Weird, Wicked, and Wild

Don't miss this preview of the rollercoaster season we have coming your way. We are swinging for the fences, and we'll probably gain a few enemies along the way. That's how we know we're doing our jobs right!

Forty-three men between 1789 and 2017 demonstrated the awesome and growing power of the American presidency. Sometimes they were blunt, other times much more deliberate. But in 2017, something shifted, and since then we've seen how extremely fragile the presidency is, too. The two men who've held the office since then have exposed its frailty over and over again. One battered norms with open contempt, mistaking spectacle for strength and grievance for governance. He treated institutions as obstacles to be humiliated into submission. The other stretched executive authority past its snapping point in the name of restoration, governing through emergency and exception. Then that first guy came back, but worse, and that's where we are now. Whether through chaos or consolidation, they both marked radical departures from the managerial, post-Cold War presidency. They weren't course corrections -- they were disruptions. Joe Biden and Donald Trump: the Aberration.

Part 2 of 2: Daddy left unfinished business in the Middle East, so Bush 43 comes to the White House in 2001 with a mission, and whether he accomplished it or not really isn't up for debate -- he didn't. That didn't stop him though, and the damage he did in the White House made his successor's election seem like salvation may have arrived. Spoiler alert: it didn't. The White House is where altruism goes to die. And the first Black president in American history revealed something ugly in this country, paving the way for horrors to come. Part 2 of the Accelerants -- George "Dubya" Bush and Barack Obama.

Part 1 of 2: Riding his predecessor's coattails into an office that had already gone off the rails, George H.W. Bush didn’t bother asking where the brakes were. He put the pedal to the metal. He and his successors put power on a fast and dangerous track with emergency authorizations, executive orders, surveillance dragnets, corporate and banking bailouts, and forever wars, all designed to look strong on TV and in social media feeds. They used every crisis as an excuse for a procedural shortcut, and then turned every shortcut into precedent. The Oval Office became a reflex factory: act fast and first, don't apologize, and deal with governing when the cameras are gone. Hesitation is failure, restraint is bad business. In this first part of a two-part episode, we'll cover Bush 41 and Bill "Slick Willy" Clinton.

Inheriting a world reshaped by total war, nuclear brinkmanship, and nonstop mobilization demanded more than managerial skill. As the U.S. slid into the Cold War, presidents acted less like careful stewards of process and more like final judges of what counted as necessary, legitimate, and urgent. They waged wars without declarations, kept secrets without oversight, and shaped markets, morals, and memory by sheer force of office (and occasional charisma). The imperial presidency fused commander-in-chief, moral advocate, and national sovereign into a single role, pulling power ever closer to the Oval Office even as the bureaucracy beneath it swelled. Authority flowed downward, justified by crisis, sustained by fear, and made routine through repetition. Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan: these are the Authorities.

Presiding over a growing territorial and overseas empire takes a lot of power vested in the one-man office of the American presidency. The expansive scope of the President's authority had grown well beyond what a single man could control by the end of the 19th century; in the 20th century, presidents relied more and more on the growing power of the entirety of the executive branch. Administrations became exactly that -- sprawling networks of professionals and politicians that all reported to the top. Bureaucracy was the new order of the day, and it came often at the expense of domestic tranquility and international harmony. Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the Administrators.

If a president of the United States won't stand up and declare unwavering support for equality, then who will? Isn't that what this country was founded on? That's what Abraham Lincoln thought, but when he was murdered in 1865, what he thought no longer seemed to matter. His next nine successors continually dropped the ball when it came to protecting Black civil rights, and their collective support for corrupt big business interests just leaves a bad taste, in our opinion. Andrew Johnson through William McKinley, the Abdicators.

The next eight presidents, from Martin Van Buren (#8) to James Buchanan (#15) all served only one term as president, and they spent their terms more or less trying to appease the various national factions that threatened to pull the country apart. This was, unfortunately, especially true when it came to appeasing the slave powers of the South, entrenching and intensifying the national debate over slavery and its expansion for decades. It would take a different kind of appeasing on the part of Abraham Lincoln (#16) to save the United States, but even he doesn't get out of this unscathed. We're calling them all out.

