several decades.

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Adam Kotsko is a writer and cultural critic whose work focuses on American pop culture, from "cringe" comedies to our national obsession with sociopathic protagonists. His latest book, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era considers how the Star Trek series has evolved (or devolved) in the political economy of streaming TV and the Marvel-ization of feature filmmaking. In this conversation we talk about how his work on TV sociopaths holds up during the new Trump administration, and the challenges of participating in fan culture within a fracturing and cynical landscape of cultural production.

Check out our previous episode with Adam, "Cringe Nation"

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Fascism comes to my local city council meeting, a proud Israel supporter haunts my gym, Elon Musk's transgender daughter drives him off a cliff, Trump wants to send people to foreign torture camps for Tesla vandalism, and the incompatible worldviews boil hotter than ever.

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