He's Scoring Politicians Against the Constitution | Joel Rakow

Send us Fan MailJoel Rakow spent most of his life as a registered, generational Democrat — socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and, by his account, never a party-line voter. That changed when he resigned from the Democratic Party, a decision he says came down to feeling the party no longer represented the middle class or the values he'd always held.Joel's background is a lot: postdoctoral work at Harvard, a stint as a cybersecurity advisor to the Secret Service (where he identified building-management systems as the entry point for roughly 60% of national-actor breaches), a former national park ranger, a software entrepreneur who sold millions of instructional app guides, and — perhaps most personally — a longtime court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for foster children.That last role directly shaped his new novel, "Life in Woke America," which follows a young man named Xavier King and is loosely inspired by a real congressional investigation into a biological research facility in Reedley, California. In this conversation, Joel and I talk through:Why he left the Democratic Party, and why he thinks the "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" middle is politically homeless right nowHow he says media and NGOs shape the perception of how many Americans are actually "progressive"Stories from inside university administrations, including a writing assignment at USC and a library at UCLA that Joel says has been stripped down to a single genre of bookJordan Peterson's take on whether traditional universities can be savedShadow banning, deplatforming, and Joel's own experience trying to get his book's website indexed by search and AI toolsThe Liberty Index — an AI tool Joel built (using Grok) that scores politicians, school boards, and institutions on alignment with the Constitution and Bill of RightsMoney in politics, ESG/DEI in corporate boardrooms, and how Joel says NGOs are used to influence corporate leadershipThe real Reedley, CA case that partly inspired his novel, and how he built the story from congressional documents and firsthand interviewsHis decades of work as a CASA advocate for kids in the foster system, and how those experiences shaped his main characterJoel doesn't claim to have all the answers — he's upfront that this is one perspective, shaped by his own experience. But it's a conversation about institutional trust, free speech, and what it feels like to no longer recognize a party you grew up in, whichever side of the aisle you're on.Find "Life in Woke America" in hardcover, paperback, and ebook at lifeinwokeamerica.com, and on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.Support the show