Desmond Meade's life story has been one of pain, perseverance, and finally, triumph. From a drug addicted felon waiting for a train to jump in front of to heading up the groundbreaking Florida Rights Restoration Coalition which has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for: "their work in building democracies, supporting the human right to representation by government, and working towards a better organized and peaceful world." Desmond, like FRRC is a force to be reckoned with. The ...
Dec 01, 2023•55 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Jewish Americans - much like the U.S. public overall – hold widely differing views on Israel and its political leadership. Israeli domestic policies and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict generate fiery attitudes toward Israel during peace time, and after the brutal Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, feelings have intensified. And rightly so. We invited 2 brilliant individuals, with deeply learned understandings of the complexities in the region on the show to have a roundtable discussion with ...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Stuart Stevens , Senior Adviser to the Lincoln Project, and longtime GOP campaign advisor and guru joins the podcast to talk with Adam about his new book: The Conspiracy to End America Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy Apart from their discourse on the dangers of democracy, Stuart and Adam lament the collapse of the party of the once, great party of Lincoln into a Trumpian puddle. Pull up a chair and lean in to this to admitted political nerdfest covering presidential ...
Nov 10, 2023•55 min
Dr. Richard Barton is a Democracy Fellow at Unite America and a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He has a PhD in Government from Cornell University, and his research examines how electoral and legislative institutions shape lawmaking in Congress and the American Political Economy. Partisan primaries are one of the main causes of government dysfunction as the recent GOP House Speaker race, aka clown show attests. Richard Barton, a Democracy Fell...
Nov 02, 2023•25 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Over the last three decades, Ethan Chorin has had an extraordinary view of developments in the Middle East and Africa as an American diplomat, oil and ports executive and advisor to senior government officials. We invited Ethan to return to the show to discuss his thoughts on the events unfolding after the Hamas attack on Israel. You may remember Ethan’s first appearance on the show last October (Episode 70). when he joined Adam in conversation about the incredible book he wrote after witnessing...
Oct 28, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 3
We have been clear since minute one of this most recent attack on Israel. Never Trump. Never Hamas. Always Democracy. Over the latest seven decades, war and conflict between Israelis and Palestinian terror organizations-currently Hamas- has resulted in countless lives lost, electrified the wider Middle East, and drawn global powers into the scenario time and time again. Last week, vicious stormtrooper styled attacks continued the spiral into a seemingly never ending cycle of violence, hatred, pa...
Oct 16, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Adam on Israel. For more on the atrocities in Israel both modern day and historical join us in unabashedly standing up for Israel and our fight to save democracy by becoming a member of the Dirty Moderate Nation. @dirtymoderate Thanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time! Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Substack ! Tell us what you think on Twitter ! Check out our YouTube channel ! Are you registered to VOTE ?...
Oct 10, 2023•22 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Despite our deep partisan fault lines on the issue, America does has a border crisis and solving it must be of the utmost urgency. Our dysfunctional system allows an unlimited number of people to cross our borders, prohibits them from working, promises free housing, and then leaves them in seven years of legal purgatory before a judge rules on whether they can remain in the country legally. Mayor Eric Adams last week declared of the 110,00 asylum seekers who are now in New York: “We have a $12 b...
Sep 16, 2023•16 min•Season 2Ep. 138
Sure, Hunter Biden is a little sketchy, but would the average drug addict who lied on a federal form be prosecuted with such verve? We think not. Thanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time! Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Substack ! Tell us what you think on Twitter ! Check out our YouTube channel ! Are you registered to VOTE ?...
Sep 15, 2023•5 min
Mitt has bid adieu to the Washington clown show and is seemingly officially out of whatever the Mormon version of fucks are. Thanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time! Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Substack ! Tell us what you think on Twitter ! Check out our YouTube channel ! Are you registered to VOTE ?...
