Political Junkie Podcast

We begin with influencer Milo Yiannopoulos on December 6, 2025, in conversation with ex-Congressman and pardoned felon George Santos on Tim Poole’s podcast.Sporting a sequined “Make America Straight Again” cap, self-described journalist and “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos served as the Parade Grand Marshall for the Boston Straight Pride Parade and Rally on August 31, 2019. Photo credit: Maverick Pictures/ShutterstockNews Summary:* On Monday, Colin Allred dropped his Senate bid to run for Congress in the new, redrawn TX-33; this cleared the way for two-term Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) to compete with State Representative James Tallarico for the Democratic nomination: new polling shows her with an 8-point advantage. But there’s an interesting race shaping up on the Republican side: three-term incumbent John Cornyn is facing a challenge from a MAGA normie, two-term Congressman Wesley Hunt (TX-38) and whack-job Attorney General Ken Paxton, who survived impeachment for bribery and corruption in 2023 and settled federal securities fraud charges in 2024. Paxton leads Cornyn by 8 points, Hunt by 9: the nominee must win 50%, or face a run-off* Democratic candidates had another great election day on Tuesday, holding two state house seats in Florida, and flipping one in a Georgia district that Trump won in double-digits and the same candidate lost by 22 points a year ago: some analysts are blaming the gerrymander. A Democrat, Eileen Higgins, will be Mayor of Miami for the first time in 30 years. Around 20% of Little Havana voters who supported Trump shifting to the Democrats: Higgins won by 19 points.* In 2025, Democrats flipped 21% of GOP-held seats up for grabs in regular and special elections, won the largest majority they have had in the Virginia House since the 1980s, expanded control of the New Jersey Assembly, and torpedoed supermajorities in Iowa and Missouri. The GOP has not flipped any seats. In FL-11 on Tuesday, Ralph Massulo, Jr. held a Republican seat—but by a margin that is 18 points lower than Trump’s tally a year ago.* Democrats are now imagining districts Trump won in the single or low two digits in North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California as potential flips, the total of targeted districts for 2026 is 39. And for the first time in modern history, Texas Democrats—a state party recently said to be dead in the water—are contesting every congressional seat in the redrawn map. In an odd twist, Trump’s pardon of Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar has moved TX-28 from tossup to Lean D (as per the Cook Political Report.)* In the face of the Senate’s failure to pass healthcare legislation, Mike Johnson is losing control of a GOP caucus running for the exits. On Wednesday, 16 Republicans cosponsored a discharge petition to extend ACA subsidies, demonstrating that the legislation can pass the House—also, that Leader Mike Johnson is losing control of his caucus. In addition, 13 Republicans joined Democrats to nullify a Trump executive order that eliminated Federal workers’ labor rights. Finally, just yesterday, after multiple visits by top Trump administration officials, including JD Vance, the Indiana legislature turned down the gerrymandering bill 31-19. Twenty-one Republicans voted against it.Your hosts:Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).Right-wing influencer Candace Owens at a TPUSA event at Texas State University-San Marcos, 2018. Owens has since broken with the organization, and promotes conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination that have splintered the MAGA-verse. Photo credit: Carrington Tatum/Shutterstock News Focus: Is MAGA Cracking Apart?* The Daily Beast is reporting a full-blown social media war featuring deeply personal attacks, often from the fringe, on Trump and his allies.* Podcaster Candace Owens is spreading rumors online that Turning Point USA committed financial fraud, and that Charlie Kirk’s assassination is related to that. This week, the Treasury Department sent Erika Kirk a letter confirming that none of the four organizations under the TPUSA umbrella are being investigated or audited. The organization appears to have pulled in $85 million in the fiscal year ending in June, 2025.* Podcaster Tim Poole has gone after Owens, who also claims that Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson did not act alone: she has implicated the American military, Israel, financier Bill Ackman, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Her fans see efforts to stop or debunk her as further proof there is a conspiracy to cover up the “facts” surrounding Kirk’s death.* We have also seen Tucker Carlson going after Laura Loomer; Carlson taking fire from Texas Senator Ted Cruz for platforming white supremacist, misogynist, and self-declared incel Nick Fuentes; and Milo Yiannopoulos maintaining that Fuentes is gay.* Some of the rifts, while predictable, are self-inflicted wounds about sex, sexuality, and violence that go well beyond allegations of a Trump administrative coverup in the Epstein case. In the past year, numerous right-wing influencers have collaborated in propping up brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, pornographers who have been charged with rape and sex trafficking in Romania and England. Members of Trump’s circle including, it seems, the President and two of his sons, have colluded to free them and put the brothers—whose penchant for sadistic sexual violence against women is well documented—back in business.