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It's baaaack.
Welcome to the era of chaos and revenge.
The show outline for this week’s podcast ran three pages, which is about three times as long as usual. And while I was putting it together, I had this random thought: I’ve had a happy life completely ignoring televised wrestling. But now, I'm expected to understand the concept of “kayfabe,” because apparently it’s what politics is all about now.
We’ll continue to uh, wrestle with all of that over the coming weeks… This one felt like an entire month.
The Podcast
Karoli was still on vacation, so Aliza and I happily welcomed Red Painter, her colleague from Crooks and Liars.com. Red hails from Washington D.C., and in a different timeline, we would have met with her IRL after the inauguration. Probably at a watering hole like the Old Ebbitt Grill.
Instead, we got together virtually. And sober. And we had a little rant over just a few of the tsunami of terrible executive orders the First Felon signed in his first few hours back in the White House.
As Aliza put it, “You can say a lot about Trump but he sure undid a lot in the span of 24 hours.”
We never got to the outrageous blanket pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists, including some convicted of sedition and brutally attacking law enforcement. But we did speculate on the economic motivations of the promised immigration raids, the likelihood that the government will encourage people to snitch on their neighbors, and who might be the new voice of the Democratic Party.
Also: The new “Gulf of America.”
View the podcast on YouTube here. Or listen to the audio version below.
What We’re Reading
Our friend, Liz Gumbinner (aka Mom101) took a look at the 120+ page list the Biden-Harris administration of their accomplishments, which they published on their way out. And she realized that we were not only about to lose many of them, but that the new guys would do everything they could to wipe it from our memory. So she presciently downloaded it and saved it to a Google doc for posterity. Access it here (and while you’re at it, check out her award-winning newsletter).
As we settle in for another period of sustained chaos, we’ve been focusing on whatever positive actions we can take. We read a couple of articles this week that highlighted the kind of messaging that we should be using to make our case more effectively (because facts and logic and reason don’t work in a culture that’s all about glitz and the WWE).
Jennifer Rubin wrote a great piece this week on the way MAGA uses language to distort reality… and how we must find the words that will make the actual effects of their actions clear. Like “forced birth” instead of “pro-life.” And instead of “tariffs,” try saying “consumer tax.”
If you want to dig deeper, Antonia Scatton’s “Reframing America” newsletter is like a graduate course in the kind of political messaging we should be using. This week, she laid out the vision and themes she’ll be tackling this year. We will be paying attention to this.
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