Fun Magician extended universe lore - this was the podcast that broke my liberal brain and pushed me towards communism.

From Wikipedia:

Mueller, She Wrote is a political podcast hosted by Allison Gill, a military veteran who worked at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. It mixes comedy, legal commentary and political analysis, from a liberal perspective, and centers on the Mueller investigation. The original co-hosts were San Diego comedians Jordan Coburn and Jaleesa Johnson; the latter has since left the show due to a pay dispute.

I remember feeling lost after trump got elected and hoped that something would come of the Mueller report. It's wild to think I believed an FBI investigation run by a Republican would to anything to shake up the system, but there were plenty of people who believed it.

These hosts would give updates on the investigation and other bits of news, but it started feeling hollow around the third 'this time he's really in trouble!' story.

The simping for Mueller like he was going to solve things felt hollower and hollower until I stopped listening altogether.

I read up on them a few years later and saw them vote shaming people who were considering withholding their vote for healthcare and student debt forgiveness. I also found out they benefited from PPP loans they didn't have to reimburse. Hypocrisy exposed is an empty victory, but it felt vindicating to know leaving that whole bubble was a good decision.

Finally, I hate the logo so much. Like they were doing investigative journalism or something by collecting headlines from news websites.

I dunno. I just wanted to air out my vitriol while it was fresh.

Did anybody else follow it or similar podcasts before moving left?

  • porcupine@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    3 months ago

    Remember when women of the SNL cast did an earnest "All I want for Christmas is You" parody about Robert Mueller? Fortunately NBC seems to have done a pretty good job scrubbing it from the internet.

  • Des [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    sadness first political podcast i ever listened to was pod save america.

    i was full berniepilled at the time and i turned away from it pretty quickly after realizing there was just one token pro-bernie guy and the other two were worse

    • casskaydee [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      My first was The Weeds starring Ezra "Vox" Klein and our fav neolib ghoul Matt "Matty" Yglesias

      • Beaver [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        I started listening to Chapo and The Weeds at the same time in the lead up to the 2016 election.

      • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
        ·
        3 months ago

        I wondered what he was up to. The usual shit. Here's a tweet that's a few hours old.

        Right now rebotaxis are driving around San Francisco so the clash is with dingbat leftists, but when it goes mainstream the real struggle with be with manly men (and truckers) who don’t want to take their hands off the wheel.

        https://nitter.poast.org/mattyglesias/status/1778178193150591254#m

        • Magician [he/him, they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          3 months ago

          Can't reckon with why people would have a problem with robo taxis in a city that had decent public transit once.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      ·
      3 months ago

      Childhood is when you listen to Pod Save America

      Adulthood is when you listen to Pod Damn America

    • Magician [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 months ago

      I was hooked on the copium for a while. Good thing US institutions are so transparently useless if you have pattern recognition and/or understanding of materialism.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        I completely bought into that whole circus and the resulting reality check was one of the things that eventually made me a Marxist-Leninist lmao

  • porcupine@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    Like they were doing investigative journalism or something by collecting headlines from news websites.

    Don't you mean "OSINT"?

    • Magician [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      Wouldn't that imply producing actionable intelligence? It's a comedy podcast that centers on trump news now that Mueller is out of the picture.

      Oh I see what you're saying. They framed themselves as being part of the investigation, yeah. Like they were going to help blow the story wide open.

      • porcupine@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        Yes, by googling headlines from major US corporate media outfits and retweeting them at @FBI, they were doing vital citizen-journalist intelligence work against the spread of Putler's dizinformatzya

  • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Did anybody else follow it or similar podcasts before moving left?

    I was really into TYT during the Obama years lol. hasan-ok-dude

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I think the reason I didn't fall for that stuff was because I believed there'd be consequences for torture under Bush when Obama got elected.

    • Magician [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 months ago

      Ooof. I was a young lib at that point. I remember voicing my annoyance with Obama failing to get same sex marriage legalized when that was one of his promises. I thought Obama was bad, but I still believed in The Process

  • Red_Sunshine_Over_Florida [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I don't know about that specific podcast but, I did buy into Russiagate for a while before really getting into the old sub around 2018. My parents still reflexively blame everything on Putin because of how CNN broke them after 2016.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      ·
      3 months ago

      The reality is that the events surrounding RussiaGate are likely real, but the people behind it are likely Israeli intelligence agents lol.

  • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I got radicalized by New Atheists so not too terribly different in tone honestly. During the Iraq War they were just deranged at times. I tried to convince my parents to vote Ron Paul in 2008 to end the war and legalize weeds, then anarchist, then ML.

  • Greenleaf [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I didn’t listen to that pod specifically but I did listen to Pod Save America and was following Seth Abramson on twitter. The Mueller report is actually kind of a turning point in my life. Not because of the report, it was just that coincidentally at that exact time the report came out, I found the cth podcast and the old sub. Binged some episodes, spent hours every day on the sub, and in less than a week I renounced my lib ways and considered myself a socialist (before then I probably would have called myself a socdem, I thought Bernie and Warren were equally good choices. Yeesh.)

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Haha you just reminded me of TrueFactsStated. He was a photographer who had some kind of very very minor security clearance since he was often invited to the White House to take photos of Obama, or maybe he only got to do that one time? Whatever. Every day with him it was like a new CIA or FBI plot had opened to take out Trump. He was absolutely the liberal version of Q and libs ate it up. I remember being in an IRC channel around that time and a lib friend literally said "Trump's done for this time." and it was like March of 2017.

    • GladimirLenin [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I looked it up a few weeks back to check if it was still active. There's still a few true believers still posting multiple times a day. Delusional.

  • Walk_On [he/him]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Don't forget she was caught changing aspects of her life story like last year. lol

  • mushroom [he/him]
    ·
    3 months ago

    oh man, ive never listened to it but i love the PPP thing and all the weird lies. fun character

  • casskaydee [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    Yes, I used to listen to a podcast called All the Presidents Lawyers hosted by Josh Barro where he would interview Popehat weekly on all of Trump's legal battles.

    I also followed Seth Abramson on Twitter and would read his 600 tweet threads about how He'd Like To See Trump Wriggle His Way Out of This One.

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]
    ·
    3 months ago

    It’s incredibly funny how after he kept yapping in court about the report whenever someone asked him a question then fucked off to obscurity, he was never talked about again. And liberals want me to believe they’ll be useful