Sep 15, 2023•5 min
This year marks the 20th anniversary of George W. Bush’s transformative program to combat H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. The left’s villain of yesteryear, who was (somewhat) rehabilitated in the Trump era, and rightly maligned for the disaster that was the invasion of Iraq, Bush also waged a noble war against an epidemic. This ongoing battle is now two decades old, and it has saved 25 million lives. But nothing is sacred in the MAGA tainted GOP. Even the life changing ac...
Sep 07, 2023•18 min•Season 2Ep. 126
Could the future of the GOP be black and female? Democrat turned Republican, Mesha Mainor, a Georgia state legislator serving the 56th District is showing that it very well could be. Her recent political revolt against her Democratic colleagues is an valiant attempt to deviate away from partisan orthodoxy while also retaining her core values. Her RICO filing against Democratic DA darling, Fani Wllis who is the black female prosecutor orchestrating the Trump and cronies indictment in Georgia's Fu...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 125
Listen to Adam's take on last nights debate and Tucker's interview with you know who. Clif Notes version: Haley has no shot at the nomination, but if she did, she'd be viable with independents. Christie is anti-Trump in a MAGA party. DeSantis had the dazzle of an armoire. He's just so bad at politics. Pence is irrelevant. Vivek is a fraud. In the end, Trump looms large. #GOPdebates Thanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time! Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Substack ! Tell us wh...
Aug 24, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 124
“I should not be here,” Ruby Freeman told the January 6 committee in her May 2022 deposition. “I signed up as an election worker because I believe in our democracy. I signed up to support my daughter, Shaye, whose entire professional career has been devoted to making sure that Fulton County elections are fair and that every vote is counted.” Like many of the GOP witnesses who testified before the Jan 6 committee , Fulton County’s indictment of Donald Trump and 18 associates also included an arra...
Aug 18, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 123
You don’t have to be a Republican to be continually aghast at the descent of the GOP into a haven for cranks, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists , performance artists and liars. We have a two party system in this country, and the collapse of the Republican Party into a Trump led cult, spells more than just trouble for our representative democracy which is only strengthened by an opposition party that challenges a particular set of precepts, offers alternative policies, and gives voters a c...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 2Ep. 121
There’s an old saying in politics: As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. Up until 2020, Ohio was a bellwether state in presidential elections voting for the winner every election cycle since 1960 except when John F. Kennedy won the general election, but Richard Nixon carried the state. Donald Trump won Ohio twice, but 2020 was the first year where Buckeyes voted Republican even as Democrat Joe Biden was elected to the presidency. Tuesday’s vote against Issue 1 , a ballot initiative spearheaded by Oh...
Aug 11, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 119
This is not America’s first manipulative fascist rodeo. Our grand experiment has been peppered with religious and MAGA type freaks throughout its 247 years. When a large group of independent thinkers, adventurers, natives, freedom seekers, religious zealots, and young, scrappy and hungry individuals come together in one pot and create a beautiful stew of a nation there are bound to be some interesting concoctions and even a few stinkers. The John Birch Society was a powerful machine fueled by ha...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 118
The events leading up to Jan 6th have resulted in Trump's third indictment for, among other charges, conspiracy to defraud the United States. The only guardrails that we have against another assault on our democracy aren't the courts, but the ballot box. Trump must be soundly defeated in 2024 . It's the only way he will never get near the presidency again. It's America or Trump; you can't have both. Thanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time! Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Sub...
Aug 03, 2023•23 min
Say hello to Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager, who allegedly assisted Trump aide Walt Nauta, in attempting to delete security footage that showed the men moving boxes of classified documents around the property to hide them from federal agents. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed three new criminal counts against Trump on Thursday bringing the total to 40. The superseding indictment charged De Oliveira with conspiracy to obstruct justice, accusing him of helping Trump to hide docum...
Jul 29, 2023•16 min•Season 2Ep. 116
An unusual group of justices — including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservative, and the court's three liberal justices — formed the slim 5-4 majority that upheld the Supreme Court's past rulings on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The court said that in Alabama, a state where there are seven congressional seats and one in four voters is black, the Republican-dominated state legislature had denied African American voters a reasonable chance to elect a second...
Jul 19, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 115
"Flesh is interesting. it comes in different sizes and colors and shapes but the bones are the things that bind us and hold us up and also what is left of us when we are gone. Happy to have the flesh be part of the culture, I want the politics to focus on the bones because that’s the only place that you get a sense of common human dignity and common human rights." -Susan Neiman “Susan Neiman’s profound wisdom, courage and vision give us a public conception of goodness and a reinvigorated progres...
Jul 14, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 104
As former Democrats with some Republican leanings, we no longer swear allegiance to any party. We find ourselves out in this new wild west of a middle, carving out a lane for the growing number of Americans who are leaning, even if ever so gently, into identifying as independents. It's not where many of us are comfortable. Not having the ability to say we are a D or R can be disconcerting for multiple generations whose core decision making was perhaps an easy sequence of ticks down a long line o...
Jul 07, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 115
Is a wealthy black kid from an upper income household more disadvantaged than a Bangladeshi immigrant’s kid whose parents work multiple jobs to stay afloat? That’s the conundrum in using race as a factor in college admissions, especially in an increasingly multi ethnic society. In a 6-3 SCOTUS decision, the court on Thursday ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina race-conscious admissions programs were unlawful, striking down nearly 50 years of jurisprudence on affirmative actio...
Jun 30, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 114
Chris Christie is the big mouthed public servant we’ve all been waiting for. And yes, that’s a compliment. Since entering the 2024 GOP presidential fray, Christie has been unsparing and relentless in his attacks on Trump. Yes, he should have done it sooner, and, no ,he should have never cozied up to the former president. But Christie’s tenure as a take no prisoners GOP governor of deep blue New Jersey has prepared him for this moment. Christie is willing to do two essential things: take it to Tr...
Jun 24, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 112
"A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." The Founding Fathers, if they could have foreseen the terror of today, would surely have revised the Second Amendment. But here we are. How does a modern society balance the right to bear arms and protect its citi...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 112
There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.” -Harvey "Big Daddy"Pollitt in Tennessee Williams' brilliant Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Important reminder: Trump could have returned the documents when asked ( they aren't his, they belong to 'we the people,') rather than defying subpoenas and leaving. The FBI no choice but to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. His refusal to cooperate was his undoing. Let us know what you think about it in the...
Jun 15, 2023•17 min•Season 2Ep. 111
The man charged in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history is currently on trial for the heinous act of shooting to death 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue simply because they were Jews. Adam has a lot to say on the subject and the myriad political agendas attached like gun control, the death penalty, Trump's nauseating validation and encouragement of radical and fascist behaviors, and how mass shootings have to some degree become just another headline, or at the very least, unsurpris...
Jun 08, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 110
The fear, loathing and bigotry of Ron DeSantis’s culture war against the LGBTQ community has sparked a national debate, and for many on the reactionary right, a national reckoning. But an entirely different narrative is emerging in the form of resistance: Even parents in deep red Hernando County, FL ( north of Tampa ,) are rising up and declaring that they’ve had enough, as a recent contentious school board meeting attests. And as Pride month 2023 begins, there are glimmers of hope that acceptan...
Jun 03, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 109
Happy Memorial Day to all. May we all honor and remember those who have served to protect this beautiful experiment we call democracy. Thank you to our servicemen and women, and the families who keep things going in their absence. We salute YOU. Ron DeSantis on the other hand is a dangerous pudding eater, who has unsurprisingly (and in poor form really) declared himself a candidate for the presidency of these United States. Hang on to your uteruses folks, because this is going to be a bumpy ride...
May 29, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 108
For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet our revered guest nationally recognized authority on the American presidency, a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN (our nerd tv mecca) and an absolute national treasure, Historian and Author, Richard Norton Smith reveals in his incredible new book Ordinary Man, An: The...
May 23, 2023•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 105