* Another little corner of the right-wing world where everyone has their panties in a twist is what Michelangelo Signorile has dubbed “Gay MAGA.” Milo Yiannopoulos, who was canceled back in 2017 for talking enthusiastically about performing fellatio on a priest when he was a boy, characterizes himself as an “ex-gay,” and now operates a crisis management form, is currently waging an outing campaign against influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson is married with four children, and recently on Tim Poole’s podcast, he and pardoned fraudster George Santos tossed it out there that the late TPUSA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk was also a closeted gay man.What we want to go viral:* Neil wants you to listen to “Blood Relatives,” a new season of In The Dark, a podcast produced by The New Yorker and hosted by Heidi Blake, who reported the original 2024 story about then murder of a prominent English farming couple and the son convicted of the crime. But did he do it?* Claire wants you to read Jack B. Reardon and Abigail S. Gerstein, “‘For the Reinvention of Man’: How a Conservative Debating Society at Harvard Pushed Women From Its Ranks,” The Harvard Crimson (December 7, 2025), about how Trumpism is helping elite conservative manhood reclaim single-sex spaces at America’s most prominent university.Short takes:* As Joe Gruters, the chair of the Republican National Committee, makes his media rounds, he is setting expectations for 2026 way low—which tells you something about the upheaval and finger-pointing up on Capitol Hill. “This week, I spoke to a number of swing-state GOP operatives about Trump and the midterm environment,” Andrew Eggers writes at The Bulwark. “And they were pretty blunt. To them, the biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability.” As one anonymous source on the Hill said to Eggers, Trump’s economic message is “landing like doo-doo.” (December 12, 2025)* President Trump is now trying to get the massively unqualified Lindsey Halligan properly appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Burgess Everett reports at Semafor, but neither of Virginia’s Democratic Senators seems likely to return the blue slip to support the nomination. Neither Tim Kaine or Mark Warner “explicitly confirmed they’ll block Halligan as they seek a nominee they could support; Warner said he’d meet with her but that it would be ‘very hard’ to support her,” Everett writes. “And Senate Republicans aren’t eliminating blue slips, despite Trump’s request, because they want input when a Democrat is president, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.” (December 12, 2025)* At her Substack, Abortion, Every Day, Jessica Valenti reports that the Wisconsin legislation that sought to compel women to bag the residue of their medication abortions, then turn it over to the authorities as “medical waste,” is DOA in the legislature. “Students for Life has been drafting “clean water” bills for lawmakers across the country—legislation that claims abortion pills and pregnancy tissue are poisoning groundwater,” Valenti explains. “Republicans are furious and embarrassed: instead of looking like environmental protectors, they seem like creeps who want to sift through women’s bloody miscarriages.” As Bette Davis memorably said to a terror-stricken Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?— “But you are.” (December 11, 2025)Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.You can also get all audio content by subscribing on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify. Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We begin with this clip from a cabinet meeting earlier this week, in which Pete Hegseth described to a journalist his participation in a deadly September 2 strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat, and a second missile fired that killed first-strike survivors.Secretary of Defense fakes screwing in a sign misidentifying the Department of Defense of the Department of War, a name he likes because it sounds more lethal. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech/Wikimedia CommonsNews Summary:* In a closely watched special election, MAGA Republican Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn by 9 points in a race to fill a seat vacated by Republican Mark Green, in TN-07. Van Epps was endorsed by Trump; Behn, a former community organizer, was endorsed by DSA. Good news for Mike Johnson’s tiny majority; not such good news for MAGA 2026, since Trump won this district only a year ago by 22 points, and Democrats clawed back a bigger percentage of the vote in every county.* For the first time since 1988, the Trump administration declined to commemorate World AIDS day. The State Department issued a statement this week saying that “an awareness day is not a strategy,” but it is also the case that the Trump administration has no strategy beyond pretending that AIDS does not exist. Funding cuts to fight AIDS globally have declined by almost 40%. Almost all funding for domestic AIDS prevention has been eliminated for 2026, and programs aimed at developing a vaccine for the HIV virus have been eliminated.* In a story we have been following in one way or another for several weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson is holding on by a thread in the face of criticism from his caucus—criticism led out by very high profile women. Johnson’s foes include Elise Stefanik (NY-21) who has accused him of lying and “getting rolled” by Democrats. Stefanik has also launched her campaign for governor, which means she can’t run for her House seat in 2026.