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With All Due Respect
Freedom Won — Now Don’t Blow It (with Tara Setmayer)
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Two days after one of the most consequential midterm elections in memory, Marcus Flowers and Madeline Summerville sit down with Tara Setmayer — former Republican, founder of the Seneca Project, and one of the clearest voices in the never-Trump movement — for an hour of celebration, analysis, and hard-nosed advice for what comes next. Texas is blue, Georgia has its first Black woman governor, and over 100 women just made history in Congress. So how did it happen, and what does it mean?
Tara breaks down why the Republican coalition collapsed — corruption became the number one issue for the first time in a generation, the Epstein files landed, and Vivek Ramaswamy ran what she calls the most vile political ad she’s seen in 33 years. She also talks about her Seneca Project ads — “America is Watching” and “Let Freedom Win” — and why the Democrats who won were the ones who finally learned how to meet voters where they are.
But the celebration comes with a warning. Tara is direct about what Democrats need to do with their new majority: don’t waste political capital trying to impeach Trump (you don’t have the votes and it only helps him), go after the cabinet instead, and let Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin loose with their gavels to investigate the Trump crime family, ICE abuses, corporate surveillance pricing, and the Epstein files. Hakeem Jeffries becomes the first Black Speaker of the House — and Tara has a message for him: more Brooklyn, less Beltway.
The bully is down but not out. Trump is suffering a narcissistic injury, surrounded by the worst people he’s ever had around him, and cornered authoritarians in that position have a history of doing unpredictable and dangerous things. Democrats can still lose in 2027 if they don’t play the next two years right.
Marcus Flowers and Madeline Summerville confront the chaos, hypocrisy, and misinformation plaguing our country while amplifying the voices of tomorrow’s leaders. This isn’t just a podcast—it’s a call to action.
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The Playbook Hasn’t Changed — and Denver Riggleman Is Reading It Out Loud
01:05:30|Six days out from the midterms, Marcus and Madeline are joined by former Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman — now one of the sharpest voices in the country on radicalization, disinformation, and the inner workings of MAGA — and the conversation does not stay on script.They start with their midterm predictions (Denver is feeling 231-204 in the House, 51-49 in the Senate — and immediately raises the Fetterman problem), but quickly spiral into a deeper conversation: why do Trump voters stay loyal even after Epstein, even after Iran, even after everything? Denver, who owns whiskey distilleries in rural Virginia and still talks to lifelong Trump voters at the bar, has a theory. He traces the psychological architecture of MAGA radicalization from the satanic panic through the Muslim Brotherhood panic through QAnon — and explains why the thing that finally cracks people isn’t morality, it’s diesel prices.Then it gets serious. Denver details what he expects will happen after Election Day: coordinated lawfare in multiple states, the “million dollar snitch fund” as a stand-back-and-stand-by call to action, potential violence at specific polling locations and the homes of political leaders, and a deliberate strategy of chaos designed to lay the groundwork for 2028. He draws on his experience documenting January 6th (he literally wrote the book on it) and connects the playbook to Russia’s disinformation strategy — explaining why Bannon, Stone, and the rest are not stupid, they’re just immoral.Madeline brings the law, the rage, and a must-see YouTube channel. Marcus brings the army background and the political instincts. Denver brings everything else.Brianna Brown: Texas Is the New Georgia — and the Work Has Already Started
01:17:21|Marcus and Madeline are back together — 13 days out from Election Day — and they’ve brought in Brianna Brown, Executive Director of Texas Organizing PAC (TOP PAC), to break down what’s actually happening on the ground in Texas.Brianna has been organizing Black and Latino communities across Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio for 16 years. She makes the case for why Texas is the new Georgia — a majority-of-color state still governed by leaders whose priorities have nothing to do with the people who live there — and why this cycle feels different. Early voting lines in Duncanville turned her away on day one. High-opportunity voters are showing up at the doors already locked in. TOP PAC knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors this cycle, and what they’re hearing is energy that Brianna says she hasn’t seen in a midterm before.They dig into why Texas leads the nation in uninsured residents (a stat that hasn’t changed in 13 years), the Koch Brothers’ Libre Initiative and how it has built real infrastructure in South Texas, the redistricting fight that started in Tarrant County and went national, and why the culture war playbook keeps losing when organizers simply ask: “Was it a trans person who raised your gas prices?”On the statewide races: Brianna’s take on James Tallarico’s path to attorney general, why Gina Hinojosa has a real advantage as the race’s demographics align with what Texas actually looks like, and why — money notwithstanding — she’s more bullish on Texas right now than she’s been in 16 years.Trump Just Bought Diesel from Putin. Jon Ossoff Just Put Mike Collins on the Record
11:15|Marcus is solo this week — Madeline is out — and he’s got two things on his mind: Trump’s diesel deal with Putin, and the Ossoff-Collins debate.On the Putin deal: the administration is planning to import 300,000 tons of Russian diesel to start, ramping up to a million tons and potentially more. Marcus isn’t buying the spin that it’ll bring gas prices down — the U.S. burns far more diesel than that — and he’s furious about what it actually is: lifting sanctions on an adversary, funding a war machine, and stabbing Ukraine in the back. Twelve senators, including six Republicans, pushed back and said it violates the 2022 ban on Russian energy imports. Trump did it anyway.Then there’s Georgia, where Jon Ossoff just wiped the floor with Mike Collins in their latest debate. Ossoff hit Collins on his federal ethics investigation, the House subpoena he refused to comply with, and the Laken Riley Act vote Collins has been lying about. Collins’s response — pure deflection. Marcus’s verdict: that Senate seat is coming home.He closes on the message he keeps coming back to: Republicans are running 2024 culture war playbooks against a 2026 electorate that is fed up and feeling it at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor. It’s the economy, and Democrats are winning that argument. Get out and vote.Juliana Stratton Is Running to Be Illinois’s Next Senator
26:47|Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton is 20 days out from Election Day, running to succeed Senator Dick Durbin and join Senator Tammy Duckworth in representing Illinois in the United States Senate. She won a competitive Democratic primary and has the endorsement of President Obama, Governor Pritzker, and Marcus’s PAC, Hold the Line.The conversation covers the arc of her public life: growing up on Chicago’s South Side with a Navy veteran father who marched from Selma to Montgomery and a public school teacher mother, becoming a lawyer and mediator for two decades, then watching a state representative try to strip healthcare from seniors like her mother — who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s — and deciding that somebody needed to run against him. That somebody turned out to be her. She won that race against a 13-year incumbent, passed 10 bills in a single term with bipartisan support and a Republican governor’s signature, and has spent nearly two terms as Lieutenant Governor overseeing the Birth Equity Initiative, the Restore Reinvest Renew criminal justice investment program, and Girls Lead — a mentoring program for girls in fifth through twelfth grade across every corner of Illinois.Marcus asks her what she heard in the primary, what she’d do first in the Senate, and what she’d say to voters about affordability. Her answers are specific: roll back the HR1 Medicaid cuts immediately, raise the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour, give middle-class families a tax break paid for by a millionaire surcharge, and fight for universal healthcare as the long game. And she makes the accountability argument that Marcus has been making for months: flip the House and Senate, be a wall of resistance, pass things and let Trump veto them, then tell that story clearly.Twenty days out. Early voting is open in Illinois. Find her at julianastratton.com.27 Days Out, a Nightmare Scenario, and Why Marcus Won't Let Ossoff Run for President