There are a lot of lists that rank the presidents from best to worst (or vice versa). Scholarly lists have some consensus, usually. Popular opinion lists vary wildly. We're not going to try to rank them, but we're going to look at the damage done to American society by each of the forty-five men we've elected to lead us, and we'll see how they all stack up to the current guy. In this episode, we're looking at George Washington (#1) through Andrew Jackson (#7). These guys were the architects of the U.S. presidency, for many reasons. They established and broke with precedents, they fostered traditions, and they built the executive office from its inception. And I think we'll find that the pedestals we've raised under some of them ought to be a little bit shorter.

Our final episode of the season tries to rescue language from the ravages of fascist Newspeak. While not invented by or used solely by fascists, Newspeak -- a term coined by George Orwell in his seminal novel, 1984 -- impoverishes vocabulary in order to limit complex and critical thought and reasoning. Newspeak may appear as historically insidious buzzwords and phrases, like “Living Space” and “Final Solution.” Newspeak may also appear harmless, such as in “Enhanced Interrogation,” or even good, like “Make America Great Again.” Pro-tip: when folks stop speaking in full sentences, watch out.We'll also sunset Season 1 and give you a heads up on our plans for Season 2.

In our penultimate episode of the season, we will try to make a distinction between populism—anti-establishmentarian political representation of the interests and voices of ordinary people—and the selective populism employed by fascist would-be autocrats. They claim to represent the will of the “true people” while identifying, excluding, and demonizing those that do not fit into their definition of the “true people.” Populism has its own drawbacks, but on the surface, it’s not an immediate threat. Selective, fascist populism, on the other hand, could make an outsider out of any of us.

If the patriarchy promises men power, why do so many of them still feel powerless? Episode thirteen pulls apart the myths of masculinity -- all the scripts that tell men how to stand, speak, fight, and everything else. From dueling pistols to MAGA hats, the performance has always required props, applause, and fear of failure. We trace how fascists and authoritarians have turned sex and gender into battlefields, equating sexual purity and weaponized virility with national strength. But beneath the uniforms and slogans lies insecurity, not strength. This episode asks who writes the rules of manhood, and whether anyone should.

If weakness is to be despised, dying as a hero is a great way to ensure you’re never seen as weak. Episode twelve laments the victims of such a mindset. The powerful—fascist and otherwise—have forever sent idealistic young people to die in the mud over wars of words and ideas. These poor children are hailed as patriots, but they’ll never know it, because they are dead. Their blind loyalties to the leader, who will not get in the trenches with them, have stolen their potential to resist that bleak fate.

The fascist’s utter disdain for weakness is the topic of episode eleven. To be clear, we’re talking about weakness as perceived by the fascist. Strongmen have always legitimized their control by contrasting their ideas about strength to the weaknesses they identify in their opposition. Whether it’s a physical disability, a lack of financial stability, or even lower television ratings, fascists will pinpoint weakness with glee and then rail against it. Thus, they redefine the meaning and appearance of strength for their target audience.

In episode ten, we will see that for the fascist, life is permanent warfare—we live only to struggle. All must be prepared to fight, endlessly, for the leader’s vision. If you are truly one of us, then you will destroy the enemy at every opportunity. If you are not willing to fight, then you must be the enemy, or at least trafficking with the enemy. Fascists remind us that pacifism is akin to degeneracy and leads down a path of ruin. They don’t want peace, much less appeasement, something we would have done well to recognize then as well as now. So much for giving peace a chance.

In our ninth episode, we try to wrap our minds around the duality of man, specifically the enemy, who is both weak and simultaneously too strong. The fascist tells us that the enemy is not only different from us, lesser than us, but that their differences—race/ethnicity, religion, political affiliations—are overwhelming. Furthermore, they are too many, they have too much, and they want to take more. They are, according to the fascist, “poisoning the blood of our country” and they must be stopped—if not by law, then by force.

Our eighth episode reminds us that the plot is all around us. Like the ancient god-kings they try to emulate, fascists are obsessed with the external and internal conspiracies that seek their ruin. From secret assassination cabals to the burning Reichstag to the sad fate of household pets at the hands of immigrants in suburban Ohio, there seems to be no limit to the forces arrayed against the fascist. Revealing the plot is crucial for his success, so he needs the people to see it to. Prepare the propaganda.