* As Democrats circulate a discharge petition to renew existing health insurance subsidies under the ACA for three years, Republicans can’t agree on how to respond to the hole they have dug for themselves. A new poll by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research shop, reveals that a quarter of those who are now insured through the ACA would drop their insurance completely, and about half say it would affect how, or even whether, they vote in the midterm elections. Although those polled had little faith in politicians of either party to solve the problem, the majority were critical of Republicans.Your hosts:Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).Like other members of the Trump administration, Hegseth enjoys sporting uniforms he is not entitled to wear. Here, he cosplays as a fighter pilot at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, on October 19, 2025. Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech/Wikimedia CommonsNews focus: Lyin’ Pete Hegseth* Hegseth was a controversial nominee for SecDef in the first place: reports of financial mismanagement, sexual assault, and an unresolved alcohol addiction dogged the nomination process. He barely squeezed through with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote in a Republican-majority Senate.* A military veteran with two Bronze stars, Hegseth was one of a number of high-level Trump appointments plucked out of the Fox News pool: here is a short bio. At 45, he is on his third wife. Hegseth’s second wife was said to have requested aid for spousal abuse on more than one occasion. He was said to habitually drink to the point of passing out, and family members said they feared him when he was drunk.* Hegseth has also been characterized as a Christian nationalist, and is a self-admitted Islamophobe who believes that Western Civilization is under attack. He has at least two tattoos that suggest he is a white supremacist, and he is a member of the arch-conservative Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Hegseth has initiated and presided over the expulsion of transgender people from the military, has women in combat roles as inherently unqualified, and has reduced the visibility of lesbian and gay people in the military service. He has characterized LGBTQ troops serving openly as part of a “Marxist agenda,” although Marx had little or nothing to say about homosexuals.* Hegseth’s command decisions have demoted a disproportionate number of Black and female officers, or forced them into retirement. A policy that bans beards is projected to prompt the resignation of significant numbers of Black men, who can develop a painful skin condition from shaving, as well as soldiers who wear beards for religious reasons. Last week, Hegseth barred all soldiers who currently have beard waivers from one of his speaking events in South Korea.* In a September meeting for which general and flag officers from around the globe were brought to Quantico, VA, Hegseth promoted the return of hazing, bullying and harassment as part of an effective training process. The U.S. military has worked to eliminate hazing since 1874.* More recently, Hegseth has announced that his department will sever all ties with Scouting America (formerly Boy Scouts of America) which, he claims, promotes DEI and is not a “boy-friendly” space.* Calls for an investigation into Hegseth’s running of the department have escalated in the past week after yet another deadly attack on a Venezuelan vessel, one followed up by a second strike to kill two survivors adrift in the water.* One important question is who authorized the second strike, which may violate the laws of war. But legal scholars have also questioned the legality of any strikes on people who, regardless of the Trump administration’s designation of them as terrorists, are still legally civilians.* But there are bigger issues: Signalgate is back! On Thursday, a Pentagon watchdog report concluded that in March, Hegseth violated his own department’s policies by discussing a military operation against the Houthis on a Signal app installed on his personal device. You can read the report here. In a bizarre twist, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell issued a statement that report exonerated Hegseth from charges that he breached security protocols, and in a xeet, Hegseth claimed “Total exoneration.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice President JD Vance may also be involved in the cover-up.* Also on Thursday, the New York Times filed a lawsuit that named numerous administration officials, including Hegseth and Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. Prompted by new Department of Defense rules that require journalists to take an oath they will not report anything not been approved for release, the suit charges that this requirement violates provisions of the First and Fifth Amendments. The new requirement caused dozens of experienced reporters to walk off the job in October, only to be replaced by influencers and luminaries from right-wing propaganda outlets like Gateway Pundit, One America News, Turning Point USA’s Frontlines, The Federalist and LindellTV.What we want to go viral:* Neil is excited about Bobby Smith II’s essay, “History Shows How Cooking Can be a Pivotal Tool for Activism,” (Made By History, TIME, November 8, 2025). Smith tells the story of Georgia Gilmore, a Black female chef fired for her civil rights activism, turned her cooking skills to fund—and feed—the Montgomery Bus Boycott.