Democrat News

This post was originally published on this site

Republicans released a report Tuesday proving that they’re gunning for former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney for having the audacity to hold Donald accountable for his crimes. As we noted earlier this month, President Biden’s senior aides have been discussing preemptive pardons for those that Donald considers his political enemies. This would be a good time to do that.

A new GOP report claims to have reviewed the “failures and politicization” of the now-disbanded House Jan. 6 committee, which focuses largely on Cheney, recommending a criminal investigation into her for rightfully claiming that the Jan. 6 committee unfairly pinned the blame on Donald, even though we saw with our own eyes that he whipped his supporters into a frenzy just before they attacked the Capitol.

The Hill reports:

“Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s multimillion-dollar Select Committee was a political weapon with a singular focus to deceive the public into blaming President Trump for the violence on January 6 and to tarnish the legacy of his first Presidency,” the report states.

The report’s conclusion also calls for an FBI investigation into Cheney, accusing her of witness tampering by being in touch with star witness Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide.

It’s a claim that if pursued would likely face significant roadblocks but that nonetheless comes as Trump has suggested members of the Jan. 6 panel should “go to jail” for their work

Donald is the Republican Baby Jesus, and they would give their lives to protect him at this very special time of year. Liz Cheney responded to the GOP’s latest fuckery.

And there’s this:

Loudermilk, chair of the subcommittee that assembled the report, was previously scrutinized by the disbanded House panel after he gave tours of the Capitol to two men who later participated in the march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The bloviating bastard responded on Truth Social:

Donald said on ‘Meet the Press’ that the Jan 6th committee should be imprisoned. Speaking of multi-million dollar investigations, the two-year-long Benghazi investigation (33 hearings in total!) cost millions, and in the end, they found no wrongdoing on Hillary Clinton’s part. Regardless, Republicans will wrap Donald in swaddling clothes and lay him in a manger because, facts be damned, their very precious cult leader is innocent of what we all saw him do.

This post was originally published on this site

Rep. Nancy Mace is doing her best to enter the MAGA hall of shame.

The anti-trans bathroom lunatic joined Outkick and made these un-astute observations about the newest conspiracy floating in the sky.

MACE: So my concern is if it’s not craft from outer space, because I think that has to be on the table, it has to be an option.

Is it our technology or is it Russia or Iran or China?

Is there someone who’s winning the arms race and are we behind? Because my question is about national security.

And I hope that it’s us.

I hope that it’s not our adversaries or something from outside the universe.

Because I have real concerns that, like if these drones are from Iran or China, like some of the rumors have been, I pray that they’re ours, but we should also know why they’re out there.

Like, are they looking for radiation? Are they looking for a missing nuclear warhead?

Like, we deserve to have some answers here because people are scared.

Martians!
Radiation!
Adversaries outside the universe!
Missing warheads!
Oh, my!

This post was originally published on this site

In case you need any more reasons to never buy a Tesla, Bloomberg and The New York Times have a few.

From Bloomberg:

Elon Musk’s charitable foundation ballooned to $9.5 billion in assets last year while handing out $237 million in gifts, most of which went to other entities controlled by the world’s richest person.

The figures are part of the Musk Foundation’s latest tax filing, obtained Thursday by Bloomberg News. The annual snapshot shows the organization got a boost from the millions of Tesla Inc. shares it holds and sent $137 million to Musk’s other nonprofit, The Foundation, which he set up to establish a STEM-focused primary and secondary school.

Bloomberg lists more Musk-related entities that got his money. But even so, Musk’s charitable foundation is remarkably stingy. Bloomberg euphemistically describes it as “muted.’

Though Musk has widened his lead as the richest person ever, his philanthropy remains muted. Over the past three years, he disclosed giving away roughly $559 million in total, with 2023 being the biggest. By comparison, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a donor-advised fund with $13.6 billion in assets in 2023, made $4.7 billion in grants in that year alone.

The New York Times reported that Musk’s foundation fell far, far short of the amounts required to give away. “Private foundations must donate 5 percent of their assets every year. Elon Musk’s enormous charity missed that standard for three consecutive years,” the paper found. “Mr. Musk’s group has fallen further and further behind. In 2021, his foundation was $41 million short, then $234 million the following year. Now, the hole is deeper still.”

If he doesn’t distribute the money that’s required, Musk “will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service,” according to The Times.