Allegedly, the greatest danger these dangerously different folks present is economic, and in episode seven, we will take a close look at how fascists play the middle class against both the elites and the poor. Espousing and exploiting the strange notion that there is simply not enough for us all to share with one another, fascists declare that the middle class is squeezed out by the greedy elite and the needy poor, especially if the poor come from somewhere else. Middle classes are the bedrock of a society, fascists say, and must wage war on the forces that would deny them their due.

Episode six hones in on the fascist ability to exacerbate and exploit intrinsic fears of difference. For fascists, danger is everywhere, all the time. Ignoring it does no good because those who are unlike us are hellbent on destroying us. Luckily, for fascists, the leader knows who the bad guys are, how to identify them, and how we should deal with them. In this context, Kristallnacht and Unite the Right rallies begin to look awfully similar, don’t they?

You’re either with us, or you’re against us. That’s what episode five is all about. Dissent and opposition are hallmarks of a democratic society; they should result in centrist compromises to everyone’s benefit. Debate gums up the inner processes of government, though, and makes it difficult for a strongman to see his agenda come to fruition quickly. It’s more efficient to accuse dissenters of hating the nation and posing a threat to national security. They are, after all, traitors. That’s how fascists think, and in this episode, we’ll find it in the past and in the present.

Our fourth episode examines the tendency of fascists to act for the sake of action, without any clear or deliberate objective and ignoring any intellectual discourse that might delay the action. Fascism relies on the projection of strength, and what better way to project strength than to shoot first and ask questions later? Whether dressed in brown shirted uniforms or red MAGA ballcaps, there are always a band of non-thinkers ready to do the leader’s bidding. Beware of them, they’re dangerous.

In episode three, we’ll explore some of the basic features of the Western Enlightenment, particularly focusing on the liberal progressivism inherent in many of the new ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, we’ll try to make sense of the threat such ideals presented to European fascists of the 20th century, who feared a societal descent into progressive depravity and persecuted the very idea of modern liberalism. That mantle has been taken up again in the 21st century, as tech bros and billionaires espouse a “dark” enlightenment meant to counter and erase any opposition to their world views.

Habemus Papam! Over a billion Roman Catholics worldwide celebrate the election of Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, and that's just some of our big news for this edition of A Week in the Wild. We're back to bring you our latest thoughts on the wildest current events and human interest stories. We'll even wade into the debate about whether 100 guys could take on a silverback gorilla.

Having decided to do a season-long deep-dive into the tenets of fascism and their appearances in contemporary American government, our second episode is all about the cult of tradition. The Romans deferred to the “way of the ancestors” for guidance about the appropriate means by which to live a good life. Traditions mattered, and straying too far from them had dire consequences. The Nazis and other fascists of modern Europe thought the same, and they imposed their versions of old traditions upon those they meant to rule…or destroy. It isn’t too hard to draw a straight line from Romans and fascists to contemporary American rhetoric about Christian nationalism and making America great again.Guest host: Amanda Wils

The news never ceases with the weirdness, and we're back to give you all our wildest takes on as much of it as we can think of. Silliness from the White House is always fair game on our show, but we'll also put Camping World and the papal conclave under our microscope. We even have some words about the 2025 Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Don't miss out!

It's been another wild week (or two) in the news, and we have our hot takes on some of the biggest stories. Stock market chicanery? Yep. Illegal deportations? We've got that, too. We've even got prehistoric wolves in the mix this time around. Join us for all of that and more on our latest edition of A Week in the Wild!

So, who are these guys anyways? What's this podcast all about?Hosts Jimmy and Jeremy take a moment to talk about who they are, what they're into, and what this whole pod is about.Enjoy :)

Welcome to our first edition of "A Week in the Wild," a mini serial within the main show wherein we discuss the most current events and up-to-date weirdness going on in the world today. Primarily U.S. news, but branching out to cover the globe whenever necessary.

In our inaugural episode, we encounter our least favorite "F" word.....Fascism. Do the authoritarian rhetoric and symbolism out of the current American executive administration remind you of anything from the past? Yes, we see it, too, and we're not prone to take it lightly. In this episode, we explore the characteristics of eternal fascism, reminding our listeners of those darkest moments in modern history to highlight the parallels we see right now, and to sound the alarm once more for democracy.