The Daily Signal - Paradise Lost: How Progressive Policies Destroyed California

Author and California resident Steve Hilton discusses his new book, "Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America's Worst-Run State." Hilton details California's dramatic decline from a beacon of American opportunity to a state plagued by homelessness, crime, and an exodus of residents.


Hilton, known for his appearances on Fox News, delves into the policies that have led to high taxes and urban decay in California, as well as the potential presidential ambitions of Gov. Gavin Newsom.


Drawing from his personal experience raising a family and running a business in California since 2012, Hilton identifies the ideological "pathologies" that have led to the state's downfall—from extreme environmentalism to union control and misguided compassion policies.


Hilton offers a vision for California's revival through his policy organization Golden Together. He provides a stark warning about the consequences of one-party rule and offers practical solutions for turning America's Golden State around.


00:00 Introduction

01:08 California's Decline: Hilton's Personal Experience

01:46 The California Dream: Past and Present

03:29 Policy Failures and Solutions

05:34 Signs of Political Change in California

07:45 Economic and Cultural Metrics: California at the Bottom

09:07 Ideological Pathologies and Political Dynamics

18:23 The Exodus: Why People and Businesses Are Leaving

25:33 Conclusion: A Call for New Leadership


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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Knuckleball

In the game of baseball, it might not seem at first glance that there is much strategy involved in the game. 


However, there is an enormous amount of strategy that goes into every pitch in the game. 


Pitchers have different pitches in their repertoire, which can rise, fall, and curve on their way to the batter in an attempt to fool the batter. 


However, there is one pitch which is unlike any other. It is so challenging that only a tiny percentage of pitchers in history have ever thrown it.


Learn more about the knuckleball, how it works and why it is so rare on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.



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NBN Book of the Day - Peder Anker, “For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering” (Anthem Press, 2025)

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular.

Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by First Nation people in northern Canada, and continuing with the racialist culture of uranium enrichment in the Atomic City of Oak Ridge, in For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering (Anthem Press, 2025) Dr. Peder Anker offers alternative perspectives. It’s a story of how the bikini swimwear came to fetishise the nuclear bombardment of the Bikini Atoll with its celebration of ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’. Our current global warming fears also harbour back to ordinary citizens wondering if atomic bombs would blow up the entire sky. If some of this was news to you, it might have to do with how the story of nuclear bombs has been told.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, “Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State” (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (University of Arizona Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Canessa & Dr. Manuela Lavinas Picq takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced.

Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, this open-access book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Pod Save America - Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power

In their new book, Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that Trump's scarcity mindset is suffocating the country: America doesn’t do enough manufacturing? Better cut back on trade. Not enough jobs or housing? Get rid of immigrants.Klein and Thompson sit down with Jon to explain how faster (and better) infrastructure projects can re-engage Democrats’ base, why tolerating government failure has made liberals look bad, and whether the accusations of neoliberalism that have been levied at the book are a fair criticism of the "abundance agenda."

 

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Up First from NPR - Gambling with Memes

What do Moo Deng the pygmy hippo, social media sensation Hawk Tuah, and the President of the United States all have in common? They've all inspired highly valuable, highly volatile memecoins. The memecoin began as a sort of joke cryptocurrency, but it soon became very real.

On today's episode of The Sunday Story, we turn to our friends at NPR's Planet Money to help us understand the phenomenon of memecoins. What are they, and how did they go from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars? Who are the winners and losers in this brazen new market?

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What Next | Daily News and Analysis - TBD | This Is Your Brain On Ketamine

Ketamine has gone from a recreational psychedelic to an approved treatment, and it has caught on in Silicon Valley in a big way. Are the long-term effects of using ketamine—recreationally or therapeutically—sufficiently known? Are we witnessing them right now?


Guest: Shayla Love, staff writer for the Atlantic.


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It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: Escape, part one

Margaret reads an anonymously authored speculative fiction story about what people could do if large scale roundups began, and discusses it with an anarchist technology enthusiast.

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