Emma hosts Ursula Hackett, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway University of London, to discuss her recent book America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide The State. Emma starts the show by touching upon the seemingly endless Chris Christie Redemption Tour that ends with Laura Ingraham grilling him as to whether he’ll fall in line when Trump inevitably runs in 2024. Then Emma starts out her conversation with Ursula by discussing the early history of school vouchers, and how since 2010 the concerted effort by the far-right, both politically and judicially, sped up the prevalence of them in the United States significantly. They then touch on how this phenomenon is uniquely American, and that historically voucher programs started before the Brown v. Board of Ed decision, but continued as a concerted effort to block de-segregation efforts through privatizing education. Ursula speaks to the idea of “attenuated governance” and the “submerged state”, where social spending gets diluted through privatizing, and where a citizenry doesn’t attribute policy prescriptions and benefits to the people who actually enacted them because they’re so obscured in bureaucracy and red tape, something that Emma sees as a real failure of Congressional Democrats and Dems in general. They then touch on some of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s policies like her failed attempt to install educations savings accounts in her home state of Michigan, and then end on the importance of the coordinated effort, that being one of many, of the right to sideline and demonize teacher’s unions in favor of “school choice” and privatization.

Emma then discusses Kyle Rittenhouse talking out of two sides of his mouth regarding the politicizing of his fateful (and fatal) night in Kenosha Wisconsin before being joined by Nomiki! They tackled Steven Crowders scorching take that American slavery had nothing to do with race (the 3/5ths Compromise would like a word…), Josh Hawley’s cringey podcast about the Bible’s take on men where he definitely lets his wife speak (she was silent the entire clip), and the Peng Shuai situation in China and how CNN is being censored on Chinese airwaves from even covering it. Plus, your calls and IM’s!