Episode 1018 features Driftglass in conversation with Dr. Cinde Wirth, the Democrat running to flip Indiana's 6th Congressional District. A seventh-generation Bartholomew County Hoosier, high school science teacher, and first-generation college graduate with a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy, Wirth brings an unusual résumé to the race — including a stint as a congressional fellow writing science and education policy.  The conversation covers what drove her to run for office, her priorities around working families, public education, healthcare access, and the environment, and what it takes to flip a seat in deep-red Indiana. It's a chance to hear directly from a candidate who says Hoosiers are worth the fight.

Her website:  Wirth For Congress: https://wirth4congress.com/

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Episode 1017 puts a decade of Never Trump confessions on trial, dissecting this unusual week where Tim Miller, Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough all admitted, in various roundabout ways, that they'd known the Republican base was rotten all along. Driftglass and Blue Gal ask the only question that matters — did they know, or were they delusional? — and prove with two decades of receipts that they knew, they profited from it, and now they're profiting again by pretending to be "the first ones brave enough to say so."  (Fun Fact:  Rick can't even get the timeline right.)  The episode also honors Dolly Parton, contrasts a manosphere UFC event (that may have killed the manosphere) with Zohran Mamdani's genuinely joyful "bro culture," and shows Abdul El-Sayed outmaneuvering Jesse Watters by refusing the culture-war bait entirely. It's about judgment as a moral obligation, not a sin, and why remembering things accurately is the one thing the Never Trump grift can never survive.

Links for this episode: 

GQ Link:  https://www.gq.com/story/ufc-at-the-white-house

Mamdani’s Bro Culture https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/nyregion/mamdani-bro-culture-sports.html 

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Episode 1016 puts Tone Policing on trial, tracing the long history of the powerful lecturing the powerless about civility while dodging the actual substance of their protests — from abolitionists to MLK to anti-war marchers, memory-holed by CNN in 2005. Driftglass and Blue Gal revisit David Brooks' unhinged 2005 meltdown over Harry Reid daring to question the Iraq War intelligence, proving that the Tone Police always overreact hardest exactly when someone hits a nerve. That pattern plays out live this week when Jon Ossoff makes one factually accurate remark about Trump's laziness and his aide, Natalie Harp, triggering a Fox News meltdown, a Newt Gingrich tantrum, and a media firestorm that made "Natalie Harp" the most-searched name in Washington. The episode's verdict is simple: until Democrats are out from under MAGA fascism, f**k Courtesy Class.

Links for this episode: 

The Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/19/trump-white-house-attacks

2005 NBC Transcript:  https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9438988

The Hill: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6036115-ossoff-calls-trump-crook/

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Episode 1015 takes apart James Carville, the "rusted-out antique device" who trashes progressives on Fox News over a single deleted Thanksgiving tweet and then pivots to backing the very candidate he just attacked, all while forgetting his own most famous line ("It's the economy, stupid"). Driftglass and Blue Gal do the math on his supposed DSA takeover panic — two national officeholders versus 257 mainline Democrats — and coin a new verb, "Carvilling," for pundits who tantrum toward MAGA cameras whenever Democrats won't chase imaginary hippies. The episode also solves a year-and-a-half mystery: why Jamelle Bouie waited so long to demolish a David Brooks column, tracing it back through Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and Reagan's Neshoba County dog whistle to an unwritten New York Times rule against columnists attacking colleagues in print. It's about faithless allies, decibels versus messaging, and the actual math behind a manufactured crisis.

Links for this episode: 

Driftglass on The Bob Cesca Show – https://www.bobcesca.com/the-bob-cesca-interview-driftglass-day-8-12-26/

Driftglass on The Nicole Sandler Show – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyneHDGQkr8 

Carville on CNN https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/politics/james-carville-election-what-matters

Jamelle Bouie, full video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46tpqFxfomI 

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Episode 1014 dismantles the "Democrats in Disarray" panic after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's progressive primary win in Michigan, tracing Third Way's $15 million war chest against democratic socialism back to nearly identical Red Scare rhetoric almost a century ago.  

Driftglass and Blue Gal prove that the same "socialism!" screeching Republicans threw at Obama just two weeks into his presidency in 2009 is word-for-word the same panic thrown at another Democrat facing deep economic crises a century earlier.   That "Red Scare" was funded then by Hearst's media empire and is now funded by Big Pharma, Big Banks, and Big Tech. 

The episode also indulges in a little well-earned schadenfreude over a solar-industry-funded super PAC quietly picking off the Republicans who sabotaged clean energy, one primary at a time. 

It's about corporate "centrist Democrats" manufacturing a crisis, media amnesia as a weapon, and why the same lies have been recycled for 100 years.

