Impolitic with John Heilemann

In which John Heilemann talks with Kenny and Keith Lucas, the 35-year-old identical twin comedians, actors, producers, and writers who share a 2021 Oscar nomination (with Will Berson and Shaka King) for Best Original Screenplay for "Judas and the Black Messiah." Heilemann and the Lucas Brothers discuss their decade-long quest to persuade Hollywood to green-light the story of Fred Hampton, the precocious and charismatic chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party in the late Sixties, and his assassination by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI; Keith and Kenny's unlikely rise from rough family circumstances and the mean streets of Newark, New Jersey through elite law schools (from which they both dropped out days from graduation) to acclaim in the world stand-up comedy, culminating in their 2017 Netflix special, "On Drugs"; the role of illicit substances in their art and lives; their mutual struggles with PTSD, addiction, depression, and suicide; their out-front, at times hilarious, codependency; their passions for politics and philosophy; and how "Seinfeld" saved their lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In which John Heilemann talks with Cory Booker, Demoratic senator from New Jersey. In the first single-topic episode of the podcast, Heilemann and Booker do a deep dive into an issue that's been central to Booker's career: criminal justice reform and racial equity. They discuss the Derek Chauvin trial and their fears if justice isn't served; the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, just recently passed by the House, and the criticism it has received from Black Lives Matter and others on left for not going far enough; the legalization of marijuana and the need to address the widespread inequities in America's drug laws; and Booker's view of Biden as ally in the cause of police, prison, and sentencing reform despite Biden's checkered history on these issues. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In which John Heilemann talks with Nicolle Wallace, the host of Deadline: White House on MSNBC. Heilemann and Wallace discuss Joe Biden’s first 11 weeks in office and the striking boldness of the agenda he's pursuing; the state of the Covid-19 pandemic amid the vaccination boom and the series of moving COVID eulogies (Lives Well Lived) that Wallace has delivered on her show each day for the past year; the Republican Party as it struggles to define itself in the post-Trump era; the aftershocks from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol; the Derek Chauvin murder trial in Minneapolis for the killing of George Floyd and America's ongoing racial reckoning; and the wave of voter suppression measures in Georgia and elsewhere and their implications for our democracy. Wallace also shares what she’s missed most during the pandemic and is most eager to recover when things return to normal ... whatever that means. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In which John Heilemann talks with Nicolle Wallace, the host of Deadline: White House on MSNBC. Heilemann and Wallace discuss Joe Biden’s first 11 weeks in office and the striking boldness of the agenda he's pursuing; the state of the Covid-19 pandemic amid the vaccination boom and the series of moving COVID eulogies (Lives Well Lived) that Wallace has delivered on her show each day for the past year; the Republican Party as it struggles to define itself in the post-Trump era; the aftershocks from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol; the Derek Chauvin murder trial in Minneapolis for the killing of George Floyd and America's ongoing racial reckoning; and the wave of voter suppression measures in Georgia and elsewhere and their implications for our democracy. Wallace also shares what she’s missed most during the pandemic and is most eager to recover when things return to normal ... whatever that means. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In which John Heilemann talks with Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell, co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. Heilemann and Dingell discuss the continuing fallout from the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and ongoing violent extremist threats; her recent grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the role of social media in spreading misinformation and disinformation; her view of President Biden's first ten weeks in office and the major items on his agenda going forward, including infrastructure, climate change, and voting rights. Dingell also addresses her experiences with domestic violence and drug abuse in her family growing up, as well as her late husband—the legendary Michigan congressman John Dingell, who held the seat his wife now occupies for 59 years before she succeeded him—and his evolution regarding gun control, in the context of the renewed debate over new gun safety measures following the horrific shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In which John Heilemann talks with Franklin Leonard, the founder and CEO of The Black List, a company best known for its annual survey of the most popular screenplays among Hollywood executives that remain unproduced. Heilemann and Leonard discuss this year's Oscar nominations, and in particular the historic levels of diversity among the slate of nominees, as well as the epic fail that was the recent Globe Globes; filmmaking amid the continuing threat of Covid-19, the explosion of streaming fueled by the pandemic, and what it might mean for the future of the industry; the story of how and why Leonard started the Black List and the long-term effects he hopes that his work and other democratizing influences will have on the entertainment industry; structural racism in Hollywood and new initiatives, including one led by Leonard, designed to combat it; and the powerful legacy of the late Chadwick Boseman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clint Watts has built his career around the study of extremism: online and off, foreign and domestic, from Russian disinformation campaigns and cyberwarfare to homegrown conspiracists, militia movements, and white supremacists. A former Army infantry officer and FBI special agent, he has served on the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force and consulted for its National Security Branch. Currently a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-resident fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, Watts is the author of “Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.”Watts first came to national prominence as one of the first experts to raise concerns about Russian online activity during the 2016 presidential campaign. But in the run-up to 2020, even as he kept an eye on the nefarious cyber exploits of foreign actors, Watts focused increasingly on the domestic front, where MAGA-fueled extremist activity was proliferating online and coalescing into a tangible terror threat. Watts warned that the threat would come to a head on or before Election Day — a fear that proved prescient, albeit ever so slightly premature. On this episode of Hell & High Water, Heilemann and Watts discuss the developments and dynamics that led to the insurrection at the US Capitol, with Watts laying out a taxonomy of extremism and suggesting that what lies ahead may prove even more violent, chaotic, and destabilizing than what took place on January 6. To read Watts's new "Selected Wisdom" Substack, subscribe here: https://clintwatts.