F-22 flyovers, 160-foot flags draped across the playing field, full color guards, camouflage uniforms, The Star-Spangled Banner, God Bless America, Support The Troops Nights, special perks for vets. What is the origin of the runaway military worship so ingrained in our sports? How did our professional baseball and football leagues become so infused to our military state and what can fans of these sports do to deconstruct and pushback against the forces of jingoism and military fetishizing? We are joined by Professor Robert Elias.

We're told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times' Nick Kristof explained "Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History." The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates' favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by - who else? - Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media... bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it's actually the opposite. For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true - just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be "measuring" improvements in society? On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence. Our guest is Dr. Jason Hickel.

Focus groups have long-been derided by the left, right, and center for watering down culture and reducing creative and political endeavors to dull, show-of-hand reductionism. But what if focus groups – which first arose from socialist experiments in 1920s Vienna – are not inherently bad? What if they've simply been exploited by the capitalist class and could, potentially, have much to offer a left-wing, democratic vision of the world? We are joined by author and professor Liza Featherstone to discuss the problems and potential of the much-maligned, but often scapegoated, focus group.

In the wake of the 2016 election, many conservatives, liberals, and - unfortunately - even some on the left pointed to Democrats' reliance on so-called "identity politics" to explain Donald Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton. One of the most popular manifestations of this sentiment was the controversy surrounding bathrooms and transgender rights. The general theory was that some unspecified cohort of voters, outraged by the oppressive nature of trans politics, responded by voting for a reactionary bigot they otherwise wouldn’t have supported. “Identity politics” – and its close cousin “political correctness” – had gone too far, we heard, and Trump's election was the blowback. Commentaries in corporate media pushed this narrative, while missing the essential point: The alleged “identity issues” of trans people are not a matter of self-esteem or feeling good about themselves or about some academic notion of "being recognized." In many concrete ways, they’re quite literally a matter of life and death. Yet conveying this notion to the broader, cis public has been almost impossible as media narratives surrounding trans issues – when they’re not outright hostile or glib – have disproportionately focused on surface-level improvements among the wealthy and within spaces that even help advance U.S. militarism. How do we breakthrough the corrosive narratives of either contempt on the one hand, or imperialist inclusion on the other? And how can we elevate narratives that affect the vast majority of trans people, like housing, police terror, legal status, healthcare and basic human dignity, while pushing back against liberal and left holdouts who dismiss trans issues as simply another “distraction.” We are joined on today's episode by Dean Spade, associate professor at Seattle University School of Law.

“Bush didn’t send enough Troops.” “Trump needs authorization from Congress before launching a war.” “Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories are not helpful.” We hear these liberal objections to war and occupation all the time. On the surface, they sound opposed to injustice—and maybe sometimes are—but what if, more often than not, they nitpick process, protocol, and procedure without ever offering substantive, existential critiques of American war-making and military destruction. Their function, primarily, is to give the appearance of dissent where none really exists. In spycraft, the term “limited hangout” is defined as a “public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important details.” Just the same, this limited opposition to war, or pseudo-opposition, serves as a way of superficially opposing war or imperialism or military occupation without the mess of actually taking a stand against it. From the invasion of Iraq to the Israeli occupation of Palestine to the boundary-less and boundless perma-war on terror, this pseudo-opposition has taken many forms over the years. In this episode, we discuss the sophisticated nature of this technique, how one can differentiate between good faith nuance and concern-trolling, and how discrediting pseudo-opposition can open space for real conversations about the true consequences of empire. We are joined by Nora Barrows-Friedman, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada.

Jake Tapper’s career trajectory is an object lesson in how to succeed in corporate media. The formula generally goes like this: go after the fringes of the left and the right––but mostly the left. Never offend any traditional centers of power. Mug. Constantly mug for the camera. Hitch your brand to “The Troops” And-always, always––attack from the neoconservative right.   As previously discussed in our John McCain News Brief, the issue with John McCain was less so about the man himself but what he represented: posturing National Security state jingoism at the heart of America’s civic religion; a phony notion of self-importance that animates US militarism. Just the same, this week’s episode is less about Tapper and more about what he represents: the dead center of American corporate media; hollow, faux-adversarialism marked by military worship; less interested in original reporting than serving as a bouncer for Club Acceptable Opinion.   We are joined on this week's episode by journalist Natasha Lennard.

