It Could Happen Here - Everyone Hates Them: Trump, the Media and Jimmy Kimmel

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Mia talks with CAW writer and editor Vicky Osterweil about Republican unpopularity, Jimmy Kimmel, and Disney’s history of fascism   Links:  https://www.cawshinythings.com/about-caw/   Sources: https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/fair-shakes-amv.pdf https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/article/jimmy-kimmel-returns-after-suspension-for-charlie-kirk-comments-our-government-cannot-be-allowed-to-control-what-we-do-and-do-not-say-on-television-195436293.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/24/trump-approval-rating/86306451007/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-dips-americans-worry-about-economy-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2025-09-23/ https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/kimmel-reinstatement-disney-price-increase-scoop https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/29/democrats-pounce-in-reliably-red-iowa-fueled-by-special-election-hopium-00538075 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-win-in-iowa-special-election-breaks-gop-supermajority https://www.the-downballot.com/p/iowa-democrats-win-massive-upsetSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls, came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you? Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episode. episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers. Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked Everything to invent open heart surgery.

Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love cardiac cowboys. Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper, AI Built for Marketers. There's a vile sickness in Ambestown. You must excise it.

Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. Welcome to Aitadap and Shia. a podcast about why everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I am your host via log and oh boy, thing feel bad.

I don't know. This is my most, this is my most Robert S. Kinsured out in a while with me to talk about why everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump, and the way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that you interact with, is Vicki Osterweil, who is a writer and editor at the Collective Journal Call, doer of many things, agitator. Busy, I'm very busy. I think it says bricklayer on that thing.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended Universe out April 14th of next year that is about the way that Disney sort of took over the world through the deployment expansion and usage of the violence of the copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours. So we'll be talking some more about that and about Disney's long history of fast as just bullshit towards the end of the show. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to be hearing me thanks. And yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel, you know, in this moment, I think.

Oh, God. Oh, no. Jimmy's kibble. Shout out to where I posted that. I love you. Okay, so I think that the place I wanted to start is with this, like, question of, like, why does it feel like this? Yeah. And I think part of the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval rating is really low.

Like, people don't actually like him. It's like 41. His approval rating is 41%. it's down like a point in September, even with all the Charlie Kirk stuff, it's still down. His most popular policies is immigration policy, which is terrifying,

but his most popular policy is pulling at 42%. So no one actually likes him or anything that he does, right? And like 41% is still like a lot of people, but it's not the majority of the country. Yeah. Notably, like by how math works. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

There's been a few things I think are interesting about this there are signs that this is actually really, really there's something substantive happening here. One of them was a special election that I think people who paid attention to for about two days and then forgot about, which was a special election in Iowa, which prevented the GOP from getting a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature. And the Democrats somehow miraculously, even though the Democrats are hideously unpopular, they won a special election. in a district in Western Iowa that was plus 11 for Trump this year. And this is not like a like, this is a district that is like just Sioux City or something or like, you know,

this is a, this is a gerrymandered-ass district that is like a little bit of Sioux City and then stretched out all the way into a bunch of rural areas to like defuse the vote. They won this district by 11, like last year. They lost this election by 11 points in Western Iowa. Yeah. Unhinged.

They're doing, like, all the elections are like this, like, it's, it's being ridiculous. Like, and again, this is, like, this is, like, this is, again, like, voting for people who are, like, not popular, but it's, like, literally any alternative people are like, holy shit, Western Iowa is like, no, fuck this, this fucking sucks ass, like, it's, yeah. A thing that, you know, I've been following a bit is that farmers are freaking out. Yeah. Soybean, soybean crops and corn crops are going to be rotting in the, fields, you know, I think soybean, soy in particular, something like 50% of the U.S. soy crop is

traditionally exported. And by traditionally, I mean, every year exported to China. This year, China is not buying any American soybeans. Yep. So literally half of the market is going to die. And I don't know, you know, sometimes these numbers don't really do justice. If half of an economy collapses, that's the whole economy collapsing. That's not, that's not like, oh, yeah, they just like took, you know, a haircut. Like, that's massive. Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed out class of people who are not like major corporations in the entire world. And it's not working. Like they keep, they keep being like, oh, it's okay, we'll just like give you a bunch of money.

And it's not enough because China has decided not to buy any of this soybean crop. But it's like, okay. And this is something we talked about like at the beginning of the administration, which is that like, this administration has been going through and systematically alienating every single part of the coalition. Yeah. They're pissing off like the farmers. they're pissing off, like, the major pharmaceutical companies, they're pissing off the military, they're pissing off a whole bunch of the parts of the government bureaucracy.