Links for this episode:  

https://www.newsweek.com/we-are-all-socialists-now-82577

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/us/politics/democratic-party-socialists-moderates.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/03/centrist-democrats-launch-new-pledge-moderate-party/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-what-progressive-primary-wins-mean-for-democrats

https://www.commondreams.org/news/cheri-bustos-next-american-era

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/29/fema-democratic-disaster-requests-trump-01013938

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/politics/kennedy-center-tours.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-07-31/alaska-road-permit-shows-how-trump-upends-business-norms

https://crooksandliars.com/2026/08/theres-nothing-we-could-do-cornyn-concedes

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/10/white-house-max-miller-pressure-campaign-01031353

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/trump-vaccine-executive-order-autism.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/07/how-solar-donors-helped-take-down-a-trump-backed-republican-01028209 

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Driftglass sits down with Blue Rep in a Red State!   Democratic State Representative Gregg Bush of Missouri is in the superminority in the Missouri State Legislature.   We go over Tuesday's Missouri ballot initiative and how Missouri voters turned back a Republican attempt to take their power away.  Also, the future of the Democratic Party, and how a Covid-era nurse got elected to the State House.  All this and more in this truly fascinating conversation.  

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In a special crossover episode, Driftglass sits down with Matthew Sheffield of Flux and the Theory of Change podcast — a journalist with a genuinely unusual vantage point on American radicalization. Sheffield grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family, left that world, then spent years as one of the internet's first conservative bloggers before walking away from that movement too, disillusioned by its hostility to facts and to people. The conversation explores why things are happening the way they are in politics, religion, and media, rather than just chasing the next news cycle. It's a rare chance to hear two people compare notes from opposite sides of the same long road out of, and against, movement conservatism.

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Episode 1011 argues that the Fauci witch hunt and the White House Correspondents' Dinner were the same show: theater staged to give a cult desperate for a villain someone new to hate. Driftglass and Blue Gal use Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" to describe legacy media pundits partying safely behind castle walls while the plague of modern Republican fascism finally breaks through the door. The episode names the psychological trap keeping disengaged voters stuck in "Yeah, but Democrats..." thinking, and exposes how devastating SNAP cuts are quietly starving hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans while being sold as "reform." It's about who the real cavalry is, why nobody's coming to save us but us, and why the midterms are the only thing that can pull the brakes on a car that no longer has any.

Links for this Episode:

Driftglass on The BradCast  https://bradblog.com/?p=18314

Driftglass on the Nicole Sandler Show 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwmgb421eI 

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Episode 1010 dissects the White House Correspondents' Dinner disaster, where Trump used his own celebration of press freedom to attack the journalists in the room with vile personal insults. Driftglass and Blue Gal replay a decade-old clip from their own archives—recorded the week Trump effectively won the 2016 nomination—to prove that Liberals saw this coming while the legacy media obsessed over Hillary's emails. The episode argues the real scandal isn't Trump's cruelty, which was never a mystery, but a media class that keeps getting blindsided by exactly what it refuses to honestly examine. It's about pattern recognition, receipts a decade old, and why nothing about the GOP or its media enablers has gotten better—only worse.

Link for this episode:  Status. https://www.status.news/ 

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Episode 1009 asks what happens when you're 20 miles into the political marathon and there's no cavalry coming over the hill to save the day. Driftglass and Blue Gal explore the difference between American "hero arrives just in time" storytelling and the harder truth found in movies like Spotlight and Lincoln—where victory comes from grinding, patient work, not a last-minute miracle. The episode confronts what it feels like to hit The Wall after decades of activism that moved the needle but not nearly far enough, while also finding real hope in how DSA ideas about time, freedom, and healthcare are quietly winning the battle of ideas. It's about exhaustion, endurance, and why you should never take political advice from your enemies.  

This week, thanks again to Hal Sparks who had Driftglass on Monday.  Bob Cesca and Nicole Sandler who put up with him for an hour each, back to back, on Wednesday.  

Hal Sparks https://www.youtube.com/live/QPVAxnKjtV4

Bob Cesca show https://www.bobcesca.com/the-bob-cesca-interview-driftglass-day-7-22-26/

Nicole Sandler show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2acNSp9cNVg

More links from the episode:  

https://patricemersault.substack.com/p/part-2-i-went-to-a-meeting-of-young 

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/dont-take-advice-from-your-enemies

https://campaign-trails.ghost.io/punching-left/

The Internet Kitty’s book, “Futura”  https://www.amazon.com/Futura-Michael-Laser/dp/B0G9Q9GSTF/ref=sr_1_9 

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Website: proleftpod.com 

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Mail: The Professional Left, PO Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791

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