Thank you to everyone who tuned into the live video! This slightly edited version of show begins with Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, which won a resounding victory in Sunday’s national elections in Hungary, and will become Prime Minister with a more than 2/3 majority—enough to allow him to return that nation to liberal democratic governance.

I brought in my friend and New School for Social Research colleague Julia Sonnevend, who is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications and Co-Director of the Center for the American Experience, to talk to us about the significance of Magyar’s victory in the erosion of what has been a global populist movement. Born, raised and educated in Hungary, Sonnevend is a longstanding observer of Central European politics. She is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton, 2024), named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, and Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event; and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (Oxford, 2016.) Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, BBC Newshour, The Times Literary Supplement, Teen Vogue, Times Higher Education, and Bloomberg News.

You can listen to an earlier conversation about Charm here. Today’s theme is The News Tonight by Shimmer.

Two peas in a pod: President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, November 7, 2025. Photo credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons.

Learn more about this turning point for Hungary and the future of democracy in the United States:

* Luke Johnson, “Too Big to Rig: Hungary’s lessons for the U.S. midterms,” Public Sphere, April 13, 2026.

* Michelle Goldberg, “What Orban’s Defeat Means for the Rest of the World,” New York Times, April 13, 2026.

* Kellen Browning and Shane Goldmacher “MAGA Absorbs the Loss of Orban, a Kindred Spirit to Trump’s Movement,” New York Times, April 13, 2026.

* Michael Birnbaum, “Orban’s defeat offers warning signs for Trump allies,” April 13, 2026.

* Julia Sonnevend, “Viktor Orbán’s loss in Hungary shows how a strongman can be defeated,” MS NOW, April 13, 2026.

* Editorial Board, “Hungarians Oust Viktor Orbán:The Putin-Trump ally loses in a landslide as statist policies fail,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2026.

* Paul Hockenos, “Orbán Is a Loser: Hungary shows how to beat an autocrat at the ballot box,” The Nation, April 13, 2026.

* Anne Applebaum, “Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable: If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2026.

* Lydia Polgreen, “It’s Not Trump. It’s America,” The New York Times, March 26, 2026.

* Jamelle Bouie, “A Minor Strongman, Some Conservative Populists and Tucker Carlson Went to a Conference,” May 24, 2022.

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We begin with a 2020 clip, in which Paula White-Caine, President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor and current Director of the White House Faith Office, explains how the Holy Spirit works through her.

Today’s theme is Joyful Morning by Cast of Characters.

Pastor Paula White-Cain speaks at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas, June 11, 2021. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* On Monday in a Truth Social post, Donald Trump threatened Iran with annihilation. It was a shocking development and roundly rebuked—not just by Democrats and a few Republicans, but by Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Leo XIV himself. “The threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified,” Cooley said. The Pope had already said in his Palm Sunday homily that the Lord “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” On Easter, he condemned the "great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day," and on the following day, called Trump’s demented Easter post “truly unacceptable.” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby retaliated by summoning Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, and appearing to threaten the Vatican with a military reprisal.

* In the category of “even when Democrats lose, they win,” voters in GA-14 went to the polls on Tuesday to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump-backed Republican Clay Fuller won with 54% of the vote—normally not a squeaker, unless you consider the nine-point shift to Democrat Shawn Harris since he last ran in 2024, when it was a Trump +37 district. Republicans spent $1.5 million on a seat that is normally a gimme. Harris spent a similar sum, but has about $750 thousand cash on hand to try again in the fall.

* In other election news, Wisconsin Democrats have snagged another State Supreme Court seat in a cakewalk. Chris Taylor’s 17-point victory gives liberals a solid 5-2 majority on the court, but part of the story is that the GOP basically waved the white flag, spending less than $1 million on a race that in the past has sucked down as much as $100 million. Then, there is Waukesha County: 86% white, wealthy and a traditional Republican bastion outside Milwaukee that Trump won by 20 points in 2024. But in a stunning reversal, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben slipped past incumbent Waukesha mayor Scott Allen with 51.2% of the vote.

* Pam Bondi was subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 14 to testify about the Epstein case, but since she is no longer Attorney General Barbie, the Department of Justice has notified the Committee that she won’t be coming. That isn’t how Congressional subpoenas work: the House Oversight Committee, including some Republicans, say she still has to show up. Committee chair James Comer (KY-01) says he doesn’t know how to withdraw a subpoena; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says it’s Comer’s problem, not his.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

In what has become an iconic image, faith leaders (including Paula White, far right) pray over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, on March 19, 2025. Photo credit: Molly Riley/The White House/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: What Pastor Paula White’s relationship with Donald Trump teaches us about white Christian nationalism

* WE begin by noting the extent to which the illegal war on Iran has been framed by the Trump administration as a Christian Crusade. On Easter Monday, for example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth compared the downed pilot rescued in Iran by special forces on Sunday to Jesus Christ.

* The establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits a national religion. However, Project 2025 promoted the strengthening of Christianity and Biblical principles across the federal government and throughout civic life, and that is what we have seen in the Trump administration’s turn to Protestant extremism. Commonly called Christian nationalism, this religious activism is both familiar and unfamiliar.

* The first President to have a spiritual advisor was Dwight Eisenhower: that was Billy Graham, who had relationships with 13 presidents, from Harry S Truman to Barack Obama.

* However, the dominant theme is Protestantism. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960: voters were concerned about his Catholic faith. On September 12, 1960, Kennedy gave a speech to a group of Protestant pastors in Houston saying that he believed absolutely in the separation of Church and state, and also opposed religious discrimination. He was “not the Catholic candidate for president” but “the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”

* Bill Clinton had a number of pastors in Little Rock, but following the Monica Lewinsky scandal, put together a group of ministers to counsel him.

* President George W. Bush was the first president to establish an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. It was maintained by Barack Obama, who was forced to sever ties with his own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for Wright’s strong testimony about American racism and his harsh criticisms of the United States government.

* The nation first met Paula White in 2017, when she delivered the invocation at the inauguration as the first female clergy member to speak at that ceremony. In 2025, White appeared on PBS’s Frontline to discuss a relationship with Donald Trump that goes back 20 years.

* White, who was born again in 1984 and launched her first ministry in the 1990s, preaches the “prosperity gospel.” She is controversial because of that, and because of her gender. Here is a short historical account of her rise in the ministry, her three marriages, and investigations into her ministries. She is currently married to Jonathan Caine, of the rock band Journey, who played the iconic opening bars of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

* White has been criticized for her political involvement and what some call a “faith-based ponzi scheme:” she has been investigated for diverting tithed funds and profits from the sale of religious items into her own pockets, and those of family members.

* White is also known to practice glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a practice of Pentecostals and charismatic Christianssaid to be a gift of the Holy Spirit. Here is a video of Caine from January 5, 2021, in which she calls upon angels from Africa: she spoke at Trump’s January 6 “Save America” rally the following day, which preceded an attack on the Capitol that highlighted white Christian nationalist support for Trump.

* In 2016, White was one of 25 evangelical Protestant pastors, televangelists, and lay Christians assembled as an advisory board to the Trump campaign and charged with outreach to the Christian evangelical community. The Board, which continued into Trump’s first term, was largely White—four members were Black—and male. The initial Board had only two women; in 2017, when A.R. Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn resigned over the Unite the Right rally, Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece and the only member of the family who supports Trump, joined the Board.

* In 2019, White joined the Trump administration to run the Faith and Opportunity office in the administration.

* When he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump createdthe White House Faith Office and put White in charge of it.

