What Do Liberals Actually Believe?
What A Day
What A Day
4.6 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Third Way, a center-left think tank, released a list of words it thinks Democrats should stop using on Friday. The list included words like “intersectionality,” “body shaming,” “cisgender,” and “LGBTQIA+.” It sparked an online debate around the terms, which has caused many people to ask “what do Democrats and liberals actually believe?” Jerusalem Demsas is CEO and founder of a new media outlet called “The Argument,” and she joins the show to answer the question: What is a liberal?
And in headlines, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov defends the Russian war in Ukraine on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a Salvadoran immigrant who was deported despite a court order allowing him to stay in the country – returns home to Maryland only to be immediately threatened with deportation to Uganda, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries criticizes President Trump over threats to deploy the National guard to Chicago, and the Department of Justice releases hundreds of pages of interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell, a collaborator of Jeffrey Epstein.
Show Notes:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Monday, August 25th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is What Today, the show that is excited for the end of August. |
| 0:09.0 | Then a deer of culture war nonsense. Cracker barrel. Sidney Sweeney. Look, let's just get to September and move on. |
| 0:21.6 | On today's show, President Donald Trump says Chicago, it's probably the next city to receive some unwanted assistance from the National Guard. |
| 0:28.8 | And part of the so-called Epstein files arrive on Capitol Hill, all while the Department of Justice releases Galane Maxwell's interview. |
| 0:35.7 | Clearing the president and a former president. Shocking. |
| 0:39.3 | But let's start with liberalism. Yes. If you call yourself a liberal, I'm talking about you. |
| 0:45.4 | On Friday, a center-left think tank called Third Way got some press because of a list it made. |
| 0:50.4 | A list of words that thinks Democrats should stop using as part of an effort to appeal to everyday voters who do not know what an existential threat is. |
| 0:58.0 | Here's CNN. |
| 0:59.2 | I want to keep people some context on some other words and phrases that were in this memo. |
| 1:03.6 | Body shaming, cisgender, holding space, incarcerated people, intersectionality, LGBTIQIA plus, pregnant people, systems of oppression, the unhoused. |
| 1:16.1 | Okay, so that's a lot of words I've heard from people who spend a lot of time on blue sky, |
| 1:20.2 | and I say that as a blue sky user. |
| 1:22.9 | As you might imagine, this list got a lot of attention online and elsewhere. |
| 1:26.4 | Some saw it as sensible, a way to get |
| 1:28.3 | Democrats to stop using terms that might appeal to college graduates, but might not work for voters who |
| 1:32.8 | aren't. Others argue that the list was papering over the real issue for Democrats. Policy. Personally, |
| 1:40.0 | even if every elected Democrat on Earth stopped saying cisgender, which is just a descriptor, |
| 1:46.2 | Fox News will still find some Democratic Socialists of America members in Brooklyn using it and argue |
| 1:50.9 | that they alone represent the Democratic Party. But the entire debate got me thinking, |
| 1:55.7 | what are Democrats and more broadly liberals, four, what do we believe? A new publication is trying to figure that out. |
| 2:02.8 | The argument, founded by former Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsus, consists of a host of |
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