So isn’t it convenient for Musk that he gets to whisper into Donald Trump’s ear what should happen to the IRS?

More from The Times:

The I.R.S. appears to be among Mr. Musk’s early targets as a leader of Mr. Trump’s government efficiency initiative. The tax agency serves as the federal government’s charity regulator and thus oversees Mr. Musk’s foundation.

Last month, Mr. Musk used X, his social media platform, to ask users if the I.R.S.’s budget should be increased, kept the same, decreased or “deleted.” His followers chose “deleted.”

This post was originally published on this site

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday signed off on two major California clean air rules designed to reduce pollution from cars and trucks, including a ban on selling new gasoline-powered cars statewide by 2035.

Under the Clean Air Act, California has the ability to adopt more stringent vehicle emission requirements than the federal government. But the state must seek a waiver from the EPA.

The EPA granted two waivers for two regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board:

• The Advanced Clean Cars II rule, adopted in 2022, requires an increasing percentage of new cars sold by California auto dealerships to be zero-emission or plug-in hybrids. The regulation eventually culminates in a ban on selling new, gasoline-powered cars by 2035. It is slated to go into effect in 2026.
• The Heavy-Duty Omnibus rule, adopted in 2020, establishes cleaner engine standards and requires warranties for new heavy-duty vehicles. It had been scheduled to go into effect this year.

The EPA action allows the state to enforce the rules, which are collectively expected to prevent more than 3,700 premature deaths and provide $36 billion in public health benefits, state officials say.

“California has longstanding authority to request waivers from EPA to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution coming from mobile sources like cars and trucks,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Today’s actions follow through on EPA’s commitment to partner with states to reduce emissions and act on the threat of climate change.”

Environmental groups lauded the EPA decision, which will help California tackle its largest source of pollution and greenhouse gases — the transportation sector. Every day, tens of millions of gas-fueled automobiles release copious amounts of smog-forming nitrogen oxides and heat-trapping carbon dioxide. But California drivers are increasingly buying zero-emission or plug-in hybrid vehicles, which made up more than 25% of all light-duty vehicle sales statewide in 2024.

The new regulation is intended to accelerate electric vehicle adoption and drastically improve air quality over the coming decades. Under the new rule, 35% of new cars must be zero emission by 2026, 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035.

Drivers will still have the option to buy a used car with an internal combustion engine.

“This might read like checking a bureaucratic box, but EPA’s approval is a critical step forward in protecting our lungs from pollution and our wallets from the expenses of combustion fuels,” said Paul Cort, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign. “The gradual shift in car sales to zero-emissions models will cut smog and household costs while growing California’s clean energy workforce. EPA must now approve the remaining authorization requests from California to allow the state to clean its air and protect its residents.”

California will join the 27 countries of the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada, which have adopted policies that ban new gasoline car sales by 2035 or sooner.

At least 11 other states, including Washington and New York, have adopted California’s zero-emission mandate. If they follow through, the rule would be in effect for about 133 million people, or nearly 40% of the country’s population.

Industry groups denounced the move by the EPA, with some expressing their desire for President-elect Donald Trump to attempt to revoke the waiver and topple the rule.

“Contrary to claims on the campaign trail that they would never tell Americans what kinds of cars we have to drive, the Biden-Harris EPA just did exactly that by greenlighting California’s ban on sales of all new gas and traditional hybrid vehicles,” American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers president Chet Thompson said in a statement. “These policies will harm consumers — millions of whom don’t even live in California — by taking away their ability to buy new gas cars in their home states and raising vehicle and transportation costs.

“They will also undermine U.S. energy and national security. Americans want nothing to do with gas car bans, EV mandates or California radicalism, which they just made abundantly clear at the polls. I suspect this is why EPA waited until after the election to issue this decision.”

But the EPA action could be the first of several before the Biden administration leaves office.

The California Air Resources Board is still waiting for the EPA to take action on six other major clean air rules, including regulations that would phase out fossil fuel-powered cargo trucks and locomotives.

Authorizing the rules ahead of Trump’s arrival to the White House makes it more difficult for the incoming administration and other opponents to attack them, according to Joe Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air.

“It’s harder to unring the bell than if they don’t get issued,” Lyou said. “The new administration can sit on them for more years, or they can decline them.”

One challenge to the zero-emission vehicle mandate is already underway. Recently, the Supreme Court announced it would decide whether red-state fuel producers have legal standing to sue the EPA for alleged financial losses caused by California’s stringent fuel economy standards and electric vehicle mandate.