* During Holy Week this year, White also appeared on Lara Trump’s Fox News show to vouch for Donald Trump’s faith, and his upbringing in the church, claiming that he attended Sunday and Saturday school “at least three times a week.” This has been questioned by numerous people, who have pointed out that Saturday and Sunday are two days, not three, and that Trump was raised Presbyterian, a faith that does not have Saturday school.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil’s viral pick this week is historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (Liveright: September, 2026). You can only pre-order it now, but this recent history of the Instagram-able world of mass culture Christianity is not to be missed. Through blogging, crafting, reading, and consuming, White Christian women created their own gospel of prosperity.

* Claire wants you to read public historian John Garrison Marks’s “America’s 250th Is Repeating a Familiar Mistake” (TIME, April 7, 2026), about a history of erasure and struggle over slave-owning by the founders—and George Washington, in particular. Marks has a book coming out this week on the fight over Washington’s memory, but this essay focuses on the efforts of African American historians like W.E.B. DuBois to ensure that the truth about our nation’s founding was not lost.

Short takes:

* "We are shocked—shocked, I tell you! “On Wednesday, the right descended into a feeding frenzy over unsubstantiated rumors of a Justice Department investigation into whether certain conservative commentators were being paid by foreign sources to argue for and against the war,” Will Sommer writes at The Bulwark. “It’s worth noting early that, while there is a rich and well-documented history of conservative influencers being on the dole, there’s so far no evidence of that happening in this particular instance.” In fact, the accusations have come from inside the influencer community itself. “But the enthusiasm for a Justice Department probe is notable not just because it suggests influencers believe the MAGA civil war now requires federal intervention,” Sommer continues. “It sticks out because many of these influencers calling for a DOJ probe have taken foreign money themselves.” (April 9, 2026)

* The Trump administration is trying to rid itself of federal buildings in downtown Washington D.C., presumably so they can never again be filled with federal workers. But the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, Judith Shulevitz writes at The Atlantic, is also a landmark filled with priceless art, painted directly onto the walls. “Ben Shahn and Philip Guston, who went on to join the ranks of the most-renowned American artists of the 20th century, won plum commissions on the ground floor, as did Seymour Fogel, a respected muralist,” Shulevitz reports. “According to sworn testimony, the Trump administration is already soliciting bids to tear down the Cohen and three other federal buildings, bypassing the usual reviews. Meanwhile, the regulations meant to protect historic buildings are being weakened.” Remember, he did it to Bonwits in New York. (April 9, 2026)

* Why did Melania Trump have a surprise press conference yesterday, to disassociate herself from Jeffrey Epstein—and the husband she does not appear to have lived with for ten years? “‘I have never been friends with Jeffrey Epstein,’ she said to reporters gathered at the White House,” Diana Nerozzi and Hailey Fuchs report at POLITICO. “She also denied any friendly relations with Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. She said she had ‘casual’ email correspondence with Maxwell and suggested any association was a result of their inhabiting the same New York social scene.” FLOTUS did not respond to questions from stunned reporters, and there was no new knowledge—including the fact that, after 30 years of living in the United States, her English is still terrible. (April 9, 2026)

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We begin with a clip from November 27, 2025, in which a reporter on Air Force asks President Donald J. Trump who—other than himself—would be a good Republican nominee in 2028.

Vice President JD Vance (left) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, February 28, 2025. Image credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* Last weekend was No Kings Part Three: Minneapolis and St. Paul saw a particularly robust turnout. The crowd was graced by special appearances from Jane Fonda and Joan Baez; Bruce Springsteen also sang his anthem to the city. Nationally, as 8 million citizens took part, with an enhanced number of young people who oppose Trump’s war on Iran. In Manhattan, the procession stretched for over a mile; in Washington D.C., the parade route went past Stephen Miller’s house as the crowd called for his removal. The National Republican Campaign Committee derided the events as “Hate America Rallies;” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson referred to them as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions” created by “leftist funding networks.”

* In the department of “We didn’t see this one coming,” Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon was outed by the Daily Mail on Tuesday as a visitor to a cross-dressing fetish website devoted to “bimbofication.” You can read the allegations as printed by the New York Post here; a spokesperson for Noem says that “The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers at the time;” and President Donald Trump expressed sympathy for the family. Bryon Noem is not speaking to the press, but his neighbors in Castlewood, South Dakota have responded with generosity and kindness.

* Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court has given the University of Pennsylvania 30 days to comply with the Trump administration’s demand for a list of Jewish faculty, staff and students. Penn is appealing the ruling, arguing that the university has an obligation to the privacy rights of its employees and does not maintain such lists. In fact, until the late 1960s Penn, and other universities did exactly that, and it was tied to antisemitic quotas and discriminatory housing practices on campus.

* A Colorado law banning gay conversion therapy has been struck down by the Supreme Court, with all justices but Ketanji Brown Jackson voting in the affirmative. Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist, said the law would prevent her from “consensual conversations” with people who believe that their feelings conflict with their religious values. The majority agreed that the law was not neutral because it did not ban speech that affirmed sexual or gender identity. Jackson’s dissent argued that states have the right to regulate medical treatment; she read her opinion from the bench, a signal about how strongly she felt about it. The ruling vacates existing or pending laws in 27 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Vance (left) and Rubio chat up U.S. athletes at the 2026 Olympics in Milan, Italy. Photo credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons

News focus:

* Let’s start with the annual poll of young conservatives at CPAC last month: Vice President JD Vance won, with 53% (down from 61% last year), but Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in single digits last year, rose to 35%. Other candidates—including re-runs Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Tulsi Gabbard—were in the very low single digits. Rubio won “favorite Cabinet member,” while Ken Paxton outscored John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary by 46 points. Except for Trump in 2024, the straw poll has never accurately predicted who will be president: Ron Paul won it in 2010 and 2011, Mitt Romney won it repeatedly, and Ted Cruz won it in 2016.

* Created by the American Conservative Union, CPAC is a festival of conservatism, largely attended by young activists. Founded in 1974, it is credited with launching the New Right and setting Ronald Reagan on a path to the 1976 GOP nomination.

* In 2010, when Fox News host Glenn Beck gave the keynote, CPAC also became the place where right wing media influencers merged with the GOP.

* In 2014, former Bush advisor Matt Schlapp was elected head of the ACU. He and his wife Mercedes are canny entrepreneurs: they have turned CPAC into a franchise, with national and international satellite conferences. CPAC sustains and mirrors the strength of the MAGA right within the GOP. For example, in 2017, after Trump won the election, his political strategist, Steve Bannon, was embraced after having been shunned for years.

* CPAC is also famous for the partying and networking. It also has a vexed relationship with queerness: in 2010, evangelicals protested the inclusion of gay Republican groups and lost. In 2015, Log Cabin Republicans was barred from the event, but has since returned; and in 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos was cancelled because of remarks he made about having sex with a priest while underage. That said, as at many GOP gatherings, the rumor mill insists that Grindr is super-busy when CPAC is in town.

* As importantly, Schlapp himself seems to be at least bisexual: he has repeatedly been accused of making advances to men. In 2022, a staffer for Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker accused Schlapp of sexual assault; the accuser settled in 2024. Then, in 2025, he was accused of assaulting another man in a Virginia bar.

* So, it’s a sign of how powerful Schlapp is in conservatism that he remains in command of CPAC, and how critical the organization is in mobilizing the base.

* This leads us back to Vance, who was chosen as Trump’s running mate in part because he was young and had working class origins; in 2024, right wing media also tried to sell him as sexy and handsome. According to Pew Research, however, Vance’s approval rating has gone south. Only 38% of voters view him positively, while 52% view him negatively. Marco Rubio, at 34/44 is polling below RFK Jr. (44/48) in favorability and above him in unfavorability.