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andrew Ross Sorkin is arguably the country's most important and influential financial and business journalist — and, without doubt, its most plugged in. Having started his career at the New York Times as intern when he was still in high school, he now presides over DealBook, which began its life in 2001 as a newsletter about Wall Street and the mergers and acquisitions game, but over the past 20 years has grown into a sprawling finance, business, and economic news fiefdom within the larger Times empire. At the same time, Sorkin is a co-anchor of Squawk Box, the daily CNBC morning show avidly watched by titans of industry and hopped-up day traders alike. He is also the author of "Too Big To Fail," the definitive chronicle of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which was adapted into a star-studded movie of the same name by HBO; a co-creator of the hit Showtime series "Billions"; and is currently developing another film for HBO on the GameStop/Robinhood meme-stock saga.On this episode of Hell & High Water, Heilemann and Sorkin discuss how big business sees the new political era dawning in Washington, DC: from President Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief and economic recovery legislation to the possibility of raising the minimum wage to the deep polarization that continues to hobble American politics in the wake (and still under the influence) of Donald Trump. They also dive into the many speculative manias currently gripping the financial markets, whether this latest Big Casino moment presages a long-predicted crash, and what if anything regulators might do about the stunning power being amassed by Big Tech. Finally, Heilemann asks Sorkin to list his top five Wall Street films, and the two men riff on the unique place that the financial masters of the universe occupy in popular culture — as objects of fascination, fetishism, reverence, and revulsion in roughly equal measure. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry is a pivotal piece of American history that's neither well-known nor well-understood — to the extent it's known or understood at all. In 1859, Brown, a militant white abolitionist and religious zealot, led a raid on the federal armory in that small Virginia (now West Virginia) town to acquire weapons and spark a slave revolt to end the peculiar institution and cleanse America of its original sin. The raid was a debacle, failing utterly in its immediate objectives, but ultimately helped to set in motion the chain of events that led to the Civil War. In 2013, the writer and musician James McBride published a novel, "The Good Lord Bird," that was a heavily fictionalized but also historically rooted account of Brown's life. The book went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction that year, and, last fall, spawned a seven-part Showtime mini-series, produced by Blumhouse Television, starring and co-created by the celebrated actor Ethan Hawke as Brown (a performance for which Hawke has been nominated for a Golden Globe this year) and Grammy and Tony Award-winning "Hamilton" phenom Daveed Diggs as the Black abolitionist icon Frederick Douglass.The TV incarnation of "The Good Lord Bird" is an incendiary, irreverent, at times hilarious, at times moving entertainment — beautifully written, gorgeously shot, studded with standout performances. But it's also something more than a stellar costume drama. In its treatment of racism not as an individual moral failing but a system of oppression; its examination of white guilt, ally-ship, and redemption; its illustration of the arguments between incrementalism and radicalism; and its forcing of the question of nonviolence versus by-all-means-necessary-ism, "The Good Lord Bird" is, as Matt Zoller Seitz put it in his review for Vulture, “a historical epic of real vision ... [that] speaks to the present as well as the past ... lead[ing] us to connect what happened back then with what’s happening on American streets right now.” As Black History Month comes to a close, Heilemann sits down with Diggs, Hawke, and McBride to discuss the series, their collaboration, and what Hawke has called the "dangerous" territory where art and race intersect — and that "The Good Lord Bird" illuminates so incandescently. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jaime Harrison is one of the brightest young rising stars in the Democratic Party. Born and raised by a single mother in Orangeburg, South Carolina, educated at Yale and Georgetown Law, and mentored by legendary Palmetto State congressman Jim Clyburn, Harrison became the first African American chairman of his home state's Democratic Party in 2013, at the age of 37. After a stint as an Associate Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Harrison launched a campaign to topple incumbent South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham — a bid widely seen as a distant longshot at the outset, but that ultimately turned into one of the marquee races of the 2020 election cycle, with Harrison shattering all South Carolina fund-raising records with a $133 million haul. In the end, Graham beat back the upstart challenge, but Harrison's emergence as a national figure left no one surprised when President Biden chose him in January to be the new chairman of the DNC.In a conversation recorded as the Senate was rendering its verdict in Trump's historic second impeachment trial, Heilemann and Harrison delve into the short and long-term implications of Trump's acquittal for Republicans and Democrats alike, the existential questions it raises about our constitutional republic, and the inescapable racial dynamics at play in the terrible events of January 6. They discuss Harrison's youthful infatuation with politics, his quasi-filial relationship with Clyburn, and his ambitious plans for the DNC — from grassroots organizing to combating voter suppression to crafting a true 50-state strategy — as the national party gears up for the 2022 midterm elections and beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices