Politix

Let’s talk about the movies. A bunch of factors have contributed to the shrinking of the movies and the Oscars in recent years. The film industry itself has changed. Streaming services have become fixtures in most households. COVID-19 happened. Social media wrecked everyone’s attention span and came to compete with every other kind of media for what was left of that attention span. Social media also tribalized the collective experience of movie watching and entertainment awards. It has tended to create multiple camps within which there’s only one right answer to questions like, Which movie was best? Which actor deserved to win? It doesn’t have to be like that! We think there’s a way to revive and modernize the way movies fit into our culture, including how people talk and disagree about them. We think we can make our collective experience of film a little more enjoyable, a little less like zero-sum warfare. Host Brian Beutler and Crooked Media Producers Kendra James and Olivia Martinez discuss the merits and flaws of last year’s hits and misses, from Top Gun: Maverick and M3GAN, to Babylon and Beast, and invent new award categories for these movies that better capture how fans relate to cinema in the modern era.

D.C. is not a state. At least not yet. The District is allowed to govern itself in some ways, but its laws are subject to veto authority by the federal government. All that forms the backdrop for a big dust up surrounding a lengthy effort by the city council here to update the city’s janky old criminal code. What would ordinarily be a technical, local issue turned into a multifaceted political fiasco for the city, the mayor of Washington, the people of Washington, Democrats in Congress, and even President Joe Biden. What was actually in the much-debated bill? Why did Biden agree to overturn it? Will it be revived? Will Republicans continue to use the federal government’s power over the city as a wedge issue to divide Democrats? And what does the whole episode say about the future of the city and its and its determination to govern itself completely? Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern joins host Brian Beutler to discuss the actual substance of the bill and what the whole incident reveals about how sincerely Democrats support equal rights and democracy reform, and whether they’re equipped to fight against an increasingly fascist opposition party.

The train derailment in East Palestine, OH, created a state of uncertainty over how severe the contamination is and the risks posed by acute and chronic exposure to the chemicals that spilled and combusted. At the same time, we’re living through a period of scientific and industrial history that seems to drown us in information about what is and isn’t toxic. And it feels like all of us, not just residents of eastern Ohio, ought to have a clear sense of which products and pollutants pose real risks to us. How long can we expect the residents of East Palestine to remain exposed to toxic air and water? Even if government officials say the air and water is safe, can Ohioans rest easy? And generally, how can any of us process the deluge of information we receive about the risks of various substances and foods that we encounter or ingest all the time? Are microplastics actually killing us?! Is beef highly carcinogenic?! Or is it essential for good health?! Or neither?! It all becomes pretty overwhelming, and it’s easy to feel unsettled by, but also a bit numb to, so many dire warnings in the news, on social media, and elsewhere. Tufts Medical School Professor Dr. Jeffrey Griffiths joins host Brian Beutler to discuss how we can live happy lives without being anxious all the time, but with enough awareness and knowledge to protect ourselves from real dangers.

After a train crash pumped toxic chemicals into East Palestine, OH, Republican Party leaders wasted no time trying to turn tragedy into partisan outrage, alleging an elite liberal conspiracy against the white working class. Republicans have gotten really good at acting livid about everything from train derailments to gas stoves to migrant caravans, which leaves us all drowning in their culture war fights. How do the flashpoints of those culture wars arise? To what extent are they organic versus orchestrated? And as a mode of politics for an entire party and political movement, are they effective? That is: Is this helping Republicans win elections? If not, why are they doing it? And if so, does that mean we’re just stuck with right wing culture where politics forever? Or can Democrats fight back with culture war battles of their own? Harvard political scientist and data scholar Theda Skocpol joins host Brian Beutler this week to talk about how Republicans continuously try to recreate the magic of the Tea Party movement, and help us better understand what purposes these right wing culture wars serve.

It’s been one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. In that time, the United States had an election and the Republicans now calling the shots in the House are the same ones who want us to cut aid drastically if not abandon Ukraine altogether. Between the debt ceiling fight, and regular budget negotiations, Republicans could reduce aid spending by a lot, or they could create a protracted crisis where aid to Ukraine remains in limbo for several weeks or longer. What happens if we cut aid to Ukraine, or worse, while the two countries remain mired in bloody warfare? What might we hope to see happen between now and then on the ground in Ukraine to lower the stakes of a possibly steep reduction in U.S. aid? Could Ukraine conceivably win before that happens? The answer requires knowing the answers to complicated questions about military tactics and logistics. Senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Rob Lee joins host Brian Beutler to cut through the jargon, and explain what we can reasonably expect to see happen in the coming crucial months before the U.S. posture towards Ukraine changes.