* That said, if we just look at Republican voters, Vance has a 75% favorability, RFK Jr. 74%, and Rubio 64%. Rubio also has the highest numbers in the cabinet, except for Pete Hegseth, when it comes to being unknown to voters in either party. The window for announcing a presidential campaign is about two years, which means we should look at these numbers again after the midterms.

* As Vice President, Vance is positioned well in a bad field: while Trump has not endorsed a successor, he seems to be pushing a Vance-Rubio ticket.

* Vance has been a shapeshifter, but may be trapped this time. He went from being a Trump critic to a Trump supporter to become Vice President. If Trump is repudiated in the midterms, will he be forced to decide whether to distance from Trump (which will be difficult, as he has no real record of his own) or embrace a MAGA agenda (which only 27% of voters endorse) that has failed to deliver? That could open the door for Rubio—or someone else.

* And, oh yes! Goodbye, Pam Bondi! Here’s the profile of Bondi that Neil references.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read Faith Wilson, “The Quiet Rise of Employee Surveillance” (March 31, 2026) because there is no federal law that regulates or controls the collection of employee data.

* Claire wants you to take a deep dive into a new report by Sophie Culpepper at Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, “How a Minnesota mom and minister `blew past’ her screen time limits when ICE came to her city” (March 26, 2026). Culpepper asks: if only 16% of Americans pay for news, how are they getting it?

Short takes:

* Local and state officials are fighting the expansion of ICE incarceration facilities through warehouse conversion by denying these facilities access to utilities—water, power, and sewage—they need to make a husk of a building into a prison. “CE has claimed it conducted “thorough due diligence” to ensure that surrounding communities were equipped to provide the warehouses with necessary utilities and infrastructure,” Judd Legum writes at Popular Information. “In at least three states, however, officials say that the new ICE facilities will overwhelm local water and sewage infrastructure or damage the local environment.” Pennsylvania, Georgia and Utah have all taken this tack, Utah as recently as this month. “Salt Lake City is facing a water crisis. The region received very little snow over the winter and faced record-breaking high temperatures in March, causing the city to issue a stage 2 drought advisory the week before voting to limit water use by new developments.” (April 2, 2026)

* The libertarian conservative tech class claims to be all about helping young (white) men: at the same time, numerous cynical projects are designed to exploit them. “Sports bettors are overwhelmingly male. Compulsive sports betters are almost universally male,” Jill Filipovich reminds us on her Substack, relaunched as Throughline. The shift to phone-based gambling has vitiated live communities organized around fandom and betting, making young men more isolated and more lonely while also picking their pockets. “I see virtually no ads for sports betting platforms on my social media pages. My husband, who like me is not a gambler nor much of a sports-watcher, gets them with regularity. And when you watch ads for sports betting, they’re strongly male-coded. They know the audience they’re trying to bring in, and it’s young men — and particularly less-educated young men, who may not be as savvy or sophisticated, and who may be looking for an easy fix to their financial problems.” (April 2, 2026)

* Are there more flimflams under the Trump administration, or is this just the same tune from a different band? Barbie enthusiasts from around the world arrived in Fort Lauderdale, FL for the “ultimate Barbie fan event,” only to find a sad little display of Barbie-themed junk swimming around in the Broward County Convention Center. “Tickets started at $149 for adult admission and went up to $449,” Madison Malone Kircher writes at The New York Times. “Tara Brooks, a data analyst who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., spent about $249 on a ‘pink pass,’ a higher-tier ticket that included a ‘special swag bag.’” It wasn’t so special. “She received a bottle of Barbie-branded hand sanitizer” that Brooks said is available at The Dollar Store. (March 30, 2026)

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s episode begins with a February 6, 2026 press gaggle on Air Force One, in which Donald Trump discusses the lawsuit he filed against the Internal Revenue Service. It is unclear what he means when he says that the United States government gives $40 billion a year to charity: we can’t document that.

Our theme for this episode is LFG by Divisioner--you can find their work, and all the talented artists we feature on these episodes, on Soundstripe.

TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk delivers remarks during the memorial service for her husband Charlie in Glendale, Arizona on September 21, 2025. Recently, Kirk threatened to sue three different people for falsely implicating her in her husband, Charlie Kirk’s, murder. Photo credit: Daniel Torok/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* On Monday, a new front opened in the redistricting and election security wars: Riverside, CA County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, seized more than 650,000 votes cast in California’s Prop 50 special election. Bianco claims that the final vote tally did not match the number of ballots cast. Both Republican and Democratic officials say this charge is baseless; however, it matches the Trump administration’s seizure of 2020 presidential election ballots last February in Fulton County, Georgia.

* Florida is the gift that keeps on giving—to Democrats. This week, first-time candidate, Democrat Emily Gregory prevailed in a special election in HD-87. That’s Palm Beach County, and Gregory, a small business owner and military spouse won by 800 votes in a district that the previous Republican won by 19 points. She will now represent President Donald Trump in the Florida legislature. In West Tampa’s SD 14, another first-time candidate—union organizer, electrician and navy vet Brian Nathan—upset Republican State Representative Josie Tomkow by 408 votes; the previous Republican in that seat won by ten points. Meanwhile, former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn is running for Congress again—this time in Cape Coral’s ultra-MAGA Florida-19, formerly Byron Donald’s seat. According to the Cook Political Report, this is an R+14 district.

* Last May, South Carolina Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews announced she would run against four-term incumbent Lindsay Graham, who beat his last challenger by 10 points. The last Democrat to represent South Carolina was Fritz Hollings, who was defeated by Jim DeMint in 2004. But Andrews just released a new ad on Instagram that points to how the Democrats are positioning candidates running against Donald Trump’s allies. We feature a controversial ad Andrews dropped on Instagram.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Image credit: AndriiiKoval/Shutterstock

News focus: MAGA’s lawsuits

* Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has had it up to her waterproof mascara with accusations that she arranged the murder of her late husband Charlie Kirk. Her attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist order to Collin Scott Campbell, the Maryland-based figure behind Project Constitution, which has also alleged that Kirk procured underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, and trafficked orphans from Romania. Influencers Candace Owens and Zach de Gregorio have received similar letters: all say that views they have expressed are their opinions, and fall under their right to free speech. The MAGA-sphere seems to be standing with Kirk, and directing most of its opprobrium to Candace Owens.

* Lawsuits are a feature, not a bug, of MAGA Republicanism. There are so many lawsuits against, or instigated by, the Trump administration that the Lawfare blog created a litigation tracker. Universities, media outlets, and law firms have been in court almost non-stop, and it seems like when these institutions fight, they win.

* Donald Trump has always employed lawsuits as a strategy: USA Today has counted 4,095 over three decades.

* Since he was re-elected president, Trump has filed a number of personal lawsuits. He sued the Des Moines Register and its legendary pollster Ann Seltzer (ongoing) for fraud. He is seeking $15 billion from the New York Times and four of its journalists for reporting fraudulent business practices. He is suing the BBC for $10 billion, and the Wall Street Journal for another $10 billion. ABC/Disney settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million; as did Paramount/CBS, which some Democrats believe was basically a payoff for FCC approval of the Skydance merger. In January, Trump and his sons filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in compensation for his tax returns being leaked to the New York Times.

* Let’s compare these lawsuits, which seem designed to extract payoffs and concessions from major corporations, to Prince Harry’s three lawsuits against British tabloids. In 2024, he was awarded about $300,000 in a phone-hacking suit against The Mirror Group. In early 2025, the Prince settled a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s English tabs in exchange for a “full apology” but no money; and he is currently suing The Daily Mail for “media intrusion.”