This post was originally published on this site

There’s a difference between making government more effective and making it disappear, and according to financial reporter Catherine Rampell, El Cheato seems to be aiming for the latter. Via the Washington Post:

How do we know? Financial deregulation was one of his major priorities during his first term. He rolled back parts of the Dodd-Frank Act, a law created in response to the 2008 financial crisis. The big banks also took on more leverage while he was in office, suggesting his appointees tolerated more risk-taking.

Since then, President Joe Biden’s appointees have proposed a series of regulations to reduce risk and make the financial system more resilient, including by requiring large banks to have a bigger capital cushion. Wall Street has fought these efforts ferociously, even running ads about them during “Sunday Night Football.”

The banks might soon get their way. Shortly after the November election, financial regulators announced they were pausing any major rulemaking, including on capital requirements, until Trump takes office. Wall Street firms and lobbyists have drafted wish lists of (de)regulatory changes they want the transition team to commit to, Reuters has reported. And more of Dodd-Frank appears to be in the crosshairs, especially if Project 2025 is implemented.

What do you want to bet that if there’s a rerun of the 2008 crash, We The People will be expected to pick up the tab?

Right now seems like a peculiar time for any pre-FDIC-era nostalgia. After all, last year was the biggest year for bank failures in modern history, thanks to a crisis that took down Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic. Runs on these regional banks threatened contagion across the rest of the financial system — at least until federal regulators (including the FDIC) stepped in to stem the panic and protect depositors.

MAGA World appears unchastened by either this experience or that of the early 1930s. Or maybe they take it as a challenge: You’ve heard of the Great Depression? Just wait until Trump delivers the greatest one of all.

This post was originally published on this site

Paul Krugman kicks off his new Substack with a look at crypto, the favored tool of tech bro billionaires. Take a look:

The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends.

The hypocrisy here is thick enough to cut with a knife. If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts.

What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

Well, Paul, like everything else, we’re rewriting the definitions these days. Crypto currency is noble and pure, used mostly by nuns and priests to send money to orphans. Or so I’m told!

But there’s a third possible explanation of crypto’s rise. Maybe asking “what are the legitimate use cases for this stuff” is the wrong question. What about the illegitimate uses, ranging from tax evasion to blackmail to money laundering? Maybe crypto isn’t digital gold, but digital Benjamins — the $100 bills that play a huge role in illegal activity around the world.

The old adage says that crime doesn’t pay, but of course it does in many cases. And it needs a means of payment, preferably one that isn’t too easily tracked by law enforcement. Traditionally, and to a large extent even today, that has mostly meant large-denomination banknotes.

This post was originally published on this site

In 2020, the Orange Felon led the choir in an endless cycle of The Big Lie, even though they couldn’t prove a stitch of it. In fact, as we’ve recently been reminded, the only irregularities in the 2020 election came from the Republicans themselves and their fake electors scheme.

Fast forward to 2024, and we’re reminded again that the problem is the Republicans, not the electoral system. Federal law requires that state electors convene on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December. However, Wisconsin state law says that the elector should meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday. Therefore, Wisconsin Republicans had to sue to get a federal judge to tell them to follow the law:

The Wisconsin Republican Party sued last week seeking an order to resolve which of the two dates it should meet. The state Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed that the votes should be cast Tuesday in accordance with federal law. The Justice Department asked that the case be dismissed.

U.S. District Judge James Pederson dismissed the case Thursday because everyone agreed that federal law should be followed, essentially making the lawsuit moot.

[…]

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature, recognizing the conflict, attempted to bring the state into compliance with federal law last session. The Senate passed the bill 31-1, but it never got a vote in the Assembly.

Just as a reminder, the Wisconsin Speaker of the Assembly is Robin Vos, who has bumped heads with The Orange Felon in the past. One must wonder if the failure of the Assembly to bring the state into compliance is an act of passive aggressiveness from Vos or if he simply that incompetent.

Miraculously, the Republicans did manage to meet on Tuesday and do their jobs, legally this time.

This post was originally published on this site

FAFO is a word Trump voters should really learn the meaning of. It stands for F*k Around & Find Out.