Like, they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones over, like, Comey stuff that they're still mad about. And then the guy they put in charge of it is just, like, completely incompetence. And it's like, okay, there's only so long you can sort of go, like, systematically alienating every party of your coalition, just like basically attempting to drop a bomb on the economy every single week. And sometimes it drops and sometimes. sometimes it doesn't. Yeah, exactly. I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here

with tech stocks and with like the economy in general that has been sort of, you know, on the ground for most of us has felt like it's been in recession since 2020, right? You know, of different sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while. Now it's really bad. No one can get a job, right? Like things are really like prices are going up, up, up. Everyone feels bad. And yet the stock market is still achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized equivalent strategy of like make it look like things are normal and good. And like that will actually support things materially. And like, I mean, maybe it will forever. Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know. I don't think that's, I think that's a bad bet, but like, okay. Yeah. Well,

and I think the interesting part of this too is if you look at what's going on with the economy, And it's also worth noting, right, like the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms looks fine. They're not fine, but it looks sort of okay, right? The stock market is still growing. There's technically like economic growth. But comma, we both sold this chart a couple of weeks ago. That is the most unhinged thing I've ever seen in my entire life, which is there is a GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst, which shows that tech in the last, like year roughly

and like in the last sort of like short-term window it's been 35 to 45% of all US GDP growth yeah and what I say tech by the way like to be clear about this

it is technically a composite of like all the sector right but like it's basically just the like the top like the five big tech companies right it's like Apple it's Microsoft but specifically and this is the one that's like

unhinged right now is that like the most valuable company in the world is invidia a company that makes graphics cards yeah yep yep and this is all because this is all of this GDP growth quote unquote is AI boom stuff right it's like massive fixed capital investments sure it's like yeah there's there's like incredible fixed capital investments but the fixed capital investments are just we're building a a diesel powered AI data center somewhere in Tennessee that is going to poison the entire population for no benefit yeah And it's like all of these companies, like, have gone just completely totally all in on AI. I think it doesn't make any money, can't make anybody, and structurally will not make any money.

And this is like a third of like the growth of the economy. We are actually living through the famous old tweet, the drill, is it drill about the candles? Someone helped fix my economy? Yeah, yeah. We're living in the candles tweet. The whole economy is candles. Yeah. And this is something that our colleague at Zichron argues that there is not enough money in the world to just continuously bail these companies.

out. Yeah. Like, there just isn't, right? The cash flow of these companies is like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is just unbelievable. And I think this is one of the disconnect things, right? Because like, it's interesting. You're starting to see a little bit of stuff crop up from like local level politicians where every once in a while you get them be like, oh yeah, no, it is like a recession economy like on the ground in like Wisconsin. Yeah. But I feel like, in. the media, and this is one of the things that I think makes everything insane, it's not being treated that way? Yeah, no, and I think, you know, you went exactly where, you know, we talked about going, but we were going to go, which is that, like, part of what is so crazy making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between sort of the on-the-ground experience that everyone's been having for years now, but is, like, especially intense. And, like, the fact that, like, AI is very obviously not interesting or good. And, you know, no one likes it. And like, even the people who sort of are, I think mostly in good faith,

like trying to take it seriously and who are like, yeah, it's going to change everything. Like, you know, like normie people in work stuff, like they don't really use it very much. Or if they do use it, like it's not effective. There wasn't a campaign to force everyone to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened. Everyone wanted one because it was like obvious what it did for you. Now, you know, obviously, whatever. This is not a defense of the smartphone. But, like, there is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right? That, like, the AI economy is nonsense, that, like, the economy that everyone says is doing fine feels bad.

And this has been going on since, you know, Biden campaigned on, you know, oh, it's just a vibe session. You know, the economy is fine. And, like, the economy wasn't fine. No. One of the charts I really am obsessed with is a chart from, like, Bloomberg, which is, like, a small business owner confidence from, like, 2010 to 2020. And, like, if you look, like, from 2016 to 2020, which is the first Trump term, it goes

up, like, 500 percent, right? Jesus Christ. It just goes up. It just is huge. It's the highest it's been by huge margin. And it just drops again in 2020. So it finally made me understand why so many libs were, like, so committed to the vibe session analysis, because there was a massive vibe inflation under the first Trump administration.

So the reason people felt like the economy was good was because small business owners, and this is the classic analysis of fascists, right? the petty bourgeois, the small business. They were like, this is the best times you've ever lived through based on no evidence. And if you work for a business and your boss is like, things are booming.

We're doing great. You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely to believe it. You know, like if everyone around you was saying that, like, there's no reason to doubt it unless, I mean, you know, you don't really believe your boss a lot of the time.

But you know what I'm saying? Like, it just, it has an effect of making everyone feel like things are better. That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election, November 2024. before Liberation Day, but on the announcement of the Liberation Day tariffs, tanks. So that's gone. Yeah, it's gone.

Yep, yep. And I think that's a really vital sort of component of what's happening is like, you know, we talk a lot about how so there's sort of these like self-contained, like, reality tunnels that people are gone down. But it's also really diffused by class. Yes, yes. And this ties back to the AI stuff, for example, where it's like, if you are in the tech sector, AI is kind of useful because the one thing you can sort of kind of do decently well is program.

Right. And if you're in this sort of like world, which is again, enormous portions of all of the economic growth, right, that is happening is coming out of these places. And it's like, oh, this really does look like the, like the future is here if you've, you suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you. And it's like, well, maybe coding was just wasn't that hard to begin with maybe. But like, you know, I say this is someone who learned a code and hated it. But like, you know, but like it creates these sort of like self-reinforced like reality tunnels. But the thing about the reality tunnels is like every once in a while like the actual world comes in like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it. And that's what happened to the small business people was they were like, oh shit, what do you mean they got rid of the dim minimis succession?

What do you mean they're like just straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistic system? have been, like, that's the basis of, like, most Americans small businesses are, like, are shipping businesses, right? Like, or they're either directly shipping businesses, or they rely on, on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries. And this just even goes into, like, the grift economy, right? Like, massive portions of the grift economy are just like, yeah, like, drop-shipping. Yeah, like, supplements, stacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, you know, it's another reality tunnel, Mia. Oh, these products and services, damn it, that was a better one than I was going to do, I was going to do, you know what else is a scam, but,

These products and services that support this podcast. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling.

I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, And I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there. This is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. Then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways. Disappearances. Legendary heists. The whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers. Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked everything to invent open-heart surgery.

Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love Cardiac Cowboys. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcast. Sponsored by Jasper. AI build for marketers. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town.

You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back, everyone's your next! And if you see the devil walking around,

Down inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. We are so back. We have never been more back. I want to kind of also talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as this has been going on, which is that Trump and his party has staged a pretty successful takeover of a lot of it. You know, you had, I mean, Elon Musk obviously buying X, but like they're in the process of taking over CBS.

basically by using the fact the quote-unquote free media is actually capitalist media and you can just buy them out and bully them by threatening them with losing money, you can in fact just completely get them to fall in line or have your own rich backers just buy it. And I think this is sort of fueling the disconnect, right? Where there was also this post-2020,

all of like this, the senior management level of all of the newspapers kind of lost their minds in 2020 because their staff was like, no, we don't want to print Tom Cotton calling for the U.S. Army to be deployed against protesters. And these people were like, okay, fuck it. We're just, like, you know, you can see it's like the Washington Post.

They were like, yeah, we will literally rather burn the post than have that happen again. And the post obviously is like under the control of Jeff Bezos, who was a style of Trump ally. And I think this has been contributing to it because like they've been able to take over social media platforms. They've been able to take over the sort of corporate like bourgeois media

and it's created this incredible unreality of this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular leader and that the

things he do are popular and that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff and it's like well I mean

there kind of has been a cultural shift in terms of like you know elite liberals are allowed to be racist again

which you know it's like all of the people who always wanted to be eugenicists are like you know

on that shit it now. And they, you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed up under COVID, right? Like, this is also continuous in a way. But yeah, I know I think that that's exactly right. And I think part of what we saw in the last week, I mean, I know we were going to talk about this a bit that, like, the last week when we're recording this, which was the week of the Charlie Kirk memorializing when everyone pretended that ventilating a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had the fallen American heroes. And I saw a lot of people who had been up until then relatively level-headed suddenly really start to panic. that week and feel like things were really, and I think part of that was because with a man as absolutely riseless and as obviously malicious and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk getting that treatment like he was, you know, Robert Redford or whatever he also passed.

I think that happening in unison across all the media, I think people finally realized like, oh, everything is totally captured. And the people who hadn't really thought that felt like that there was sort of this unanimity. The unanimity you're talking about because they're able to project this unanimity through this one sort of media voice. And like the fact that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel

getting fired and they're being like a genuine upswell of popular attention about the man show guy like who hasn't been funny probably since he was 14 or whatever. I think a lot of people have focused on that as being extremely embarrassing and cringe which like yeah, accurate. But I think like also like

they couldn't even hold it together for a week. right? Like they couldn't even hold this full court press together for a week. They had that Charlie Kirk documentary. They were like, we're going to film it on, you know, on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing Jimmy Kimmel. They just canceled it. They put it on YouTube. Yeah, 26,000 views. This means that I am very, very proud of this. More people listen to me, complaining about the way that everything everywhere all at once was spreading the bourgeois patriarchal ideology of the family. More people listen to me, talk about that on this show than why. Oh, that's the stupid fucking Charlie Gert Memorial. Yeah, sorry to that, man, but people do not care. Like, people don't care about that guy. And it didn't, and also, as you said, at the opening, his polls have gone down. People are, like, shut up about this. Like, they don't care.

It doesn't work. And, like, holes aren't everything. But, like, I think this disconnect that's so hard is that if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment, which all of us do, like, that's how most of us get all of our information, that's, this is not a judgment. it feels like everyone is at like half-mast, you know, for their beautiful, their beautiful boy. Look what they did to my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and caught bullets. Like a Fox News article said that he was like particularly strong-bodied and he kept he saved other people.