* This strategy goes beyond Trump: Peter Thiel destroyed Gawker, a gossip website, in 2014 by financing a successful lawsuit against it.

* In the ultimate tabloid event, Melania Trump threatened to sue journalist Michael Wolff, because he has tied her to Jeffrey Epstein, for $1 billion. In retaliation, he hit her with a SLAPP suit which, if it goes to court, would cause both Donald and Melania Trump to be deposed about their relationship with Epstein. Wolff has been chronicling the progress of this lawsuit on his Substack and podcast, and in the Daily Beast.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read and subscribe to LA Material, Los Angeles’s new neighborhood-by-neighborhood local paper. You don’t have to live in the City of Angels to find it interesting: it’s got stories that matter to any community that cares about art, culture and politics, as well as fascinating general interest stories like what actor Mickey Rourke left behind when he was evicted from his home. And I have to tell you: it looks a lot like it was built on a Substack platform, which is really exciting.

* Claire wants you to watch Louis Theroux’s documentary, “Inside the Manosphere” (Dir. Adrian Choa: Netflix, 2026), which digs into the gamified world of right-wing male influencers, a number of whom are one or two degrees of separation from Donald Trump. As a film, as Theroux is filming them, their people film him filming them and turn the event into content. While the misogyny and reactionary politics are real, it’s all in service of making money by selling the dream of power, independence, and style to boys and men who are insecure and directionless. You can read more about the movie here.

Short takes:

* A new investigative report from Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson at The New York Times explores how much the Trump family and its various imitators have profited from all that MAGA merch: the answer is over $300 million a year. “The vast economy of tchotchkes and trinkets has become a visceral proxy for the energy behind his political movement, with the products acting as billboards for membership in the club,” Hsu and Thompson write. “No other sitting president has tried to make money off of the office the way Mr. Trump has, according to several ethics watchdogs. For members of Congress and many federal employees, using public office for private gain is explicitly forbidden by their codes of conduct. There are no comparable rules for the president.” (March 27, 2026)

* “America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective,” Thomas Chatterton Williams writes at The Atlantic. “From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.” Why do these powerful men “whose work is most profoundly shaping our collective reality” lack the desire or ability for introspection? Relying on a crude and reductive reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, they view conscience itself as“a sickness that emerges when repressive social norms cause us to turn our aggressive instincts inward—leading to crippling guilt and obsessive self-reproach—rather than directing them outward,” Williams explains. “In order to justify exerting their will and creating their own values, some readers reduce Nietzsche to a mantra: Act and then forget.” (March 27, 2026)

* “In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio,” Rafael Carranza and Arizona Luminaria write at ProPublica. But their new investigative report shows that Maricopa County, Arizona, the poster child for anti-Latino racial profiling in the western United States, has not changed all that much. “When all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.” (March 26, 2026)

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Last week, The New York Times published an investigation into legendary labor organizer Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) and his decades of alleged criminal conduct. Women, including Dolores Huerta, a key ally, have revealed what was rumored, and well-known in the movement’s inner circle: that he was a serial sexual abuser. Chavez, along with Huerta and other allies, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. The NFWA later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez has had celebrations and spaces named for him, and President William Jefferson Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom on 1994.

Chavez’s accomplishments were historic, and like many organizers of the period, he was a charismatic leader. However, that gave him an extraordinary amount of power in the movement, which we now know he used to selfish and cruel ends. While Chavez’s mercurial temperament and marital infidelities were well-known, his sexual abuse of women and young girls was not, in part because those in the movement who knew helped to conceal it by not calling him to account. A second painful revelation is that one of his victims was Dolores Huerta. In support of the other victims, she revealed that Chavez, a friend and comrade, raped her twice.

I asked the University of Pittsburgh’s Eladio Bobadilla, to visit with Political Junkie on a Substack Live. A prize-winning historian, Bobadilla has a terrific new book coming out, Dangerous Migration: Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights (University of Illinois, 2025.)

Eladio and I applaud all of these women for making their stories available to us, and wanted to put it in the context of Chavez and Huerta’s achievements.

Cesar Chavez, guarded by two Chicano Brown Berets, speaks at Los Angeles peace rally, May 3, 1971. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons

Catch me if you can:

Image credit: Juice Flair/Shutterstock

If you are in the vicinity of Boulder, Colorado on 4:00 tomorrow (Wednesday, March 25), stroll on over to Macky Auditorium at the Center for Humanities and Arts. I will be doing a star turn as the Cox Family Process Speaker—and reflecting on the inspiration for this newsletter, my 2020 book Political Junkies. If you come, bring your copy—I’ll sign it.

What I’m watching:

Vladímír, a limited series on Netflix, based on a 2020 fictional sendup of academic life of the same name written by Julia May Jonas (which my friend Laura Kipnis says is better.) It’s a dark comedy starring Rachel Weisz and John Slattery as an aging power couple in the English Department of a liberal arts college that could be Bard. Or not.

It’s based on the novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas This pair has an “arrangement”—one that has, in the further past, landed Slattery (who also played a serial sexual harasser in Mad Men) in the beds of students. Empowered and inspired by #MeToo, those students have filed a mass grievance against him.

The show’s “so what?” attitude towards sex and power imbalances catapults us back in time (or sadly, maybe not), and is amplified by the arrival of a flirty, married tenure-track assistant professor. Vladímír (played by Leo Woodall, who you last saw in the movie Nuremberg) becomes the stuff of Weisz’s fantasies, propelling her towards an affair with a subordinate even as she navigates fallout from the sexual harassment suit. English actor Ellen Robertson (Mickey 17, Black Mirror) has a superb supporting role as an adult queer daughter trying to understand what all this chaos has to do with her own relationship issues.

Read a review here.

Short takes:

* Expect Donald Trump’s 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence to portray a bunch Enlightenment atheists as devout Christian nationalists, Ja’han Jones warns at MS NOW. One member of the planning committee is “Eric Metaxas, the far-right media figure and promoter of election conspiracy theories who has touted his belief that Christians should ‘infiltrate’ government,” Jones writes. Celebratory events are expected to include “universal” favorites like a cage match on the White House Lawn, a drag race in the Streets of Washington D.C., and a religious revival on the National Mall. “One of the people apparently helping plan the programming is a self-described Christian nationalist named Sean Feucht, who has portrayed himself as an informal adviser of sorts to Trump officials. He has been a fixture alongside Scott Turner, secretary of Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.” Last year, Feucht was enlisted, and presumably paid, by the Trump administration to provide a “divine perspective” on California wildfire recovery. (March 20, 2026)

* Does public pressure on federal immigration detention work? HSA says no, appearances say yes. “This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows,” ProPublica’s Mica Rosenberg and McKenzie Funk write about the Texas facility that became notorious for its poor treatment of children. “One 13-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edison was released from Dilley with his mom this week. During his 92-day detention, Edison had cried in video calls to his father back in Chicago, saying he felt like he was being treated like a criminal,” Rosenberg and Funk write. “Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning,” (ICE Barbie lost her job the previous Friday) “a guard came to their bunk room and told him and his mom to start packing their belongings. By that night, they were on a plane to Chicago to be reunited with Edison’s dad.” (March 20, 2026)

* Katha Pollitt read Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir of having been drugged and serially shopped out for rape by her husband, and she wants to know why we care less about sexual assault when it is perpetrated by ordinary people. “In every social class, men tend to have power over the women in that social class and the ones below,” Pollitt writes in The Nation. “It’s not universal—some men are more interested in sexual coercion than others, some women are more vulnerable than others. But men who commit sex crimes mostly get away with it, and society mostly shames the woman.” And had Pelicot not had the courage to not just prosecute, but put her face on the crime, Pollitt points out, the 51 men who subscribed to a web site that facilitates spousal rape, would be free today to continue their crimes. (March 18, 2026)

Thank you Alison Moore, Mary Cuellar, Order is never Peace, Alison Holt-Kalish, and many others for tuning into the live video with Eladio Bobadilla! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We begin with a deposition from Nathan Cavanaugh, a twenty-something DOGE staffer on a team tasked with reviewing NEH grants awarded by the Biden administration in 2024 and to be paid in 2025. Cavanaugh and others cancelled grants based on whether, in their judgement, they violated Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any initiative that forwarded diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Today’s theme is Billionaires by LNDÖ.

DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh. Image credit: screenshot by author

In the News:

* After a machine recount and a manual recount, Boca Raton, Florida has its first Democratic mayor in 30 years. Andy Thomson defeated 70-year-old Republican incumbent Mike Liebelson by only five votes. Liebelson may challenge the results based on his skepticism about what he calls a “last minute dump” of 109 mail-in ballots. A third Republican in the race, Fran Nachlas, split the GOP vote, in a town only 27 miles south of Mar-A-Lago that went for Kamala Harris by less than a point in 2024.

* Illinois Democrats are getting their business done, sending Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton on to the general election as the party’s nominee to replace Richard Durbin. Her election—which is likely would be historic, both for Illinois and the Senate: she would join Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) as the first cohort of three Black women Senators to serve concurrently.

* Another big winner in Illinois? Governor J.B Pritzker, who was not on the ballot but financed and promoted Stratton. AIPAC was engaged in open and dark money spending in the state, and emerged with mixed results, going three for three. It underlines a recent trend for the pro-Israel lobbying group: while they still do quite well supporting party moderates, in some districts their support can be toxic.

* MAGA drama! Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, accusing the administration’s of capitulating to Israel’s desire for war in Iran. Some Capitol Hill watchers describe Kent as groyper adjacent; a far-right conspiracy theorist, he was always a controversial pick for the job. Kent has amplified antisemitic MAGA influencers who blame the war on Israel, some linking Trump’s decision to Prime Minister Netenyahu’s February visit. But conspiracy theories have room to fester: there are no clear goals or exit plan for the conflict, and why the operation was launched remains a mystery.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Are you always thinking that you would love to read a book we have talked about? Then:

Image credit: DCStockPhotography/Shutterstock

News focus:

* Here is a running list of attacks that the Trump administration has made on funding for the humanities, including the cancellation of NEH grants made by the Biden administration.

* Several initiatives converged in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to remake the arts and humanities to support a certain kind of patriotic narrative. As one of his first acts as President, Trump signed an Executive order called the “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” That same day, Trump created DOGE, also by Executive Order.

* On March 27, Trump issued an EO called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which reflects a longstanding conservative commitment to events, political actors, and historical myths that valorize conquest, whiteness, and masculinity.

* In 22 days, existing grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute for Museum and Library services were canceled by DOGE operatives assigned to those agencies. Trump wanted the Republican Congress to eliminate these agencies; in January, 2026, Congress instead reaffirmed this funding.

* Trump said he would redirect the funding to a “National Garden of American Heroes,” which would open in Washington D.C. as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Little progress has been made: there appears to be no definite site, while Politico warned early in that there were not enough artists in the country to complete such a mammoth project in a year.

* On May 1, 2025, the American Historical Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Modern Language Association sued the Trump administration to restore the grants. You can read an up-to-date summary of the case and the damage done here; here is a list of specific grants cancelled.

* Posted depositions of DOGE staffers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox have become the face of MAGA contempt. A judge has ordered these videos taken down, but so far, no good. Neither appeared to know what they were doing: they could not define what DEI was, feed grants into ChatGPT to determine whether they were DEI projects. The DOGEys also admit that their work failed to balance the budget.

* On March 6, 2026, the AHA, MLA, and ACLS filed a motion for summary judgement that would restore humanities funding.

* How do we account for Cavanaugh and Fox’s contempt and hostility? Right-wing attacks on these fields that characterize them as inherently soft and pointless. Claire and Neil discuss the lack of men in college-level humanities courses, particularly those in STEM.

* Cavanaugh and Fox seemed to have little knowledge of the damage they had participated in, conflating all the projects canceled with wasteful and fraudulent government spending. You can see Nate Cavanaugh’s deposition in a second suit against the NEH filed by the Authors’ Guild here.

* Online commentary about these depositions has foregrounded the brand of masculinity Cavanaugh and Fox project: arrogant, diffident, and reckless. It points to the number of low-level Trump administration staffers steeped in the manosphere, as well as Elon Musk’s cult of masculinity.

* Both men admitted that the terms they fed into ChatGPT were “gay,” “BIPOC,” “indigenous,” “Jewish”—because such work was inherently promoting minority viewpoints. But there are also a crosscutting themes put this incident in a larger culture wars context: the longstanding hostility of tech bros to diversity initiatives in their own industry, and reactionary intellectuals (for example, Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, recently interviewed by journalist Ross Douthat) who see work about national diversity as inherently discriminatory towards white people, men, and Christians.

* Attempts to rebrand the Kennedy Center have also failed. After programming was gutted by artist cancellations, Director Ric Grenell (a diplomat—but gay!) has been fired, and it will be closed for two years.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil is a great fan of dogs, and wants you to read John Seabrook’s “How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour,” (The New Yorker, March 16, 2026) Poodle crossbreeds are all the rage—and as it turns out, these cuddly floofs have a social history.

* Claire’s political imagination was captured by Thomas Friedman’s “How Minnesota Beat Trump,” (New York Times, March 15, 2026) a hopeful set of observations about how the idea of neighborliness knitted a diverse community together to protect vulnerable people against an out-of-control federal policing campaign.

Short takes:

* Today’s big political news: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed Graham Platner, who is running neck-and-neck with Governor Janet Mills for the right to knock off incumbent Maine Senator Susan Collins. “The intervention by Ms. Warren is her latest split with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, whose polling numbers have sunk as the Democratic base turns on him for his handling of government shutdown negotiations,” Tim Balk and Reid J. Epstein write at The New York Times, noting that Warren is a formidable fundraiser who is expanding her endorsement across the country. “Ms. Mills’s campaign responded to Ms. Warren’s endorsement by noting that the governor was backed by several other prominent Democratic governors, including Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Maura Healey of Massachusetts.” (March 19, 2026)

* Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership is backing Brandon Herrera, who is the proud owner of a copy of Mein Kampf and denies that Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved people, in TX-23. “Even without House leaders’ backing, Herrera emerged two weeks ago as the party’s de facto nominee after Rep. Tony Gonzales exited a Republican primary runoff with him in response to allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide,” Kadia Goba

and Teo Armus report at The Washington Post. “Several of Herrera’s videos show him reenacting historical assassinations, including testing the type of guns that killed John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln or were used in various historical wars.” Herrera has also re-enacted the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 19, 2026)

* George Washington, meet the manosphere—AI George, that is, a bot created by conservative media tycoon Glenn Beck. “The founding era’s premier beefcake is uniquely adaptable to an alpha aesthetic. He was famous for his bearing—his height, musculature, and command,” presidential historian Alexis Coe explains at Vanity Fair, although not his teeth, which Beck’s programmers have repaired. They have also repaired Washington’s ideology to match the MAGA present. “AI Washington can be made to bless positions that the real Washington spent years warning against. His early presidency was dominated by the question of how a fragile republic survived infancy, and he made a call: profit, not war,” Coe writes. Yet, in Beck’s hands, Washington is “a non-interventionist turned Iran hawk, a deist recast as an evangelical, a man who dreaded partisanship now a guest on a culture warrior’s podcast.” (March 18, 2026)

Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

You can get all audio content by subscribing for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We begin with a clip from the 2016 campaign trail in which presidential candidate Donald Trump discusses a Black supporter and invites rally-goers to “look at my African American.” At this point in MAGA history, influencer Candace Owens still identified as a liberal. By late 2017, she had transitioned to a conservative identity and become a leading voice in the MAGA movement.

