Latest episode
2. #DogShirtTV: Will Saletan on "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham"
01:22:40THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS IN BIG TROUBLE, and Lindsey Graham knew it. It was January 21, 2016, and the senator was taking questions at a press conference. A month earlier, he had abandoned his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Now two men he despised, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, were leading the race.Graham thought either of them, if nominated, would lose the general election. Choosing between them, he told reporters, was “like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?”Two months later, in March, Graham changed his mind. He endorsed Cruz and joked that it was better to be poisoned than shot. “Donald is like being shot in the head,” Graham told talk-show host Trevor Noah. “You might find an antidote to poisoning, I don’t know. But maybe there’s time.”Graham was wrong. Trump wasn’t a shot to the head. He didn’t kill the GOP. In fact, he won the election.Trump turned out to be poison. Over the next five years, he thoroughly corrupted Graham’s party. Republican leaders had time to counteract the poison, but they never did. One reason was that the poison moved slowly. Graham and other Republican politicians lost the ability to see what they were becoming. They rallied around an authoritarian, excused authoritarian acts, and embraced authoritarian ideas.This is a story about how that happened.
More episodes
View all episodes
1. #DogShirtTV: Sean Mirski on "We May Dominate the World"
01:30:09In the inaugural episode of #DogShirtTV: Book Talk, we discuss Sean Mirski's new book, "We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus."Publisher's Description:What did it take for the United States to become a global superpower? The answer lies in a missing chapter of American foreign policy with stark lessons for todayThe cutthroat world of international politics has always been dominated by great powers. Yet no great power in the modern era has ever managed to achieve the kind of invulnerability that comes from being completely supreme in its own neighborhood. No great power, that is, except one—the United States.In We May Dominate the World, Sean A. Mirski tells the riveting story of how the United States became a regional hegemon in the century following the Civil War. By turns reluctant and ruthless, Americans squeezed their European rivals out of the hemisphere while landing forces on their neighbors’ soil with dizzying frequency. Mirski reveals the surprising reasons behind this muscular foreign policy in a narrative full of twists, colorful characters, and original accounts of the palace coups and bloody interventions that turned the fledgling republic into a global superpower.Today, as China makes its own run at regional hegemony and nations like Russia and Iran grow more menacing, Mirski’s fresh look at the rise of the American colossus offers indispensable lessons for how to meet the challenges of our own century.
672. Kashmir Hill on False Positives
59:41Wherein Kashmir Hill joins to discuss her latest article on false positives in Google's automatic screening for child sexual abuse material.
637. Minna Ålander on Finland, Sweden, and NATO
01:00:12Streamed live on May 20, 2022 Wherein Minna Ålander, Research Assistant at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, joins us to discuss Sweden, Finland, and NATO!
671. Mike Pesca on High Conflict and Being Horrible
59:04Wherein Mike Pesca joins us to discuss deescalating high conflict and how not to be a horrible person.
636. Where's the Lie, Matteo Carrabba?
01:03:16Wherein Matteo Carrabba plays "Where'e the Lie?" with a story about being kidnapped in Jordan.
635. Dan Byman on the Buffalo Shooting
01:01:04Wherein, Dan Byman—author of "Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism"—joins the show to talk about the shooting in Buffalo, New York.