20:22|Marcus runs his watch list. Ohio is the early bellwether — if Sherrod Brown holds, the dominoes start moving. North Carolina matters early. Then Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas. He's not making a 30-seat prediction like the bullish House member he spoke to at the CBC retreat, but he's cautiously optimistic, and he explains exactly why: anger gets people to stay home, but redirected anger gets people to cross the aisle. Democrats messaging on affordability — staying on the chain from gas prices to diesel to shipping to grocery prices — gives angry former Trump voters something to vote toward, not just against.Madeline brings her jury consultant framework: undecideds don't move on issues, they move on trust. The question isn't whether someone's upset about tariffs. It's whether they believe Democrats will do something different. And the primaries have already filtered out the most contentious intra-party fights — the candidates left on the ballot are mostly ones people can live with. That's a better position than the party has been in for a while.Then the 2028 bench: Westmore, Shapiro, Pritzker, and Ossoff all come up. Marcus loves all of them. He also does not want any of them to leave Georgia. He is explicit about this. He will not share. Pritzker can run. Warnock and Ossoff stay. That's final.Madeline closes with two announcements: daily videos launching on her Maddie's Hot Take YouTube channel, and a trip to Las Vegas to participate in a surrounded-format debate against Ben Michael and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys — who, she notes with some satisfaction, is Canadian. Her geneticist husband is already pulling the studies. She's ready.Anthropic Won. Thirty-One States Have Laws on AI. Congress Has Done Nothing
17:19|Madeline opens on Anthropic's legal wins — two cases, both decided in their favor, with roughly a hundred judges signing on in support of their challenge against the Pentagon. The context: Dario Amodei walked away from Pete Hegseth's military contract rather than agree to use AI for autonomous targeting without human oversight or for surveilling American citizens without warrants. Hegseth said no to both conditions, blacklisted Anthropic, and declared them a supply chain risk. Now the courts have weighed in. Marcus says what he's been saying since the beginning: there should always be a human who gets the last word on any targeting decision. AI doesn't know when innocent bystanders walk into a building that's been painted as a target. Pilots need to be able to redirect at the last second. That's not a political position. That's just how it works.Then the campaign ad problem. From January through mid-September, campaigns spent more than $54 million on TV ads that used or were suspected of using AI — and about $38 million of that didn't disclose it. Madeline calls the Spencer Pratt/Karen Bass situation — where Pratt used AI to put words directly in Bass's mouth — straight-up defamation. Thirty-one states have passed laws. Mike Johnson's Congress has done nothing.They close on the economic through-line that keeps coming up: gas prices drive diesel costs, diesel costs drive shipping, shipping drives everything in the store. That chain is why the president matters for prices — and this president started a war and a tariff regime that both pushed in the same direction. The JCPOA was working. Any expert could have told them what would happen. They didn't ask.The Good Liars, the Kiss Cam, and Why We're All Victims of the Same People
15:10|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.Keisha Won the Debate and Trump Told Nebraska That Los Angeles Is Expendable
18:43|First, the Georgia gubernatorial debate. Marcus wasn’t there (he was traveling), but Madeline watched the whole thing and her verdict is clear: Keisha Lance Bottoms was prepared, quick on her feet, and answered every question with substance. People who had privately wondered whether she could hold her own on a debate stage got their answer. Rick Jackson, by contrast, looked like he didn’t know the topics, looked out of touch on others, and got caught in a flat-out lie — denying that he’d ever suggested using the National Guard during elections, while a clip of him doing exactly that was sitting right there. They play it. He was talking about it with a voter at what appears to be a campaign event. On camera. Marcus’s read: he was trying to distance himself from Trump and it didn’t work. Too late, Rick.Then Trump’s Nebraska rally, where he called rising gas prices “a small price to pay” and suggested that if Iran wanted to take out Los Angeles or San Diego, well, that’s just how it goes. Marcus says that should be an impeachable comment. Madeline says Democrats should be hammering the simplest version of this argument relentlessly: aren’t you supposed to be the president for everyone? He’s never tried to be. The evidence is everywhere — withheld funds from blue states after disasters, a war that any expert could have predicted would drive up gas prices, tariffs he lied about who would pay for. And yet the coherent messaging argument against all of it keeps getting lost in the noise.They close on the independent voter collapse — Trump won independents by 15-17 points in 2024, and he’s now 60-plus points underwater with them. That’s the tell of the tape, 27 days out.