Offline with Jon Favreau

This week, a Crooked Media crossover event as Brian Beutler, host of Positively Dreadful, sits down with Jon to talk all the things Democrats could learn from Republicans. Yep, you read that right. Brian makes the case that when it comes to messaging, Democrats should be less shy and spend more energy drawing attention to Republican scandals and controversies — just like the GOP did for Hillary’s emails, the migrant caravan, or crime. He talks to Jon about the obstacles in front of the Democratic party, what will matter to swing voters in 2024, and how the Republican Party is already on the hunt for the next Benghazi. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Beth Goldberg joins Offline to discuss her work at Jigsaw, the misinformation-tackling team at Google that’s been called “the Internet’s justice league.” Goldberg walks Jon through the dos and don’ts of drawing your Q Anon cousins, election-denying uncles, and vaccine-skeptic grandmas out of their conspiracy rabbit holes this Thanksgiving. By pre-bunking, seeding doubt, and listening with compassion, together we can hash it all out. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. 

Dr. Lynn Vavreck, professor of political scientist at UCLA and contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, sits down with Jon to talk about 2022 midterms. After 2020, Lynn and her colleagues interviewed over 500,000 voters, leading them to conclude that our politics aren’t just polarized, but calcified. She argues that calcification has placed our politics on a knife’s edge, raising the stakes of every election and that 2022 was the biggest case of calcification we’ve seen yet. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. 

Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast, talks with Jon about Elon Musk’s newest and thorniest business venture: purchasing Twitter. In a recent article, “Welcome to Hell, Elon,” Patel describes the quandary that awaits the Tesla founder and argues that Musk has made a historic mistake. He joins Offline to talk Musks’ misguided free speech promises, the limits of technical solutions to political problems, and the hubris of an internet troll-turned-King Twit. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. 

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. 

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa faces 100 years in prison stemming from what she says are illegitimate charges, but that hasn’t stopped her mission of exposing political malfeasance and lies in her home country of the Philippines. She joined David to talk about immigrating to the US as a child and later returning to the Philippines where she built a career, technology’s corrosive impact on journalism and democracy, founding Rappler and finding herself a government target, and maintaining hope as she fights corruption and disinformation through her journalism.

What will it take to save democracy in 2022 and beyond? The MAGA movement is one of the greatest threats to American democracy. But one of the greatest divides in American politics is between the minority of voters who follow politics closely and the vast majority who don’t. In order to win the midterms, Democrats will have to reach that majority.New episodes of The Wilderness drop every Monday. Subscribe to The Wilderness wherever you get your podcasts.Apple: apple.co/thewildernessSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6JfsJlD5sBhVpEQEALNw4UStitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-wilderness If you want to learn more about how you can take action in the fight for our democracy, head over to https://votesaveamerica.com/midterm-madness/