And you will want to listen from the beginning for a special announcement from Neil!

Candace Owens speaking with the 2023 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

In the News:

* This week, prices on the global crude oil market cracked $120 a barrel, an almost 90% increase since Donald Trump started a war on Iran. This is a shock to the global economy. At United States, gasoline pumps, prices have risen an average of .27 a gallon with states like California, Florida and Pennsylvania seeing much higher prices. Trump’s reassurances that U.S. oil independence will shield American consumers from higher prices are false. Because it is traded on a global market, the price of oil is the same regardless of where it is pumped. Americans should expect to see rising prices, from utility bills to food. And with 61% disapproval on Trump’s handling of the economy, Republicans may see their path to retaining a majority in the 2026 midterms extinguished.

* Speaking of the economy: in Maine and Ohio, where Democrats have targeted two Republican incumbents, recent polling suggests MAGA economic policies hurt voters. In Maine, Democratic Governor Janet Mills is polling even with Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Democrat Graham Platner also polls only two points behind Collins—and it is Platner who seems to have momentum. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown polls two points ahead of Jon Husted—Husted, although uncharged, is also enmeshed in a major corruption case.

* As Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gear up for their Republican primary runoff, a Democratic poll with a Trump +14 sample shows James Talarico in a statistical dead heat with either opponent. Are conditions ripe for Democrats to snatch a Texas Senate seat too?

* It looks like frenemies Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, fixtures in the Democratic House leadership for decades, will fight one last battle. Pelosi has endorsed Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who testified about the January 6 coup against a former Hoyer aide, state delegate Adrian Boafo, in the primary for MD-05 Hoyer will vacate in 2027. Dunn lost a previous congressional bid in 2024, also endorsed by Pelosi; there are currently 22 other candidates vying for the Democratic line on November’s ballot.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Turning Point USA founder and Director of Communications Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, then Director of Urban Engagement for the organization, during a visit to Texas State University in San Marcos On October 24, 2018. Photo credit: Carrington Tatum/Shutterstock

News focus: Who is Candace Owens, and why is she saying these terrible things about Erika Kirk?

* Candace Owens, who is only 37 years old, began life as a Connecticut liberal in Stamford, CT. She became locally famous for filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that, as a senior in high school, she was not protected from racist bullying. The Stamford School Board settled the lawsuit for $37,500.

* After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, Owens worked in journalism, finance, and marketing. She founded SocialAutopsy.com, a web site where users could report bullies, in 2016. However, Social Autopsy was identified by internet activists as an asset for doxxing and trolling. Owens then waged an aggressive campaign against two of these critics, feminist gamers targeted in GamerGate. Owens claimed that Zoe Quinn, a GamerGate victim, targeted her with doxxing and racist hate mail and a Quinn ally undermined Social Autopsy’s fundraising efforts. This moment marks Owens’s conversion to conservatism and conspiracism.

* In 2017, Owens launched a site called “Red Pill Black,” marketed as a rebuttal to the Democratic party’s record on race. A frequent guest on Fox News, Owens described liberal policies as a long-term strategy to make Black Americans dependent, a perspective she elaborated on in a 2020 book, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.

* Also in 2017, after Turning Point USA was exposed as a cauldron of racism. She became a Trump supporter, Owens went to work for Charlie Kirk. Trump noticed her in 2018 after she and Kanye West appeared on TMZ to defend the right of Nazis to hold public demonstrations and assert that remaining in slavery was a choice that African Americans made.

* But Owens was also becoming increasingly antisemitic: she was forced to resign from TPUSA in 2019 after praising Adolf Hitler and defending Kanye West’s antisemitic statements.

* Nevertheless, Owens joined The Daily Wire in 2021 as editors Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boering defined the issues of the current right-wing culture war politics, most prominently anti-vaccine, anti-trans, and anti-DEI campaigns. But much of this is also nested in Owens’s allegations of longstanding CIA and state-sponsored conspiracies to destroy America. Owens’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, which intensified after October 7, 2023, caused Shapiro to break with her: her podcast is now on YouTube.

* Owens’s current campaign against TPUSA and its CEO, Erika Kirk, stems from new conspiracy theories that position Erika Kirk as an ambitious gold-digger who married Charlie to take control of the multi-million dollar nonprofit. Owens maintains that Kirk’s killer was in league with larger forces--the FBI, the Mossad, antifa, Egypt, France, Donald Trump or Kirk enemies within TPUSA itself—or that Charlie Kirk is still alive.

* In 2025, Owens broke with Trump over his support for Israel. Currently, she is also currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over her claims that Brigitte Macron is a trans woman.

* Owens sat down for a four hour meeting with Erika Kirk in December 2025 to iron out their differences. It didn’t work. Recently, Owens dropped a 6-episode YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie” in which she portrays Erika Kirk and her whole family as fraudulent.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil can’t stop thinking about Heath W. Carter, “Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism,” (The Atlantic, March 9, 2026), and book Carter reviews, Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books, 2026). Weaving religious values into the nation’s policies and priorities is too often configured as backward looking and repressive, but the quest for a Christian America has, and still can be, one that attends to humanity and love.

* Claire wants you to read Sarah Weinman, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime (Ecco, 2025), about Greta Rideout’s 1978 accusation that her husband had sexually assaulted her. This was a crime that could not even be charged in most states at the time, much less believed by many police and jurists—but because of Rideout’s courage, and the support of a feminist legal establishment, marital rape is now a crime in all fifty states.

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month and never miss a pod drop. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

You can get all audio content by subscribing for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

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We begin this episode with a clip from a four-hour segment of testimony by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She appeared before the House Oversight Committee on February 26, 2026; former President Bill Clinton testified the following day.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Dec. 3, 2009. Image credit: Chad J. McNeeley/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* The big news this week is the Trump administration, minus Congressional authorization or an explanation, and in partnership with Israel, starting a war with Iran. You can see a timeline of the conflict here. Although the administration continues to insist that this will be a short war, there are no war goals or a timeline. Trump hints at regime change (hence the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in an Israeli air attack within the first 48 hours), as well as the Islamic Republic’s long history of sponsoring terrorism in the region. Trump also announced yesterday that he plans to be personally involved in choosing Khamenei’s replacement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and others are scrambling to get out of the region: there was no evacuation plan.

* In related news, cracks in the MAGA coalition widen. On the extremely far right, influencer Laura Loomer has leapt to Trump’s defense, Groyper Nick Fuentes announced he will vote for Democrats in 2026 because Trump has broken all his promises, and antisemite Candace Owens blames the war on Israel. Hawks in the GOP have surfaced for a victory lap, while former Trump champions like Ann Coulter, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, who were high on the deportation supply, have crashed to earth. Trump’s response? MAGA is what he says it is.

* War or no war, the midterms approach: on election day we saw incumbents in both parties struggling or knocked off. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper had a big win in North Carolina; incumbents on both sides of that state legislature’s aisle were pummeled. In Texas’s Senate contest, DemocraticState Representative James Talarico defeated Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, while incumbent John Cornyn faces a runoff with Attorney General Ken Paxton. Can Talarico win?

* On Thursday, Trump fired ICE Barbie: could it be because Kristi Noem passed the buck to Trump for that $220 million ad campaign—about herself? She has been given a soft landing, a newly created job securing the Western Hemisphere, where she will be Marco Rubio’s problem.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

In an earlier moment of grace under fire, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary Clinton, now also a defeated presidential candidate, attend Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Photo credit: Cristian L. Ricardo/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Hill and Bill—Still?