"The suspect fled on foot, police said. Call this number if you have any information." "The incident took place at the 1200 block of Grove." "Police say." "Police sources are telling us." "Suspect is thought to be armed and dangerous." We’ve all heard this type of Official Copspeak before. The local press dutifully informs us about "suspects" and "gang members" and "burglars." They're infiltrating our neighborhoods, rampaging through our streets, climbing in our windows. The police, of course, are just doing their part to keep us safe. Local media and community-based message boards they pander to read like police blotters. "Dial 1-800-985-TIPS for your friendly neighborhood detective!" But what if publishing police department press releases isn't really journalism, but rather free public relations for an already extremely powerful, routinely violent, often corrupt and deeply conflicted institution? What if the genre of so-called “crime’ reporting is inherently reactionary and the whole enterprise of how we think about “crime” needs to be deconstructed and reconsidered? On this week’s episode, we discuss why local "crime" reporting widely suffers from racist tabloidism and what overworked and under-resourced journalists can do to gather information from sources that don't wear badges. We are joined by Chicago-based activists Sharlyn Grace and Malcolm London.

Trump says he opposed the war in Iraq, but in fact said he supported it in an obscure interview in 2004. McCain was for the tax cuts before he was against them. Republicans say they’re Christians, yet support a philandering liar. Hypocrisy takedowns – which reached peak popularity during the heyday of The Daily Show – have been the bread and butter of liberal discourse for years. Gawker founder Nick Denton famously said that “Hypocrisy was the only modern sin”––doctrine-driven ideologies had been replaced by the nihilistic ersatz ideology of not contradicting oneself. Consistency, even in the service of nothing and in defense of power, was the highest moral achievement. But as outright lying and contradiction were not only ignored but embraced by Trumpism, this worldview began to lose any remaining purchase. And as the emptiness of this approach grew more stark, a new generation of politically engaged people sought out traditional ideologies based on first principles, on the left this broadly manifested as a resurgence of socialism, which offered an alternative to the self-contained cult of self-satisfaction. On today's episode, we discuss the limits of hypocrisy-as-critique, when it can still be useful and why never contradicting oneself is often evidence more of cowardice than principle. Our guest is Roqayah Chamseddine.

"Diversity" is a simultaneously important and buzzword-y term beloved by the media, corporations, real estate agents and elite universities. It’s something to strive for and take pride in, a symbol of inclusion and tolerance. While diversity is a noble feature – and something all large systems should strive for – it originally was not supposed to be an ends in-and-of-itself. Diversity, in this vein, has morphed under capitalism into a PR industry, supplanting notions of equity, decolonization and desegregation for something much more sanitized. The term is now often used as a catch-all for making white people feel better about the schools they go to, businesses they run, neighborhoods they gentrify. It largely exists, in its current iteration, to ameliorate whiteness rather than confront it, allowing for the commodification of the idea while giving existing power structures a glossy patina of liberal race-awareness. We are joined this week by journalist and author Jeff Chang, Vice President of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward.

Post-Cold War liberal chauvinism knew no better ideological conduit than the hit NBC series The West Wing. Foreign policy was imperial, staffers were self-satisfied, and Serious Democrats fended off radical leftists and made the Tough Choices needed to run a benevolent superpower.    The West Wing, created and primarily written by Aaron Sorkin, heavily influenced the politics of dozens of high-status Obama-era liberals. By their own admission, we know it had among its superfans Obama staffers Sam Graham-Felsen and Eric Lesser, Vox founders Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, The New Statesman’s Helen Lewis, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell (who produced and wrote for the show), Democratic party hacks Meredith Shiner and Micah Lasher, and many more. Indeed, it’s fair to say anyone under 40 who came up through the ranks of liberal public relations and politics during the Obama years was either directly impacted by The West Wing or, indirectly, by those under its comforting, Starbucks-color-palette worldview.    On this week's episode, we discuss how this Sorkinized worldview both informed and reflected prevailing thought in the Democratic Party, promoted smugness as the highest virtue, and––more generally––how ideology is spread through seemingly benign cultural products like schlocky television dramas.    We are joined by Toronto-based writer and co-host of the Michael and Us podcast Luke Savage.