The Curious Middle

Jill Kargman grew up on the Upper East Side and still felt like an outsider there. The creator of Odd Mom Out joins us o talk about status, Instagram, October 7, and why she calls herself politically homeless. Jill explains why so many Jewish New Yorkers have already switched, why Hollywood stays quiet, and what her daughter saw on campus after October 7. Then it's rapid fire: Birkins, four-nanny families, body-altering filters, and the Upper East Side habit that tells you someone's a jerk.
We also talk about her new movie Influenced and her next project, a film based on her book Sprinkle Glitter on My Grave.
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Meet Tanya. She was born in Los Angeles to parents who left the Soviet Union as refugees in 1979. After October 7, her group of friends and her lesbian basketball league turned on her. Teammates she'd played with for years stopped talking to her. When she said she was voting for Trump, they actually banned her from team events. Her story went viral, and now she's running for West Hollywood City Council, and working for ThinkAgain
We chat about:
Losing friends in the queer community after October 7
Why Tanya believes the fight against antisemitism is being lost online
The moment she left the Democratic Party
Why the best politicians change their minds
https://highlyjewish.com
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00:28 Born in LA to Soviet Jewish refugees
02:30 Growing up a proud Jew and Zionist
03:40 The Lambda basketball league
04:40 October 7 and the friends who turned away
06:19 Where the misinformation comes from
07:00 Fighting antisemitism online at Think Again
09:40 Moving to Iowa to campaign for Hillary
11:54 Admitting you were wrong
13:26 Coming out at 14 and refusing to tone it down
18:20 The moment she left the left
19:30 Kicked out of the league's social events
21:25 Why she's running for city council
23:40 Bike lanes, parking, and the fight over Fountain Avenue
26:16 Running as a worried resident
28:33 Who sits on the WeHo City Council now
30:32 West Hollywood's voters and the immigration debate
34:00 The Democratic Party and antisemitism
37:12 Tanya's take on the LA mayoral race
41:01 Advice for anyone running for local office
44:14 Where to find Tanya and Think Again

Father Robert Sirico shares the unlikely path that led him to the priesthood — from protesting alongside Jane Fonda to a political transformation sparked by a chance encounter with a conservative friend, who handed him Bastiat, Hayek, and Milton Friedman and unraveled everything he thought he knew. Now president emeritus of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Father Sirico makes the moral case against socialism without abandoning genuine compassion for the poor.
 
Memorable Quotes from Reverend Sirico: 
"if you want to feed the poor, you have to be able to build a factory that makes bread." "
We must be ruthless in our pursuit of the truth always, but always gentle with people."
Advocating even a soft form of anti-Semitism is by itself renouncing Jesus Christ."
"If you want to feed the poor, you have to be able to build a factory that makes bread."
"The socialism of the early Christians said, 'all that is mine is yours.' The socialism of today says, 'all that is yours is mine.'" — Rev. Sirico, quoting Winston Churchill
Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCblDlKsPVQ&t=753s
 
Tony Sirico's Introduction of Rev. Robert A. Sirico at the Acton 20th Anniversary Dinner    • Tony Sirico's Introduction of Rev. Robert ...   ‪@actoninstitute‬

Danielle Haas spent 14 years inside Human Rights Watch editing their reports before she quit and helped found Eightrights.org, an insider-led group holding the human rights sector accountable. In this episode, she walks us through how Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders operate with almost zero outside scrutiny, and how human rights became a civil religion for secular Westerners, complete with its own priesthood and rituals at Davos. We also get into just how much influence these NGOs hold: their reports and messaging shape mass media, academia, public policy, and the UN, and where the funding for these "neutral" organizations actually comes from. 
We discuss why Amnesty International suspended its own Israel chapter, a group of Israeli leftists who've worked there since 1964, for refusing to call the war a genocide. And we cover why Human Rights Watch called Hamas's casualty figures "reliable" with no way to verify them.

Germania Rodriguez was 11 years old when her family fled Venezuela . Her mother, one of the regime's most aggressive journalist critics, had just been falsely accused by Hugo Chávez's government. Two decades later, sitting in NYU lecture halls, Germania became a Bernie Sanders supporter anyway. In this episode, Germania joins The Curious Middle to explain how someone who watched socialism destroy her home country still fell for it in an Ivy League classroom — and what finally broke the spell.
 
We get into why the New York Times and Hollywood have a decades-long blind spot for left-wing dictatorships, the actual difference between Norway's social democracy and Venezuela's socialism, why "free stuff" isn't the same thing as the government seizing the means of production, and how Cuba spent 70 years exporting revolution across Latin America. Venezuela went from a top-5 global economy in the 1960s to nearly 9 million refugees and 70%+ of households in poverty in under 30 years. Germania breaks down how that happened, and why the same playbook is showing up in New York City politics right now.
 
Timestamps: 
0:36 – Fleeing Venezuela at 11: her mother's persecution by the Chávez regime
2:00 – Quitting the Daily Mail after refusing to stay silent about the NYT calling Delcy Rodríguez a "moderate"
3:09 – Media bias: is it ideology, or access
 5:17 – The NYT's long history of covering for communism
6:29 – Hollywood's blind spot: Danny Glover, Chávez, and a Peabody-winning documentary
8:34 – The cost of being a radical centrist: everyone hates you
9:36 – Confession: Germania was a "Bernie Bro" at NYU
11:04 – What made her fall for it
14:10 – NYU campus culture in 2016, and Bernie's Castro comments
15:47 – How moral superiority becomes an excuse for authoritarianism
16:12 – Is anyone actually moving toward the center?
17:06 – The John Leguizamo clip: confusing social programs with socialism
 18:34 – What "socialism" actually means, according to the DSA's own website
20:11 – Venezuela's refugee crisis: nearly 9 million fled
20:39 – 71–73% of Venezuelan households now live in poverty
21:12 – How Venezuela went from a top-5 global economy to collapse
25:25 – Less than 30 years to destroy a country
25:43 – The same playbook, today, in Zohran Mamdani's New York City
26:39 – Where's the actual red line between healthy social programs and socialism?
27:58 – Bodega owners vs. taxpayer-funded competition
28:34 – What government should do — and where it should stop
30:57 – Gun control and Chávez's disarmament of Venezuelans
2:04 – NYC rent control and the housing supply death spiral
33:22 – "If I were a billionaire, I'd fund a sexy pro-capitalism Netflix show"
34:12 – Norway vs. Venezuela: what makes one work and the other collapse
36:05 – Why progressive support for Chavismo is its own kind of racism
37:53 – Cuba's 70-year role exporting revolution across Latin Americaa
39:49 – Did the US actually win the Cold War? 
40:44 – "Democracy privilege," and forgetting what's at stake