* Claire is excited about James Reginato’s, “Oscar Wilde’s Only Grandchild Investigates the ‘Atom Bomb’ of the Oscar Wilde Scandal,” (Vanity Fair, November 28, 2025), which follows the Wilde family’s disintegration after the scandal of their patriarch’s arrest and imprisonment for homosexuality. Short takes:* Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, one of the most consequential constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War to eliminate barriers to full Black citizenship. The Trump administration argues that the amendment was intended to apply to Black Americans and no one else, but that would repudiate a century of legal precedent. “In a landmark 1898 case, the Supreme Court ruled Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment,” Justin Jouvenal writes at The Washington Post. “Roughly 250,000 babies were born to mothers who are in the country illegally or on a temporary basis in 2023, the latest year figures were available, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which aims to curb immigration.” (December 5, 2025)* A big driver behind MAGA back in 2015 was the populist revulsion for opportunistic wars, mostly driven by the toll the 20-year War on Terror took on working-class America. But how does Trump’s apparent eagerness for regime change in Venezuela jive with an “America First” agenda? “So far, Trump’s base supports his pivot to hawkish interventionism in Venezuela: 66 percent of MAGA Republicans would favor the United States taking military action in the country, according to a recent poll by CBS News and YouGov,” Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic. However, “Among Americans as a whole, fully 70 percent oppose a war with Venezuela. But assuming Trump does not usurp the constitutional order by trying for a third term, he will never again face voters, so if there are political consequences for a failed war in Venezuela, as there were for the war in Iraq, other politicians––perhaps Rubio or Vance––will suffer them.” (December 5, 2025)* Donald Trump is exactly the kind of venal self-dealer our founders worried might ascend to the presidency, Jamelle Bouie writes at The New York Times, and his abuse of the pardon power is a prime example. “But if there’s an issue that demands constitutional amendment, it’s this one. Americans should give serious consideration to whether they want to amend the Constitution to restructure the president’s pardon power—to limit its scope and make it more subject to the checks and balances that are supposed to structure the American system,” Bouie proposes. “Even without an amendment on the table, a future Congress could use its power and authority to speak about the Constitution to condemn the Trump pardons as an unconstitutional abuse of power. That Congress could say, through legislation, that the pardons are invalid. It could investigate the pardons and force the White House to explain itself. And in the almost certain event that this would then reach the Supreme Court, congressional action could push the court to state its view, so that the American people know where they stand if they decide to rein in the president’s authority.” (December 3, 2025)Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.You can also get all audio content by subscribing for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify. Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Here are a few books you might be interested in after listening:* Kevin M. Schultz, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (University of Chicago Press, 2025).* Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: 2016).* Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Houghton Mifflin, 1949).* James E. Clyburn, Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Hello listeners! This is a Substack live I did earlier in the day: in the future, I will be doing more features that take a deep dive into an important story that illuminates the functioning of our democracy.* Trump allies are demanding Pam Bondi’s resignation over the botched indictments—but no that they happened in the first place. See Edith Olmsted, “MAGA Demands Bondi’s Head After Failed Comey Indictment,” (The New Republic, November 25, 2025)* The article I refer to in this video is Alan Feuer and Devlin Barrett, “Judge Dismisses Cases Against Comey and James, Finding Trump Prosecutor Was Unlawfully Appointed,” New York Times, November 24, 2025.* The book I wrote about the FBI is War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998.)* Listeners who want to learn even more about J. Edgar Hoover, the long history of the FBI, and why this is such an aberrant moment in the history of hte federal justice system should check out Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Penguin Books, 2022, which won the Pulitzer Prize it is so good!* Want to know why everyone thinks the current FBI director, Kash Patel, is out of his league? Try Marc Fisher, “Kash Patel’s Acts of Service,” The New Yorker (November 17, 2025.Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video, and just to say: I have rescheduled historian Kevin Schultz, and the conversation about whether everyone *really* hates liberals. I filmed this before Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress late last night.Join me for my next live video: download the app, if you have not done so already, and I will see you on Wednesday, if not before. Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe