Author: Paul Matzko

Look, when a member of Congress gets paranoid about Jewish-controlled, forest fire-starting space lasers, the Impolitic crew is going to talk about it. Sean and Paul situate Marjorie Taylor Green’s lunacy in a long history of American conspiracy theories, discuss the odds of QAnon dissipating, and what role social media played in its rise.

Trumpists stormed the US capitol this week in the worst national insurrection since 1877. That’s it. That’s the episode.

This week, Paul and Sean discuss why they are optimistic about the 2020s given innovations in mRNA vaccines and battery technology. They also tease a special Patreon episode about the classic Christmas (?) movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Look, it’s not really that hard to figure out what this episode is about from the title, but listen in and you’ll also find out the secret for why Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion can’t win the Great British Baking Show and suss out the difference between Prodigal Son George W. Bush and Fail Son _______ [insert various and sundry Trumps].

Sean and Paul discuss a little pandemic reading, including Elena Ferrante’s novels about post-WW2 Italy and the work of the recently deceased historian of American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn. That leads into a discussion of whether Bailyn’s liberal legacy will endure new/old challenges from the New York Times’s 1619 Project and other more radical histories. Oh, and the two rhapsodize about how great SimCity is and whether it is the most or least neo-liberal video game ever created.

Paul and Sean discuss Bryan Caplan’s controversial take on college education as being primarily a form of social signaling, then Paul introduces Sean to the wonders of the Painter of Light himself, Thomas Kinkade, and what he symbolizes about the past, present, and future of evangelicalism.

After a brief farewell to Bernard Sanders, Paul and Sean discuss how the economy, labor, tech, and daily life have been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic and which of those changes will persist even after the pandemic is over.

Paul is hopping mad as he and Sean discuss the many failures of the Food and Drug Administration in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US could have followed the example of South Korea, but instead of encouraging private companies to rapidly develop multiple tests for the virus as they did in Korea, the FDA created a single point of potential failure by giving only the CDC permission to develop a test. And, because we live in the worst timeline, it failed. They were also slow to remove regulations that discouraged manufacturers from switching over to surgical mask production.

After a little coronavirus chat and a discussion of Paul’s Mini-Beef with Max Boot™, Sean and Paul square off on the electability question as it pertains to one Bernard Sanders.