In this video I talk about my–and many other’s–complete lack of sympathy for white union voters, Muslim voters & Latino/a voters who didn’t act like adults & vote against human iron lung Donald Trump. No, not the majorities of these groups who used common sense and voted for Kamala Harris. But, the larger numbers of each group than in 2020 that voted for Trump this time. Even though he spent his one term attacking unions, passing a Muslim ban & deporting Latin American immigrants.

Trump promised to do the exact same thing this time, but somehow these morons thought it didn’t apply to them. Well, they’re now at the “find out” phase. I will have sympathy for all members of these groups who voted in their interests. And have not one ounce of sympathy for those who didn’t, and saddled the rest of us with the 5-star dolt and human waste can for the next four years. I’m all out.

Please be sure after you watch the video to go to Cliff’s Edge and Subscribe for more great content like this! We just passed the 100,000 subscribers mark, so we’re really getting the message out! Thanks!

This post was originally published on this site

Environmental advocates are cautiously optimistic after the Supreme Court left California’s nation-leading auto emissions standards in place — at least for the moment.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from Ohio and 16 other conservative states that aimed to strip California of its authority to adopt vehicle emissions standards stricter than federal benchmarks. However, days earlier, justices announced they will decide whether red-state fuel producers have legal standing to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for alleged financial losses caused by California’s stringent fuel economy standards and electric vehicle mandate.

State policymakers and environmental advocates view the Supreme Court’s decision to leave California’s regulatory powers intact as a triumph. But, as an adversarial presidential administration is poised to take office, experts say they anticipate a flurry of legal objections over nearly all forthcoming California clean air policies.

“The Supreme Court was right to turn away this radical request by Republican-led states to upend decades of law letting California cut pollution and clean our air,” said Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom. “California’s authority was codified in the Clean Air Act by none other than Republican Richard Nixon, who recognized that California should continue serving as a lab for innovation to show the nation what’s possible with smart policy.”

The battle to alleviate air pollution and reduce planet-warming gases will be waged largely in the courts over the next four years, according to experts. And the legal strategy, they say, will need to focus on defending California’s aggressive clean air rules as much as it will be about ushering in new regulation.

“It’s good news, at least in the short term,” said Joe Lyou, president of California-based nonprofit the Coalition for Clean Air. “Everyone’s concerned about what’s going to happen in the long term. But this is a good start to what will undoubtedly be a long, long battle over clean air over the next four years. A lot of it is going to be up to the lawyers.”

Several industry groups have already filed litigation to contest California’s rules, including a ban on new sales of gasoline vehicles in 2035.

Last week, when the Supreme Court announced it would review a legal challenge over how California regulations affected fuel producers, it signaled its willingness to consider objections to California’s vehicle emission rules. However, the justices won’t be weighing the merits of the case, only whether the fuel companies have the right to sue.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals had previously ruled the lawsuit invalid, in part, because fuel producers are challenging California emission standards adopted in 2012. Because car manufacturers already comply with the standard, there is no feasible remedy for their claims, experts say.

Another part of the fuel producers’ argument is that the Clean Air Act only grants California the ability to regulate conventional vehicle pollution for clean air — such as smog-forming nitrogen oxides — not planet-warming gases such as CO2 to address global warming.

“Their argument is this authority was given to California because they have really bad smog problems, not because of climate change,” said Ann Carlson, the founding director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment at UCLA. “And therefore, they shouldn’t be able to regulate greenhouse gases under this special power they have.”

But many environmental advocates say that argument may be moot. California air regulators have long maintained that air quality issues in major California cities — including smoggy Los Angeles — are so severe that electric vehicles are necessary to meet pollution standards. Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions go hand in hand, they say.

“You have a technology, in these zero emission vehicles, that can reduce the full spectrum of pollution,” said Alice Henderson, lead counsel for transportation and clean air policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization that has helped defend California rules. “And it is sort of laughable to think that these air agencies should be forced to ignore that technology.”

But the fight to enshrine clean air rules is not just legal sparring. For Lyou, it’s about the health consequences of inhaling air pollution. According to the California Air Resources Board, air pollution contributes to roughly 5,000 premature deaths each year in Southern California.

“It really comes down to whether people are going to have asthma attacks, whether people die prematurely or whether people have heart attacks,” Lyou said. “These are lives at stake.”

This post was originally published on this site

If Democrats want to understand why president-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House, a good place to start might be the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, hosted by two self-described leftist bros who, without mockery or tongue-in-cheek elitism, explore the complicated past and feverish present of the American conservative movement.

