Madeline went to the Braves game Monday night and came back moved. Watching the kiss cam pan across the crowd — farmers, hipsters, people of every background, all lighting up the same way when the camera found them — she felt the weight of what's been done to us. Those people aren't enemies. They were made to think they are.
And she walked back through the cognitive dissonance she watches play out every time she talks to Trump supporters who genuinely don't know the answer when they're asked what evidence they have that the 2020 election was stolen. They just know what they've been fed.
Marcus connects it to the Good Liars — the YouTube channel that does what Jordan Klepper does, going to rallies and asking hard questions — and then goes further back, to his campaign experience in Northwest Georgia, where he heard the same talking points over and over and could trace each one to Fox News or hostile foreign actors. And then further back still: to Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes, who figured out in the 1990s that politics weren't divided enough and built an industry around changing that. Georgia went from a Democratic state to 22 years of Republican control in no small part because of what those two men decided the country should look like.
The through line Marcus keeps coming back to is Nelson Mandela: we're all victims of people who wanted to take advantage of us. The goal isn't to beat the other side. It's to remember we're on the same team. And the first thing people who want to destroy democracy always go after is a shared set of facts and a free press — because without those, you can't have the conversation at all. The judges pushing back on Trump's press bans are doing something important. So is this show.
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