The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal
"Fiercely and unapologetically progressive, and definitely NSFW. 'The Professional Left' features award-winning bloggers Driftglass and Blue Gal as they skewer right-wing absurdities and dismantle mainstream media mealy-mouths with razor-sharp wit and zero filter. From mercilessly mocking partisan hacks to elevating stories the media ignores, it's the profane, unflinching political commentary you didn't know you needed. More at http://ProLeftPod.com."
Episodes
1042 episodes
Ep 1006: Pump Up The Venom
Episode 1006 uses the beloved 1990 teen rebellion movie "Pump Up the Volume" to ask a deeper question: what happens when you take "Truth is a virus" and unrestricted free speech into the real world, where the fascists aren't outsiders trying to...
Ep 1005: Meanwhile, In Local News...
Episode 1005 of The Professional Left makes the case that if you really want to understand America — not a focus group of twelve Trump voters in Florida, not three congressional primaries in Brooklyn, not the punditocracy's endless parade of co...
Ep 1004: The MAGA Merry-Go-Round
It goes in circles but never gets anywhereIt’s all horses’ assesAnd there is no brass ring.Driftglass on the Bob Cesca Show : http...
Ep 1003: Science Fiction University - Trust
Science Fiction University returns at long last, with an extended deep dive into one of the oldest and most unsettling questions in the genre — who can you trust when the threat is wearing a human face? The episode traces the theme of trust thr...
Ep 1002: It’s Still the Republican Party
No rebranding! They cashed all those checks with the Tea Party. Episode 1002 of The Professional Left opens with a pop quiz, and the reveal says everything you need to know about how this particular cycle always ends. Driftglass and...
Ep 1001: 119 Billion Kilometers and Counting
Episode 1001 of The Professional Left kicks off the post-1000 era with a reading from Octavia Butler — written in 1993, about a fictional America that looks uncomfortably like the one outside your window right now — and uses it as the jumping-o...
Ep 1000: For Your Consideration...
Episode 1000 of The Professional Left opens with the countdown finally hitting zero — and instead of a victory lap, Driftglass and Blue Gal do exactly what they've been doing for 999 episodes: explain the thing hiding in plain sight that everyo...
Ep 999 The Patron Saint of Corruption
Episode 999 of The Professional Left takes a detour through the smoke-filled back rooms of mid-century Chicago machine politics to explain something essential about the moment we're living in right now — because it turns out that Mike Royko had...
Ep 998: Who's This Jagoff?
Episode 998 of The Professional Left opens with a game of "Who's This Jagoff?" — a quiz that turns out to be a master class in how the Both Sides Do It lie gets laundered through the media, repeated without evidence, and rewarded with radio sho...
Ep 997: What Do Democrats Want?
Episode 997 of The Professional Left uses the sudden, very public firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes as a jumping-off point to ask a much bigger question — why do the people with the biggest megaphones still have absolutely no idea what Dem...
Ep 996: The Maine Event
Episode 996 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the media circus surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate primary, asking who is actually stirring the pot, why they're stirring it, and who benefits when a private matter between a marri...
Ep 995: The Politics of Pronouns
Episode 995 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into one of the most revealing tricks in modern political history — the quiet, deliberate shift from "we" to "they" that happens every time a prominent Republican needs to pretend they had ...
Ep 994: An Epidemic of Recycled Lies
Episode 994 of The Professional Left takes a hard look at the war on memory — the long, grinding campaign to erase what actually happened to this country and replace it with a comfortable myth that lets the people who caused the damage off the ...
Ep 993: Fools In a Burning House
Episode 993 of The Professional Left finally arrives at the pivotal year of 2008 — the moment the Republican party began eating itself alive — and traces exactly how a party that had just driven the country into a ditch decided that the best re...
Ep 992: Both Sides Don't Have A Budget Surplus
In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal trace how the Clinton-era budget surplus was dismantled piece by piece during the Bush years, setting the stage for the catastrophic financial collapse of 2008. While millions of...
Ep 991: Underbabied?
Episode 991 of The Professional Left starts with a question that sounds absurd on its face — are Americans "underbabied"? — and then spends an hour making the case that the people asking that question are the same ones who have spent decades do...
Ep 990: Straining Gnats, Swallowing Camels
Episode 990 of The Professional Left takes a step back from the daily chaos to talk about something the mainstream media almost never bothers with — scale — and why understanding it is the difference between seeing propaganda clearly and gettin...
Ep 989: 'Velveeta'
Episode 989 of The Professional Left takes on one of the most overused words in modern politics — "authenticity" — and asks whether anyone in American political media is actually serving the real thing, or just a smooth, processed, cheese-like ...
Ep 988: Schrödinger's Alliances
Episode 988 of The Professional Left is a drama in three acts, each one taking a hard look at a political strategy that keeps failing — and the people who keep insisting it will work next time. Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the endless, madd...
Ep 987: The Vice of the People
Episode 987 of The Professional Left takes a deep look at the concept of authority — where it comes from, who really has it, and what happens when the people in charge decide the rules no longer apply to them. Driftglass and Blue Gal trace a cl...
Ep 986: 'AmeriKKKan Gothic'
Episode 986 of The Professional Left traces how one simple political rule — Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" never to speak ill of a fellow Republican — quietly mutated over decades into something far more dangerous. Driftglass and Blue G...
Ep 985: 'The Cheaper The Crook...'
"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." -- The Maltese Falcon Episode 985 of The Professional Left takes a deep dive into the word "normalizing" — a term that gets thrown around constantly in political coverage, bu...
Ep 984: War On Hiatus Due To Bad Ratings
In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal take a hard look at how America ended up in yet another Middle East war — and why the whole thing feels like a rerun that somehow got worse the second time around. Drawing a shar...
Ep 983 "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb"
In this episode of The Professional Left, Driftglass and Blue Gal dig into the decades-long project that brought American politics to its current breaking point — and what it really means that we've arrived here. A viral social media feud invol...