It’s a sort of anti-Joe Rogan program for a perplexed and dismayed left-wing set curious about William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, the rise of the tea party movement, conservative fans of the Grateful Dead and why so many right-wing commentators suffer from “Taylor Swift derangement syndrome.” The show’s interrogation of conservative history is rigorous and occasionally peppered with expletives, but the exchanges with guests are nuanced and civil.

“Know Your Enemy” was started in 2019 by Matthew Sitman, the son of a factory worker raised in a Christian fundamentalist home in central Pennsylvania, and Sam Adler-Bell, a Jew who grew up in a left-leaning family, listening to union leaders and visiting picket lines with his labor-lawyer father. They met when Sitman, then an editor at Commonweal Magazine, asked Adler-Bell to write book reviews. The two shared a fascination for country music and right-wing politics, believing the best way to oppose conservatives is not to berate or ridicule but to respect and understand.

“Even if I come to find the [conservative] ideas unpersuasive, there might be some kernel or core there” — such as understanding the costs and consequences of social change — “that’s worth treating seriously and exploring,” said Sitman, 43, a onetime conservative disciple turned Bernie Sanders fan.

“The left has to think really hard about why we’re right [in our beliefs],” Adler-Bell, 34, said in one episode, adding that conservatives are not “self-consciously evil,” but rather rooted in their convictions.

Such equanimity is rare in the age of podcasts and politics of recrimination. The driving forces of the moment are fixated less on enlightenment than on attacking, distorting and vanquishing. Disdain and division reverberate across a vast and partisan social media landscape that includes X, TikTok and YouTube. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans under 30 regularly get news from social media influencers, the large majority of whom have no background with or ties to news organizations.

“Know Your Enemy,” which the two record in their New York apartments, has a modest audience — about 30,000 listeners an episode and 8,000 subscribers who bring in $39,000 a month. The show is smaller than more prominent podcasts with similarly progressive temperaments. “Pod Save America,” hosted by Jon Favreau and other former aides to President Obama, has a reported 20 million monthly downloads; and Tim Miller, host of “The Bulwark Podcast,” which is described as providing an “unabashed defense of liberal democracy,” has nearly 400,000 followers on X. Sitman has 31,300 followers on the platform, and Adler-Bell has 46,300.

But “Know Your Enemy” appeals to socialists, Democrats and more than a few conservatives — some who have been guests — interested in right-wing thought including that of neoconservatives, so-called reformicons and a species known as the paleoconservative. The show, as it wades into what Adler-Bell calls a “swampy morass” of conservative history that touches on free markets and American interventionism, is heavy on reading lists.

“It’s an innovative and important podcast,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine, who appeared on the show in November to discuss foreign policy and Trump’s picks for his national security team. “It doesn’t have an enormous audience, but it’s an extremely important audience.”

He added that the show’s willingness to dissect center-right ideas at a time when the left often demonizes Republicans implies “a level of curiosity that I think was often lacking for the last eight years. … They’re essentially honest brokers.”

Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau, from left, co-host the more popular “Pod Save America” with their fellow former Obama administration aide Dan Pfeiffer, not pictured.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Other podcasts that focus on right-wing politics include “5-4,” which analyzes Supreme Court cases, and “In Bed with the Right,” which studies conservative ideas on sexuality and gender. But few are as comprehensive as “Know Your Enemy.”

The show’s liberal followers are loyal but don’t hesitate to take Sitman and Adler-Bell to task when they sense a whiff of politesse toward the right.

An interview with rising young conservative Nate Hochman, who was later fired as a speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for posting Nazi-adopted imagery online, drew backlash. And after the Mills episode, a listener wrote: “Completely ridiculous how you let him get away with talking about [Pete] Hegseth and the intelligence scandals around Tulsi [Gabbard]. If that’s your approach to having conservatives on – no thanks.”

Another wrote, “Stop giving Trump apologists a platform.”

“We’re really not debaters,” Adler-Bell said. “I think other podcasts on the left, if they had a conservative or a person they disagreed with, the goal would be victory. To embarrass or humiliate the guests. We just don’t do that.”

Listening to Sitman and Adler-Bell is like wandering the basement stacks of a library with two grad students jazzed on coffee and shuffling index cards. Nothing is too obscure, no tidbit too arcane. In an episode that discussed Buckley, founder of the National Review and widely considered the godfather of modern conservatism, the hosts examined extremist and racist elements in the conservative movement half a century ago that persist today.