* After months of negotiating that included threats to jail them, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee last week.

* The Clintons were treated by, and responded to, the committee, quite differently. Hillary Clinton seemed annoyed and exasperated as she repeatedly said, in response to a battery of repetitive and stupid questions, that she knew nothing about Jeffrey Epstein, and had never visited any of his homes. Republicans also quizzed Clinton about Pizzagate and UFOs.

* Former President Bill Clinton was charming, polite and voluble; he said he saw nothing, and did nothing, wrong when in Epstein’s company. As a point of interest, even the Daily Caller reported Ghislaine Maxwell’s claim, under oath, that Clinton never received “a massage.”

* But why is the GOP still obsessed with the Clintons? Conspiracy theories about them first emerged during the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bill—then governor of Arkansas—seemingly came out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination, then ejected a sitting Republican president. That campaign also featured the fracturing of the GOP by a serious populist candidate, Pat Buchanan, as well as rumors of serial infidelities.

* In 1993, when White House counsel Vince Foster committed suicide, right-wing outlets promoted the story as a murder, paid for by the Clintons. Later, Bill Clinton was investigated and nearly impeached for real estate dealings and an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; subsequently, former campaign worker Juanita Broadrick accused him of raping her.

* Many of these investigations were generated by right-wing actors who Hillary Clinton characterized in 1998 as a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” They were, in fact, targeted by operatives who promoted outlandish tales about them.

* Conspiracies were also spread by Fox News, new media actors like Matt Drudge, as well as operatives and ordinary people using free social media platforms.

* By 2008, Ron Paul’s libertarian bid for the presidency highlighted the extent to which conspiracy theories powered the right.

* These falsehoods gathered new life during the 2016 campaign, when MAGA influencers promoted rumors that she was hiding a terrible illness and a story, spread by Fox News’s Sean Hannity, that DNC staffer Seth Richie had been murdered by his employers (Fox later retracted this story to settle a lawsuit.) As election day approached, and Wikileaks dumped a tranche of Clinton’s emails into the public domain, Clinton conspiracists noted that many of them mentioned “pizza.” This morphed into accusations that the Democratic party was running a pedophilia ring out of Washington’s Ping Pong Cosmic Pizza.

* Only last May, Donald Trump—for no apparent reason—dredged up an old video from 1994 called The Clinton Chronicles that falsely alleges the Clintons had numerous political enemies murdered.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants to endorse a walk on a college campus to enjoy the beauty of these places, but also to take in the infectious joy of diverse young people engaged in a common enterprise at an exciting and life-changing moment.

* Claire wants you to read Ellen Cushing, “The McDonald’s CEO’s Big Burger-Eating Mistake,” The Atlantic (March 5, 2026), in which fast-food CEO Chris Kempczinski makes an unconvincing stab at eating his own product—and gives us a window into what the world of food influencers expects.

Short takes:

* Is Donald Trump about to lose the unreality shield that protects him from the consequences of wreaking havoc on a global economy? “It is unsettling how often Trump affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who in any case has little investment in the outcome,” Lydia Polgreen writes at The New York Times. “But that curious passivity reveals a darker truth. Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.” Not for much longer. (March 6, 2026)

* At The Atlantic, Phillips Payson O’Brien argues that Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attitude that war is about relentless aggression may be degrading the United States’ military capacity by neglecting technology and strategy. “On multiple occasions after President Trump launched a massive air campaign against Iran this past weekend, retaliatory attacks by simply constructed Iranian drones have penetrated American defenses with serious results,” O’Brien writes. “In Bahrain, a lone Iranian drone penetrated the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which oversees 2.5 million square miles of the world’s oceans. The incoming weapon destroyed an AN/TPS-59 radar unit intended to provide 360-degree air surveillance for U.S. forces. In a moment, Iranian equipment that cost perhaps $30,000 devastated a piece of U.S. military hardware estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.” (March 5, 2026)

* It’s spring break in Florida—which is having a measles outbreak! “Florida measles (rubeola) cases increased five-fold from January to February, making Florida third-highest in the nation for measles this year, behind South Carolina and Utah, according to state and federal health data,” Laura Cassells writes at The Florida Trident. “In this high-stakes setting, state lawmakers voted Tuesday to send the Florida Senate a bill that guts school-age vaccination requirements, including the MMR shots that prevent measles, by granting a “conscience” exemption for any reason. The bill does not suggest that vaccines are unsafe nor recommend against their use, but is part of a conservative, anti-regulation movement in Florida.” (March 5, 2026)

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Thank you Theresa Smalec, John Stoehr, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ryan James Girdusky!

At the end of last week, I had a chance to do a Substack live with Ryan Girdusky, a conservative political junkie who has many balls in the air at any given time. Ryan’s book with Harlan Hill, They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution (Bombardier Books, 2020) was one of the first to explain to a mass audience how and why national populist movements, from MAGA to Orbán, swept North America and Europe. His Substack, the National Populist Newsletter, tracks this phenomenon from a conservative perspective, including important data and sources, whether you are a reader on the left or the right. If you are a podcast fan, try It’s A Numbers Game, where Ryan breaks down politics according to how he understands the data.

From left to right: Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R, GA-14), Tucker Carlson, President Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump on July 31, 2022, at the LIV golf Tournament, Trump National Golf Club, Bedminster,NJ. Photo credit: L.E.MORMILE/Shutterstock

Together, we talked about Jason Zengerle’s new book, Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind (Crooked Media Reads,2026). A biographical study of Carlson, who rose to national fame as a Fox News pundit in parallel to Donald Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate, it’s an excellent survey of the interconnections between radio, television, internet publishing as cable TV pushed Americans to extremes—and conservative journalism profited from their relationships to Donald Trump.

Short takes:

* You know by now that Ayatollah Khamenei was killed by an Israeli missile on the first day of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. He was a pivotal figure in the calcification of Iran’s brutal totalitarianism, policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour writes at the New York Times. For almost 40 years, “this seemingly unqualified cleric who rose to the top almost by chance would become one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, confounding every American president since George H.W. Bush,” Sadjadpour writes. “He would at one point become the most powerful man in the Middle East, dominating five failing lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. This ambition and hubris also eventually led to his downfall. He came to govern with the hypervigilance and brutality of a man driven by the idea that much of his own society and the world’s greatest superpower sought to unseat him — which, in the end, it did.” (February 28, 2026)

* Did Representative Jasmine Crockett (TX-30), on track to win the Democratic Senate primary in the Lone Star State, have Atlantic reporter Elaine Godfrey removed from her Lubbock rally last week? Crockett says no, Godfrey says yes. “After Crockett finished speaking, I attempted to join a closed-door press scrum with the congresswoman that was open to the other reporters at the rally,” Godfrey writes. “But I was turned away, so I walked over to interview people in the crowd. That’s when I heard my name from the same woman with the badge at the entrance—and hit ‘Record’ on my iPhone. She asked me to leave, and armed security guards escorted me from the property.” You can listen to the audio if you click the link: the Crockett campaign has yet to issue a full statement on what happened. (February 27, 2026)

* Mary Walsh, a producer and 46-year veteran at CBS News, has left the building. Saying that the newsroom has been “told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum,” she explained; “I don’t know how to do that.” Jeremy Barr at The Guardian broke the story, reporting that “On a staff-wide editorial call on Friday morning, Walsh received a glowing tribute from the CBS News president, Tom Cibrowski, as did another departing veteran producer, Kate Rydell, according to a staffer who participated. The two producers also received an emotional sendoff at the network’s Washington bureau on Thursday.” The CBS News division is now helmed by conservative Bari Weiss, and numerous unnamed sources claim to fear for their jobs if they do not bend the news to her viewpoint. (February 27, 2026)

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We had a little trouble with the video upload on today’s podcast: it is inconsistent, so if you will find that annoying, please just listen!

