#1803 Monthly-ish Mix: Manufactured Legitimacy and the Fight to Reclaim It
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2026
⏱️ 279 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date: 6/24/2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! If you've been pulling back from the news for your own sanity, this one's built for you — a quick recap and reference guide to the past month or two, organized around a single idea: when power can't earn legitimacy, it manufactures it.
The performance. Spectacle, religion, and health branding standing in for real consent: Trump collecting a FIFA "peace prize," Christian nationalism worn as a costume the actual church refuses to bless, and RFK Jr. dressing up a gutted vaccine agenda as "moderate," scapegoating immigrants as he goes, while the USAID cuts run up a body count.
The machinery. The infrastructure that keeps the performance going while real consent drains away underneath: a legal system bent toward self-dealing and a $1.8 billion slush fund, billionaire money rewriting the rules since Citizens United, an AI gold rush sold as inevitable before anyone voted on it, and an economy booming on paper while the ground shifts under everyone's feet.
The vacuum and the reclaiming. What rushes in when legitimacy collapses, from normalized political violence to a manifesto born of that collapse — and then the democratic answer: why the rupture hasn't come, why revolutions tend to devour themselves, and why the slower work wins. Nonviolent movements draw eleven times the participation, and the ballot box the Supreme Court is fighting hardest to narrow is the same one that just turned out 78% of Hungary to remove Orbán.
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SECTION 1: THE PERFORMANCE OF LEGITIMACY
(00:01:31) #1798 - FIFA Sportswashing Fascism: The World Cup from Mussolini to Trump
2: Jules Boykoff on World Cup and Sportswashing Part 1 - CounterSpin - Air Date 5-15-26
3: Trump LOSES IT as FIFA SUFFERS MAJOR CRISIS!! Part 1 - MeidasTouch - Air Date 5-6-26
(00:23:20) #1787 - The American President vs The American Pope: Leo XIV, Trump, and the MAGA-Catholic Rift
6: Why America and the Vatican Have Fallen Out - TLDR News Global - Air Date 4-11-26
(00:46:03) #1794 - From MAHA to Measles: RFK's Public Health Purge Will Make America Sick Again
7: Why RFK Jr. Is Projecting a More 'Moderate' MAHA Stance - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 4-27-26
8: RFK Jr Goes Full Eugenics to Congress; IMMIGRANTS BRING DISEASE - Brittany Page - Air Date 4-22-26
SECTION 2: THE MACHINERY & THE LEAK
10: We Will Find You and We Will Kill You Part 1 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 5-15-26
11: Congress Strikes Back as Trump Rushes $1.8 Billion Scam - Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Air Date 5-18-26
(01:34:00) #1792 - Capitalist Class Warfare: AI, Billionaire Capture, and the How to Fight Back
13: The Case Against Billionaires | Chuck Collins - Washington Monthly - Air Date 1-5-26
14: How Oligarchs Hijacked America in Just 16 Year - Benaminute - Air Date 4-30-26
15: It Will Be 17 Times Worse Than the .com Crash - Upper Echelon - Air Date 5-7-26
(02:04:29) #1797 - AI Spent $540 Billion to Make You Lonelier: Betting Against Jobs, Art, and Community
16: Will SpaceX and OpenAI Starve the Market? - UNFTR Media - Air Date 5-26-26
18: The AI Backlash Just Got VERY Public - House of El - AI - Air Date 5-24-26
(02:33:22) #1789 - Boomcession: Why the Economy Looks Great on Paper and Hurts in Real Life
19: Monday Morning Economy Politics Inflation Soars Part 1 - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 4-13-26
21: These Georgia Swing Voters Do Not Like the Iran War - The NPR Politics Podcast - Air Date 4-16-26
22: Trumps Brutal Immigration Crackdown Continues Part 1 - Velshi - Air Date 3-21-26
SECTION 3: THE VACUUM & THE RECLAIMING
(03:15:42) #1790 - Assassin Nation: How Political Violence Got Normalized And How To Reverse It
25: The Cole Hard Truth - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 4-28-26
(03:42:14) #1795 - You Say You Want A Revolution: Successful Revolutions are the Boring Ones
27: Why the Epstein Files Didn't Start a Revolution - Uncivilized - Air Date 4-21-26
28: Is The US In Its French Revolution Era? - Leeja Miller - Air Date 5-13-26
29: Why Nonviolence Wins - Degenerate Art by Andrea Pitzer - Air Date 5-14-26
(04:14:56) #1791 - Jim Crow 2.0 — SCOTUS Kills the Voting Rights Act and Unleashes the Gerrymandering War
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this monthly-ish mix episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. |
| 0:08.3 | In our regular episodes, we focus on one major theme, presenting our top takes in the first |
| 0:13.9 | hour of the show before diving deeper into each of those subtopics in the second half. |
| 0:18.9 | For monthly-ish-mix episodes like this one, we skim across the |
| 0:22.8 | surface of the past month or two as a sort of quick recap and reference guide. It's well known |
| 0:28.5 | that many have felt the need to pull back from the news a bit for their mental health. If that's |
| 0:31.8 | you, welcome. If you know someone who fits that description, send them this episode. Now for today's |
| 0:37.4 | episode, we have three big sections and a lot of ground to cover. |
| 0:40.9 | If you want to skip around, reference the show notes for guidance. |
| 0:43.5 | Section 1, the performance of legitimacy will open with how power performs the consent it can't |
| 0:51.0 | earn. |
| 0:52.0 | Buying it through spectacle, borrowing it from religion, and touting |
| 0:57.0 | public health reform like the snake oil salesmen they are. Section 2, the machinery and the leak |
| 1:04.0 | will follow the infrastructure that sustains the performance. A legal system bent towards |
| 1:09.4 | self-dealing, billionaire money remaking American |
| 1:12.3 | democracy since Citizens United, an AI gold rush consuming the entire R&D ecosystem, and |
| 1:18.8 | an economy booming on paper while real life keeps getting harder. |
| 1:23.4 | And Section 3, the vacuum and the reclaiming, will confront what fills the space when legitimacy |
| 1:30.2 | collapses before turning toward the democratic answers, nonviolent mass movements, the strategic |
| 1:36.4 | case for participation, and the ballot as the largest nonviolent channel they're working |
| 1:42.0 | hardest to close. But we begin with Section 1, |
| 1:45.3 | the performance of legitimacy, opening with clips from episode 1798. |
... |
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