In another show, they discussed global right-wing populism and a class realignment that foreshadowed Trump’s victory in November.

“Know Your enemy” also delves into right-wing influences on film, music and literature. It examined how conservatism played into the careers of celebrated authors such as Joan Didion — “why she loved Barry Goldwater and hated Ronald Reagan” — and Tom Wolfe, he of the vanilla suits and quicksilver prose, who navigated how post-World War II prosperity led to American subcultures.

Sitman and Adler-Bell spent more than an hour in March on an episode about Taylor Swift.

“Why does she make the right so crazy? Why does she sometimes make the left so crazy? What does her celebrity mean?” Adler-Bell asked at the beginning of the show. “What can she tell us about the nature of American culture today? It turns out, listeners, Taylor Swift is a great lens into making sense of some of the American berserk.”

The podcast offers possible solutions for how liberals and Democrats can appeal to working-class voters they have lost. In an episode called “Organizing in Rural America,” the hosts spoke with Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho, a grassroots group that mobilized voters to expand Medicaid in a deep-red state.

“Know Your Enemy” has criticized Democrats for hubris and elitism as the party has shifted toward identity politics and urban college-educated voters. That occurred in the years Trump was breaking taboos within the Republican Party by opposing the war in Afghanistan and global trade, and, according to Sitman, tapping into a “vicious and nativist” anti-immigration sentiment that was embraced by his working-class base even as it left the GOP establishment initially uneasy.

“I can’t really remember when a candidate had shown up in the place where I grew up and told people they were being ripped off and they were right to be angry,” said Sitman, who is on the editorial board of the leftist magazine Dissent, which partners with his podcast. “The nature of Trump’s transgressions mattered less than their anger at the system.”

Sitman and Adler-Bell discussed Taylor Swift, and some conservatives’ views of her, for more than an hour in a March episode.

(John Shearer / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)

Sitman knows something about that anger. Growing up in a blue-collar, deeply Christian home, he was shaped by the Bible and the conservative politics of self-reliance. Those who fail in life, he once thought, bring it on themselves. He carried those views into young adulthood as he met prominent conservative thinkers while interning at the Heritage Foundation and attending graduate school at Georgetown University.

“I was at my most conservative,” he said, “when I experienced the least of the world — when I was at my most naive.”

His sentiments shifted after he experienced severe depression and reflected on the struggles of others and how the economic class one is born into affects the trajectory of their future.

“The reason I moved from right to left is not because my fundamental values changed,” said Sitman, who has converted to Roman Catholicism. Rather, it was because he came to realize he wasn’t empathetic enough to class differences and the privations of others.

Sitman — who as a boy saw his father pull out one of his teeth over the kitchen sink because he lacked dental insurance — wrote in a 2016 essay for Dissent: “The failure of conservatives to attend to the world as it actually exists, the world in its suffering and hardship, drove me from their ranks.”

Adler-Bell’s upbringing was more secular, tailored by labor struggles and watching movies like “Matewan,” about union organizing in the coalfields of West Virginia in the 1920s. This background taught him, he said, the power of solidarity: “We are all vulnerable, frail and broken and flawed, and the only way we can overcome atomized suffering is through recognizing [this] in others.”

At which point, Sitman, the more understated of the two, chimed in during an interview: “Your diaper was pink, if not red.”

They laughed, then pressed on.

The conservative right, said Adler-Bell, who writes for Jewish Currents, the New Republic and other publications, is less empathetic to shared vulnerability.

“Trump represents,” he added, “more explicitly than any politician I think maybe in American history, … the message of the racketeer, of the mafioso who says, ‘I will protect you, and you can get yours, and everyone else, f— ’em.’ The world is a war of all against all.”

Both hosts wonder who will rise as key players in the new Trump administration. Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help get Trump elected, is in the ascent and supports the president-elect’s pro-business agenda. But Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., is also a force. He is close to Vice President-elect JD Vance, whose brand of economic populism leans more toward the working class of Trump’s base than corporate America.

They are also watching how Trump, who has threatened to arrest his political enemies, will oversee the FBI and the Justice Department, and how much of a hawk Sen. Marco Rubio might be if he becomes secretary of State.

“We’re very much in Versailles, French monarch territory,” said Sitman. “Observing the courtiers around the king and trying to decipher who wins favor.”