We began our episode with a clip from this video, made by NBC journalist Savannah Guthrie, offering $1 million for the return of her mother. Eighty-four-year-old Nancy Guthrie was reported missing from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026, and is believed to have been abducted by persons unknown. The FBI has also offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to her recovery.

Today’s theme music is Mirror by New Alkemi$t.

FBI Director Kash Patel at the head of the table as the task force assigned to Nancy Guthrie’s abduction meets on February 10, 2026. Photo credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* With a hat tip to journalist Erin Reed, we have a report from Kansas that a bill passed over Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto has invalidated the drivers licenses of trans people across the state, and that licenses are to be surrendered by end of business today. Senate Bill 244 requires that all drivers’ licenses reflect “sex at birth:” there is no grace period for updating credentials, and anyone found driving without a license is subject to fines and imprisonment. The legislation also awards a bounty of $1,000 to anyone uncovering a transgender person using a bathroom that the state deems incorrect.

* Donald Trump gave the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. It was 108 minutes long, soup to nuts, and the longest SOTU ever, breaking the record held by...Donald Trump last year at 100 minutes. You can read a transcript here, and highlights here. Nearly all of the people honored that night were men, including the gold medal Olympic US Ice Hockey team that partied with Kash Patel and laughed when the President dissed the gold medal women’s team. The exceptions were National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, killed near the White House last year, a little girl who was rescued at the Texas summer camp that suffered a deadly flood last year, and a woman who benefitted from IVF.

* On Wednesday, Dr. Casey Means came before a Senate Committee charged with vetting her for the position of Surgeon General of the United States. Means is a wellness influencer and popular author who dropped out of her surgical residency, no longer has a license to practice medicine, and promotes the idea that individuals, not doctors, are the experts on their own bodies. Not surprisingly, she is an influential figure in the MAHA movement; when asked about vaccines, she refused to commit to any position. The United States does not currently have a surgeon general: that role has been temporarily filled by Stephanie Haridopolos, a Florida family practice physician who was appointed as the acting chief of staff and senior advisor to the U.S. Surgeon General. She is married to Representative Mike Haridopolos (R, FL-08). This may be the longest that post—created in 1879 and usually filled by a high-ranking physician in the military--has remained vacant.

* Primary voting is underway in Texas for the Senate seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn. On the Democratic side, the polls are all over the place: YouGov sees Representative Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) in firm command of the race; Emerson gives James Talarico (HD-52) a 9-point lead. The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram poll gives Crockett a comfortable 8-point lead. On the Republican side, John Cornyn is clearly struggling, and ahead by only 2 points in a single poll, with Attorney General Ken Paxton leading the pack in most polls. Cornyn warns that if he is not nominated, and if the primary goes to a runoff (as it is likely to, with three strong candidates, none of whom Trump has endorsed) Democrats will win the seat.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Image credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation

News focus: the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie

* Last weekend, video of Kash Patel partying with the US Men’s gold medal ice hockey team in Milan once again pointed attention to his use of federal assets for personal travel and entertainment. But it also underlined what he was not doing: overseeing the search for Nancy Guthrie, now well into its fourth week.

* The New York Times has summarized all information that can be known to the public, and a timeline of the investigation here.

* It is unusual for Guthrie not to have been found by now. While murder only has a 61% clearance rate, kidnapping has upwards of a 90% clearance rate; for children, it is 92%, because children are usually snatched by relatives. Kidnappings targeting adults are rare; kidnapping elderly adults is even rarer.

* The New York Post reports that the investigation is at a dead end; the FBI is currently engaged in genetic genealogy, using DNA in a glove found away from the crime scene that seems to match a glove worn by the person who disabled Guthrie’s Ring camera.

* Tip lines are common in a case like this. They can produce useful leads—but they also draw kooks, and require manpower to run down plausible leads. The FBI eliminated 1500 positions in 2025; 18 of 53 Special Agents in Charge were forced out; around 1,000 FBI agents and personnel were reassigned to redacting the Epstein files; and nearly half of the agents across the country (or 23% of the remaining workforce) were reassigned to immigration enforcement.

* Then, the search is complicated by misinformation, volunteers, amateur detectives stoked on CSI episodes, and conspiracy theorists. Influencers and content creators are also a problem: one innocent family who had a degree of separation from Nancy Guthrie was targeted by an internet mob.

* Like many high-profile kidnappings, the Guthrie case has become a media spectacle.

* Are the kidnappers particularly deft—or is the turmoil at the FBI at fault? Donald Trump appointed podcaster Dan Bongino (who recently resigned) as Associate Director and Kash Patel as Director. Neither one had any senior law enforcement or investigative experience; Patel was said last December to be virtually unable to function at an agency paralyzed by chaos and lack of leadership.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s take on the RFK Jr./Kid Rock workout video, “RFK Jr. and Kid Rock’s MAHA manosphere mashup,” MS NOW (February 22, 2026). There are so many questions! By “whole milk,” do they mean “raw milk”—you know, the kind with all kinds of wild bacteria? But most of all—where are the women on MAHA’s agenda, when Trump claimed he was going to forward the interests of women?

* Claire wants you to read Charles Duhigg, “What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting,” The New Yorker (January 26, 2026), about the difference between community based activism and top-down political organizations.

13-year-old Gerson Lopéz Garcia wrote: “We are all stuck in rooms that can hold 12 people they won’t let us go out to the playgrounds and park and it’s very boring to do every day God touch the hearts of those at ICE let us out We are not criminals I want to go home.” Image obtained by ProPublica

Short takes:

* One of the ways children process trauma is through art, but ICE isn’t having it. During room searches at Dilley Detention Center in Texas, “Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper,” McKenzie Funk and Mica Rosenberg report at ProPublica. “Guards have taken artwork, too, they said — even one child’s drawing of Bratz fashion dolls.” Detainees are also losing access to Gmail and other computer services, making it harder to contact attorneys. “The detainees and others interviewed for this story said these measures increased after the Jan. 22 arrival of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, sparked protests and congressional visits. They said the clampdown intensified as children and parents at Dilley wrote letters to share with the public and reporters and relatives recorded video calls with the detainees, including those published by ProPublica this month. The children’s stories, many told in their own words, fueled an outcry over the scope of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which the president had promised would focus on criminals.” (February 26, 2026)

* Perhaps you have seen all the Republican influencers and politicians on X promoting the SAVE act, which would require a photo ID to vote in federal elections. “But upon closer inspection, something very strange is going on,” Mark Novicoff writes at the Atlantic. “For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true.” Well, bring it on! “Republicans’ current voter-ID push seems almost custom-designed to disenfranchise their own voters.” (February 26, 2026)

* “Trump believes he is popular, strong and successful,” New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote after Tuesday’s State of the Union address. “The truth says otherwise. Trump is as unpopular as he’s ever been.” Bouie has a lot to say about Trump’s catalogue of missteps and policy pratfalls, but here’s the truth: “What Trump has, a little more than one year into his second term, is a failed presidency: one that has crashed on the rocks of his ambition to supplant constitutional government with that of his own will. Yes, Trump has done a tremendous amount of damage. And yes, he has degraded American democracy to the point where it is on life support. But he’s failed to make himself a dictator, and the public is poised to punish his party for his transgressions.” (February 25, 2026)

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe