Hi, welcome to Positively Dreadful. I'm your host, Brian Boiler, and if you're new

to this show this week, that may be because our first episode went live just a couple

hours before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which is a bad time to launch

anything, but also kind of a microcosm of what we want this show to be about. This shows

about how things are happening all the time, a lot of the news is terrible, and about

how we should confront things as enormous and catastrophic as the summary abolition of

reproductive rights without just sinking into despair. Especially when we know we may be

in the last few months of unified democratic party control in Washington, and they don't

have enough votes to undo the decision right now. Metaphorically, I think of it like an

earthquake or hurricane that strikes a country that doesn't have the means to rebuild on

its own. If outside help doesn't come, the damage dwarfs the capacity of citizens working

together, and things are just kind of permanently worse than they would have been. So how do we

stop that, or at least how do we minimize the risk that we'll have to wait decades to

get back to where we were just last week? One thing we know for sure doesn't work because

it's part of how we got here is to misapprehend or discount or dilute ourselves about the

scope of the challenge. And another thing that definitely doesn't work is defeatism or cynicism

about how bad things are, or about the differences between the two parties, right? Like that's how

we got George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and through them four of the five justices who just

imposed this cruel decision on the country. But if we're going to give a quick rebound the old

college try, I think we also need to look at how it is that this court, this illegitimate court,

representing an unpopular minority faction, managed to win. What mistakes do we need to correct?

What can we learn about what works and doesn't from the acceptance of defeat? We went looking

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