The Play Typer Guy

In this week’s episode, Florida state senator Shevrin Jones discusses the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, climate change, and the Democrats’ chances in this year’s elections.

You will hear:

• Policy conversations that need to be happening, even in states like Florida where the current government officials want to wipe anything to do with climate change off the map, especially with an annual hurricane season that seems to be getting worse every year
• Why Republicans are more focused on excluding marginalized communities in lawmaking than on solving problems that affect all Americans
• How gerrymandering impacts the voices of the people at the ballot box, including silencing those who don’t serve the purpose of the current party in power
• Is Florida actually a red state or is it a purple state that has been demoralized?
• And more!

Guest Info: 

A Florida native, born and raised in Miami Gardens (Carol City), Shevrin Jones has called West Park home for nearly two decades. After teaching A.P. Chemistry in Broward County Public Schools, he served as Executive Director of South Florida Reading Corps. He also founded South Florida Youth Summit, the largest gathering of young people in South Florida, and LEAD Nation, one of South Florida’s top organizations for leadership training. As a teacher, leader, and legislator, Shev has always fought to expand opportunities for our kids.

Before his election to the State Senate, Shev served in the Florida House from 2013-2018. From advocating and securing funding for youth mentoring to championing legislation that increases transparency between the public and law enforcement, he consistently fought for real change. Shev has a track record of working collaboratively to get the job done for our community, even as a member of the minority party.

Links:  

Shevrin Jones website: https://shevrinjones.com/

Connect with Stephen:
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Email: [email protected]

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This week, Noah Berlatsky from the Everything Is Horrible newsletter joins me to discuss CNN's misinformation campaign against Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

You will hear:

• How CNN moved the news cycle focus away from Republican Mark Robinson’s declaration of being a “Black Nazi” to smear Representative Tlaib as anti-semetic after expressing concern for anti-Palestenian bias shown by Michigan’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, after charges were filed against students at the University of Michigan protesting ongoing war crimes against Palestinian people in Gaza
• How openly lying about antisemitism where none exists is dangerous to all, particularly to progressive Jewish people
• Why the right tends to focus on college campus protests as a way to infiltrate educational institutions in order to squash progressive efforts to fight fascism and anti-democratic policies (such as anti-abortion laws or raising the voting age, etc.)
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Noah Berlatsky has worked as a writer for twenty years, focusing on a wide array of topics for audiences including academics, popular audiences, high school students, and children. 

Noah’s book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948 was published in early 2015 by Rutgers University Press.

His reviews and essays have appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, NBC Think Online, Pacific Standard, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Guardian, Media Matters, Salon, the Awl, Slate, the Chicago Reader, The Escapist, Esquire, Reason, the Dissolve, the Baffler, and many other publications. 

Links:  

Everything is Horrible: https://www.everythingishorrible.net/

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

Democrat Ruwa Romman made history in 2022 as the first known Muslim woman elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. The granddaughter of Palestinian refugees, she’s also the first Palestinian-American elected to any office in the state. 

I had the opportunity to speak with Rep. Romman about the upcoming election and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. 

You will hear:

• Ruwa’s unusual story of how she got into office
• How she came to be in Georgia with grandparents who were forced out of their homes in Palestine
• The difference between attempting to interact with the Biden White House regarding the conflict in Palestine/Gaza/Israel versus the access to the Harris Campaign
• How focusing on local campaigns can lead to bigger things as leaders move up
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Ruwa is passionate about politics, civic engagement,  interfaith dialogue and community service. As an organizer, policy analyst, and public speaker, she works to empower communities and everyday people to become more civically engaged!

Last year she leveraged her platform to inform thousands of Georgians how to get involved in the 2020 elections, and worked as a field organizer for Asian American Advocacy Fund. Ruwa also helped establish the Georgia Volunteer Hub to train the influx of Georgia and national volunteers while connecting them to local Georgia organizations. Ruwa has volunteered in every election cycle since 2014 to help flip Georgia blue. In the past, she also worked as a Field Organizer for the Georgia Muslim Voter Project, as well as served as Communications Director for CAIR Georgia.

Ruwa was born in Jordan and is the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees. Her family moved to Georgia when she was 7 years old. Ruwa graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics from Oglethorpe University in 2015 and a Masters in Public Policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University in 2019. Ruwa currently works as a senior consultant for a professional services management company assisting government agencies and other stakeholders by advising, implementing, and developing improved strategies to deal with major public policy issues at the local, state, and federal level.

Through her diverse set of experiences, Ruwa will be ready on day one to tackle the tough challenges facing our state and to provide the leadership that District 97 deserves.

Links:  

Rep. Romman's website: https://www.ruwa4georgia.com

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

(Recorded before President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign on July 21)

Democrats in tough races this year are asking the incumbent president and presumptive nominee Joe Biden to step aside. This is unprecedented, so political analyst Cliston Brown joins me to unpack why the Biden re-election campaign has become the Hindenburg after the explosion. Can the president turn this around and why is he struggling against a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist? Does it really just come down to Biden's age and the price of eggs?

You’ll hear:

• The correlation between presidential candidate votes and votes for Congressional races
• How “strong and wrong” can tend to win out over “weak and right”
• Why the “average” voter might still vote for Trump over Biden, even with all of his faults and poor performance previously
• The problem when Democrats spend more time talking to each other than trying to explain to non-Democrats why their options are better
• The importance of having a strong “bench” of party leadership in the wings, rather than the one and only option
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Cliston Brown is a political analyst and communications executive. He writes on U.S. politics at ClistonBrown.com, having previously written for the New York Observer and the California Globe. Additionally, he was a regularly scheduled weekly guest (“Listen to Cliston”) on The Hal Ginsberg Morning Show on Radio Monterey, and also has appeared on “Inside Story” on Al Jazeera English; A News (Istanbul, Turkey) with Andy Boyns, Zaviar Ahmed and Mark Mourad Hammami; India Ahead with Neha Khanna; “Left, Right, Center” with David Webb on the Sirius XM Patriot Channel; “The DeMaio Report” with Carl DeMaio on KOGO-600 AM San Diego; the CY Interview with Chris Yandek and Jay Bildstein; and “Millennial Talk” with Chelsea Krost. He has been mentioned in the Boston Herald, Newsweek, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, in Reason magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog and on Vox.com, among others, and he has spoken before numerous business and trade groups on U.S. elections.

Brown has had particular success in pinpointing key Congressional races and projecting the number of seats won by each of the major political parties every two years starting in 2006.

On average, Brown has projected the final composition of the U.S. House of Representatives within 7.5 seats and the U.S. Senate within 1.222 seats. In the most recent election, he correctly predicted every U.S. Senate race.

In the 2012 election, Brown correctly called 49 of the 50 states in the presidential race, missing only President Obama’s razor-thin victory in Florida. He also called the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House within one seat of their final compositions.

Brown began his career as a journalist in the Chicago area in 1994, covering government and politics, intellectual property law, international business issues, education, and law enforcement. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 2001, where he served for two years as director of communications for U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Indiana), then transitioned back into the private sector as a communications professional and political analyst in the insurance industry, holding positions in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco.

A Midwesterner born and raised

Connect with Stephen:
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YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

The showgirl scholar herself, Sailor St. Claire — also known as Stevi Costa, joins me to discuss her work at the Noveltease Theatre in Seattle and the state of theatre during what the government at least considers the post-covid period.

You’ll hear:

• How Noveltease Theatre uses burlesque to drive storytelling forward, harkening back to how burlesque started in the U.S. back in the 1880s
• How the theatre chooses what works to interpret and how to make it more gay, looking into how to create a queer reading or understanding of the story
• Stevi’s background in academics and literature and how it affects her interpretation of stories
• Her experience with the COVID shut down in 2020 and how the company handled the months/years to follow
• The challenges of rebuilding an audience after the shutdown
• The value of participating in a collective experience rather than watching entertainment at home in your robe
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Sailor St. Claire (Stevi Costa) (she/her) is the Artistic Director of Noveltease Theatre whose mission is to create community through storytelling by reviving the historical artform of literary burlesque. Sailor has been putting her knowledge of the literary canon to more-than-scholarly uses as a performer, producer, and emcee since 2009. She is entrusted to steer the ship as the host of Emerald City Burlesque Revue and at Burlesque and Cabaret Behind the Pink Door, and has worked her wordsmithery on the grand stages of the Vogue Theatre at the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival and the Orleans Casino Showroom at the Burlesque Hall of Fame’s Movers, Shakers, & Innovators Showcase.

She is proud to have been a part of the production team for Sinner Saint Burlesque from 2013-2018, co-adapting and co-directing the troupe’s much lauded burlesque of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was also part of the team of nerdy feminist superheroes that brought Bechdel Test Burlesque to the University of Oregon in 2016 at the invitation of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. The Showgirl Scholar holds a PhD in English from the University of Washington, and once did a pin-up shoot atop her actual dissertation.

Although she loves 19th century American realism and naturalism with a fervor that confuses most, her favorite book is and will always be Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Links, info you’d like to share with audience:  

Novelties Theatre: https://novelteasetheatre.org/

Sailor’s Bio: https://novelteasetheatre.org/sailor-st-claire

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

In the previous episode, I chatted with Gabe Garbowit, former Senate staffer for Democrat Tina Smith, regarding the radicalized Supreme Court and how the party’s leadership has responded in ways not easily understood by the public. In this episode, Gabe and I continue our discussion, so make sure you check out episode 34 for the first part.

You’ll hear:

• Why we hear that crime is up/down or that there is an invasion at the border, but also why our economy is the best it has ever been
• How opinions are often filtered through “polls” and pundits, leaning on supposed data versus people saying what they personally believe
• Why communications staffers should be watching Fox News
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Gabe Garbowit is the former Digital Media Specialist for Senator Tina Smith and found his way to the Hill sort of by accident — but has been invested in carving out his own space in the Senate’s digital landscape since his arrival in 2018. Garbowit left Congress and took a sharp turn away from politics. He worked briefly as a meat cutter at a Washington barbecue joint and then moved back to Minnesota.

He’s more than 1,000 miles away from the Capitol now, but the challenges he experienced working on the Hill are still top of mind. Garbowit decided to do something he hopes will improve conditions for former compatriots still working in the Senate and those yet to join. In 2023, he launched SenateUnionTracker.com, which, true to its domain name, tracks the union support or opposition of all 100 senators.

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

Gabe Garbowit, former Senate staffer for Tina Smith, joins me to help explain why Senate Democrats, especially in leadership, have responded to a radicalized Supreme Court and GOP in ways that don’t make a lot of sense to us common folk.
This is part one of a two-part episode. You're welcome.

In this part, you will hear:

• How things have come to become so radicalized within the U.S. Supreme Court
• How Dick Durbin has not been checking the Court with the tools at his committee’s disposal
• Why is the leadership for the Democratic party so lax in handling seemingly obvious corruption?
• The difference between how Republicans and Democrats use their resources to get what they want
• The downside of taking the high road or being the adult in the room when things go sideways
• What would the polls look like if Biden were running against someone other than Trump?
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Gabe Garbowit is the former Digital Media Specialist for Senator Tina Smith and found his way to the Hill sort of by accident — but has been invested in carving out his own space in the Senate’s digital landscape since his arrival in 2018. Garbowit left Congress and took a sharp turn away from politics. He worked briefly as a meat cutter at a Washington barbecue joint and then moved back to Minnesota.

He’s more than 1,000 miles away from the Capitol now, but the challenges he experienced working on the Hill are still top of mind. Garbowit decided to do something he hopes will improve conditions for former compatriots still working in the Senate and those yet to join. In 2023, he launched SenateUnionTracker.com, which, true to its domain name, tracks the union support or opposition of all 100 senators.

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

My friend Raven Snook is a writer, editor, performer, mom and all-around diva (in the positive sense of the word) who’s currently the Editor of Creative Content for TDF and a contributing theater critic for Time Out New York. She joins me to discuss the Tony Awards and the post-pandemic state of theatre. 

You will hear:

• Raven’s analysis of this season’s Broadway shows and who could win different categories
• Disappointment over shows and performers who were not nominated
• Comparison between the storyline of Cabaret with our current MAGA climate
• The uncertainty of how the pandemic would affect the theatre world with everything shutting down
• Downturn of financial availability for shows post-pandemic and the accessibility to the average American who might want to see shows
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Raven Snook is a writer, editor, performer, mom and all-around diva (in the positive sense of the word) who’s currently the Editor of Creative Content for TDF and a contributing theater critic for Time Out New York.

Raven's work has also appeared in New York Magazine, Yahoo Parenting, the New York Post, The Village Voice, Bon Appétit, Better Homes & Gardens and Parents.com, among others.

Links:  

www.ravensnook.com

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

In this episode, Sci-Fi/Fantasy author M.H. Ayinde and I discuss the racial politics at the core of Doctor Who’s “Dot and Bubble.” We also discuss Modupe’s debut novel, A Song of Legends Lost, launching in 2025, how it came to be, and more about the publishing journey itself. 

You will hear:

• Moving forward in the face of rejection
• Finding space in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre as a POC
• Looking at colonialism and racial undertones in this particular episode of Doctor Who and how it isn’t something from the distant past, but something struggled with in modern day and in futuristic settings like in Sci-Fi/Fantasy media
• The backstory of Modupe’s novel and where her ideas came from, from microaggressions that non-POC people may not even realize to depicting a society that is dominated by POC people
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Modupe H. Ayinde was born in London’s East End and studied English Literature at university. She’s worked as a video games reviewer, magazine sub editor, and television researcher, and now tinkers with spreadsheets for a large media organization. She is a runner, a screen time enthusiast, and a lapsed student of martial arts, including Wing Chun and karate. Her debut novel, A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy, will be published by Orbit Books in Spring 2025. Her short fiction can be found in FIYAH Literary Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Omenana, and elsewhere, and she was the 2021 winner of the Future Worlds Prize. She lives in North London with three generations of her family and their Studio Ghibli obsession. Modupe is a member of SFWA and the African Speculative Fiction Society.

Links: 

https://www.mhayinde.com/ 

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson

Lawyer, professor, and all-around whiz Madiba Dennie joins us for a lively discussion about her debut book, "The Originalism Trap, How Extremists Stole The Constitution And How We The People Can Take It Back."

Dennie's legal and political commentary has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and more. She's shared her views about race, gender, and the law on BBC and MSNBC. She's taught at Western Washington University and NYU School of Law. She earned her law degree from Columbia Law School and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, where she concentrated in Politics and earned a certificate in African-American Studies.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• What originalism is and how it’s affecting our country
• Why we cannot just “pass an amendment” to the Constitution (it’s not that easy!)
• Issues with the Supreme Court being largely unchecked and the structural reforms necessary to keep the Court from staying stagnant and divided
• Why Court expansion is needed
• And more!

Guest Info: 

Madiba K. Dennie is an attorney, columnist, and professor whose work focuses on fostering an equitable multiracial democracy. Her debut book, The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, is now available for preorder. Dennie is the Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor at the critical legal commentary outlet Balls and Strikes. In her previous role as a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, she provided legal and policy analysis regarding a range of democracy issues including the census, the courts, and attempts to disempower communities of color. Her legal and political commentary has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and more. Dennie has been interviewed on-air about race, gender, and the law on outlets including the BBC and MSNBC. She has taught at Western Washington University and NYU School of Law. She earned her law degree from Columbia Law School and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, where she concentrated in Politics and earned a certificate in African-American Studies. Her hot takes are not legal advice.

Links:  

Madiba Dennie’s website: https://madibadennie.com/

Connect with Stephen:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SER1897
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThePlayTyperGuy
Email: [email protected]

Join  the Player Typer Guy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenrobinson