Back in Week 25, the guests on The Weekly Show were Tony Gilroy and Mike Duncan. (I actually thought I wrote about it at the time, but I guess not.) Now, Gilroy was there because he’s the creator of Andor, a “science fiction” show which, many point out, is eerily parallel to our own current experiences in many ways. Duncan is a bit tougher to describe: he started a podcast called The History of Rome way back in 2007. As a historian, he was able to parlay that into 179 episodes across 5 years. His next project was Revolutions, a series of deep dives into the various revolutions which have shaped the world: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and 4 others. This brought him to 2022, when he had not run out of revolutions, but he had run out of steam. So he took a break, and then came back in 2024 with “The Martian Revolution.”
Now, obviously, this is not a real historical event, but rather a piece of elaborate science fiction. But of course Duncan knows how to make it sound like a real historical event, complete with references to biographies and other secondary sources, controversies debated by competing historical viewpoints, larger-than-life personalities who are revealed to be just human after all, and everything else you could imagine. I thought the whole thing sounded intriguing, and I decided to give it a listen. In two episodes, I was hooked. Two weeks and 27 more episodes later, I have emerged from nearly non-stop binge listening to tell you that you too must listen to this amazing piece of “fiction.” And I put that in quotes rather advisedly, because, like Andor, it has a number of eerie parallels to current events, even though (like Andor) it was conceived and entirely written before President Musk started destroying everything. And, yet, there is a character in “The Martian Revolution” who is an almost perfect Musk analog. It’s almost like Musk himself is a tired stereotype instead of a tech genius.
Throughout the series, I kept seeing the parallels to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, and I’m sure I’d have seen parallels to others if I knew more about them. But it was hearing the echoes of our current American political landscape that intrigued (and disturbed) me the most: not just the CEO with tunnel vision cutting services and jobs that he had no understanding of, but the rule of the gerontocracy, the exploitation of the poor by the upper classes, the blindness of bean-counters making organization-wide decisions with catastrophic consequences, the inevitable in-fighting among the oppressed leading to movements being hijacked by selfish interests. Each episode is pretty short, so it doesn’t take much investment to figure out if it’s for you. But, trust me: it is.
Other things you need to know this week:
- Two great videos from Adam Kinzinger this week: the first, another great weekly news roundup (where, thankfully, “Jizz-lane” is replaced by “Jih-lane”: still wrong, but much easier on the ears) and, the second, a stirring condemnation of masked ICE agents.
- On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews Peter Beinart, a Jewish author who has been quite vocal lately (he showed up on several of my feeds this week, but this is likely the best introduction to him). He takes the insane position that Jews should not be supportive of starving childre
n— go figure. Here’s a perfect quote that sums up Binart’s essential point: “And I know a lot of people caricature a lot of these people who care about Palestinian rights and freedom as, like, being anti-Semitic. But to be honest, the vast, vast majority of people I meet, they strike me as, like, the kind of people who would have stuck up for us when we were in trouble, the kind of people who are willing to risk something because when they see people suffering and being abused, they act. And those are the people who I want to be around.” Amen.
- Also on Monday’s Daily Show, Stewart talks about Trump’s accusations against every black person he could think of, and a special guest shows up. Exquisite commentary.
- On this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, Kate and Leah cover the motion by Chief Justice Roberts to stifle a FOIA request from Stephen Miller which, as Leah describes it, “seems to be a backdoor way to try to seize power over the federal courts by asserting that these entities, which are critical to the functioning of the courts, are actually executive branch entities subject to presidential control.” The incisive observation from Kate exposes the hypocrisy of Roberts and the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court: ”... this seems like a pretty big indication that John Roberts is aware that things may not be purely on the up and up in the federal executive right now. And he is kind of letting us see that when it is his institution at stake, not, say, those who by statute independently protect consumers from products that try to hurt us.” Preach on, professor.
Where is the hope this week? Well, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that it’s the Wall Street Journal that keeps fucking with Trump over the Epstein business. He claims he’s suing them for one of his ridiculous amounts (I believe it’s actually $10 billion in this case, which is basically so large as to be meaningless). But I wonder how long that suit will stand ... likely exactly as long as it takes to realize that Rupert Murdoch is not Disney, or Paramount, and he isn’t likely to roll over and throw money at Trump’s temper tantrum. Because, if the suit goes on any longer than that, then discovery kicks in, and all of a sudden WSJ actually produces that utterly bizarre birthday letter that he wrote to Epstein. And something tells me that people actually seeing this letter, which so far we’ve only heard described, would be really bad for ol’ Trumpy.
But what’s still breaking my brain is why. Murdoch is, after all, the owner of Fox “News,” quite possibly the #1 reason we’re stuck with this idiot in the first place. So why this sudden 180? The only thing I’ve been able to figur
But I’ll leave you this week with a quote from Andry Hernández Romero, as read by Leah Litman (again, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny). You may recall that Romero was the gay hairdresser who was, like Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, caught up in the Trump regime’s fervor to deport innocent immigrants. At the end of last week, he was finally released from the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador. As Leah reports:
I wanted to read a quote from him upon his release, when he learned that people continued to call for him to be released and drawing attention to his case. So he said, quote, “It fills me with so much peace, so much comfort, so much tranquility that I was never alone from day one. There were many people who worried for me.”
And, as Kate went on to say:
I do think that it can feel like you’re toiling in the dark and it’s totally futile tSo never doubt that these efforts are having an impact. Sometimes it seems like it can’t possibly be enough. But for the people who have been un-disappeareo— whether you’re posting on social media or actually marching with sign s— but continuing to call for the return of individuals detained at CECOT, whether or not any individual action has any kind of causal connection to what ultimately happened, A) it meant a lot to the people who, like Andry Hernández Romero, but also the other hundreds of men who, not only whose friends and families, but a lot of people in the kind of public at large, continued to press for the release of, but also I do think it matters from the perspective of policy makers and kind of the diplomatic effort, such as it was, that actually did kind of result in people actually being released from these horrific conditions.
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