Is the media in the early stages of repeating the same mistakes it made when it piled on to manufactured GOP scandals like Benghazi and EMAILS? Biden’s vice presidential documents, Balloonghazi, the debt ceiling “debate”—all of these have been like bat signals to journalists who thrive on false equivalences. But conveying reality isn’t as simple as making sure that the facts you report are true and passing them along. At some point you have to use subjective judgment about language and story placement and sheer volume of reporting. And yet, journalists keep pumping out a rash of stories that normalize aberrant Republican behavior and abnormalize Democratic behavior in order to appear neutral. Does the media take enough responsibility for its role in this democracy? Has the national media learned any lessons from their fateful mistakes in the run-up to the 2016 election? If that doesn’t make American political journalism rethink its practices, what will? Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’s former public editor and one of our best media critics, joins host Brian Beutler to talk about how we can fix the media, or at least improve it.

January 22nd was the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade—a bittersweet milestone, because there’s no more Roe v. Wade to commemorate. Since the Dobbs decision last year overturned Roe, we’ve had an election that went pretty well for Democrats under the circumstances, but also created a false sense of reprieve. But now it’s January and the dust is settled and there’s still no national right to abortion. The anniversary can thus serve a real purpose as a wake up call after the midterms lulled many Americans into complacency. How is America different now with Roe gone than it was before? What are pro-choice forces doing to help where abortion has been banned or where it’s under threat or where it’s still legal? What more could they be doing? What more could we all be doing? And as we look ahead to elections in the future, what can our political leaders do to nationalize a referendum on abortion? Reproductive Justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman joins Brian Beutler to reassess the state of abortion rights in post-Roe America.

Streaming video tempted us with a utopian dream of unbundling, where modern technology could let us build our own a la carte entertainment packages. Unbundling works for consumers in theory, but in practice, calling up what you want to watch when you want requires subscribing to several different increasingly niche services plus paying to rent or buy programming on top of that. Our new nexus of on demand technology and consumer impatience is somehow worse and often more expensive than when we all had DVD players and overpriced cable packages. Has unbundling failed consumers, artists, and the businesses themselves? If so, why are we doing it? How has it affected the quality of TV we get? And if we don’t want to go backwards, can we move toward a better, more easily shared experience of popular culture? Variety reporter Michael Schneider has covered the television business for 25 years, and joins Brian Beutler this week to talk about how we evolved to this point and what the next iteration might be.

Kevin McCarthy is finally Speaker, and now we get to see what having a Republican House under his nominal stewardship, but really under MAGA control, actually means. We also get to see how Democrats respond and react in order to exploit the GOP's ineptness, harm, and flat out corruption. Republicans wasted no time this week sabotaging criminal investigations of Donald Trump and of themselves, and McCarthy all too happily promised them a Benghazi style committee that will have authority to access the inner workings of those very criminal investigations. Setting aside how corrosive it is to the rule of law, does the new Democratic leadership see the committee as a political opportunity? Has there been any rethinking on the part of leadership since the midterms of the political value of having opponents who are so corrupt? Will Democrats continue to pass up opportunities to exploit the corruption of their opponents to maximum benefit? Member of the 117th Congress and current member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Mondaire Jones joins to help us sort some of this out and share insight on how this new status quo took shape from the insurrection through the 2022 midterms.

Republicans have failed to elect a speaker of the House, and the ensuing crisis—which has effectively dissolved Congress—is a harbinger of what to expect over the next two years. When you imagine the future speaker trying to get 218 votes to raise the debt limit, or renew aid to Ukraine, our schadenfreude over the ramshackle Republican conference gives way to genuine alarm. It’ll be Hakeem Jeffries’ job to stand against that juggernaut of corruption and dysfunction and hostage taking. Will Jeffries and his lieutenants be an effective opposition? Can they improve on the leadership team that just stepped down? Is there anything even a brilliant leadership team can do to stop this Republican majority from breaking everything in sight? Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent joins host Brian Beutler to discuss the danger Republicans have placed all of us in, and what optimal resistance to them looks like.