Shows / Political Junkie Podcast
Political Junkie Podcast
Where contemporary history and politics meet the challenge of today.
clairepotter.substack.com
Episodes
Political Junkie PodcastNot Dead Yet!
This image of President Donald Trump leaving the White House prior to the Labor Day weekend raced around the internet and fed rumors that he was either already…
Political Junkie PodcastDisco Donald
Hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, the first out gay man to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, at his January 2025 Senate confirmation hearing. Photo credit…
Political Junkie PodcastJust Say No To Bathroom Politics
Delaware Representative Sarah McBride at the Delmarva Central Railroad headquarters in Harrington, DE, August, 2025. Behind her is Senator Chris Coons. Photo…
Political Junkie PodcastBad Guys
Representative Cory Mills (FL-07) firing up the base in August, 2022. Photo credit: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock We begin with a clip from the so-called…
Political Junkie PodcastLoomered!
We begin our show with a clip from a June 3, 2025 White House Press briefing in which Karoline Leavitt is asked about Laura Loomer’s influence on White House…
Political Junkie PodcastFighting Words
Photo credit: Jim Vallee/Shutterstock Today’s theme music is Ni Aarin, by Cast of Characters; the show begins with State Senator Barack Obama’s keynote speech…
Political Junkie PodcastA Trip to Epstein Island
As the 2020 campaign revved up, MAGA conspiracy theorists once again attempted to portray the Democratic Party as covering up elite crimes: note the triple…
Political Junkie PodcastPassing the Buck
President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson answer questions about the budget bill from the media at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on…
Political Junkie PodcastGunfighter Nation
We begin with a response to last Saturday’s attacks on Minnesota State legislators and their families from Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, as well…
Political Junkie PodcastPolitical Junkie Summer Film Festival: Reese Witherspoon’s “Legally Blonde” (2001) with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s live video! This morning, Natalia and I had fun talking about Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) making the transition…
Political Junkie PodcastWe Love You, Bro
Hi friends: You may have seen changes in this neighborhood lately. Starting this summer, there’s going to be more multi-media content that you can consume the…
Political Junkie PodcastNo Kings
Today’s video cast is available to all subscribers and will also be issued as a Why Now? podcast: this means that you can listen here, on the Substack app. If…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 72: Commiecrats
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, on August 23, 1953. Photo credit…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 71: Black Children, White Schools
Ruby Bridges leaving William Frantz Elementary School, in New Orleans in on or about November 14, 1960. Bridges became one of the first four Black children to…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 70: Fagin!
A 1903 illustration in London’s Daily Graphic of actor Ivan Berlyn as Fagin, one of the “weird and eccentric parts” he was said to specialize in. Descended…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 69: No More Girl Bosses
Image credit: Cookie Studio/Shutterstock On October 12, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 68: Arise, Ye Workers From Your Slumbers
In 1938, philosophy professor Edward I. Fenlon testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that that professors and students at Brooklyn…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 67: The Great American Crack-Up
Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who transformed the use of television to drive partisanship, speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C. after a…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 66: You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
Gift Shop in Trump Tower, New York City, September, 2022. Photo credit: Suiren2022/Wikimedia Commons In the 1939 movie, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” W.C…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 65: Baby Trump
A Trump baby balloon at the third Womens March, Los Angeles, January 19, 2019. Photo credit: betto rodrigues/Shutterstock Near the end of Donald J. Trump’s…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 64: How We Fight
Competing reproductive rights protesters outside the Supreme Court on March 26, 2024. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock On October 28, 2023, the morning…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 63: To The Constitution, With Love
As a freshman representative from Texas, Barbara Jordan sat on the House Judiciary Committee hearing the Watergate case in 1974. Photo credit: United States…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 62: We Shall Not Be Moved
Georgia Congressman John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, August 24, 2013. Photo credit: Joseph…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 61: How the GOP Killed Dissent
Republican Nelson Rockefeller (left) with Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on June 10, 1968. Photo credit: Yoichi Okomoto/Lyndon…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 60: When We Lose, We Win
On July 20, 1925 the Washington Times published three front page stories about Tennessee v. Scopes—along with Prohibition, crime, and a woman who was arrested…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 59: Before Kamala, There Was Shyamala
Delegates holding a pro-choice banner at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas. Photo credit: National Archives/Wikimedia Commons Before Vice…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 58: Picturing Asian America
Photographer Corky Lee on 42nd Street. Photo credit: Jennifer Takaki/Wikimedia Commons On July 23, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris reached the threshold of…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 57: Waiting For the Academy To Catch Up
Cover art from Susan Stryker, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader. Photo credit: Loren Rex Cameron. In the early 1980s, Christine Jorgensen, a…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 56: We Need A Grey New Deal
Amazon is a top recruiter of retired workers who need extra income to survive. Photo credit: Tada Images/Shutterstock.com We are all thinking about the aging…
Political Junkie PodcastBonus Episode: When Being Queer Was A Mental Illness
The south and east facade of St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., where historian Regina Kunzel’s archive of writing by incarcerated queer patients…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 55: The Ten-Dollar Founding Father
Photo credit: Janusz Pienkowski/Shutterstock It was May 12, 2009. A crowd had assembled at the White House for a program billed as “An Evening of Poetry &…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 54: Typewriter Combat
Hannah Arendt (left) and Mary McCarthy in the early 1970s: close friends, they were two of the very few women identified as “New York Intellectuals.” Photo…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 53: Nobody Else Has My Eyes
Sojourner Truth, copyright by Nell Irvin Painter, 2022: reprinted with permission of the artist. On July 21, 2023, amid a culture war manufactured by…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 52: Goodbye, Beaver Cleaver
The situation comedy Leave it to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963, was one of many half-hour comedies that idealized the American post-war suburbs, always…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 51: MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth
It’s the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose. On this…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 50: Who Do You Love?
If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 49: Without Mothers, There Is No War
Content warning: this podcast discusses sexual assault and other forms of violence. We begin this episode with Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 48: The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights
That was a small portion of the State of the Union speech that President Joe Biden gave on the evening of February 7, 2023. By the time many of you listen to…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 47: It's Good Work--If You Can Get It
The first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in late December 2019, near a lab in Wuhan, China that may or may not have been responsible for accidentally…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 46: Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
If you are my age, you remember exactly where you were when defense attorney Johnny Cochrane delivered his closing statement in The People v. O.J. Simpson, a…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 45: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
In the introduction to this episode, we begin with some false and partially false claims. Listeners should know that aborting a viable, healthy fetus in the…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 44: Inventing the Police
On June 10, 2020, grassroots calls to defund the New York City Police Department, initiated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the police murder of George…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 43: Where In the World Is Merze Tate?
You just heard an anthem sung by members of the Merze Tate Explorers, a non-profit, grassroots organization founded in 2008 for girls in the sixth through…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 42: Why the Blind Should Lead the Blind
By the time he was four, the little boy began to notice that he could see less of the world. Had he not been born into a working-class African American family…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 41: Heather Cox Richardson Believes In You
You remember that morning. It was November 9, 2016, and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had gotten even less sleep the night before than the…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 40: Oswald's Mother
We had a feedback issue on this recording. We managed to eliminate most of it, but if you hear a squeak, or a bit of distortion, that’s us—not your equipment…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 39: Old Enough To Fight, Old Enough To Vote
This episode begins with a 1994 exchange between a teenage American voter and sitting President William Jefferson Clinton. Running against an incumbent…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 38: The Adventures Of A Very Amateur Historian
You probably recognize the tune this episode begins with: it’s “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” sung by Leonid Kharitonov and the Red Army Orchestra at…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 37: Black Resistance, Black Joy
The peaceful march in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 6, 2020, was organized by a chapter of the Black Lives Matter network to protest the murder of George Floyd…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 36: The Reality of Desire
At various points in this episode, we discuss sex and sexuality, AIDS, mental illness, and suicidal ideation. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 35: No Age of Innocence
The cartoon ad for retired General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s presidential run, “I Like Ike,” was created in 1952 by a Disney employee. It was part of a…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 34: We Demand Equality--NOW!
As we saw in the last episode, women were engaged in passionate activism to achieve gender equality by 1970. But unlike grassroots radical feminist groups, the…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 33: Seattle, the Feminist Soviet of Washington
In 1970 Marlene Sanders, a legendary woman journalist, and Emmy-award-winning correspondent produced and reported an ABC News feature about the women's…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 32: The Court Room of History
You just heard an excerpt from Vice President Kamala Harris’s response to the new standards for teaching African American history in Florida. Released by that…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 31: Haunted By History
That was a February 2011 news segment recorded by journalist Sam Ford for WJLA TV, an ABC affiliate in the Washington D.C. area. In the first of two episodes…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 30: Inventing A White Race
We begin this episode with a June, 2021 school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a mob of angry white parents had taken over the room. They…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 29: To Sexual Outlaws, With Love
In “The Initiation,” a 1959 educational film probably shown in high school health classes, the American girls who were its intended audience learned that…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 28: Terrorism Begins At Home
On January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters, enraged by waves of misinformation and outright lies, attacked the federal government. They sought to…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 27: How Gay Rights Became "Special" Rights
On May 18, 2023, Florida Governor and Republican presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557, perhaps the most significant retraction of…
Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 26: Lost and Found
On September 6, 1970, CBS News Anchor Harry Reasoner and London correspondent Charles Collingwood reported on the hijacking of three international flights and…