Bitchy History - July 20, 2026


Working in the Myth Factory - Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam!


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

153.78

Word count

723

Sentence count

52


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 A few years ago, a friend of mine said,
00:00:03.540 Sometimes I forget Republican Meredith was a person.
00:00:07.720 I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat.
00:00:13.600 Republican Meredith does sound fake now.
00:00:16.900 Like a cryptid, grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying saucer somewhere in the X-Files.
00:00:23.980 Unfortunately, she was real.
00:00:26.400 The machine that produced her was real, too.
00:00:28.520 I worked in conservative media. I was part of the new media wing of the GOP back when we still
00:00:35.500 pretended that new media meant we were democratizing political conversation and not
00:00:41.080 manufacturing outrage faster with ring lights. Conservatism didn't sell itself to me as cruelty.
00:00:47.880 That would have been easier to spot. It sold itself as reason, common sense, freedom,
00:00:53.500 limited government, all those polished little phrases that sound sturdy until you press on
00:00:59.260 them and realize they're mostly stage scenery. That's how the myth factory works. It doesn't
00:01:05.420 begin by asking you to hate people. It begins by handing you a very flattering story about yourself.
00:01:12.200 You aren't selfish or hostile to equality. You're sensible. You understand economics.
00:01:17.560 you believe in small government and personal responsibility. Except I started noticing that
00:01:24.500 the people who talked most about small government didn't actually want small government. They wanted
00:01:31.180 selective government. Government small enough to stay out of corporate boardrooms and large enough
00:01:37.120 to crawl into classrooms, doctor's offices, and bedrooms. And history was one of the main tools
00:01:43.200 used to make that contradiction feel natural. I watched the machinery at work from the inside.
00:01:50.140 Culture war narratives pushed to distract while someone else was dismantling a social safety net
00:01:55.480 somewhere else and consolidating power somewhere even worse. I watched history get cherry-picked
00:02:01.780 to justify policies that harmed the most vulnerable. I watched talking heads confidently
00:02:07.320 repeat historical nonsense that they either knew was false or didn't care enough to fact-check.
00:02:13.200 the point was never accuracy it was repetition say it often enough loud enough and with enough patriotic wall paper behind it and eventually the lie sticks
00:02:24.160 the right doesn't fight about history because it's sentimental they do it because the past is politically useful the myths we tell about what happened then become the policies we accept now
00:02:36.640 if you can convince people that feminism destroyed the family or racism ended with a few speeches and a federal holiday you can make attacks on women's rights sound like restoration and civil rights enforcement sound like special treatment
00:02:51.040 Historical erasure isn't an accident. It's strategy.
00:02:54.960 That's what I eventually had to face.
00:02:57.260 I hadn't just been lied to. The lie had been useful to me.
00:03:01.400 It made me feel reasonable, moderate, sophisticated.
00:03:05.220 It let me imagine I was standing above the mess when really I was standing on top of people the system had already pushed down.
00:03:12.640 The myth factory doesn't ask you to become a monster.
00:03:15.760 It asks you to become comfortable.
00:03:18.760 My breaking point, like many, came in 2016 when I watched Trump win the Florida Republican primary
00:03:24.820 and finally realized that this was not an intellectual movement that had been hijacked.
00:03:30.320 It wasn't a good-faith policy debate that had temporarily gone off the rails.
00:03:35.360 This was the product.
00:03:37.400 The fear, the cruelty, the historical illiteracy, that had been the point the entire time.
00:03:43.440 My mother, sensing either political disaster or impending personal growth, handed me tequila.
00:03:49.960 The next morning, hungover, I changed my party affiliation and took a sledgehammer to several load-bearing walls of my career.
00:03:57.660 But leaving wasn't enough. I had helped carry the myth, so I had to help dismantle it.
00:04:03.700 You don't get to walk out of the factory covered in soot and pretend you were only sightseeing.
00:04:08.080 I study history because history isn't safely behind us.
00:04:12.580 It's alive, badly behaved, and currently being used in campaign emails.
00:04:17.320 I teach it, I write about it, and I yell about it online
00:04:20.620 because people who understand the past are much harder to control in the present.
00:04:25.680 So when my friend says that she forgets Republican Meredith was a person, I get it.
00:04:30.440 Sometimes I forget too.
00:04:32.400 But she was real.
00:04:33.680 She was a person standing in the myth factory, pulling levers,
00:04:36.660 and pretending she wasn't setting fires.
00:04:39.480 And now I spend my life pulling the fire alarm.