Okay, I didn't talk about this for a second because this is so fucking unhinged. Okay, so his like, Sergeant or whatever was like, oh yeah, he was. he started his surgeon wrote a thing about like this bone that doesn't exist in the neck that he was like oh yeah he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet and this got like picked up by like fox news who's not running a story about this magical iron bone in charlie kirk's neck that like god put there or something to save i i just it's it's so yeah i can read the headline for you hang on i've got it here oh god so this is fox news uh on x there's a picture of Charlie Kirk, it says, Surgeon says, Charlie Kirk's body stopped bullet in, quote, absolute miracle that saved others, TPSA says. And then, quote, man of steel, Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet that would typically, quote, just go through everything.

And it was, quote, an absolute miracle. Nobody else was killed. His surgeon told Turning Point USA. So that's weird behavior that people don't like. That's not, yeah. No. So I think, like, basically, they have this capacity to do this, like, really, really intense, unified message across the entire spectrum of the media.

And we're seeing it again right now with like NPR publishing basically does Tylenol actually cause autism, so the science isn't out yet, you know, or whatever, like as their headline, you know? So like, obviously, like, that's scary if you're used to a reality which is shaped largely by the media. And Trump has gotten into office twice based on a media reality shaping effect. The media has been the main tool, both social and mainstream, for putting him into power. So it's understandable to take it seriously because it does need to be taken

seriously. But there's other stuff going on. Well, and like the funniest version of this was just how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimball back? Yes. Which was like sub one week. Yeah, no, it was sub one week. And, you know, to me that says that actually the boycott spread real fast and real far. Yeah. Like, there was a Disney adult on TikTok,

right, who was sort of like giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney World vacations and was like canceling his Disney World wedding, you know,

and like, this was like all happening really, really fast. People were really mad. And, you know, yeah, it's, again, it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel,

but it's not really about Jimmy Kimmel, right? It's because everyone hates this man. They hate this. Yeah. And people don't actually want this in dip shit

to just literally, and you know, and he's trying to do this again, right? he's apparently trying to sue Disney. Like, they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able to just straight up say what is legal to say on TV, which is the thing that he is attempting to do right now. And the other thing about it that I think is really important and relevant is that

a better dictatorship doesn't go to the press and fire this man. They pull strings behind the scenes. They get him to retract on his show in a way that causes no attention. and the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they probably don't really think much about it, right? That is how like real, really smooth repression of a free press into a bot press involves a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes. And in fact, it has been happening for 20 years in America. There has been a lot of that going on.

Part of what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain way is that Trump just needs to do less. things have been set up for fascism for a while he just needs to do less and he can't help himself they can't help themselves because they're you know because they need it to be

in this sort of public mode and also he's lost his you know his juice but yeah yeah well and it's also just like I mean this is also partially Trump is just like pathologically obsessed with late night comedy because he's a TV guy

and so he's just mad on red and mad and nude online except like the previous version of it were like you were just like throwing shit at your television set in like 1955, which is a really terrified thing to have in the presidency. But, you know, speaking of having things in the presidency, these products and

services, look, if they pay me more, you'd get better transitions. But they don't. So... Vote for them. All I know is what I've been told. And that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved. Until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up.

Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes than have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time.

There's a shootout in broad daylight. people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers. Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked everything to invent open heart surgery. Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers,

you will love Cardiac Cowboys. Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper, AI Build for Marketers. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back, everyone! And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron May. Yankee, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise.

Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. We are back. So, you know, I think it's worth noting that, like, Yeah, no, like the immediate financial pressure of, you know, just the collision of, wait, hold on, like, the people who buy things, which is most people, and admittedly, like Disney adults are a very narrow subset of people, but like, the speed and rapidity of which reality, which is people don't like this guy hit the like, sort of, you know, just like just like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of the Charlie Kirk stuff was just, Unbelievable. And like part of this, this is something that Marissa Cobbos from the handbasket reported, which is that part of what was going on was Disney was about to roll out a price increase. Yeah. And so they had to bring it back so they could do their price increase, which, well, did brother, just delay the price increase. If we're trying to do authoritarian, whatever. Okay. You know, I am happy these people suck at doing this. It's great. We like it. We like that they're bad at it. Right. Yeah. You know, like Disney is being pressured here, but I think it's worth talking about. something that you have been spending a ungodly amount of time in the minds of, which is Disney and

fascism. Oh, boy. Yay. Yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny about this week for me personally, and that's what really matters, obviously, is that, is that like, you know, when we went into this administration, we started seeing what they were doing, I was like, I can't believe I'm writing a book about free trade and lawfare, right, like warfare by law, like, you know, like sort of this this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart, right? Like the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow to the IP regime. Sorry, the intellectual property regime, the IP regime is what I analyze in the book I've just written and is coming out in April. And it's about how Disney really was like a sort of

pioneer in understanding the value of intellectual property and manipulating it and how you can see that through the entire corporate and artistic history of Disney Studios. So it's about like Disney movies and how they're all connected. They actually all sort of tell stories about IP in certain ways and how we sort of miss that angle on them very often, very frequently, and misunderstand how much IP functions in the broader society because, for example, fast fashion companies, now I know you said talk about Disney, I'm talking about something else, but fast fashion companies, they actually own very, very little materially. So their offices are leased mostly. Their factories are contracted. You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted, they might own their stores,

but they probably lease their stores, right? They like have very few direct employees other than like store level, if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise. They might not even employ the store level people, but they probably do. Store level people, corporate employees, and then they own their IP. And maybe they own a headquarters building somewhere, right? Like, that's a fancy building. Yeah. And everything else. is quote unquote owned by them controlling the designs, the logos, the images, and they can guarantee that they can make almost infinite money off of that because the global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that would make people who would like to see any human rights

thing enacted blush with shame. And it is incredibly effective. It is the one thing that international law does quite well is enforced copyright and trademark and patent. So when you have have stuff like the, you know, you can no longer ship under $800 without tariffs, like those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because they don't own ships. They don't own factories. They don't even really own the, you know, they own the shirts only when they arrive on American shores, really. This has always been the dream of reproduction of capital, which is to have a company with no assets that makes money. Exactly. And they're so close. They're so close. And all this

stuff is destroying it. So I was like, well, great. Now I've written this whole book about how Disney, you know, is actually really like a state actor. And like they have, they have like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which you may or may not know about. People talked about Celebration Florida a bit when that happened in the 2000s, which is like a weird, creepy company town that they run. They actually own a huge section of, uh, it's like two counties. It's larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida. Jesus Christ. What? The conference, The conflict was DeSantis over the don't say gay bill, which people, you know, interpreted largely through the lens of the, you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics he was pushing, which is understandable, is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida, because they don't pay taxes in the same way. They make their own laws. They have their own police force. So basically.

Jesus Christ. Disney made the first network state. They did it. They actually did it, and they've been doing it for 30 years. Oh, no. Jesus Christ. Sixty-nine is when they get the deal for really. Holy shit! We've had it for a long time. People don't love to talk about this for some reason. I think it's really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting. But the reason that that's all really, really connected to intellectual property is because one of the things that Disney did, despite, you know, having literally their own state-lit

in the middle of Florida, is maintain themselves as the Magic Kingdom. They are associated with childhood, nostalgia, magic, even as they've grown and grown and grown of his behemoth, like, they've managed to largely stay connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood. And there have been moments in the 90s, they overreached a bit. There's been, like, you know, there have been problems and you can read all about that. But basically, they did image management on all these different levels. So they managed Mickey Mouse.

They managed the law around copyright, like copyright extensions famously were largely driven by Disney lobbying in 1976 and then again in 1998. Anyway, so all of these things, I'm trying to reduce a very broad. big argument to a very small package here. But basically, Disney designed and the other IP businesses that work around it have figured out that if you can control the way your product appears in the market and you can control the images and the feelings people have about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you can really do whatever you want materially behind the scenes, right? That like controlling an image is so powerful. And part of why what's happening with Disney,

why it's falling apart so fast, is because if they give in to Trump at all, it requires shattering that image that has been a century in the making, right? Like part of what was so brutal about the thing with Jimmy Kimmel was like, it's just obvious that Disney did that, that the corporate people did that,

and they did it because Trump did it publicly. Trump is humiliating these corporations publicly, right? He's humiliating them, he's forcing them to come to heal. It's not working popularly. He's not capturing anti-corporate sentiment, really. People are like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel? Like, that's weird. You're a creep. But then also, he's also destroying the legitimacy of everyone. It's pulling everything

down around him. It's a family annihilation, right? He's so angry about 2020 and, like, being tried that he's just going to rip everything down around him. Wow, that was a, I just said a lot of different things. But all of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about, like, the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship to Disney is that Disney has for so long built this image of America that has managed to persist, like, across and against, you know, a century of increasingly violent, ineffective, and visible imperialism, like in Korea and Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan, it was so crucial to the image of what American capitalism was. And then Trump, a man who is just as built by images as the Disney Corporation, comes and is

just, like, just is ripping it all down because he's sort of, you know, one gaping narcissistic wound, right? Like running a country, right? Yeah. So if you look at the history of like Disney in general, Hollywood and intellectual property management in general, what you can see is the way that we have, that this media apparatus has been built. When I say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know, when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever, they just think about stuff on TV. But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate through society. And it's like the way that you get paid for your job with, you know, like the idea of clout is like. actually part of that. Like, it does function as a form of payment, right? Like, it's not,

like, people make fun of that, like, oh, good, but like, then everyone acts as though it's real, right? And when everyone acts as though it's real, it's real, it's a social relation. So, the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on images that rely only on being forced through a sort of massive group think from the top of the economy and the political class was built by these corporations. But it was built explicitly to, you know, reap as much wealth as possible for their shareholders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To make money. Yeah. Trump is too perfect a product of that.

And this regime is too perfect a product of that. And now it's all, it's all, you know, it is its own grave digger, you know? Yeah. The point has a line about like the way that the spectacle sort of like intrus into and like becomes reality. And like, if Disney is sort of like the stage manager of this, right, like Trump just is the thing, like come to life and powering through it. And because he is the image and not the thing that creates the image, he has different interests than the people who create the image who are, you know, trying to make money.

Trump is trying to, like, satisfy all of his, like, vindictive sort of narcissistic rage. Exactly. It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's doing is extremely real, he genuinely is fighting over the election and over, like, Comey, like, he is like, he really believes these things. This is a regime that believes the things that, for example, Carl Rove would teach people to say to get away with doing what they wanted to do, right? These are, as you said, they are the image itself. They are true believers in the spectacle. And as such, break the fourth wall, right? If we're going to use a theater metaphor

here. As such, they end up, they end up, like, just destroying it. And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture the spectacle, right? And then there were all the people, as you described and the people who make the spectacle, maintain the image, make the image. They were around him. So they would just close up the puncture. They would close up the suture.

They would work really, really hard, right? So what I mean by that is, like, Trump would say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would be, like, controversial statement from President Trump, right? Which, like, completely normalizes it. And, like, everyone would sort of pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatic shit.

And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right? Like, people would just pretend that it was normal. Yeah, that he was speaking of, four-season total landscape. It's just like, shit would happen. Exactly. And everyone would sort of try to, it would normalize it.

And that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle. And it made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch august institutions such as the Washington Post, going over backwards to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim, right? So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him as he punctured it, right?

But he has actually too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair. He actually thought they were his enemies. The rhinos, right, the Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media, they have been purged. They have all been purged and controlled. And now they all just repeat what he says. And what ends up happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people see through it. Like, it's just not working anymore.

And I think what's scary is that it's still. feels like they're repairing the spectacle around his claims because the entire media is speaking as one and the Democrats are speaking as one and the Republicans are speaking as one and they're all agreeing. You know, we imagine someone else, John Q. Public, sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay, it's all pretty normal. Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, you know? We sort of project that that person is there. But actually, more and more people who would have been like that in the first regime are like, well, I don't believe any of this shit. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's also we're saying, like, the way

that we're talking about this in terms of his unpopularity and reality, you know, in terms of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that it's, there's not just horrible shit happening constantly, right? And that's the other part of his ability to sort of eliminate the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that, it was to

some extent restraining him, right? Like, that's the reason why there wasn't just like, there were a bunch of deportations under Trump, there were a bunch of deportations under Biden. The thing that's happening now is not the thing that was happening before, right? Yeah.

The Secretary of the Interior wasn't showing up at like 5.30 in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American citizens out of their house. Like, that was like not happening. Yeah. Before, and that's what it's just, you know, it's unbelievably horrifying. And it's also not popular. Right. Like, even those approval rating numbers, right?

Like, you know, like his immigration policy, in theory, is the most popular thing he's doing. And also, ICE can't do mass, large-scale raids because if they stay in one place for too long, so many people will show up, they can't do it. And, you know, and the lightning raids that they've been doing have been really brutal and really effective. But, like, those are not the tactics, a stormtrooper force that broadly has popular consent. Yeah. Right? They don't move like that.

And, you know, I talked about this, I guess it'll be like two weeks ago on executive order. But like, people are like stopping these raids in like Wheaton. Yeah. Like, Wheaton used to be literally the center of the base of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit. For like 40 years, this was like the center of the Christian right. And they have lost Wheaton. Yeah. It's been like electing Democrats.

And it's not just electing Democrats. It's like the speed of which has moved from electing Democrats to like a bunch of people showed up and are stopping like lightning ice rates, which is really impressive genuinely, very, very impressive organizing. It's very hard to do. Most times it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough. And somehow

again, like the place that used to be the capital of the moral majority, it's like Jerry Farwell's fucking like home domain, right? Like the epicenter of like the Christian right is in doing the anti-ice raid shit. Like what?

And this is something that's been going on for like, you know, probably like four or five years. But like them doing like really serious, very good direct action. The entire terrain of the world is shifting beneath us while all of these people constantly try to like paint over this like little tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like, no, no, the ground's still there. There's all these holes in the middle of it. But like, you know, we're going to put us some tarp that like looks like the sky beneath it. It's like, wait, why is the sky down? Yeah. Don't ask questions.

Just keep walking. Exactly. And I think that's like, I think that's really important. And a thing that I think happens sometimes when I sort of make this analysis with my friends, I think they think that I'm saying that like fascism isn't here or that like this isn't a fascist regime or that like they don't want to like do Nazism. Like they very clearly do. Yeah. My analysis has been like since February. I mean, part of what's happened is like in February when the Doze stuff was going on. I was like, well, the American Republic is over. Like we'll never be able to go back. Like now, what do we do? So I think like a lot of a lot of the disjuncture in the confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines. Because it's really hard to accept. It's a hard and complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually like this is a dying regime and a dying empire. And like that does not mean it's less dangerous. In fact, historically it's often more dangerous and it's death throws. And it does not mean when I, when you and I talk about him being ineffective, it does not mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying. We're both

trans women who organize with other trans women, like, we know about it, okay, y'all, like, we are dealing with the fallout all the time. But, like, the situations that we could be going through, the situations that they could be achieving, that with the public that they were handed by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID, that had created an effective red scare around Gaza, that had, like, you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten liberals to, like, say that that was normal and good, right? Like, that was a very, very scary Republic to hand to Nazis too now with nooks, right? And like I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when the only fascist regimes we think about are Nazism and we think

that like it's inevitably like going to be just like the Nazis. Or even if we just say, well, it could be more like Italy. Like there are dozens of different dictatorships. Yeah. Across the history. I don't expect everyone to study all of them. But like, but like it's worth understanding. Learn a third one. Pick one. Literally pick one. Literally pick one. Fucking. Anyone that's not the maid, too, there are so many. Like, you have, you are spoiled for options.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, you can do, you could do, if you, you know, pick a decade, you know, you like the 70s, go for Swarto in Indonesia. You like the 80s, Brazilian meditletary dictatorship. No problem. Like, or you could do Korea in the 80s. You got lots of choices.

Oh, the 50s, go for Greece. No problem. Don't worry about it. The reason that I bring all that up is just to say that, like, things are really bad. And if we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build an authoritarian, fascist state

eventually, just by the sheer inertia of the power that they have available on the time that they can wait. But as you're saying, and as I've been sort of seeing also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance. It is completely uncovered. It is not being seen. But because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made, they also don't see and understand their level of resistance.

Like, they've disorganized the FBI, right? They fired about, like, was it, like, a fifth of FBI agents, like head of agents? and then like a bunch more are now doing like street crime and are like being put into ice raids and people talk about that as being terrifying and it is terrifying. The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids and to use every resource available to them is scary.

Yeah. But also if they don't have the FBI's eyes on the ball, which they clearly don't anymore, they have redirected the FBI, they are not nearly as cognizant of what's going on in terms of resistance as they were even six months ago. No, like if you look at the guy you shot Charlie Kirk, right?

This is like, Carly Kirk is like their guy, right? The FBI is so stripped down right now that with a full court press, the only reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand that discord wasn't private and he like dropped his gun and didn't pick it up again.

Yeah, and his dad recognized it, right? And if he had done those two things, they wouldn't have found him. Like, yeah, they didn't catch him. She turned himself in, right? And that's, again, someone assassinated like their guy and they couldn't find him

like this repressive apparatus it is really really scary and very good at doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors down and like dragging them away to a prison

right it's not good at anything else and the thing right that is a very very good way to create an engine of you know like immense human misery that whose spectacle they can sell But it's not actually a good way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship. We have seen very, very successful sort of dictatorships in the last, like, 20, 30 years, right?

Yeah. And, you know, like, they take a bunch of forms. I think, like, the most classically, like, 1930s Nazi Party one is Modi in India. Yep. And Modi in India has done the thing in the sense of, like, has really, really successfully transformed the consciousness of people in India to this sort of, like, unbelievable. unhinged right-wing fascist version of like Hindu supremacy. That hasn't happened here. Right. You know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which is his brown shirts, like, has four million people in it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like, I mean, you know, it has millions, they have millions of

brown shirts, right? Like, ICE is having trouble hiring 12,000 extra agents in a, in a, in a continent of 400 million people. Again, this doesn't mean everything's fine. But yeah, like, if you look at that, if you look at Erdogan in Turkey, or you look at Putin and Russia, or even Orban, to a different degree in Hungary, like, they slow-rolled it, right? They went through a few elections that were, like, slightly sketchy, but basically normal. And they, like, and they just slowly built power, and it took them a decade to get to the point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that Trump was trying to do. Yeah. And, like, again, there's no rules. It might work what Trump is doing, but, like, compare it to Millet in Argentina, right, who they all loved so much,

who came into power, similarly to Trump, started throwing truth bombs everywhere, you know, just like ripped apart and has now had to come hat and hand begging for a bailout to the United States. Yep. Because his whole thing, his regime fell apart within 24 months. Yep. There is ultimately a material limit to what you can do. Yeah.

You can't just speak reality into existence for that long. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? If it was possible to just speak reality into existence, we would all be living under neoconservatism, right? There would be like a pure, well-functioning oil extracting American clients aid in Iraq right now. And I don't know what the fuck they would have done with Afghanistan,

but like if you could just do the thing, and I talked about this on the show, I talk about this on the show all the time, right? The thing the neoconservatives thought they could do with evidence-based reality thing, right? Where like they thought that what they could do was just, instead of observing reality and creating your positions from it, they thought they could just purely influence and manipulate reality to become whatever they

wanted it to be and they couldn't right like where the fuck is george bush right now right like where is dick cheney like the trump administration somehow staggeringly has managed to like they finally found a war crime so bad that john woo the architect like the guy who wrote the torture manuals was like wait hold on you can't just blow up random like boats of people in venezuela like what what like i i i i i literally Literally, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible for you to commit a war crime so bad that the guy who wrote the torture memos was like, hold on, hold on, hold on, whoa, I ain't set up for this shit. Like, yeah, they're absolutely, like, unhinged, they're horrible, and thank God, they are so unpopular and so bad at this. Yeah. Because if they were just a little bit better at this, I think it's very clear what they want.

Yeah, we're fucked. Yeah. Yeah, like we go under it like four months, but that hasn't happened because they're not good at this. And they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatus like Disney. Like they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatuses that were designed to like propagate them. Like Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right? Like Trump could have just used, you know, like like basically like the way that every other thing like the way literally the Nazis did. Right.

Like, until, like, literally until they were forced to break it off during, like, World War II, right? Which is, like, used Disney as a propaganda apparatus for you. And Disney was gun-shy because of the fight with, the fight with Santa's didn't go that well for them, surprisingly. You know, like, they had some trouble with that. And so they were gun-shy, like, going into the administration, like, they were very quiet. Like, they were not rocking the boat. They were making lots of statements about how, like, you know, we support it. Like, he didn't have to goad them into taking a position in the culture world.

Like, they were just very glad that they weren't fighting off to Santos anymore. on that they weren't fighting off, you know, the daily wire, you know, claiming that they were, you know, whatever, the woke mind virus or whatever the hell, you know? Yeah. Like, they were just putting their, keeping their heads down, trying to rebuild after the disaster of the pandemic, right? Like, trying to, like, get their cruise line back up and, like, as profitable as it could be. You know, like, they were working on, like, they were just doing their thing.

And they were like, no reason Trump should stop that. There's no reason Trump should stop that is what they thought. No. It's like they were implementing, like, a lot of the culture war stuff that they wanted in terms of, like, okay, we're going back to white people. We're never having another non-white character again, like, eat shit. Yeah, like, they're cancel, they're canceling TV shows with just, like, queer characters. Like, they're just doing stuff like that. They're doing, they're doing everything that the regime wants. But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there watching TV and, like,

throwing his remote around. And, like, unfortunately, his remote, like, dictates U.S. policy. Mm-hmm. I think that's an important note to close on, because, like, his remote dictates US policy to the extent that everyone pretends that it does. And one of the things that can start happening in the end stages of these kind of regimes is that like the levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state. Yeah. Right. So he just like declared that Antifa is like a domestic terrorist organization, right? We're going to be talking about that later this week, possibly earlier this week. I don't know when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything in and of itself. He's just,

just like waving a magic wand around but if he doesn't have the repressive apparatus to make that matter then okay then him throwing the remote around isn't like gesturally controlling the arm of like one of the most sophisticated what's supposed to be one of the most sophisticated repressive apparatus ever

right and they rely on both the compliance of the state bureaucracy which they've been decently good at pulling in line but also they rely on our compliance for this and you don't have to comply with them that's that's that's that's that's that's the that's the fun thing about about existence is that

they can't yeah just they can't just make it real unless you help them and as we saw as we've already talked about the the the charlie kirk special doesn't go up right they say like the yeah the COVID vaccines are like we're going to restrict them and most of the pharmacies are just like just check a box saying you need it like you know like not in every state but again like these massive institutions they can't really get them in line so why are you letting them get you in line yeah and remember you know like they they had better control of their institutional apparatuses in 2020. And the outcome of that was there was a giant uprising and they put the president in a bunker, a thing that he's still mad about to this day,

right? Even when it looks like they have total control, they don't. And I don't know if he's going to like end up in a Hitler bunker, but look, as of right now, as it stands, the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in a bunker is 100%. So, you know, if if the past is to be a prediction of the future, we could can see it again when all of this shit goes to hell and the economy collapses and everyone's like, oh, this was all a lie the whole time. Wow, damn.

Hey, look. Like, you know. And I don't know if you can say that, but I don't know if we can't. We're just going to put a really long leap over that entire sentence and we're going to leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader.

You too. completing the sentence just figuring out what it was saying not doing the thing oh okay this this this this is it could happen here Vicki where can people

pre-order your book oh you can go to Haymarket that's who's putting it out and they have a list of links you can also go to my Blue Sky account Vickyacab acab dot B-sky

dot social and you can find a link there yeah and where can people find you in your work cawshinythings.com it's the collective anarchist writers or any other acronym you like, C-A-W,

that's where I'm working most regularly now. Good crow-thaming. That's great. It's great. It's Corvid-based. Yeah. We love a Corvid-based economy. Thanks so much for having me, Mia. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to. podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of. of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways,

disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist. On the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers. Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment

who risked everything to invent open heart surgery. Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love Cardiac Cowboys. Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper, AI Build for Marketers. There's a vile sickness in Amper's Town.

You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHart podcast.