PN Pod

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of America’s foremost authoritarianism scholars and author of Strongmen and the Lucid Substack. We discuss the factors that contributed to Trump’s rise and MAGA’s parallels to other authoritarian movements, the bizarre GOP primary as a reflection of Trump’s personality cult, the current state of the global struggle been authoritarianism and democracy, and much more.

This week's episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features lawyer and political commentator David Lurie. Topics include a premortem of the DeSantis campaign that David just wrote for Public Notice, the Trump indictments as well as the legal defenses and delaying tactics David expects from Trump's attorneys, why Hunter Biden is actually being treated unfairly by the DOJ, and more.

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features Justin Higgins, host of the Politics+Media 101 podcast, on his remarkable political biography and the insight it provides into today’s Trumpified GOP. Higgins is a former RNC staffer who did opposition research during the 2016 cycle, but was so turned off by the reality of President Trump that he became a Democrat and ended up working for the Democratic governor of Puerto Rico.

We talk about what working for the RNC during Trump’s rise was like, the factors that led to Higgins leaving the GOP, the demise of John Boehner’s speakership and how similar dynamics could take down Kevin McCarthy, why Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is floundering, and much more.

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features Liz Dye, who needs no introduction for readers of this newsletter. Liz has done fantastic work here in recent weeks documenting Trump’s mounting legal problems and nonsensical defenses. Now, she joins my podcast to unpack Trump’s January 6-related indictment, including the specific laws he’s accused of breaking, important scenes from Jack Smith’s charging document, the identities and roles of his six co-conspirators, and much more.

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features comedian Jay Black on his stand-up and the state of political comedy more broadly. Topics include how rising authoritarianism has made joking about politics more challenging, conservatives’ one joke and why Jay is so turned off by it, right-wingers’ difficulty to grasp what censorship is and isn’t, and much more. (“If you start screaming about your diarrhea at a Starbucks and they remove from the Starbucks, you’re not being censored.”)

We had a lot of laughs, and I think you will too!

This week's edition of the Aaron Rupar Show features Simon Rosenberg, author of the Hopium Chronicles and a longtime Democratic strategist, on the political state of play as we head toward 2024. We discuss the stakes of this election cycle and the importance of MAGA suffering a decisive defeat, Biden's strong record and why Simon isn’t especially worried about it not yet showing up in polling, how Trump's legal problems are an albatross for the whole Republican Party, and much more.

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features returning guest Juliet Jeske, author of the Decoding Fox News newsletter. We discuss Tucker Carlson’s fading star, Fox News’s new Tucker-free primetime lineup, Ray Epps, Hunter Biden, and more.

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features Tim Mak, founder and author of The Counteroffensive, discussing what it’s like to do independent human interest journalism from a warzone. We talk about the Ukrainian counteroffensive and what we know about its early progress, how Kyiv residents handle near-nightly missile strikes, the challenges involved in traveling around Ukraine to report these days, what Ukrainians are thinking and saying about US politics, and much more (including, briefly, Ukrainian McDonald’s).

This week’s episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features regular Public Notice contributor Noah Berlatsky on why he thinks it’s appropriate to describe Trumpism as a fascist movement, how families like his with trans kids are dealing with the GOP’s escalating attacks on the LGBT community, his disagreement with Cenk Uygur about what Biden’s lagging approval ratings mean for 2024, and more.

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This week's episode of the Aaron Rupar Show features Nikki McCann Ramírez — politics reporter at Rolling Stone, longtime Fox News watcher for Media Matters, and friend of this newsletter — on how she's detoxing now that she’s no longer watching Tucker Carlson every night, her big picture view on the Trump/DeSantis race, right-wingers threatening to boycott (checks notes) Chick-fil-A, her love of F1 racing, and much more.

I really enjoyed our wide-ranging conversation and I think you will too. Check out the audio at the top of this post, or watch the footage below via my YouTube page.

New episodes of the show drop each Thursday morning. Next week's will feature Noah Berlatsky, a regular contributor to this newsletter, discussing his work about rising fascism in America.

Please share the show with your friends to spread the word. And to support this work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Public Notice if you haven’t already.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a piece examining the remarkable accomplishments of Minnesota’s Democratic trifecta during the state’s just-completed legislative session. Until then, I hope you like the pod.